This book treats the tumultuous history of the Jews in the colonial kingdom of Valencia through focusing on one town, Morvedre.Based on archival sources, it explores the Jews' activities as settlers and officials, their role in the new kingdom's economic development, and their rapidly changing relations with the Christian conquerors and the subject Muslims.It dissects the Jewish community's internal social and political struggles while it dealt with the monarchy's heavy fiscal demands.It also considers the controversies surrounding Jewish moneylending and the Jews' embattled position during...

This book discusses the decoration types of Sephardic illuminated Bibles. Unlike illuminated Passover manuscripts from the same period with their rich figurative and narrative picture cycles, Bibles are almost exclusively aniconic. Whereas the former borrow heavily from Christian art, the Bibles are entirely indebted to Islamic culture. The volume elaborates in particular on the cultural history of the decorative motifs and types of ornamentation in an era of cultural transition in Iberia and culture struggle within Spanish Jewry. The first two chapters describe the cultural, social and...

This volume examines the Spanish Inquisition's response to a host of self-proclaimed holy persons and miracle-working visionaries whose spiritual exploits garnered popular acclaim in seventeenth-century Spain. In an effort to control this groundswell of religious enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition began prosecuting the crime of feigned sanctity, attempting to distinguish "false saints" from their officially approved counterparts. Drawing on Inquisition trial records, confessors' manuals, treatises on the discernment of spirits, and spiritual autobiographies, the book situates the problem of...