The subject and the “logics of lineage” in social ascent processes, as seen through the house of Castellnovo in the seventeenth century

Abstract

This paper aims to shed new light on the complexity of the processes of social mobility within the modern Hispanic nobility. For this purpose, we follow the trajectory of the lineage of the Marquises of Castellnovo in a bid to answer several questions which seek to gauge the weight of individual activity and the role of inherited merits in the pursuit of social ascent. We observe the centrality of the distributive justice exercised by the monarch and the importance of a subject who – both in his activity and decisions, and in constant dialectic with his group and historical context – adapted his strategies of ascent, thus achieving social prosperity and maintaining the family at its socio-political peak, even though this sometimes led to intra-family conflict.