Rethinking late thirteenth-century monastic cultural politics through micro-history: the social and documentary networks of Pero Marín at Santo Domingo de Silos (1280–1293)

This article proposes a micro-historical reassessment of Pero Marín, a monastic procurator at Santo Domingo de Silos whose activity between 1289 and 1293 has remained marginal in post-Alfonsine studies. By applying prosopographical analysis and network reconstruction it shows that the Miraculos romançados—traditionally viewed as devotional literature—functioned simultaneously as institutional documentation, legal argumentation, and strategic memory construction. Marín's coordination of the miracle collection reflected documentary practices evident in his procuratorial work, establishing a foundational corpus later recompiled c. 1297 as a “miracle cartulary” for institutional defence. The Miraculos are read as “documentary hagiography,” a hybrid genre in which the authentication apparatus of legal instruments constitutes, rather than merely supplementing, hagiographic proof. Examining Marín’s networks compels a reconceptualization of late thirteenth-century monastic politics not as a centralized royal programme but as a decentralized, multi-sited process involving diverse actors pursuing strategic aims while selectively appropriating the Alfonsine legacy. By foregrounding this collaborative infrastructure, the article challenges prevailing narratives of medieval authorship and suggests that monastic memory construction was an essential collaborative endeavour for reconstructing late thirteenth-century Iberian cultural history.