From Gonzalo de Berceo (1963) to Nebrija (2022): Written Culture of the Middle Ages and the historical comics in Spain

Abstract

This research aims to explore the reception and use of the knowledge that Palaeography makes available to society in the field of the Middle Ages´s history of written culture. To realise this, we will study this impact through the mass media, specifically through a product assigned to popular culture such as the comic-book and the graphic novel, which makes use of recognizable elements re-lated to writing and documents from the Medieval times. To carry out our goal we have made use of an extensive comic corpus of more than 100 titles of the historical comic genre published in Spain. The most important examples that have been found have been selected, as well as the general concept that comic authors have about written communication and its presence in this period, the representation of documents and the role that the different letters receive in the period they develop. The results show that there is a certain arbitrariness when it comes to using graphic references that aesthetically help to reinforce the reading experience in the evocation of times from the medieval past using fonts that, being adaptations of capitular letters, attempt to imitate the Original handwritten writ-ing of the codex aesthetically and visually. It is a particularly commercial strategy, as the cover is the first contact between the public and the work. Within graphic narratives, the letter shines as a preferred means of communication, with its own space within the structures themselves, which allow the ad-vancement of the plot or is even its genesis. It is especially notable how the written element has a more prominent presence during the democratic period in a more detailed way about the book, the document and the importance of the knowledge transmitted. Socially, it is observed how the common people seem alien to the circuits of readers, but they enjoy their own cultural and learning networks thanks to orality. The development of the historical comic in Spain has meant that, according to the informative intention of its authors, other types of scriptural examples are explored, such as that of the great Other of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, al-Andalus. It is in these examples where a greater commitment to reclaim-ing the written culture of this extinct society is recognized, more than in the tradition of presenting comics from a Christian point of view, focused on political-military themes.