Bento Silva SANTOS; Adriano BERALDI

Original title: Conversio ad creaturam e distentio animi: Considerações sobre o não-ser nos problemas do mal e do tempo em Agostinho de Hipona

Published in Returning to Eden

The present article is dedicated to trace thoughts about some identifiable correspondences between Augustine of Hippo's conceptions of evil and of time through the indication of a relation between the movements of the voluntary defection of the will and the dispersion in the temporal mutability of the human creature in its link with non-being. To this end, some aspects of these conceptions will be examined both as worked out in De libero arbitrio and those elaborated in the Confessions, more specifically in Book XI (and to a certain extent in X), both works of the hyponensis where they appear, we believe, mutually implicated through the notions of conversio ad creaturam and distentio animi respectively.

María LAURA MONTEMURRO

Original title: Monedas de las Cruzadas: introducción al análisis de su iconografía y estilo

Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades

Keywords: Coin types, Coinage, Coins, Crusader, Latin East, Numismatics.

The numismatic material offers an outstanding opportunity for iconographic studies, often neglected by art historians. For ages, coinage has not simply served as a medium of financial or commercial exchange, but also (and more interestingly for the art historian) as a vehicle that conveyed, through a wide territorial span, design and iconographic concepts of enormously influential gravitation. Crusader coins are not an exception: on the contrary, its influence in the late mediaeval coinage in regards to iconography and other devices was paramount. This paper attempts to draw attention to several aspects related to the iconography of the Crusader coins, their probable typological models and derivations, that it, its decisive influence in the later Mediaeval and early modern coinages.

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.

Manuela Santos SILVA and Alice TAVARES

Original title: David Negro: un judío cortesano en la coyuntura portuguesa de 1383- 1385

Published in Aristocracy and nobility in the Ancient and Medieval World

Keywords: Court Jews, Don David Negro, King D. Fernando, King D. João I.

Contribution to the study of Portuguese Judaic courtiers, in particular of Don David Negro. King Fernando’s councilor and royal servant, and the later rabbi in Castilla, during the reign of Juan I. Don David took part in the political rebellion of 1383 – 1385 which resulted in the rise of the Master of Avis to the throne of Portugal – D. João I.