This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved the relations of Europeans and Native Americans in an Oaxacan town (in New Spain, today’s Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worlds preserved in the inquisitorial files share many things. By comparing and contrasting the two inquisitions, Hamann reveals how very local practices and debates had long-distance parallels that reveal the larger entanglements of a transatlantic early modern world. Through a dialogue of two microhistories, he presents a macrohistory of large-scale social transformation. We see how attempts in both places to turn old worlds into new ones were centered on struggles over materiality and temporality. By paying close attention to theories (and practices) of reduction and conversion, Hamann suggests we can move beyond anachronistic models of social change as colonization and place questions of time and history at the center of our understandings of the sixteenth-century past. The book is an intervention in major debates in both history and anthropology: about the writing of global histories, our conceptualizations of the colonial, the nature of religious and cultural change, and the roles of material things in social life and the imagination of time.

In 1609, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory or else be killed. In a brutal and traumatic exodus, entire families were forced to abandon the homes and villages where they had lived for generations. In just five years, Muslim Spain had effectively ceased to exist: an estimated 300,000 Muslims had been removed from Spanish territory making it what was then the largest act of ethnic cleansing in European history. Blood and Faith is a riveting chronicle of this virtually unknown episode, set against the vivid historical backdrop of Muslim Spain. It offers a remarkable window onto a little-known period in modern Europe - a rich and complex tale of competing faiths and beliefs, of cultural oppression and resistance against overwhelming odds.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity (mostly under duress) in late medieval Spain. "Converso and Moriscos Studies" examines the manifold cultural implications of these mass convertions.

This rugged new translation--the first entirely new English translation in half a century and the only one based on the most recent critical edition of the Guatemalan MS--allows Diaz to recount, in his own battle-weary and often cynical voice, the achievements, stratagems, and frequent cruelty of Hernando Cortes and his men as they set out to overthrow Moctezuma's Aztec kingdom and establish a Spanish empire in the New World. The concise contextual introduction to this volume traces the origins, history, and methods of the Spanish enterprise in the Americas; it also discusses the nature of the conflict between the Spanish and the Aztecs in Mexico, and compares Diaz's version of events to those of other contemporary chroniclers. Editorial glosses summarize omitted portions, and substantial footnotes explain those terms, names, and cultural references in Diaz's text that may be unfamiliar to modern readers. A chronology of the Conquest is included, as are a guide to major figures, a select bibliography, and three maps.

Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity in large numbers and usually under duress in late medieval Spain. The Converso and Morisco Studies publications will examine the implications of these mass conversions for the converts themselves, for their heirs (also referred to as Conversos and Moriscos) and for medieval and modern Spanish and European culture. Volume two of the series focuses on the Moriscos, offering new perspectives on this elusive group's social and religious character in the period leading up to its expulsion from Spain in 1609.

“Gretchen Starr-LeBeau’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition provides an excellent introduction to Habsburg Spain’s most reviled and misunderstood institution. Drawn from archival sources and modern scholarship, this concise study presents the long and tortured history of the Spanish Inquisition in an accessible format for readers interested in the intersection of religion and jurisprudence. Addressing common misconceptions about the procedures, effectiveness, and reach of the Inquisition, this work argues convincingly for an updated assessment encompassing change over time and variations across Spain and its empire. Students of the early modern period will benefit from the volume’s logical organization, glossary of terms, and suggestions for further reading.” —Benjamin Ehlers, University of Georgia

The story of Seville’s Archive of the Indies reveals how current views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based on radical historical revisionism in Spain in the late 1700s. The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa. In this meticulously researched book, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of eighteenth-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data—assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Elionor of Sicily, 1325–1375: A Mediterranean Queen’s Life of Family, Administration, Diplomacy, and War follows Elionor of Sicily, the third wife of the important Aragonese king, Pere III. Despite the limited amount of personal information about Elionor, the large number of Sicilian, Catalan, and Aragonese chronicles as well as the massive amount of notarial evidence drawn from eastern Spanish archives has allowed Donald Kagay to trace Elionor’s extremely active life roles as a wife and mother, a queen, a frustrated sovereign, a successful administrator, a supporter of royal war, a diplomat, a feudal lord, a fervent backer of several religious orders, and an energetic builder of royal sites. Drawing from the correspondence between the queen and her husband, official papers and communiques, and a vast array of notarial documents, the book casts light on the many phases of the queen’s life.