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The thirteenth-century monarch Alfonso the Learned of Castile and his contemporary rival James the Conqueror, of Aragon-Catalonia, are key figures who made enduring contributions to Western civilization--although neither is well known to American students. This book explores the contrasts and convergences not only of the kings but of the scholarly-cultural with the military-commercial society. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Sometime around 1190, King Alfonso VIII of Castile granted a royal charter to the community of Cuenca, a Castilian frontier town recently recaptured from the Muslims and resettled by Christians. The royal charter was in the form of a law code, or fuero. Fueros, which evolved from short lists of exceptions to standing royal directives into much more extensive commentaries on legal matters, were used as an incentive to Christian settlement on the frontier. Reflecting the complexities of administering a town that still had large Muslim and Jewish populations, the fuero or code of Cuenca was meant to assure the permanence of Christian conquest and settlement. James Powers provides the first tran...
Alfonso X of Castile (1252-1284) was a true philosopher-king, a medieval monarch whose contributions to science, music, historiography, poetry, fiction, and art have had lasting influence. His grand vision was to bring Castile into the mainstream of high civilization and to create a united artistic and religious people. To that end, he established Castilian as a proper language (it is now the fourth most spoken in the world) and wrote one of the most extensive and influential law codes in western history. After centuries of attention to the northern European countries, scholars increasingly are turning to Hispanic countries in general and to Alfonso's vast influence in particular. The contri...
This volume provides, for the first time, a pan-European view of the development of written languages at a key time in their history: that of the 16th century. The major cultural and intellectual upheavals that affected Europe at the time - Humanism, the Reformation and the emergence of modern nation-states - were not isolated phenomena, and the evolution of the orthographical systems of European languages shows a large number of convergences, due to the mobility of scholars, ideas and technological innovations throughout the period.
Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492. Interfaith liaisons carried powerful resonances, as such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda. Examining a wide range of source material including legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visual art, Simon Barton presents a nuanced reading of the ways interfaith couplings were perceived, tolerated, ...
No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and ...
Few historians have argued so forcefully or persuasively as Bernard S. Bachrach for the study of warfare as not only worthy of scholarly attention, but demanding of it. In his many publications Bachrach has established unequivocally the relevance of military institutions and activity for an understanding of medieval European societies, polities, and mentalities. In so doing, as much as any scholar of his generation, he has helped to define the status quaestionis for the field of medieval military history. The Medieval Way of War: Studies in Medieval Military History in Honor of Bernard S. Bachrach pays tribute to its honoree by gathering in a single volume seventeen original studies from an ...
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This series of essays, dedicated to the work and career of Father Robert I. Burns, S.J., treats the complex relationship of Spain to the Western Mediterranean and Atlantic on the eve of Spain's ascent as a world power.