This article argues that centuries of compilations of laws in Spain, and possibly elsewhere in Europe, were not evidence of a desire to make statutes more comprehensible or efficient, as is generally assumed by historians, but rather a statement of royal power and genealogy. What we call law today is a far cry from late medieval and early modern law, whose symbolic role outweighed its practical function. From the thirteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Spanish monarchs in their prefaces to these enormous volumes always claimed the compilations would end disorder and confusion, seen as the enemies of good rule. These volumes provided an implicit history of rule, made visible through glosses, and in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries this implicit link became explicit, as laws and historical chronicles were the object of parallel compilation programs by the crown and the Cortes. There was good reason for monarchs and lawmakers to believe that fat volumes of law and history were part of the same project. It was not the content of either sort of book that mattered, but rather their physical existence and their proclamation of origins, authority, and completeness.
Ruth MacKay (Sun,) studied this question.