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The Spanish Inquisition has become such a byword for injustice that many forget it was also a judicial system capable of acquittal. This study of more than 67,000 trials uncovers over 2,500 formal acquittals, more than 6,600 suspended trials, and nearly 2,100 with unknown or no recorded outcomes. The inquisitors were jurists who frequently held other judgeships before and after their tenure and used the same evidentiary rules as other Spanish courts. If every acquittal may be taken as an admission of error, the Spanish Inquisition admitted its errors thousands of times, occasionally even putting them on public display at the autos de fe. An acquittal can also be taken as a sign that the inquisitors did not wish to punish the innocent and that while they were quick to arrest and charge people on flimsy evidence, they were too conscientious to convict them without further proof. However, it is also clear that the Holy Office at times did bend, twist, or even break the law when it suited it in order to secure a conviction. This book is aimed at students, scholars, and general readers seeking a nuanced understanding of the Spanish Inquisition and its workings.
Germán Jiménez-Montes sheds light on the role of foreigners in the Spanish empire. The book examines how a group of Dutch, Flemish and German merchants came to dominate the supply of timber in Seville.
This book examines property legislation and the actual position of women in receiving, holding and passing on family property as daughters, wives and as widows throughout history. Traditionally the prevailing view has been that women have been disadvantaged in the distribution of property and therefore less interesting as objects of study. This volume challenges this view and explores the securing of property for families or for individuals through transfers in the shape of dowries, marriage contracts, wills and other arrangements, as well as how women used and distributed the property they were holding.The scope of the volume is both urban and rural, analysing the position of women in relation to family property through contributions from a wide geographic area. The chapters investigate the situation in southern and northern Europe, across the Atlantic and Africa throughout the 18th to the 20th century. This volume will be of value to academics, undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in gender and history and social history.
From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and the best ways to manage its threat. In this transnational study, Cindy Ermus focuses on the social, commercial, and diplomatic impact of the epidemic beyond French borders, examining reactions to this public health crisis from Italy to Great Britain to Spain and the overseas colonies. She reveals how a crisis in one part of the globe can transcend geographic boundaries and influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far from the epicentre of disaster.
Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville offers a reassessment of the impact of plague in the early modern era, presenting sixteenth-century Seville as a case study of how municipal officials and residents worked together to create a public health response that protected both individual and communal interests. Similar studies of plague during this period either dramatize the tragic consequences of the epidemic or concentrate on the tough "modern" public health interventions, such as quarantine, surveillance and isolation, and the laxness or strictness of their enforcement. Arguing for a redefinition of "public health" in the early modern era, this study chronicles a more restrained, ...
This book demonstrates the evolution of resilience and recovery as a concept by applying it to a new context, that of courts and monarchies. These were remarkably resilient institutions, with a strength and malleability that allowed them to ‘bounce back’ time and again. This volume highlights the different forms of resilience displayed in European courts during the medieval and early modern periods. Drawing on rarely published sources, it demonstrates different models of monarchical resilience, ranging from the survival of sovereign authority in political crisis, to the royal response to pandemic challenges, to other strategies for resisting internal or external threats. Resilience and Recovery illustrates how symbolic legitimacy and effective power were strongly intertwined, creating a distinct collective memory that shaped the defence of monarchical authority over many centuries.
In the aftermath of the religious crisis triggered by the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church set out to conquer faithful in new territories. The first missionaries to arrive in Japan were the Jesuits who were forced to adopt a different type of evangelization, with a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. This volume shows that Japan turned out to be a land of experimentation and development of a global Catholicism, as well as an unprecedented laboratory of encounter between political, scientific and religious cultures in the age of the first globalization. It analyzes the different conversion strategies developed by the Jesuit fathers toward various groups, including samurai, B...
For decades historians argued for the downfall of communication, when early modern societies were hit by a natural disaster. After all, earthquakes caused the destruction of infrastructure, which hindered the spread of news. Instead, the last investigations opened a new point of view about the political communication: every crisis was a catalyst for news. The book widens this reading through a comparative analysis of several earthquakes in the Hispanic Monarchy territories, from Asia to America. However, the examination of communications provided in this volume is not an end in itself but is offered as a basis for reflection and to propose the notion that earthquakes trigger change in social...
In The Complexity of Hispanic Religious Life in the 16th–18th Centuries, Doris Moreno has assembled a team of leading scholars to discuss and analyze the diversity of Hispanic religious and cultural life in the Early Modern Age. Using primary sources to look beyond the Spanish Black Legend and present new perspectives, this book explores the realities of a changing and plural Catholicism through the lens of crucial topics such as the Society of Jesus, the Inquisition, the Martyrdom, the feminine visions and conversion medicine. This volume will be an essential resource to all those with an interest in the knowledge of multiple expressions of tolerance and cultural dialectic between Spain and the Americas.
An examinination of the role that Catholic missionary orders played in the dissemination of accounts of Christian martyrdom in Japan. The author offers an overarching portrayal of the writing, printing, and circulation of books of “Japano-martyrology.”