Suchergebnisse

The corregidores were Castilian royal officials who functioned as mayors and superior judges in the provinces, cities, towns, and villages they were sent to oversee. At the head of urban militias they took part in the War of Succession and the Granada War. The corregidores thus had significant dealings with the peasantry, urban masses, the merchants, the nobles, the aristocracy, the officials of the Inquisition. Through its study of their many varied duties, this book offers a panoramic view of Castile during the late medieval and Renaissance eras. Despite their importance, a major study has never before been devoted entirely to their activities during the reign. This study also incorporates a major effort at periodisation of Isabella's reign, the first attempted in modern times. Overall, the book offers a tripartite dissection of the queen's career in power and an assessment of the differing states of the operations of corregidores over her three decades

Throughout the Iberian world from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century an all-purpose scapegoat drawn from a few prosperous convert families was thrust by inquisitors into view during times of social stress. The tribunal's education in hatred required that ever-more-grandiose pageants be held in major cities. The issue raised by these Autos de Fe is how such a "pedagogy of fear" kept subjects of the Crown in line by evoking racial hostility with little more proof presented after secret trials than mere sentences. It was through costume, ceremony, and printed invective that defendants were men made over into society's definitive Other: the Secret-Jew.