Spanish Kingdoms Research Articles

The African Presence in Iberian Art*

The African presence in early modern Iberia increased with the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade following the discoveries of the Americas from the middle of the fifteenth century. This article focuses on the visual representation of Africans in the Kingdom of Portugal and the Spanish Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile until the seventeenth century. It focuses on the depiction of urban enslaved and liberated Africans in the main cities of Lisbon and Seville, in religious compositions, as the most popular Adoration of the Magi and the violent Castilian iconography of The Miracle of the Black Leg and in portraiture.

The Apache Diaspora by Paul Conrad

Reviewed by: The Apache Diaspora by Paul Conrad Andrés Reséndez (bio) Apache, Native Americans, Ndé, Slavery, Indigenous The Apache Diaspora. By Paul Conrad. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 366. Cloth, $34.95.) This is the first comprehensive examination of Apache (Ndé) groups from the 1500s, when they entered the Spanish documentary record, to the twentieth century. Previous scholars have examined a variety of aspects of Apache history: Some have looked at Apaches during the Spanish colonial era while others have studied the protracted wars along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the long nineteenth century, focusing on such figures as Mangas Coloradas, Victorio, and, of course, Geronimo. Paul Conrad's treatment reveals the astounding range of Apache experiences in a broad region of the American Southwest and northern Mexico and reaching as far south as Veracruz, as far east as Florida and Cuba, and as far north as Canada. The Apache Diaspora surveys a multi-secular struggle that spanned multiple empires and nations across much of North America. The notion of a "diaspora" in the title and through the manuscript is very flexible and allows Conrad to analyze the scattering forces of colonialism, enslavement, deportation, incarceration, and boarding schools to which Apaches were subjected through the centuries as well as their will to overcome such forces of dispersion, survive, and endure as a people. The book is organized chronologically in two parts. Each chapter usually features a specific locale to underscore the range of Apache experiences. [End Page 318] Thus, Chapter 1 is centered on Santa Fe, New Mexico and sometimes more specifically on the Palace of the Governors. In Chapter 2, Conrad moves to the mining town of Parral in what is now southern Chihuahua. Chapters 3 and 4 are anchored on the Southern Plains, Chapter 5 follows the deportation of Apaches through Mexico City, Veracruz, and Cuba, and so on. One strength of The Apache Diaspora is definitional. Instead of considering "Apaches" as an identifiable set of peoples or a collection of groups, Conrad helpfully emphasizes that "Apache" was a convenient label applied to a variety of mobile peoples (initially around New Mexico) who were deemed at war with Christians and therefore enslaveable. Such rhetorical convolution was necessary in colonial times because the Spanish crown generally forbade the enslavement of Native peoples except in extraordinary circumstances, and being at war with the Spanish kingdoms and Christendom in general was one of them. By the seventeenth century, as Conrad rightly notes, the terms "Apache" and "slave" were virtually interchangeable among Spanish settlers of New Spain's northern provinces. The Apache Diaspora combines great depth of archival research along with engagement with the work of many scholars working on multiple aspects of this history. In the first part of the book, Conrad is primarily in conversation with historians of Indigenous enslavement, teasing out forced-labor arrangements and clarifying patterns of coercion with numerous cases and examples, some known to previous scholars and others drawn from the author's archival work. In the middle chapters, Conrad shifts the focus from slavery to deportation or banishment campaigns that New Spain waged against specific Apache groups in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author argues persuasively that deportation required more nuanced understandings of family and kinship ties among Apache peoples. Whereas the slave trade was predicated on the fiction that all Apaches were enemies and indistinguishable from one another—and therefore all enslaveable—the deportation campaigns had to be far more discriminating and attuned to local bands and groupings known as gotah among southern Apaches and rancherías to the Spanish. Conrad shows how Spanish officials in northern New Spain got to known Apache headmen and understood their primary and more distant group belongings and loyalties and used this knowledge either to negotiate peace with them or wage war and deportation campaigns. In the last three chapters, Conrad treads over familiar ground around the Apaches de Paz program—an early Spanish version of the U.S.-run [End Page 319] Indian reservations—and the later American social experiments that included reservations and banishment to distant forts and boarding schools. Here the author dwells less on explanations for...

Comparing the New World and the Old: Fray Juan Bautista and the Languages of the Spanish Monarchy

Abstract Born in New Spain, fray Juan Bautista Viseo (b. 1555) authored perhaps a dozen books in Nahuatl, Castilian, and Latin, making him one of the most prolific writers of the colonial period in Mexico. While many are lost, his available texts provide a valuable window into religious conversion efforts in the Spanish monarchy around 1600. This paper investigates his recommendations regarding how priests and members of religious orders ought to use indigenous languages. In the sixteenth-century Spanish territories, Church and Crown officials discussed language strategies on several fronts. This paper also compares Juan Bautista’s ideas about language use in Mexico to similar discussions elsewhere in the Spanish kingdoms. Existing scholarship has highlighted parallels in how the Spanish monarchy dealt with Native American and Islamic communities. However, an examination of Juan Bautista’s writing, together with that of contemporary churchmen, suggests fundamental differences in the ways that Spanish officials thought about and approached Amerindians and Moriscos.

Splitting Definitives: The Separation of the Definite Article in Medieval and Pre-Modern Written Judeo-Arabic

Abstract This article explores the reasons behind the orthographic practice of representing the definite article in written Judeo-Arabic as an independent entity, a phenomenon which became widespread in Jewish Arabic-speaking communities in the pre-modern era. Commencing with its representation in fifteenth to nineteenth-century Egyptian Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, the orthographic feature is traced back to Judeo-Arabic texts produced in medieval al-Andalus, Sicily, and the Maġrib, and from there, to post-1492 CE Sephardī Jewish refugees, who settled in North Africa and Egypt. The phenomenon is revealed to be the result of a two-stage process: (i) direct language contact between Romance and Judeo-Arabic; and (ii) the influence of Judeo-Spanish writing on Judeo-Arabic spelling practices in diaspora communities after their expulsion from the Spanish Kingdoms.

Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms, by Lucy K. Pick

Lucy Pick draws to a close her impressive study of royal females in the eleventh-century kingdom of León with a glance across to the Anglo-Saxon nunneries of Ely, Barking, Wimbourne, Repton and the slightly later house at Wilton, with their strong connections to royal daughters, putting them in parallel to similar developments in Carolingian Francia and, perhaps crucially, under the Ottonians. Princesses-becoming-abbesses is a recurrent trope of hagiography, but Pick is at pains to differentiate the women she depicts from that hagiographic norm. The kings of León, unlike their weaker Iberian Christian rivals, preferred to keep their daughters unmarried. This state of affairs came about, she argues, because north-western Spain inherited strong (perhaps pre-Roman) matriarchal traditions, which the kings sought to circumvent: the right to rule passed down the female line, inevitably converting sons-in-law into rivals to the throne, and certainly bypassing direct male heirs. These Leonese princesses were thus...

El concepto de infancia en la Baja Edad Media en Castilla a través de los «Espejos de Príncipes» (siglos XIII-XV)

Durante la Baja Edad Media, Castilla vive un resurgir de la literatura sapiencial en lo tocante a la formación moral e intelectual de los príncipes. Es este un fenómeno novedoso al calor del resurgir de la cultura clásica y la revisión de los textos latinos bajo una nueva dimensión en esta época. Los reinos bajomedievales hispanos adoptaron una nueva visión de los textos clásicos no solo desde el punto de vista moralizante cristiano, sino desde una óptica laica y más práctica. La literatura sapiencial o los «Espejos de Príncipes» constituyen un ejemplo del afán por formar al buen príncipe o monarca ante un contexto político cambiante y novedoso, pero también, como un recurso habitual en la Edad Media, se hace mirando al pasado clásico como referente inicial.

Lucy K. Pick, Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2017, xiii, 274 pp., 16 b/w ill. and maps.

Lucy K. Pick, <i>Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms</i>. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2017, xiii, 274 pp., 16 b/w ill. and maps.

Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick

Reviewed by: Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick Miriam Shadis Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. By Lucy K. Pick. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2017. Pp. xvi, 274. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-5017-1432.0.) With the publication of Her Father's Daughter, scholars of history and of religion can no longer ignore the crucial role of royal women in shaping the political worlds of the Middle Ages. In her study of the formation of the Christian realms of northern Iberia, Lucy Pick joins a growing group of scholars rethinking the notion that any medieval woman with power—and particularly political authority—was "exceptional." Pick has mastered a significant historiography pertaining to medieval gender, monarchy, and religion, and a chastening array of feminist and cultural theory to reinterpret the roles of some inarguably powerful women. Religious roles were their sources of power as women participated in political systems and kinship networks. In 1071, Urraca Fernández, the oldest child of Fernando I and Sancha of León re-founded the see of Túy, which had suffered Viking depredations. Why and how did Urraca, a consecrated virgin, have the power and authority to accomplish this? Urraca's action, recorded in an extraordinary charter, serves as a touchstone in Pick's study about the gendered features of political and religious power and authority in tenth and eleventh-century Iberia. Four lengthy chapters, as well as an introduction and epilogue make a strong case. Pick begins by examining matrilineal inheritance and the inheritance principles of Visigothic law. Royal daughters were reserved for the help and status they could supply their male relatives. These consecrated virgins were neither nuns nor abbesses: neither cloistered nor poor, they moved freely and effectively in the political world, controlling numerous monastic communities. Women's appearances in tenth- and eleventh-century charters prove their significant networks. Pick walks the reader through the structure and meaning of these remarkable charters: the protocols, the invocations, the probable singing and performance of these texts—and the networks revealed by the confirmants and witnesses, providing a veritable clinic in how to read a charter. A brilliant reading of Urraca Fernández's 1071 charter restoring the see of Túy demonstrates its extremely special relationship to liturgy, to performance, and to Christian texts such as Paul Albar's carmina. The charter expressed Urraca's power within her family and within Galicia, where she controlled significant property. Urraca and [End Page 142] her sister Elvira exercised their spiritual power as women, collaborated with their brother, Alfonso VI of León-Castilla, and built the networks which they carefully displayed and exploited, and they were not alone. Elite women such as Elvira Ramírez, Abbess Guntroda Gutiérrez, and Countess Muniadomna prefigure the activity of Urraca and Elvira, even a century and a half earlier (p. 123), as they competed over the relics of the virgin martyr Pelayo and the introduction of and control of his cult in northwestern Iberia. Finally, "Gift-giving and memory" were "always allied to power" (p. 19). Pick's fluent engagement with material culture is couched in a sophisticated analysis of scholarship on the medieval gift and counter-gift. Royal daughters were "at the nexus of memory, gift, and death" (p. 175), as a kind of gift themselves, but also charged with giving, preserving memory, and caring for the dead. In possibly the most enjoyable section of the book, Pick carefully reads a variety of artifacts, from the bronze candelabra of Abbess Mathilda of Essen to the reliquary of Saints Adrian and Natalia, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, which Pick persuasively identifies as Urraca's gift to Eslonza (pp. 186–188.) The theme of virginity is pursued as an analytical tool—these reliquary boxes and other containers physically represented donors' virginity. Similar claims are developed throughout the book: from Ambrose, to Leander, to Urraca's charter, to the foundation of San Martiño de Pazó, the aula regis puderis, the "royal hall of chastity" repeatedly frames and articulates the connection between virginity, gender, and royalty (pp...

Matrimony and Monarchy: The Failure of Bourbon-Habsburg Matrimonial Alliance

The research paper titled “Matrimony and Monarchy: The Failure of Bourbon-Habsburg Matrimonial Alliance,” is an in depth study of the matrimonial alliance between the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties through the marriage of Louis XIV; the King of France, with the Spanish hieress Maria Theresa. This matrimonial alliance, which was arranged to start a new era of Franco-Spanish relations in the seventeenth century, was one of the many similar examples that had been followed in state craft from the earliest times. The paper serves a two-fold purpose: to bring to light the unsuccessful nature of this marriage, and to probe the various reasons for which the alliance was a failure in the very quintessence of a marriage. The paper highlights the factors that contributed in not only keeping the matrimonial alliance into a contentious relationship between Maria Theresa and Louis XIV but also in causing a decline in the political ties between the French and Spanish kingdoms. The research paper, thus, caters to an aspect in the study of matrimonial alliances that remains largely unexplored.

Beyond Borders: Jean Gerson’s Conciliarism in Late Medieval Spain

In recent years there has been renewed interest in conciliarism, the belief that the authority of the universal church resides in an ecumenical council, not the pope, though the perception remains that conciliarism had a negligible impact in Iberia. One way to better understand the evolution of conciliar thought in the Spanish kingdoms is by looking at the circulation of the works and ideas of the French conciliarist Jean Gerson (1363–1429). Though a complete reconstruction of Gerson’s circulation is impossible, one can offer an initial overview of his impact in the Spanish kingdoms not simply by counting manuscripts or incunabula, as valuable as that is, but by thinking broadly about networks of exchange and dissemination. Gerson’s works came to Spain through the church councils, trans-Pyrenees Carthusian networks, monastic reformers, printers and printing houses, mendicant reformers, and the library of the University of Salamanca.

Beyond Borders: Jean Gerson’s Conciliarism in Late Medieval Spain

In recent years there has been renewed interest in conciliarism, the belief that the authority of the universal church resides in an ecumenical council, not the pope, though the perception remains that conciliarism had a negligible impact in Iberia. One way to better understand the evolution of conciliar thought in the Spanish kingdoms is by looking at the circulation of the works and ideas of the French conciliarist Jean Gerson (1363–1429). Though a complete reconstruction of Gerson’s circulation is impossible, one can offer an initial overview of his impact in the Spanish kingdoms not simply by counting manuscripts or incunabula, as valuable as that is, but by thinking broadly about networks of exchange and dissemination. Gerson’s works came to Spain through the church councils, trans-Pyrenees Carthusian networks, monastic reformers, printers and printing houses, mendicant reformers, and the library of the University of Salamanca.&#x0D;

Lucy K. Pick. Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in Early the Spanish Kingdoms.

Lucy K. Pick. Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in Early the Spanish Kingdoms.

A Spanish composite Rex Virginum Mass and the Beata Virgine Maria Mass tradition in Europe

Abstract Concepts of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in Renaissance music studies have sometimes been the cause of oversights concerning points of contact and cultural exchange between the musical ‘mainstream’—represented by the northern European and Italian circles—and the Spanish kingdoms. Musicians from the Iberian Peninsula—among them, Francisco de Peñalosa—were well aware of musical developments in the Franco-Netherlandish polyphonic tradition, and incorporated some of these into their Mass composition throughout the 16th century. This article presents a case study of the Rex Virginum composite Mass, with sections by Pedro de Escobar, Francisco de Peñalosa, Pedro Hernández [de Castilleja] and Alonso Pérez de Alba. This Mass is directly connected with the popularity of votive Beata Virgine Maria Masses composed by Franco-Netherlandish and later Spanish composers. In order to shed more light on the significance of this work, the different musical styles of each composer involved in its creation are examined, and the Mass compared with other Beata Virgine Maria models. Through this analysis, the distinct musical contribution of this Mass in the context of European Renaissance music, and its influence on later generations of Spanish composers—especially Francisco Guerrero—are examined.

España a finales de la Edad Media, I: Población. Economía, by Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada

Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada’s overview of population and economy in Spain in the late Middle Ages, from the mid-thirteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century, is a useful and clearly organised study; it successfully provides a lucid account of changes in, and peculiarities of, the different Spanish kingdoms and regions. His synthesis refers to a vast array of works on Spain, which have advanced the understanding of the social and economic distinctions of its territories. Methodologically, Ladero Quesada’s interpretation draws upon analyses mainly of other European territories. These latter have enriched the debate by proposing new interpretations of the effects of the so-called crisis of the late Middle Ages, drawing attention to its transformative and positive effects. Stephan Epstein is only partially credited in this book, but he is indeed the historian whose methodology and interpretations seem to have strongly influenced the structure of the present volume. In discussing the evolution of the economy of the Hispanic kingdoms and regions, Ladero Quesada confirms their lack of homogeneity, rejects any form of generalisation and considers single territories and/or larger connected areas within the kingdoms to gain a better understanding of their economic systems.

Book Review: Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms

Book Review: Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms

Pick, Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms (Cornell University Press, 2017)

Review of Lucy K. Pick, Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

Her father's daughter. Gender, power, and religion in early Spanish kingdoms. By Lucy K. Pick. Pp. xvi + 274 incl. 16 figs. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2017. £50. 978 1 5017 1432 0

Her father's daughter. Gender, power, and religion in early Spanish kingdoms. By Lucy K. Pick. Pp. xvi + 274 incl. 16 figs. Ithaca–London: Cornell University Press, 2017. £50. 978 1 5017 1432 0

Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick

Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick

Sobre la segunda legación en España del cardenal Guido de Boulogne (1372-1373)

This paper aims to cast a general view over the mission entrusted by Pope Gregoire XI to the cardinal Gui de Boulogne, sent for the second time as a legate to the Spanish kingdoms in 1372-1373. There he kept primarily busy with the negotiations of peace between Castile, Portugal, Navarre and Aragon, but there were other issues in his diplomatic agenda as well, related to a variety of topics, including some attention to clerical discipline matters, the need to find a final settlement between Castile and the Papacy on behalf of the destiny of the late Templar order’s properties, and also some causes raised to him by several local clerical institutions. The analysis of a significant selection of documentation from the Vatican archives provides the main shape to our work (with some of them edited in our appendices).

Garden of the Generalife in Granada: Théo van Rysselberghe.

Garden of the Generalife in Granada: Théo van Rysselberghe.