A construção da imagem do poder em textos jurídicos da Idade Média peninsular = The construction of the image of power in legal texts of the Middle Ages

Abstract

The article intends to analyse, from a linguistic-discursive perspective, two of Afonso X3;s legislative texts, those of the Primeyra Partida and the Foro Real. In this study I intend to analyse some strategies of the persuasion characteristic of Afonso X - the Wise3;s legislative work which reveal a certain relationship between rhetorical construction and political power in the Peninsular Middle Ages (in the 13th and 14th centuries). I have focused my analysis on the structuring and functioning of these texts - or of the speeches shown in them -, using theoretical elements and methodological instruments which are generally used in Linguistic Pragmatics (necessarily taking into account their connections with the Theories of Argumentation and Rhetoric). The use of arguments of authority, the invocation of examples and analogical structures using natural models was a rhetorical doctrine which was doubtless well known at the time the legal texts analysed here were being written; it was a use typical of texts intended for preaching, but not exclusive to them. In the legislation discussed in these texts, the addressee is intended to follow a given practice. It is therefore possible that this "rhetorical genre" which aims to convince / seduce, and which was established during centuries in sermonistic practice, was not exclusive to preaching of a religious nature, since it was also used, since the middle of the 13th century, in legal texts.