The article focuses on the consideration of animal species and their relationship with populations and individuals, in order to reinterpret their meaning in a new perspective: that of the social and economic changes of the expansion of the Middle Ages, in this case limiting the object to the northwest of the peninsula. Thus, the research examines the representations and diffusion of natural and supernatural animal species in Santiago de Compostela in the twelfth century, proposing conditions and changes linked to the conjuncture of plenomedieval economic growth and social complication. It is argued that the forms, locations and characteristics of the importance given to certain species can be interpreted from the changes implied by the expansion of the urban space, the reduction of the forest and the greater contact of the individual with a previously wilder nature. For this purpose, several sources are considered, both textual, such as the Liber Sancti Iacobi or the Historia Compostellana, and iconographic, such as the cathedral representations. In the first section, a brief methodological perspective is developed; in the second, the conditions of the supernatural species are considered; and in the third, the same is done for the natural ones. Finally, different lines of interpretation for Compostela and the animal representations are marked out, confirming a link with the socio-economic aspect that has not yet been pointed out, and offering a line of interpretation applicable to other cases or spaces. - [Abstract]

Language: Spanish

Locators: ISSN: 2386-4753; DOI: 10.14198/itaca.28537