La condición social y profesional de los maestros de primeras letras en Navarra durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII [The Social and Professional Condition of School Teachers in Navarre During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century]

Comunicación

Abstract

There has been very little research done on primary school teachers’ condition in early modern Spain. This is partly due to the difficulty in finding documents from which data on the issue can be gathered. Thus, in this work we rely on Navarra’s General Archives and Pamplona’s Municipal Archives in an attempt to show the social condition and the professional profile of school teachers between 1750 and 1800. The main conclusion of our study is that their social and professional condition is far from being homogenous. In some of the main cities and villages there were school teachers who were well remunerated and were truly teaching professionals. However, the majority of them lived in small villages, received modest salaries and worked at several jobs, and undoubtedly saw their income deteriorate, as a result of the turbulences in the economy of the last decades of the Eighteenth Century