Órdenes mendicantes y estructuras feudales de poder en Castilla la Vieja (siglos XIII y XIV)

Editada en la Fundación Empresa PúblicaEl objetivo del presente articulo es analizar y comparar la estructura de los dominios de tres casas conventuales de Castilla la Vieja en los siglos XIII y XIV. Los tres ejemplos elegidos permiten obtener una perspectiva cronológica amplia y mostrar cómo evolucionaron los mecanismos de adaptación de los mendicantes a las estructuras feudales. En segundo lugar, es posible comparar su papel como miembros de la clase señorial con el de otros señores feudales, especialmente con otras instituciones eclesiásticas de fundación anterior.The aim of this paper is to analyse and compare the structure of rural properties of three houses of mendicants in Castile during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Analysing these three case studies we can gain a wide chronological view to show how the mendicants evolved to adapt to the feudal structures. We can also compare their role as members of the dominant class with that of other feudal lords, specially with other ecclesiastical institutions of previous foundation.Publicad

The consolations and conflicts of history: Chaucer's Monk's Tale

Chaucer’s meditations on the recording, rewriting and understanding of history occur in the context of a struggle between the dominant sacred view of history as a providential, divinely superintended plan and an emergent secular historiography that sought its own internal logic of causation for the events of history. While the late medieval historiographical and epistemological struggles are visible in many of Chaucer’s writings — and prominently in the tales of the classical past, Troilus, Anelida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’ — nowhere in Chaucer’s oeuvre is the conflict between sacred and secular models of history dramatized so directly as in the under-appreciated ‘Monk’s Tale’. Its self-conscious staging of divergent historiographical worldviews is most clearly demonstrated in the discord between the text’s form and its speaker. As a series of tragic histories of great men (and a single great woman), it was inspired by Boccaccio’s virulently democratic and anti-monarchist De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Illustrious Men, 1355–74), a title which serves as the incipit to the ‘Monk’s Tale’ in many manuscripts