El volumen primero de España a finales de la Edad Media (2017) ya trató sobre algunos marcos y fundamentos del orden social como son las realidades geográficas, la población y, en especial, el sistema económico y su funcionamiento, incluyendo una aproximación a los grupos sociales que intervenían en la producción y distribución de bienes. Este segundo volumen tiene como objeto estudiar el conjunto de la estructura social, su dinámica y las relaciones que se establecen en el seno de la sociedad, en diversos ámbitos y modalidades: Iglesia, nobleza y señoríos, campesinos, ciudades y municipios, grupos marginales, judíos, mudéjares. El tiempo histórico a considerar discurre desde mediados del siglo XIII hasta comienzos del XVI y, como e el primer volumen, se ofrece una amplia guía bibliográfica clasificada por materias para dar a conocer el estado de las investigaciones y gran parte de las publicaciones especializadas.
Explores the history of Spain from the Roman province, through the Visigothic and Arab conquests, to the Christian Reconquest and reorganisation of society in the thirteenth century
En los últimos siglos Occidente ha ensanchado el abanico de las opciones de la creencia, ya sean religiosas, ateas u otras difíciles de clasificar. Un proceso paulatino de declive de la fe y retirada de la religión de la vida pública. Este retroceso supone un cambio impactante si pensamos en el papel que hasta hace poco jugaban las iglesias cristianas en el mundo Occidental. ¿Por qué ha sucedido todo esto? ¿Cuáles son los rasgos del nuevo paisaje espiritual? La era secular es el ensayo escrito más ambicioso y sobresaliente sobre el complejo proceso de secularización en Occidente que aún sigue en marcha. El filósofo Charles Taylor desgrana, en este segundo volumen, el cambio de las condiciones de la fe que desde la Ilustración socavaron las viejas formas y sentaron las bases de una nueva alternativa humanista. Sin embargo, este debilitamiento de las representaciones anteriores no ha sido incompatible con la persistencia de cierto anhelo de religiosidad, lo cual se traduce en nuestros días, en el florecimiento de múltiples alternativas —a veces contradictorias— y en un novedoso pluralismo en cuestión de espiritualidad.
In a study published in the mid-twentieth century, French historian Robert Ricard postulated that the evangelization and conversion of the native populations of Mexico had been rapid and relatively easy. However, different forms of evidence show that the so-called “spiritual conquest” was anything but easy or rapid, and, in fact, natives continued to practice their traditional beliefs alongside Catholicism. Within several decades of initiating the so-called “spiritual conquest,” the campaign to evangelize and convert the native populations, the missionaries faced growing evidence of idolatry or the persistence of traditional religious practices and apostasy, straying from Church teachings. The evidence includes written documents such as inquisition investigations that resulted, for example, in the execution of don Carlos, the native ruler of Tezcoco, on December 1, 1539, or that uncovered evidence of systematic organized resistance to Dominican missionaries in the Sierra Mixteca of Oaxaca. Other forms of evidence include pre-Hispanic religious iconography incorporated into what ostensibly were Christian murals, and pre-Hispanic stones embedded in the churches and convents the missionaries had built. One example of this was the stone with the face of Tláloc at the rear of the Franciscan church Santiago Tlatelolco in Distrito Federal. During the course of some three centuries, missionaries from different Catholic religious orders attempted to convert the native populations of colonial Mexico, with mixed results. Native groups throughout colonial Mexico resisted the imposition of the new religion in overt and covert forms, and incorporated Catholicism into their worldview on their own terms. Native cultural and religious traditions were more flexible than the Iberian Catholic norms introduced by the missionaries. The so-called “spiritual conquest,” a term coined by Ricard, evolved as a cultural war set against the backdrop of the imposition of a foreign colonial regime. The 11 essays in this volume examine the efforts to evangelize the native populations of Mexico, the approaches taken by the missionaries, and native responses. The contributions investigate the interplay between natives and missionaries in central Mexico, and on the southern and northern frontiers of New Spain, and among sedentary and non-sedentary natives. In the end, many natives found little in the new faith to attract them, and resisted the imposition of new religious norms and way of life.
From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.
During the 1930s, thousands of social scientists fled the Nazi regime or other totalitarian European regimes, mainly towards the Americas. The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City and El Colegio de México (Colmex) in Mexico City both were built based on receiving exiled academics from Europe. Comparing the first twenty years of these organizations, this book offers a deeper understanding of the corresponding institutional contexts and impacts of emigrated, exiled and refugeed academics. It analyses the ambiguities of scientists’ situations between emigration, return‐migration and transnational life projects and examines the corresponding dynamics of application, adaptation or amalgamation of (travelling) theories and methods these academics brought. Despite its institutional focus, it also deals with the broader context of forced migration of intellectuals and scientists in the second half of the last century in Europe and Latin America. In so doing, the book invites a deeper understanding of the challenges of forced migration for scholars in the 21st century.
This study looks at the concepts of society, space, urbanism, expansion and organisation in the transition from Late Antiquity to the medieval period in Castile, Spain. Escalona reviews the evidence for the Iron Age and Roman antecedents in this area and details the history of fragmentation of the different territories within it, especially under the Visigoths and prior to the medieval period. Escalona discusses the development of a series of territories including Juarros, Carazo, Barbadillo and Salas, and focuses in particular on Lara which, by the middle of the 11th century, had become the main administrative center in the area, unifying many of the surrounding minor areas. Spanish text.
