Actas y comunicaciones del Instituto de Historia Antigua y Medieval
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
The catholic reformation in Spain and the anti-muslim polemic: the Tridentine Decrees in the Catecismo del Sacromonte
The objective of this work is to analyze the influence of the resolutions of the Council of Trent in the Catecismo del Sacromonte, a catechism for Moriscos dated from 1588 which author is an anonymous Jesuit. We use the comparative method, confronting the document with a source from the beginning of the XVIth century: the Confusión o confutación de la Secta Mahomética y del Alcorán of Juan Andrés. We begin by thinking about the relationship between the Catecismo and the particular moment in which it was written, with a Papacy that tries to impose the acknowledgment of the results of the Council of Trent in the entire world, beyond the degree of the protestant menace in each region. With the intention of understanding the reach of this influence we compare the source with another one, pretridentine and previous to the protestant Reformation, that is an anti-muslim treaty ordered by the Catholic Kings, written by a convert muslim and published in 1515.
Regulated prostitution and the jesuitic congregations
Thorough the early modernity, the regulated prostitution was based on a contradiction: while the practice was tolerated, women who practiced it were persecuted and criminalized. The “Compendio” of the popular missionary Jesuit Pedro de León shed light on a specific issue of this problem: the Company’s congregational practice, which sought to limit or end the activity. Although it could mean a more benevolent position on public women, it was the other side of the coin: the discipline of the female body. Both violence and segregation, as well as Jesuit congregations, responded to the discipline of women needed by the community of the faithful in a scenario of strengthening of the Confessional States.
Las formas del conflicto religioso y de la violencia simbólica en el espacio cultural europeo (siglos XIV a XVIII): actores, escenarios, estrategias
"Valientes predicadores y operarios zelotes". Diego Torres Bollo y su Breve Relatione
Diego Torres Bollo was the first Provincial of the Jesuit Assistance of Paraguay and who initiated the recognized program of reductions of the Guarani Indians. This founding in 1607 was the result of an intense internal debate about the redefinition of the tasks that the Jesuits should occupy in American lands, with the goal of reconcile the demands and cross-needs of the papacy and the Spanish monarchy.
Encounters between Saint Francisco de Javier S. J. and the Bonzos
How did Javier perceive the Japanese beliefs and how did he portray their truthful exponent: the bonzos? How much influence did the historical and religious context had on his vision? This paper analyze the relationship between the Counter-Reformation context and the early Christian missions in Japan in order to comprehend the originality of Francisco de Javier’s thought about this matters.
The invencible force of (dis)agreement: Eucharistic defense in "Les epistres" of Gentien Hervet (1499-1584)
The letters and discourses published by the theologian and Humanist scholar Gentien Hervet around 1561 demonstrate the relevance of printed culture as a tool for the transmission of ideas. His connections with the Parisian publishing industry allowed him to attack the French Calvinists in a heated textual dispute over the sacred sacrament of the Eucharist, which was a key factor to analyze in the outbreak of continuous violence that undermined harmony in the kingdom.
Problems and categories on the analysis of medieval sources. Popular communication as an aprehensible action
Popular preaching and its historical sources – sermons – have became during the last decades in invaluable resources on Late Medieval and Modern culture. Since the development of the field, new theories and technics had arisen. This paper present some of the debates on the field and, connected with those, and hermeneutic on the sources. The purpose is to vindicate medieval sermon as an oral registry of communication that can be studied and understood beyond its content in order to enrich the History of pre-Gutenbergian Europe.
The devil's school: superstition in James VI's demonology
This article analyzes the relevance of the concept of superstition with respect to James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie (1597), with a particular focus on Book III of the treatise. It aims to show how the use of this particular analytical model helps to understand the way spirits and folk entities are conceived. The notion of the tacit pact will be emphasized as a common denominator between the different books that compose the Daemonologie. Additionally, this interpretation allows us to link James’s work with the 1563 Witchcraft Act and the broader Calvinist conceptions regarding superstitions.
Tomás Sánchez Dávila and the construction of a Historia Sacra Carmelitarum Discalceaturum (1599-1606)
The present article examines the attempt to write a historia sacra by the Discalced Carmelite Tomás Sánchez Dávila (1564-1627). Using Teresa de Ávila (1515-1582) as an empirical reference and recent proof of the divine action among humans, Dávila connects a past of biblical-millennial dimensions with his own days to respond the urgencies of his present. However, in that construction the author introduces a modifying genitive: the historia sacra carmelitarum discalceatorum arises. In this way, Tomás blurs Teresa and proposes the Order as the real protagonist of its past with an absolute absorbing sense.
historia sacra carmelitarum discalceatorum
Possessed, mystic, obssessed: the case of diabolic possession of Jeanne Féry, Soeur noir from the Mons convent at the end of the XVITH century
The diabolical possession was a complex cultural experience very common in the early modern society. This study is oriented to exhibit a first approximation to the case of diabolic possession (mixed with characteristic elements of mysticism and obsession) that the soeur noir Jeanne Fey suffered during the years 1584 and 1585 in Mons, border of the Spanish Netherlands, corresponding this evil spiritual invasion with the violent confessional problems that Catholics and Calvinists maintained in sixteenth-century Europe.
Cultural Landscapes: construction; perception and evaluation in the Late Middle Ages and today
Cultural landscapes “represent the combined work of nature and man” (UNESCO). In the late Middle Ages, images of them could become a popular means to create or strengthen the identity of their beholders showing, for instance, views of one’s beautiful town, one’s successful mining community or one’s well governed territory. Today’s methods to create and preserve identity with the help of cultural landscapes and their representation are certainly in some aspects different from the late medieval methods, in other ones strikingly similar and clearly not in any way less important.
Dossier. Taller del investigador. El proceso de la investigación: etapas y prácticas (Zurutuza, Botalla,eds.)
Ways to represent violence and conflict in the Liber Chronicarum by Angelo Clareno
When we think about the message of Francis of Assisi, we associate his Christian message to a message of peace and tolerance, a return to the ideals and primitive practices of the Gospels. However, throughout the history of the Order of Friars Minor, we can see that many of the situations of tension and/or conflict ended with the manifestation of representations and practices less peaceful. Think about the “violence” as a cross-cutting theme requires the use of semantic issues, ways of narrating conflicts; then the determination of the antagonists fields, identification of violent / peaceable acts, the construction of the actors in those situations, among others, allow to reveal the various modes of relationship between the persons and the construction of a specific identity. The purpose of this work is to investigate the different meanings that the term tribulatio have in the Angelo Clareno’s work, and to analyze what kind of relationship we can establish with narrated violence.
Rapax inuenti auaricia ridet: the animalization of greed in Bruno of Querfurt's Vita quinque fratrum
Animalization is a characteristic of disqualification of the infidel Slav in the sources of the Christianization Age in Central Europe. The “Slavic dog” is repeatedly qualified as greedy. This paper discusses the role of greed in the identification of the infidel as well as of the impious Slav with the further objective of recognizing and widening the number of distinctive features attributed to the other living at the border of the Ottonian Empire by Christian authors.
Aproximaciones metodológicas a una colección de sermones medievales: San Vicente Ferrer y el manuscrito del Colegio del Corpus Christi
Vicente Ferrer was one of the most outstanding preachers of the Medieval West. The study of his sermons gives us the opportunity to recognize some of the main characteristics that this genre had in the Iberian peninsula towards the end of the Middle Ages. The sermons of the saint, which are preserved at the Real Colegio-Seminario del Corpus Christi of Valencia, provides access to a homiletic corpus of over 180 sermons. Studying these ones, we can get a significant sample of the main contents of Ferrer’s speech, and ask what place his apocalyptic preaching occupies in them.
Persarmenia in Late Antiquity: Sasanian Marzbans and local elites in the history atributed to Sebeos
The partition of the Armenian Kingdom between the romans and the sasanians at the end of IV A.D. guaranteed to the government of the Shahanshah the administration of his oriental regions. To assure the control of such dominion, the Persian sovereign advanced with the administrative integration of that regions. The solution implemented was based in the appointment of a series of marzbans (military commanders) in charge of the defense and administration of the Persian Armenia. Those dignitaries always find themselves in a delicate situation. In a political level, thanks to the frontier reality of the territories under their control. To the treat of the roman power, added the recurrent demands of the local elites integrated by diverse Naxarar, tough’s defenders of the privileges of their strata so much as about his Christian faith. To that, added the pressures emanated from the court in Ctesiphon. Although such challenges, the marzbans where been capable of sustain the control of the region until the sinking of the dynastic authority after the end of the last romano-sassanid war (602-628) and the immediate muslin invasion. To try an approximation to the reasons of such stability, in relation to the capacity in the management of the territory by the royal functionaries, we will advance here with a study of the remains the practices of government, management and war of the sasanian marzbans present in historic work attributed to Sebeos. The object of such exercise is to collaborate to the comprehension of the motives whereby was possible to sustain the north occidental frontier of the sassanid kingdom in front of the roman challenge and the complex relations between the royal functionaries and the members of the local elites during the last centuries of Antiquity.
Monks travelers in the Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. The course of Fulgentius of Ruspe: contacts, exchanges and influences
Fulgentius, monk, bishop and “forced traveller” was born about the year 468 at Telepte (modern-day Medinet-el-Kedima), Tunisia, into a senatorial family. This reputation helped him to acquire a post as a procurator or tax recollector of Byzacena. He quicky grew tired of the material life. This, together with hiis sudies of religion, particularly a sermon of Augustine of Hippo on Psalm XXXVI, determined him to become a monk. In 508 was persuaded to take the post of bishop of the maritime city of Ruspe, but was soon banished to Sardinia with others bishops who did not hold the Arian position. In 515, he returned to Carthage, having been summoned there by Thrasamund for a public debate with their Arian opponents, but then renewed complaints from the local Arian clergy caused him to banish Fulgentius back to Sardinia in 520 and he founded un monastery with scriptorium at Cagliari (Carales) This scriptorium will become an important center of production, transcription and dissemination of religious texts in the Mediterranean space of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
A fragment of the Catalogus haereticorum of Gennadius of Marseille
The four chapters on heresies that manuscript tradition has preserved as belonging to Gennade of Marseille and following Augustine’s De haeresibus or pseudo-Jerome Indiculus have external and internal evidence that supports such attribution. This article seeks to make visible formal and content similarities between these chapters and Gennade’s De viris illustribus and De dogmatibus ecclesiasticis, as well as contextual conditions that favor the opposition to augustinian soteriology.
La tardía república romana: el ejército y la sociedad en la historia de Roma
Entre 1949 y 1954 Gabba publicó tres ensayos. Partiendo de los temas caro a Fraccaro, el jovensísimo estudioso pone las bases de una visión de la historia tardo-republicana que ha orientado toda su posterior investigación.
"Que no es todo para todos". El deber de escribir en la compañía de Jesús
In the Company of Jesus writing practices played a crucial place, because not only were the central mechanism for controlling a wide range personnel and dispersed throughout the world, but also because it had an apologetic purpose and of catchment of vocations. Alfonso Polanco in 1547 wrote the ratio scribendi, this document can be considered as one of the fundamental pillars of Jesuit writing.
Two Memorial Offenses of Ciudad Rodrigo: political dialogue between pecheros, elites and monarchy about the exercise of power
The study of two lists of offenses filed by the pecheros mirobrigenses in 1419 and 1455 respectively, uses as erudite support of a reflection on modalities of political action in the Castilian area council in the late Middle Ages. Within a critical dialogue with recent contributions on the political cultures, is to review the incidence of key notions such as the "Common Good" and "service to the king and the city"; inscribing use by knights and commoners in the logic separated from construction of their positions socioestamentales. In this sense, the reasons for the dispute and the way claims are possible closer to a universe of practices that make sense from breeding strategies that support privileged and unprivileged.
By force and without reason: the technical vocabulary of the appropriation from abulenses
The documentation of Asocio the city of Avila is a rich collection of for an analysis of the legal proceedings that were developed in Castile from XV century around the problem of appropriation of common land. The testimonies presented in these lawsuits show a recurrence in the arguments (time, use, reason and strength) that merit a technical analysis of these references. The aim of this paper is to analyze the references to fuerça e syn razón in the statements of witnesses as discursive juridical strategy for the acquisition of rights. With this objective will explore the link between these arguments and the legal definitions of dominium and ius consuetudinarium of ius commune.
Peasant production and power of the council in Piedrahita: the ordinance about wood for 1405
The aim of this paper is to analyze the regulations of wood’s production and supply in the Castilian council of Piedrahíta in Late Middle Ages. This document is especially clear with respect to the articulation between petty peasant production and the council’s goal of guarantee the subsistence of the village’s settlers. Besides, and this is uncommon in this kind of documents, the ordinance includes a correction made some months later, which increases flexibility of the original norm. To understand the reason of this auto-limitation of the local political power is another aspect of the analysis, referred to the contradiction between feudal reproduction and the autonomous structure of peasant production.
Scope and limits of Ecclesiastical Archives for the Study of León Nobility (10th - 11 th Centuries)
The aim of this paper is to discuss the scope and limits that ecclesiastical archives have for the study of Leon medieval nobility. By focusing on the diplomatic documents gathered at the Cathedral of León and the monasteries of Sahagún and Santa Maria de Otero de las Dueñas, three major documentary collections in the region, the article will examine some issues related to the production of nobility documents, as well as their later integration into ecclesiastical archives, considering the methodological problems these processes pose to scholars. Furthermore, some possibilities offered by ecclesiastical documents for the study of medieval nobility will be identified, and the main lines of research this documental corpus has enabled will be highlighted.
About franciscans Exempla in Italy in the 13th Century
Some examples of the chronicles of the thirteenth century, as the franciscan Salimbene of Parma, are receptive of genres such as the exemplum, a typology of great significance in the activity of preaching of the mendicant orders, but reducing their fictional profile for of stories they want to convey factual veracity through resources of temporary insertion and / or space or identifying actors and informants.
Unequal peasant struggles in the Middle Ages and lessons for the historian in the comparison documentary
Between 1110 and 1116 developed a great peasant insurrection in Leonesa area, which accompanied the rebellion that in those years staged the Sahagun burghers. In this struggle the Grajal peasant took part. This uprising is compared with a conflict that the people of the local council argued subsequently with the Sahagun monastery, surrounding the use of the Cea´s waters. It is analyzed as well a local struggle there are the internal divisions of the peasantry and the role of its leaders by channelling the demands. The analysis compared with laying down the barriers that the peasant had to overcome to achieve the unity of action that was regional in the uprising of the early twelfth century.
Religiuos identity and kinship in the Kitāb al- Mi'yār de al- Wanšarīsī
Islamic fatwas are legal judgments given by a specialist in law to a specific question. They are essential for the organization and regulation of the Muslim community since they solve problematic situations that may occur at various levels of the daily life. Given their importance, many of them were collected in corpus and consulted by the mufti, the jurist or faqih specialized in judicial matters. One of the most important compilations of fatwas from Muslim West was reunited by al- Wanšarīsī, the well known Kitāb al- Mi`yār. This corpus contains numerous statements concerning economic, religious, legal and marital practices made by judges from North Africa and al- Andalus, and forms a remarkable material for the study of the everyday life of the inhabitants of the region between IX and XV. The aim of this lecture will be to address those fatwas concerning conflicts that happened as a result of the coexistence between Muslims and Christians in the Iberian Peninsula, with special emphasis on those cases related with mixed marriages. Without ignoring the normative nature of this sources, and the limited information on the subject, our goal is to analyze how legal discourse constructed and judged the relations between individuals of different faiths, as well as the concepts of identity, purity and pollution of that time.
El edicto de Spello: perspectivas recientes
Me concentraré aquí, más modestamente, sobre aspectos privilegiados en los estudios de los últimos decenios, retomando oportunamente las principales líneas interpretativas del significado del Edicto. Y esto, incluso en confrontación con cuanto, hace menos de veinte años atrás, había sostenido sobre aquél, principalmente en relación a la reorganización político-administrativa de fines del s.III, pasando en verdad prácticamente desapercibido. La hipótesis según la cual el Edicto sería una falsificación (antigua o moderna) fue propuesta, como se sabe, inmediatamente después del descubrimiento (que tuvo lugar en 1733, en el santuario de Villa Fidelia, no lejos del gran teatro, pero que probablemente se deba vincular con el área de la futura iglesia de S. Fedele).
Glory and afflictions of the Ottonian empire: The Chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg
The Chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg is a key document for studying the Liudolfinger (or Ottonian) dinasty (919-1024). The author was the bishop of the see between 1009 and 1018, during Henry II’s reign. The aim of the source was to relate the history of Merseburg –a see which was part of the Archdiocese of Magdeburg–, as well as the history and deeds related to the Saxon kings. Along the eight books comprising the Chronicle, it is possible to recognize Thietmar´s perception regarding the events recounted and the main actors who performed them. In the case of the Ottonian dinasty, laudatory words intersect other words expressing dissent. The chronicler criticises certain developments, which he witnesses or which he finds narrated in his oral or written sources. His view of Otto II´s reign is particularly severe: which are the reasons that explain such appreciation? The bishopric of Merseburg was involved in a history characterized by intrigues and personal interest at the expense of the see. Its removal in 981 was only rectified in 1004, when the diocese was re-established. We consider that Thietmar´s criticism against Otto II is closely linked with the above mentioned events, which caused many difficulties for the development of the see, as well as repercusions up to Thietmar´s time. The prologues to the books of the Chronicle will be analysed, given the fact that the author´s general points of view are manifest in them.