Article
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Aristocracy and Nobility in Dante Alighieri
Moisés Romanazzi TÔRRES
Original title: Aristocracia e Nobreza em Dante Alighieri
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Aristocracy, Dante Alighieri, Nobility.
One of the essential elements of the whole Political Philosophy of Dante Alighieri was your considerations about the aristocracy and the nobility. For him, the two notions are different although in a certain way they correspond to the same matters. This aristocracy, however, it will only reach the divine talent that is the true nobility if it be educated according to the parameters of the Aristotelian philosophy. It is this, in fact, the ethical theme of the Convivio. In Commedia, Dante persists in these ideas. It is exactly for this reason that he reserves the Limbo the great wise persons of the Antiquity. In the one of Monarchia, he treats of the relationships between the supreme nobleman, the emperor, and the princes, the private noblemen that lead the human crowds.
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Notion of spiritual aristocracy in the first book of Kuzari
Rosa PLANAS FERRER
Original title: El concepte d’aristocràcia espiritual en el llibre primer del Kuzari
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Aristocracy, Halevi, Judaism, Kuzari, controversy.
The objective of the following work is showing, through the First Book of Kuzari, by Iehuda Halevi, firstly translated into Catalonian by Rabbi Jordi Gendra, one of the first formulations of the aristocratic origin of the Jewish population, defended by one of the most important poets of Judaism during the Jewish Diaspora. The book explains that through a divine selection, Israel is constituted as the authentic aristocracy of the world, due to its condition of a prophetic population it is situated over the rest of populations and in the Creational scale it’s only superadded by angels.
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The image of the nobility, according to Rafael Martí de Viciana (16th century): from the medieval past to the imperial project
Vicent JOSEP ESCARTÍ
Original title: La imagen de la nobleza, según Rafael Martí de Viciana (s. XVI): del pasado medieval al proyecto imperial
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: 16th Hispanic century, Historiography, Nobility, Spanish Empire, Valencia, political ideology.
The present paper makes an analysis of the concept of "nobility" throughout the work of the notary and valencian noble Rafael Martí de Viciana (1502-1582). Across his writings we can see clearly how Viciana, on the paper, combined the ancient and medieval origins of the local nobility with the privileges given by the crown in more recent times, to incorporate the nobles of his time to the new imperial project Carlos V for the Hispanic monarchy.
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The new aristocracy and nobility at the end of Middle Age in the catalan novel Curial e Güelfa
Júlia BUTINYÀ I JIMÉNEZ
Original title: Les noves aristocràcia i noblesa a les acaballes de l’Edat Mitjana a través de la novel•la catalana Curial e Güelfa
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
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History handbooks and medieval education: Middle Ages historiography, proximities and distances
Luciana Rosar Fornazari KLANOVICZ
Original title: Os manuais de História da Educação e a educação medieval: aproximações e distanciamentos na historiografia sobre Idade Média
Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World
Keywords: Historiography, History handbooks, Middle Ages, education.
This article addresses interpretations on medieval education available in Education History handbooks in the light of a historiography reading on the topic. Therefore, Paul Monroe’s História da Educação, Edward Myers’ La educación en la perspectiva de la historia, Mario Manacorda’s História da educação, and Franco Cambi’s História da Pedagogia have been analyzed. Amidst any discourse disputes, knowledge on Middle Ages within Education History has also been losing quality or becoming rather symbolic in physical space or time periods, in order to guarantee the identification of western civilization with secularization, progress, and civilization conceived as the ideal society meant to be constructed for the contemporary age.
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Preface: Considerations about the Crusades
Almudena BLASCO VALLÉS
Original title: Prefacio: Consideraciones sobre las Cruzadas
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
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Presentation: The Crusade reborn?
Ricardo da COSTA
Original title: Apresentação: A Cruzada renasceu?
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
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Love of God or Hatred of Your Enemy? The Emotional Voices of the Crusades
Sophia MENACHE
Original title: O amor de Deus ou o ódio ao seu inimigo? As vozes emocionais das Cruzadas
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Crusades, Emotions, Moslems, Papacy.
The present paper attempts to investigate three cornerstones of the history of the early crusades from a wider range of emotions while focusing on [1] the call to the crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem, [2] the fall of Edessa and, subsequently, the Second Crusade and its outcomes, and [3] the Christian defeat at the Horns of Hattin. Less than a century before the crusades, different groups in Christian society had been the target of the same pejorative emotions that were later used to denounce and reproach the Moslems. These terms should therefore be seen and analyzed, not to produce a superficial moral reading of the vilification of the Moslems, but as an essential part of the thesaurus in which Christian society analyzed itself. In fact, the use of the same Augustinian emotional index transforms negative attitudes toward the Moslems into an act of inverted inclusion of the Moslems within the Christian sphere; in other words, using illusionary inclusion in order to exclude. This inverted inclusion means that within its inner discourse, Christian society defeated the Moslems symbolically, independently of the real outcome on the battlefield. The transformation of the crusaders from esterners into Easterners in Fulcher’s eschatology (note 45) is a conscious practice of erasing the “other” by expropriating its identity. This was not, however, an act of including the Easterner into the crusaders’ weltanschauung, but a symbolic denial that further served to exclude the Easterners altogether.
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The ğihād and his substitute, the ribāṭ, in the traditional Islam: Evolution from a militaristic and collective spirit towards an inner and individual spirituality
Francisco FRANCO-SÁNCHEZ
Original title: El ğihād y su sustituto el ribāṭ en el Islam tradicional: Evolución desde un espíritu militarista y colectivo hacia una espiritualidad interior e individual
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Holy-War, Islam, Ribāṭ, Spirituality, Ğihād.
At the beginning Ğihād was in Islam a militaristic spirit that articulates a defence of the religion, or what is the same, of the Muslim State, by means of arms. When in the first century of the Hegira it becomes impossible to continue the expansion of the Islamic State, the Ribāṭ was articulated as a substitute for Ğihād. It involved the internalization of the same spirituality, now understood not as a collective and official precept, but as individual command and internal fight. We revise the data from Arab sources about the Ribāṭ and its performance in the building known as rābiṭa. The function of these buildings, historiography, juridical frame, religious life and the economy related to the rābiṭa-s are explained. Toponymic traces and material vestiges of the rābiṭa-s at the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, especially those found in Guardamar del Segura are explained as well.
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Cynocephalus in commentario? The monstrous or savage nature of infidels as juridical argument
Alejandro MORIN
Original title: Cynocephalus in commentario? El carácter monstruoso o salvaje de los infieles como argumento jurídico
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Innocent IV, Islam, Monstrosity, Oldradus de Ponte, Savagery.
For some years a type of historiographical approach has rendered fruits about the relation Christians-Muslims, focused on the perception/construction of alterity. This is evident in different works that analyze the medieval “images” of the unbelievers created in a hostile context. But this approach can ignore the rhetorical-juridical inscription of the description of the unbeliever in teratological or wild terms. What seems an ethnographic reference that says much about the medieval Christian ethnocentrism may in certain context operate as a juridical argument that enables one type or another of justification for the conquest on unchristians. We pose here the convenience of bringing together two subjects that medievalists had developed separately: the history of the Christian stereotypes of Saracen “monstrosity” and the history of medieval law.
