PERSONAJES SOCIALES, UNA CLAVE EN LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DE IDENTIDAD COLECTIVA: LA EDAD MEDIA

Abstract

This historiographical article identifies and explains some of the social characteristics of the personality and collective identity of certain representative figures of medieval history (villicus, the knight, the courtier, the civil servant, the polygraph and the european witch) from the self-assertion conceptual perspective raised by the German sociologist Norber Elias. A study carried out from the perspective of the combination of methodological collectivism, in which material and cultural conditions are fundamental to contextualize and explain into historical proceses, and methodological individualism, which warns us of the presence and interference of individual episodes in the creation of a process in time and space. These elements allow us to establish that all these social characters were conceived in a rural, peasant and feudal matrix, relatively autarkic, and evolved in the crucible of an urban, mercantile and courtly structure.