Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Spain

Mute in life as in death, peasants of remote history rarely speak to us in their own voices. But Thomas Bisson's engagement with the records of several hundred twelfth-century people of rural Catalonia enables us to hear these voices. The peasants' allegations of abuse while in the service of their common lord the Count of Barcelona and his son the King reveal a unique perspective on the meaning of power both by those who felt and feared it, and by those who wielded it. These records--original parchments, dating much earlier than other comparable records of European peasant life--name...

Between the late twelfth century and the mid fourteenth, Castile saw a reordering of mental, spiritual, and physical space. Fresh ideas about sin and intercession coincided with new ways of representing the self and emerging perceptions of property as tangible. This radical shift in values or mentalites was most evident among certain social groups, including mercantile elites, affluent farmers, lower nobility, clerics, and literary figures--"middling sorts" whose outlooks and values were fast becoming normative.

Drawing on such primary documents as wills, legal codes, land...

Beginning with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1875 and ending with the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, this book explores the intersection of education and nationalism in Spain. Based on a broad range of archival and published sources, including parliamentary and ministerial records, pedagogical treatises and journals, teachers' manuals, memoirs, and a sample of over two hundred primary and secondary school textbooks, the study examines ideological and political conflict among groups of elites seeking to shape popular understanding of national history and identity...

In this volume, a panoramic history of medieval Valencia continues to unfold, as the noted scholar Robert Burns presents a new set of documents from the registers of Jaume the Conqueror at the Crown Archives in Barcelona. Here Burns focuses on 500 government charters covering the years 1264 to 1270, the culmination of the king's warrior fame in Christendom, and places these documents within the context of Jaumes's pan-Mediterranean military and political exploits. The most impressive archives of its kind outside the papal series, this collection is invaluable to medievalists as well as to...

This fourth volume in Robert Burns's celebrated series on the warrior King Jaume the Conqueror's Kingdom of Valencia describes the crucial years of 1270 to 1273, a period during which Jaume continued his consolidation of political power for future territorial expansion. Here in the colonial kingdom that he carved out from the Islamic Mediterranean regions of coastal Spain, Jaume presided over a society more complex than any in Christendom. This lively frontier was home to semiautonomous communities of Muslims, Jews, and Christian settlers. Jaume's pioneering exploitation of Valencia's...

In 1502, a decade of increasing tension between Muslims and Christians in Spain culminated in a royal decree that Muslims in Castile wanting to remain had to convert to Christianity. Mary Elizabeth Perry uses this event as the starting point for a remarkable exploration of how Moriscos, converted Muslims and their descendants, responded to their increasing disempowerment in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain. Stepping beyond traditional histories that have emphasized armed conflict from the view of victors, The Handless Maiden focuses on Morisco women. Perry argues that...

This is the first book to examine the economic impact of external cultures - the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans - upon the Iberian peninsula throughout the first millennium BC. Benedict Lowe provides a synthesis of recent archaeological work to place Spain in the broader context of debates about Romanisation during the Republic and Early Imperial period. He adopts a chronological approach, focusing on the processes of integration and regionalism in the economy of the Iberian peninsula. The book begins with an introduction to the kingdom of Tartessos and the impact of the Phoenician and...

B. Netanyahu, one of the world's foremost medievalists, has made a lifelong project of studying the historical evolution of Marranism and seeking to ascertain the genesis of the Spanish Inquisition. In this seminal work, which opened an ongoing debate on the nature of conversion and belief in late medieval Spain, Netanyahu analyzes evidence on the Marranos contained in the Hebrew sources. For this new edition, the author has updated the book and added an Afterword in which he considers some of the scholarly reactions to the work since the publication of the first edition in 1966. "This...

Medieval Spain is brilliantly recreated, in all its variety and richness, in this comprehensive survey. Likely to become the standard work in English, the book treats the entire Iberian Peninsula and all the people who inhabited it, from the coming of the Visigoths in the fifth century to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Integrating a wealth of information about the diverse peoples, institutions, religions, and customs that flourished in the states that are now Spain and Portugal, Joseph F. O'Callaghan focuses on the continuing attempts to impose political unity on the...