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Toward the end of the fifteenth century, Spanish Christians near the border of Castile and Muslim-ruled Granada held complex views about religious tolerance. People living in frontier cities bore much of the cost of war against Granada and faced the greatest risk of retaliation, but had to reconcile an ideology of holy war with the genuine admiration many felt for individual members of other religious groups. After a century of near-continuous truces, a series of political transformations in Castile—including those brought about by the civil wars of Enrique IV's reign, the final war with Granada, and Fernando and Isabel's efforts to reestablish royal authority—incited a broad reaction ag...
This 1996 book, based upon a vast range of documentary and secondary sources, shatters the disproven but persistent myth of the closed immobile village in the early modern period. It demonstrates that even in traditionalist Castile, pre-industrial village society was highly dynamic, with continuous inter-village, inter-regional, and rural-urban migration. The book is rich in human detail, with many vignettes of everyday life. Professor Vassberg examines such topics as fairs and markets, the transportation infrastructure, rural artisans and craftsmen, relations with the state, and life-cycle service. The approach is interdisciplinary, and pays special attention to how rural families dealt with economic and social problems. The rural Castile that emerges is a complex society that defies easy generalizations, but one which is unquestionably part of the general European reality.
In Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Iberia Donald Kagay and Andrew Villalon explore the background, administrative, diplomatic, economic, and military results, and the aftermath of the War of the Two Pedros between Castile and the Crown of Aragon (1356-1366) and the Castilian Civil War (1366-1369).
Since 1987 we have defended in articles that the Spanish queen Isabella I of Castile (Isabel la Catolica) was the new chess queen (dama) on the chessboard. Other publications were in 1990, 1994, 1997, and 2004. And of course, Marilyn Yalom studied our book during her visit to the National Library in The Hague (Holland) before she wrote Birth of the Chess Queen in 2004. In her book one cannot see that in 1987, 1990, and 1994 we already published material about Isabel la Catolica (Isabel I of Castile) being the new powerful dama or chess queen on the chessboard. In other words we can state here that we have been studying Spanish history and its chess literature for over 30 years. Since 2003 we have also known the development of the new bishop in chess."
By the middle of the fourteenth century, Christian control of the Iberian Peninsula extended to the borders of the emirate of Granada, whose Muslim rulers acknowledged Castilian suzerainty. No longer threatened by Moroccan incursions, the kings of Castile were diverted from completing the Reconquest by civil war and conflicts with neighboring Christian kings. Mindful, however, of their traditional goal of recovering lands formerly ruled by the Visigoths, whose heirs they claimed to be, the Castilian monarchs continued intermittently to assault Granada until the late fifteenth century. Matters changed thereafter, when Fernando and Isabel launched a decade-long effort to subjugate Granada. Uti...
In thirteen articles, this volume affirms that the Hundred Years War was a struggle that spilled out of its heartlands of England and France into many European regions. These “different vistas” of scholarship greatly amply the study of the conflict.
This highly original biography of Infante Manuel offers an intriguing and alternative perspective on one of the most turbulent eras of medieval Spain.
Portraying Authorship argues that the medieval Castilian writer Juan Manuel fashioned a seemingly modern authorial persona from the accumulation and synthesis of medieval authorial roles. In the manuscript culture of medieval Castile and across Latin Europe, writers typically referred to their work in ways that corresponded to their role in the bookmaking process: scribes took credit for preserving the works of others, compilers for combining disparate texts in productive ways, commentators for explaining obscure works, and authors for writing their own words. Combining literary analysis with book history, Anita Savo reveals how Juan Manuel forged his authorial persona, “Don Juan,” by ad...