With their active apostolate of preaching and teaching, Dominican friars were important promoters of Latin Christianity in the borderlands of medieval Spain and North Africa. Historians have long ...assumed that their efforts to convert or persecute non-Christian populations played a major role in worsening relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in the era of crusade and reconquista. This study sheds light on the topic by setting Dominican participation in celebrated but short-lived projects such as Arabic language studia or anti-Jewish theological disputations alongside day-to-day realities of mendicant life in the medieval Crown of Aragon. From old Catalan centers like Barcelona to newly conquered Valencia and Islamic North Africa, the author shows that Dominican friars were on the whole conservative educators and disciplinarians rather than innovative missionaries - ever concerned to protect the spiritual well-being of the faithful by means of preaching, censorship and maintenance of existing barriers to interfaith communications.
Firmly established by the 14th century throughout much of Europe, men and women associated with the Dominican Order emerged as leading voices within the Roman Catholic Church during its difficult yet ...also creative and expansive transition from late medieval to early modern times. Dominican friars, nuns, and growing numbers of lay penitents who accepted their supervision all contributed to the emergence of new spiritual directions and cultural productions, while also in many instances firmly upholding conservative and strictly disciplined versions of Catholic orthodoxy. This essay briefly surveys recent approaches to the Dominican legacy as it unfolded from the crisis years of Black Death and Schism, through the challenges of Observant, Protestant, and Tridentine reform movements, to the dawning of a global colonial age.
Recent developments in Italian, Portuguese and colonial inquisition histories around the globe have greatly enhanced our knowledge both of these persecuting bodies’ own institutional nature and of ...the varied sorts of human experience they sought to discipline. Social historians continue to find evidence for a wide range of premodern mentalities and lifeways in inquisitorial and related trial documents, not only in Europe but among indigenous and subaltern peoples in colonial settings as well. At the same time, studies of inquisitorial personnel, policies and organizational structures are contributing to broader historiographies of religion and politics in the late medieval and early modern periods. The future of inquisition history now requires increased collaboration and sharing of research across traditional divides of region, confession, and specialization.
On 16 August 1341, as he entered the bishop of Barcelona’s imposing stone palace to sign yet another arrest warrant, the Dominican inquisitor Bernat de Puigcercós gave every appearance of being a ...very powerful man indeed. With nearly a half century of service in the order to his credit, he had already achieved a great deal, and showed no indication of wanting to slow down any time soon. He was known in the most exalted of secular circles, both comital and royal, throughout his native Catalonia. Benefiting from an impressive elite education, including a stint of higher theological studies at
Abstract
Though often disappointing as sources for religious history, urban convent archives have the potential to shed valuable light on otherwise invisible social networks of the medieval ...bourgeoisie. Analysis of merchant and other names appearing in a wide variety of mundane contracts reveals the realia of economic relationships that, in the frontier context of Mallorca, occasionally crossed confessional lines. The case studies included in this article hint at the diverse array of characters whose entrepreneurial careers led to associations with and around the thirteenth-century Dominican convent of Sant Domingo de Mallorca. From social-climbing archers and tailors to converso shipping magnates and landowners, speculators of all sorts crossed paths within the cloistered halls of a mendicant sanctuary whose function was never exclusively spiritual. Dominican archives appear primarily to have served as repositories for such clients' transaction records, especially in unstable colonial situations-an aspect of the order's pastoral mission which has hitherto received little attention.
PDF
