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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.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions conducted a number of trials against individuals accused by members of their communities of being of the other gender – men accused of being women and women accused of being men – or even hermaphrodites. Using new inquisitorial sources, this study examines the complexities revolving around transgenderism and the construction of gender identity in the early modern Iberian World. It throws light upon the manner in which the Inquisition, medical practitioners and the wider society in Spain and Portugal responded to transgenderism and on the self-perception of individuals whose behaviour, whether consciously or unconsciously, flouted these social and sexual conventions.
Is it possible to talk about antisemitism in the Middle Ages, before the appearance of scientific concepts of "race"? This work analyses this question and offers a nuanced response.
This book examines the life of Maria Duran, who was born with female genitalia, but was accused of being a man and subsequently put on trial for sorcery by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 18th century. François Soyer uses Maria's story to open a window onto the world of the experience of 'transing' gender, as well as the gendered attitudes and responses to the transgression of gendered norms that were adopted by churchmen, medical practitioners and ordinary lay men and women. Drawing on the surviving (and staggeringly 736-page long) sorcery trial dossier, Soyer analyses the secretive life of an individual who actively and deliberately 'transed' gender. The dossier analysis enables ins...
This book charts the history and influence of the most vitriolic and successful anti-Semitic polemic ever to have been printed in the early modern Hispanic world and offers the first critical edition and translation of the text into English. First printed in Madrid in 1674, the Centinela contra judíos (“Sentinel against the Jews”) was the work of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo, who wrote it to defend the mission of the Spanish Inquisition, to call for the expansion of discriminatory racial statutes and, finally, to advocate in favour of the expulsion of all the descendants of converted Jews from Spain and its empire. Francisco de Torrejoncillo combined the existing racial, theological, social and economic strands within Spanish anti-Semitism to demonize the Jews and their converted descendants in Spain in a manner designed to provoke strong emotional responses from its readership.
This book charts the history of the most vitriolic and successful anti-Semitic polemic printed in the early modern Hispanic world, offering the first analysis, edition and translation of the text: the Centinela contra judíos of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo.
In 1496-7, King Manuel I of Portugal forced the Jews of his kingdom to convert to Christianity and expelled all his Muslim subjects. Portugal was the first kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula to end definitively Christian-Jewish-Muslim coexistence, creating an exclusively Christian realm. Drawing upon narrative and documentary sources in Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew, this book pieces together the developments that led to the events of 1496-7 and presents a detailed reconstruction of the persecution. It challenges widely held views concerning the impact of the arrival in Portugal of the Jews expelled from Castile in 1492, the diplomatic wrangling that led to the forced conversion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497 and the causes behind the expulsion of the Muslim minority.
This four-volume collection of primary sources focuses on the history of emotions in Europe and its empires between 1517 and 1914. Arranged chronologically, each volume examines the subjects of the self, family and community, religion, politics and law, science and philosophy, and art and culture. The collection begins with the Reformation in 1517 as a key transformative moment in European history that required people to rethink the self, belief, and scientific knowledges – all of which shaped and were shaped by emotion. It ends with WW1, by which point psychology and modern frameworks for the self had become standard knowledges. In between, ideas and practices of emotion were not static, and part of the history charted across these volumes is the making of a new vocabulary for emotions and the self. Sources include letters, diaries, legal papers, institutional records, newspapers, science and philosophical writings, literature and art from a diversity of voices and perspectives. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students of history and literature.
In Portuguese Jews, New Christians and ‘New Jews’ Claude B. Stuczynski and Bruno Feitler gather some of the leading scholars of the history of the Portuguese Jews and conversos in a tribute to their common friend and a renowned figure in Luso-Judaica, Roberto Bachmann, on the occasion of his 85th birthday. The texts are divided into five sections dealing with medieval Portuguese Jewish culture, the impact of the inquisitorial persecution, the wide range of converso identities on one side, and of the Sephardi Western Portuguese Jewish communities on the other, and the role of Portugal and Brazil as lands of refuge for Jews during the Second World War. This book is introduced by a comprehensive survey on the historiography on Portuguese Jews, New Christians and 'New Jews' and offers a contribution to Luso-Judaica studies
The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Is...