Misera Hispania

Misera Hispania
Author: Rosa Vidal Doval
Publisher: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0907570267

Fortalitium fidei is one of the central texts in the controversy surrounding the religious and social status of conversos in fifteenth-century Castile. This monograph provides a close analysis of the text itself and contextualizes this study through comparison with pro-converso texts and with reference to Alonso de Espina's career as an Observant Franciscan. After an outline of the development of the converso problem, it offers a biography of Espina and a discussion of the context of production of Fortalitium fidei. There is then a discussion of three works of theology in defence of conversos: Alonso de Cartagena's Defensorium unitatis christianae, Juan de Torquemada's Tractatus contra madianitas et ismaelitas, and Alonso de Oropesa's Lumen ad revelationem gentium. The rest of the work is detailed reading of Fortalitium fidei, with chapters on the image of the fortress, the treatment of Jews and Judaism, and of conversos. This volume addresses the extent and nature of the debate about conversos, the development of models of genealogical exclusion, and the role of Espina and his text in the ending of religious plurality in Spain.

Marx and Haiti

Marx and Haiti
Author: Wulf D. Hund
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 252
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 3643915187

Although modern racism was fully developed by their time, Marx (and Engels) did not engage in a theoretical discussion of its essential features. This analytical silence is investigated in the chapter Marx and Haiti: Notes on a Blank Space. At the same time, the chapters of this volume demonstrate that and why the principles of a historical materialist analysis of society present links for a critical theory of racism. In the chapter Dehumanization and Social Death: Fundamentals of Racism, this is shown concerning the various historical shapes of racisms caused by different forms of class relations. The chapter Racismflq: Birth of a Concept connects the conceptual history of racism with the socio-historical conflicts of differently affected social groups. Finally, the chapter A Historical Materialist Theory of Racism: Introduction addresses basic elements of a Marxist analysis of racism. It elucidates the necessity of a theoretical conjunction of classist and racist discrimination as well as the historical differentiation of racisms.

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World

Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World
Author: Francois Soyer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004395601

In Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred, François Soyer offers the first detailed historical analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Spain, Portugal and their overseas colonies between 1450 and 1750. These conspiracy theories accused Jews and conversos, the descendants of medieval Jewish converts to Christianity, of deadly plots and blamed them for a range of social, religious, military and economic problems. Ultimately, many Iberian antisemitic conspiracy theorists aimed to create a ‘moral panic’ about the converso presence in Iberian society, thereby justifying the legitimacy of ethnic discrimination within the Church and society. Moreover, they were also exploited by some churchmen seeking to impose an idealized sense of communal identity upon the lay faithful.

Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam

Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam
Author: Mercedes García-Arenal
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 900441682X

Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula but examining related European and Mediterranean contexts as well, Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam traces how Christians, Jews, and Muslims grappled with the contradictory phenomenon of faith brought about by constraint and compulsion. Forced conversion brought into sharp relief the tensions among the accepted notion of faith as a voluntary act, the desire to maintain “pure” communities, and the universal truth claims of radical monotheism. Offering a comparative view of an important yet insufficiently studied phenomenon in the history of religions, this collection of essays explores the ways in which religion and violence reshaped these three religions and the ways we understand them today.

Polemical Encounters

Polemical Encounters
Author: Mercedes García-Arenal
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2018-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271082992

This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups. From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers. Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Mònica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais, Óscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J. Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, and Carsten Wilke.

An Invisible Thread: Heresy, Mass Conversions, and the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Castile (1449-1559)

An Invisible Thread: Heresy, Mass Conversions, and the Inquisition in the Kingdom of Castile (1449-1559)
Author: Stefania Pastore
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2024-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004714235

In Toledo in 1529, a converso named Pedro de Cazalla declared that the connection between man and God was but a thread and that it should not be mediated by the Church. Hardly an isolated phenomenon, Cazalla’s inner spirituality was a widespread response to the increasing repression of religious dissent enacted by the Inquisition. Forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims had profound effects across Spanish society, leading famous intellectuals as well as ordinary men and women to rethink their sense of belonging to the Christian community and their forms of religiosity. Thus, in this book, early modern Iberia emerges as a laboratory of European-wide transformations.

Juan de Torquemada

Juan de Torquemada
Author: Thomas M. Izbicki
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2023-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 900454612X

This is the first English translation of one of the most important treatises written during the late-Middle Ages in defense of converts from Judaism, favoring religious tolerance in the face of religious and racially motivated prejudice and violence. The book also includes a fresh Latin edition, drawing on all known manuscripts. The text was written in response to the actions of the "Old Christians" of Toledo against the "New Christians," also called conversos, in 1449. A letter of Pope Nicholas V favouring the converts is included.

Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean

Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean
Author: Sarah Davis-Secord
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030839974

This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.

Jews and Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and Beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries

Jews and Muslims Made Visible in Christian Iberia and Beyond, 14th to 18th Centuries
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004395709

This volume aims to show through various case studies how the interrelations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in Iberia were negotiated in the field of images, objects and architecture during the Later Middle Ages and Early Modernity. . By looking at the ways pre-modern Iberians envisioned diversity, we can reconstruct several stories, frequently interwoven with devotional literature, poetry or Inquisitorial trials, and usually quite different from a binary story of simple opposition. The book’s point of departure narrates the relationship between images and conversions, analysing the mechanisms of hybridity, and proposing a new explanation for the representation of otherness as the complex outcome of a negotiation involving integration. Contributors are: Cristelle Baskins, Giuseppe Capriotti, Ivana Čapeta Rakić, Borja Franco Llopis, Francisco de Asís García García, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Nicola Jennings, Fernando Marías, Elena Paulino Montero, Maria Portmann, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Amadeo Serra Desfilis, Maria Vittoria Spissu, Laura Stagno, Antonio Urquízar-Herrera.

Contra Iudaeos

Contra Iudaeos
Author: Ora Limor
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783161464829