Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Spain

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...

In the early seventeenth-century, when Spanish interests often competed with those of the House of Austria, three women in the court of Philip III of Spain--Empress Maria, Philip's grandmother; Margaret of Austria, Philip's wife; and Margaret of the Cross, Philip's aunt--worked behind the scenes to win favor for the causes of the Austrian Habsburgs.

In The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun, historian Magdalena Sanchez offers an intriguing examination of the political power wielded by these three women. Sanchez examines the ways that women used religious piety, childbearing,...

The 250 years covered by Silver, Trade, and War marked the era of commercial capitalism, that bridge between late medieval and modern times. Spain, peripheral to western Europe in 1500, produced American treasure in silver, which Spanish convoys bore from Portobelo and Veracruz on the Carribbean coast across the Atlantic to Spain in exchange for European goods shipped from Sevilla (later, Cadiz). Spanish colonialism, the authors suggest, was the cutting edge of the early global economy. America's silver permitted Spain to graft early capitalistic elements onto its late medieval...

In Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance, Lu Ann Homza rejects the traditional view of the Spanish Renaissance as a battle of strict opposites in favor of a more nuanced history. Through analyses of Inquisition trials, biblical translations, treatises on witchcraft, and tracts on the episcopate and penance, Homza illuminates the intellectual autonomy and energy of Spain's ecclesiastics, exploring the flexibility and inconsistency in their preferences for humanism or scholasticism, preferences which have long been thought to be steadfast.

In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache, who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. Before that, he had tried to return with his family to Spain, and to this end he tried to convert to Catholicism and worked as an informer, intermediary, and spy in Moroccan affairs for the Spanish court....