The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship established between women and silence during the Late Middle Ages. Silence itself was valued as a virtue for all the faithful; however it was demanded of every woman as the necessary condition to show honesty and devotion. Moreover, loquacity was considered a natural attribute of women, who, according to moralists, used the word in many negative ways, especially to criticize other women or to convince men to behave wrongly. As a result, the imposition of silence and therefore the restriction of the word – spoken or written – became tools aimed to exercise control over women and to perpetuate the prevailing models of imbalance and inequality between men and women at a time precisely in which female voices were gaining greater authority within some intellectual circles. To this end, we analysed the sermons of one of the most remarkable preachers at the time, saint Vicent Ferrer, since preaching was an effective way of propagation of role models. In addition to this, we studied images such as paintings or book illuminations, which contributed also to spread the ideal of the silent woman, following the example of the Virgin Mary, who barely spoke in the New Testament. Nevertheless, the Holy Mother and other female saints were often represented reading the Bible, which encouraged some women to read and possess Books of Hours or other Prayer Books.
This article focuses on the description of the other view of Valencia in the 15th century, that of social marginalization, which, in addition to excluding a large part of society suffering from contagious diseases, could be manifested in a more concrete way for exercising various trades that are considered as immoral. The following pages offer a description of two female groups, particularly treated as vile and despicable: the healers, sorceresses and witches, whose strength was considered to have a demonic origin, and the prostitutes, dedicated to cover a “minor evil” in society, but seen as unworthy by society, because of the practical exercise of their trade.
As for the healers, both the sermons of St. Vincent and the texts of didactic and moralizing literature attack this profession, which, on the other hand, was required on many occasions. In this sense, Jaume Roig’s Spill presents a whole series of superstitious practices, exercised by women doctors. This natural inclination of women to superstition, understood as an exponent of popular culture, reaches its maximum expression from the idea, widespread in medieval Europe, that women become witches, renounce God and worship the devil.
Another group described in this article is that of prostitutes, whose profession is understood, from the Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine, and preachers such as St. Vincent, as a lesser evil, in order to avoid worse evils on the side of lust. Prostitutes, especially if they were muslims, were marginalized, punished, and considered vile women, because they had strayed from a honest life. The only possible alternative was to leave the brothel and be confined in a monastery, as is the case of the monastery of “Les Repenedides”, which was founded in Valencia in 1345, where prostitutes had to remain in prison for at least one year, in order to achieve social reintegration and grace before God.
In 1516, the first Jewish ghetto was created in Venice and, from that moment, the already narrow perimeter of tolerance between the Christian majority society and one of the religious minorities that existed in the territories of the Republic was limited: I’m referring to the Jews. After a few years, a seat of the Tribunal of the Holy Office was installed in the city. Despite these two elements, Venice remained a territory open to contamination; in fact, the Venetian Inquisition enjoyed a certain autonomy with respect to the Roman one and exercised its office in a less strict way if we compared it with the Spanish one. Notwithstanding that, its attention to the different forms of heresy was attentive and constant.
Among the processes that the historian Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini has managed to bring together in his essential work Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro ebrei e giudaizzanti (1548–1734), I consider it interesting to study those that refer to the situation of women in the Jewish context since, frequently, a “natural” relationship is established between gender-conviction and religion-persecution of female victims, guilty of any type of infamy.
The observations that I present here have as a starting point the treatment of certain female attitudes that were the cause of persecutions and convictions. In particular, I intend to comment on two geographically very distant situations, but accompanied by two elements: the suspicion of crypto-Judaism and being a woman. The space-time dimension extends from Spain to the Republic of Venice in the 16th century. The protagonists I will name share one more element: having had to go through the trial of the Court of the Inquisition, in some cases the Spanish one and in others the Venetian one.
The critical view with which this type of documentary material will be addressed will be of a socio-cultural nature and will be delimited to the documentation related to the 16th century and, in particular, to that related to the Sephardic and Conversos’ communities.
The purpose of this essay is not only to provide new data that can open up new research perspectives, but is also to try to return, although a posteriori, the voice to some of the victims of gender violence.
The diary titled Coses evengudes en la ciutat y regne de València, which was written by Monsignor Pere Joan Porcar between 1585 and 1629, is one of the literary testimonies of the Valencian Baroque that has aroused major interest among scholars. However, it has never been analyzed from a gender perspective. Therefore, in the present work we propose to analyze and establish a typology of the different cases of sexist violence that the document reports, and that ended with the injury or death of women: wives, unmarried women, maids, girls, etc. In conclusion the diary depicts a patriarchal society presided over by structural violence, where women only played a marginal role.
Banditry was a social phenomenon that affected most places in the Hispanic monarchy. However, banditry is not a homogeneous phenomenon, it is different depending on the area and territory. In the crown of Aragon, in the 16th and 17th centuries, noble families solved their problems by hiring bandits for hire. These gangs of bandits stole, extorted and killed as a way of life or a way of work. In Catalonia from the middle of the 16th century until the end of the 1640s, banditry became a widespread evil and a problem for the authorities. In this work we analyse, through judicial documentation, one of the most important acts of Catalan banditry in the second half of the 16th century, that is to say, the capture and execution of an important gang of bandits integrated by famous bandits of the time as Moreu Palau, Camadall, Gralla and Escales, among others. The capture of the criminals was carried out by the men of the Solicitor of the Duke of Cordona, Jaume Pau Franquesa and the Militia Igualada in 1573. In the first part of this article, we analyze the facts through the interrogations that were made of the people who lived in the towns where the acts took place, mostly peasants. In this way, we are approaching the facts through the experiences of the popular classes, because they were the ones who fought, were injured or died in the fight against the bandits. In the second part of the work, we reconstruct, with the help of the Generalitat diary as the main document, the sentences handed down against the bandits and the punitive ritual suffered by those sentenced to death. In the third and last part, we study the popular literature that was printed on the facts. These chapbooks were printed before, during and shortly after the execution of the inmates and are part of the gallows literature, which was very important in the acts of execution in many European countries in the modern age.
It deals with the linguistic study of two criminal procedures manuscripts, both dated to around year 1600. The texts, belonging to Catalan-Valencian language, provide good morphosyntactic and lexical information, which show the importance and the need to edit and study documentation of such kind in order to properly understand the evolution of language, because they are verbatim transcripts. Therefore, complementing the study of formal literary and administration texts, not only by discovering new words and linguistic attributes that may have not remained up to the present, but also by fixing the date when many other characteristics first appeared in time.
Typically, the unavailability of similar texts to scholars has not allowed to well-determining, how old and how deep-rooted, some of the discussed phenomena are in linguistic communities. For instance, the preposition ‘a’ + direct object, the final conjunction ‘per a que’; colloquial terms as ‘barandat’, ‘esgolar’, ‘sitara’, or ‘sellavors’; extinct terms like ‘malavejar’, ‘empényer’ and ‘espollegar’; Spanish lexemes like ‘assomar’ or ‘apexugar’.
Criminal procedures, also known Royal Court books, faithfully depict the ancient reality of different people, bringing to light diverse testimonies offered regarding the same facts; usually coexistence related topics. A great mirror of the daily life and customs of an era, which openly gives us their true colloquial and narrative registers, like a perfect voice recorder saving the language of the moment, on precisely dated and located documents.
Naples, 1590, Carlo Gesualdo killed his wife and lover caught in flagrant adultery. The process allows us to outline some marginal figures, such as the maids, one of whom testifies at the trial, together with the Prince’s cloakroom attendant: their half-truths more mendacious than lies” are aimed at strengthening the motive, safe conduct of the double murder. The prince of Venosa will also be at the center of another process: women who we usually find on the margins of history will intervene; figures who normally have their place in recent literary novels, willing to draw their protagonists from that marginal story brought to the light by Carlo Ginzburg in The cheese and the worms. The cosmos of a 16th century miller (1976, first Italian edition), through the inquisitorial archives, where it is possible to catch the voices of individuals who often do not appear, or appear only indirectly, in historical documentation: from farmers to women. These are secondary cases, micro-stories such as that of the Friulian miller Menocchio (we are in the 16th century) that can shed light on large problems (here is bet of the book): from the challenge to the authorities in a pre-industrial society to the intertwining of culture oral and written culture. But the purpose of this story-writing experiment was, and is, to bring Menocchio’s voice to the reader. It is these documented and marginal stories that offer new material to current novels. And in fact, the novel that won the 2019 Campiello Prize, Madrigal without sound: death of Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa by Andrea Tarabbia is dedicated to the story of Carlo Gesualdo.
In medieval French Literature there are many more or less veiled references to the hero’s homosexuality. One of the best known, explicit this time, is certainly that of Lanval of Marie de France. This fact is in line with a tradition in the Celtic word, which, for example, according to the attestation of Diodorus Siculus, considered the Celts notoriously attracted to the same sex. It should be emphasized that for most of the situations the fact of accusing of homosexuality as a negative aspect of the personality is a function of something else, for example as the justification of a lack of attention for the queen (Lanval) or to induce Lavinia to refuse the love of Aeneas (Roman d’Eneas). And, among all the texts of medieval French literature dealing with sexual marginality, in this case homosexuality, the anonymous Roman d’Eneas (c. 1165) is undoubtely one of the most significant. But allusions on the same topic can be found in the episode of the visit to the Sibilla in the Guerrin Meschino, an Italian novel written by Andrea da Barberino (c. 1410), as well as in its French translation by Jean de Rochemeure.
Bibliography on the pictorial production in the city and the kingdom of Valencia focuses on the altarpiece painting. Painters who embellished other devices – such as coffers, boxes, shields, flags, armours or curtains – have not been displaced from the history of Valencian painting, but they need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. This paper examines the painter of coffers’ profession between 1390 and 1430. For this purpose, we are going to consult archival documents published by Josep Sanchis Sivera and Lluís Cerveró Gomis in different journal volumes, as well as to look up information from the documentary collections on Valencian medieval painting edited by Ximo Company, Joan Aliaga, Lluïsa Tolosa, Milagros Cárcel Ortí and Juan Vicente García Marsilla. The aim is to read the documents in which the painters of coffers are mentioned – mainly inventories and judicial sentences or obligations – in order to suggest new questions about this medieval profession.
We use the case of Hernando – or Fernando – Cabrera, carceller of the secret prisons of the court of the Inquisition of Valencia between the years 1515 and 1541, to illustrate both the institutional language of the time and the current historiography on the Inquisition and its secret prisons, innovative institutions in their time and considered modern, in relation to “medieval” prisons, take us at the deception: at the reality, accessible thanks to the internal documentation of the Santo Oficio, we find a dark world where there it is widespread inefficiency and negligence at the work, corruption and economic extortion of prisoners, as well as abuses of the privileges of the staff of the Inquisition. Hernando Cabrera has been receiving continuous and useless warnings from the inquisitors since 1526, but he is incorrigible and does not change his behavior, until he is degraded by the Council of the Supreme Inquisition in 1541.
The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship established between women and silence during the Late Middle Ages. Silence itself was valued as a virtue for all the faithful; however it was demanded of every woman as the necessary condition to show honesty and devotion. Moreover, loquacity was considered a natural attribute of women, who, according to moralists, used the word in many negative ways, especially to criticize other women or to convince men to behave wrongly. As a result, the imposition of silence and therefore the restriction of the word – spoken or written – became tools aimed to exercise control over women and to perpetuate the prevailing models of imbalance and inequality between men and women at a time precisely in which female voices were gaining greater authority within some intellectual circles. To this end, we analysed the sermons of one of the most remarkable preachers at the time, saint Vicent Ferrer, since preaching was an effective way of propagation of role models. In addition to this, we studied images such as paintings or book illuminations, which contributed also to spread the ideal of the silent woman, following the example of the Virgin Mary, who barely spoke in the New Testament. Nevertheless, the Holy Mother and other female saints were often represented reading the Bible, which encouraged some women to read and possess Books of Hours or other Prayer Books.
This article focuses on the description of the other view of Valencia in the 15th century, that of social marginalization, which, in addition to excluding a large part of society suffering from contagious diseases, could be manifested in a more concrete way for exercising various trades that are considered as immoral. The following pages offer a description of two female groups, particularly treated as vile and despicable: the healers, sorceresses and witches, whose strength was considered to have a demonic origin, and the prostitutes, dedicated to cover a “minor evil” in society, but seen as unworthy by society, because of the practical exercise of their trade.
As for the healers, both the sermons of St. Vincent and the texts of didactic and moralizing literature attack this profession, which, on the other hand, was required on many occasions. In this sense, Jaume Roig’s Spill presents a whole series of superstitious practices, exercised by women doctors. This natural inclination of women to superstition, understood as an exponent of popular culture, reaches its maximum expression from the idea, widespread in medieval Europe, that women become witches, renounce God and worship the devil.
Another group described in this article is that of prostitutes, whose profession is understood, from the Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine, and preachers such as St. Vincent, as a lesser evil, in order to avoid worse evils on the side of lust. Prostitutes, especially if they were muslims, were marginalized, punished, and considered vile women, because they had strayed from a honest life. The only possible alternative was to leave the brothel and be confined in a monastery, as is the case of the monastery of “Les Repenedides”, which was founded in Valencia in 1345, where prostitutes had to remain in prison for at least one year, in order to achieve social reintegration and grace before God.
In 1516, the first Jewish ghetto was created in Venice and, from that moment, the already narrow perimeter of tolerance between the Christian majority society and one of the religious minorities that existed in the territories of the Republic was limited: I’m referring to the Jews. After a few years, a seat of the Tribunal of the Holy Office was installed in the city. Despite these two elements, Venice remained a territory open to contamination; in fact, the Venetian Inquisition enjoyed a certain autonomy with respect to the Roman one and exercised its office in a less strict way if we compared it with the Spanish one. Notwithstanding that, its attention to the different forms of heresy was attentive and constant.
Among the processes that the historian Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini has managed to bring together in his essential work Processi del S. Uffizio di Venezia contro ebrei e giudaizzanti (1548–1734), I consider it interesting to study those that refer to the situation of women in the Jewish context since, frequently, a “natural” relationship is established between gender-conviction and religion-persecution of female victims, guilty of any type of infamy.
The observations that I present here have as a starting point the treatment of certain female attitudes that were the cause of persecutions and convictions. In particular, I intend to comment on two geographically very distant situations, but accompanied by two elements: the suspicion of crypto-Judaism and being a woman. The space-time dimension extends from Spain to the Republic of Venice in the 16th century. The protagonists I will name share one more element: having had to go through the trial of the Court of the Inquisition, in some cases the Spanish one and in others the Venetian one.
The critical view with which this type of documentary material will be addressed will be of a socio-cultural nature and will be delimited to the documentation related to the 16th century and, in particular, to that related to the Sephardic and Conversos’ communities.
The purpose of this essay is not only to provide new data that can open up new research perspectives, but is also to try to return, although a posteriori, the voice to some of the victims of gender violence.
The diary titled Coses evengudes en la ciutat y regne de València, which was written by Monsignor Pere Joan Porcar between 1585 and 1629, is one of the literary testimonies of the Valencian Baroque that has aroused major interest among scholars. However, it has never been analyzed from a gender perspective. Therefore, in the present work we propose to analyze and establish a typology of the different cases of sexist violence that the document reports, and that ended with the injury or death of women: wives, unmarried women, maids, girls, etc. In conclusion the diary depicts a patriarchal society presided over by structural violence, where women only played a marginal role.
Banditry was a social phenomenon that affected most places in the Hispanic monarchy. However, banditry is not a homogeneous phenomenon, it is different depending on the area and territory. In the crown of Aragon, in the 16th and 17th centuries, noble families solved their problems by hiring bandits for hire. These gangs of bandits stole, extorted and killed as a way of life or a way of work. In Catalonia from the middle of the 16th century until the end of the 1640s, banditry became a widespread evil and a problem for the authorities. In this work we analyse, through judicial documentation, one of the most important acts of Catalan banditry in the second half of the 16th century, that is to say, the capture and execution of an important gang of bandits integrated by famous bandits of the time as Moreu Palau, Camadall, Gralla and Escales, among others. The capture of the criminals was carried out by the men of the Solicitor of the Duke of Cordona, Jaume Pau Franquesa and the Militia Igualada in 1573. In the first part of this article, we analyze the facts through the interrogations that were made of the people who lived in the towns where the acts took place, mostly peasants. In this way, we are approaching the facts through the experiences of the popular classes, because they were the ones who fought, were injured or died in the fight against the bandits. In the second part of the work, we reconstruct, with the help of the Generalitat diary as the main document, the sentences handed down against the bandits and the punitive ritual suffered by those sentenced to death. In the third and last part, we study the popular literature that was printed on the facts. These chapbooks were printed before, during and shortly after the execution of the inmates and are part of the gallows literature, which was very important in the acts of execution in many European countries in the modern age.
It deals with the linguistic study of two criminal procedures manuscripts, both dated to around year 1600. The texts, belonging to Catalan-Valencian language, provide good morphosyntactic and lexical information, which show the importance and the need to edit and study documentation of such kind in order to properly understand the evolution of language, because they are verbatim transcripts. Therefore, complementing the study of formal literary and administration texts, not only by discovering new words and linguistic attributes that may have not remained up to the present, but also by fixing the date when many other characteristics first appeared in time.
Typically, the unavailability of similar texts to scholars has not allowed to well-determining, how old and how deep-rooted, some of the discussed phenomena are in linguistic communities. For instance, the preposition ‘a’ + direct object, the final conjunction ‘per a que’; colloquial terms as ‘barandat’, ‘esgolar’, ‘sitara’, or ‘sellavors’; extinct terms like ‘malavejar’, ‘empényer’ and ‘espollegar’; Spanish lexemes like ‘assomar’ or ‘apexugar’.
Criminal procedures, also known Royal Court books, faithfully depict the ancient reality of different people, bringing to light diverse testimonies offered regarding the same facts; usually coexistence related topics. A great mirror of the daily life and customs of an era, which openly gives us their true colloquial and narrative registers, like a perfect voice recorder saving the language of the moment, on precisely dated and located documents.
Naples, 1590, Carlo Gesualdo killed his wife and lover caught in flagrant adultery. The process allows us to outline some marginal figures, such as the maids, one of whom testifies at the trial, together with the Prince’s cloakroom attendant: their half-truths more mendacious than lies” are aimed at strengthening the motive, safe conduct of the double murder. The prince of Venosa will also be at the center of another process: women who we usually find on the margins of history will intervene; figures who normally have their place in recent literary novels, willing to draw their protagonists from that marginal story brought to the light by Carlo Ginzburg in The cheese and the worms. The cosmos of a 16th century miller (1976, first Italian edition), through the inquisitorial archives, where it is possible to catch the voices of individuals who often do not appear, or appear only indirectly, in historical documentation: from farmers to women. These are secondary cases, micro-stories such as that of the Friulian miller Menocchio (we are in the 16th century) that can shed light on large problems (here is bet of the book): from the challenge to the authorities in a pre-industrial society to the intertwining of culture oral and written culture. But the purpose of this story-writing experiment was, and is, to bring Menocchio’s voice to the reader. It is these documented and marginal stories that offer new material to current novels. And in fact, the novel that won the 2019 Campiello Prize, Madrigal without sound: death of Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa by Andrea Tarabbia is dedicated to the story of Carlo Gesualdo.
In medieval French Literature there are many more or less veiled references to the hero’s homosexuality. One of the best known, explicit this time, is certainly that of Lanval of Marie de France. This fact is in line with a tradition in the Celtic word, which, for example, according to the attestation of Diodorus Siculus, considered the Celts notoriously attracted to the same sex. It should be emphasized that for most of the situations the fact of accusing of homosexuality as a negative aspect of the personality is a function of something else, for example as the justification of a lack of attention for the queen (Lanval) or to induce Lavinia to refuse the love of Aeneas (Roman d’Eneas). And, among all the texts of medieval French literature dealing with sexual marginality, in this case homosexuality, the anonymous Roman d’Eneas (c. 1165) is undoubtely one of the most significant. But allusions on the same topic can be found in the episode of the visit to the Sibilla in the Guerrin Meschino, an Italian novel written by Andrea da Barberino (c. 1410), as well as in its French translation by Jean de Rochemeure.
Bibliography on the pictorial production in the city and the kingdom of Valencia focuses on the altarpiece painting. Painters who embellished other devices – such as coffers, boxes, shields, flags, armours or curtains – have not been displaced from the history of Valencian painting, but they need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. This paper examines the painter of coffers’ profession between 1390 and 1430. For this purpose, we are going to consult archival documents published by Josep Sanchis Sivera and Lluís Cerveró Gomis in different journal volumes, as well as to look up information from the documentary collections on Valencian medieval painting edited by Ximo Company, Joan Aliaga, Lluïsa Tolosa, Milagros Cárcel Ortí and Juan Vicente García Marsilla. The aim is to read the documents in which the painters of coffers are mentioned – mainly inventories and judicial sentences or obligations – in order to suggest new questions about this medieval profession.
We use the case of Hernando – or Fernando – Cabrera, carceller of the secret prisons of the court of the Inquisition of Valencia between the years 1515 and 1541, to illustrate both the institutional language of the time and the current historiography on the Inquisition and its secret prisons, innovative institutions in their time and considered modern, in relation to “medieval” prisons, take us at the deception: at the reality, accessible thanks to the internal documentation of the Santo Oficio, we find a dark world where there it is widespread inefficiency and negligence at the work, corruption and economic extortion of prisoners, as well as abuses of the privileges of the staff of the Inquisition. Hernando Cabrera has been receiving continuous and useless warnings from the inquisitors since 1526, but he is incorrigible and does not change his behavior, until he is degraded by the Council of the Supreme Inquisition in 1541.