UCLA

At the close of the eleventh century, Ávila emerged as a strategic Christian city on the arid Castilian Meseta as part of the centuries-long struggle for control of the Iberian Peninsula. Along with other nearby polities, Alfonso VI granted Ávila the privileged status of founded city as part of the program of frontier settlement (repoblación). This period of urban development, which spanned the end of the eleventh century to the end of the thirteenth, witnessed a construction and population boom responsible for the erection of over two dozen parish churches, a small handful of monasteries or convents, a fortified cathedral, city walls, bishop’s palace, alcazar, and number of mosques and synagogues that no longer survive. Despite Ávila’s exceptionally preserved medieval architectural landscape, studies on medieval Castile tend to privilege documentary sources at the expense of art-historical evidence. Moreover, Ávila’s existing architectural scholarship primarily focuses on stylistic analysis and construction history, overlooking the unusual distribution and utilization of local stone, and to a lesser extent, brick, across Ávila’s medieval monumental landscape—a scholarly lacuna I correct in this dissertation. This dissertation takes a novel approach to the medieval city’s art history, one that engages with the materials of each of the city’s surviving monuments to argue that material was used as an expression of status, social division, as well as solidarity for Ávila’s Christian society. The city walls, cathedral, and urban churches all prioritize different local building materials in construction—a topic as yet unstudied in the scholarly literature— which I argue symbolized the structures of authority responsible for their building. That is, spolia in the city walls conveyed ancient glories for the emerging city’s nascent lay government, the concejo; piedra sangrante, or “bleeding stone,” in the cathedral’s sanctuary bolstered episcopal status through associations to Christ and wartime victories; the pragmatic employment of combining piedra caleña and grey granites in the city’s parish churches paralleled the solidarity of the city’s parish-militia organization; and brick was used in a single parish church outlier to affirm the parishioners place of origin. Looking beyond traditional studies of Ávila as a “frontier city,” my project instead analyzes urban social boundaries through a material lens.