Abstract

The role that class and ethnicity played in the self-fashioning of the professional men of letters who shaped fifteenth-century Spain's humanist project has been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny for over fifty years. It was José Antonio Maravall who first demonstrated that the so-called letrados had a “conciencia estamental,” a class consciousness derived from their indispensable roles as administrators, advisors, diplomats, and chroniclers in the service of the crown. Subsequent scholarship showed that part of letrado self-consciousness resulted from the hostility of Old Christian noblemen toward these ambitious non-noble, university-trained men, many of them New Christians or conversos. One way in which the aristocracy stigmatized the intellectual pursuits of the letrados was in fact to call those endeavors “Jewish.”