Flocel Sabaté - Böcker

The death penalty was unusual in medieval Europe until the twelfth century. From that moment on, it became a key instrument of rule in European society, and we can study it in the case of Catalonia through its rich and varied unpublished documentation. The death penalty was justified by Roman Law; accepted by Theology and Philosophy for the Common Good; and used by rulers as an instrument for social intimidation. The application of the death penalty followed a regular trial, and the status of the individual dictated the method of execution, reserving the fire for the worst crimes, as the Inquisition applied against the so-called heretics. The executions were public, and the authorities and the people shared the common goal of restoring the will of God which had been broken by the executed person. The death penalty took an important place in the core of the medieval mind: people included executions in the jokes and popular narratives while the gallows filled the landscape fitting the jurisdictional limits and, also, showing rotten corpses to assert that the best way to rule and order the society is by terror. This book utilises previously unpublished archival sources to present a unique study on the death penalty in late Medieval Europe.

The death penalty was unusual in medieval Europe until the twelfth century. From that moment on, it became a key instrument of rule in European society, and we can study it in the case of Catalonia through its rich and varied unpublished documentation. The death penalty was justified by Roman Law; accepted by Theology and Philosophy for the Common Good; and used by rulers as an instrument for social intimidation. The application of the death penalty followed a regular trial, and the status of the individual dictated the method of execution, reserving the fire for the worst crimes, as the Inquisition applied against the so-called heretics. The executions were public, and the authorities and the people shared the common goal of restoring the will of God which had been broken by the executed person. The death penalty took an important place in the core of the medieval mind: people included executions in the jokes and popular narratives while the gallows filled the landscape fitting the jurisdictional limits and, also, showing rotten corpses to assert that the best way to rule and order the society is by terror. This book utilises previously unpublished archival sources to present a unique study on the death penalty in late Medieval Europe.

This book places identity at the centre of a project to better understand medieval society. By exploring the multiplicity of personal identities, the ways in which these were expressed within particular social structures (such as feudalism), and their evolution into formal expressions of collective identity (municipalities, guilds, nations, and so on) we can shed new light on the Middle Ages. A specific legacy of such developments was that by the end of the Middle Ages, a sense of national identity, supported by the late medieval socio-economic structure, backed in law and by theological, philosophical, and political thought, defined society. What is more, social structures coalesced across diverse elements, including language, group solidarities, and a set of assumed values.

Part of a trilogy involving research on identity and memory also, this substantial volume sets out to illuminate medieval thought through an in-depth and highly interdisciplinary study of ideology, interrogating the underlying values that inform the interpretive framework through which we might better understand men and women of the Middle Ages.An introductory chapter situates the Christian Church in the West as a framing ideology of the Middle Ages, analysing Christianity as a coherent narrative providing people with security through its integrated explanation of physical surroundings, social order, and spiritual hope. The book then goes on to consider ideology from four angles: as a means of defining power; as a way of managing power; ideology in the mind as an influence on daily living and how we understand societies; and finally, the ways in which ideology associated with the Middle Ages has exerted influence centuries later, conditioning understandings of past and present. The individual chapters focus on concrete cases, giving preference to exemplars from southern Europe, a region with a large amount of documentation but which to date has occupied a relatively minor position in research into the Middle Ages. It is this emphasis that is acknowledged in the title of this book, Ideology in the Middle Ages: Approaches from Southwestern Europe, which is offered as a means of enriching and complicating study of the Middle Ages.This book has two companion volumes, dealing with the allied concepts of memory and identity as part of a larger project that seeks to map and interrogate the significance of all three concepts in the Middle Ages in the West.

Memory was vital to the functioning of the medieval world. People in medieval societies shared an identity based on commonly held memories. Religions, rulers, and even cities and nations justified their existence and their status through stories that guaranteed their deep and unbroken historical roots.The studies in this interdisciplinary collection explore how manifestations of memory can be used by historians as a prism through which to illuminate European medieval thought and value systems. The contributors draw the link between memory and medieval science, management of power, and remembrance of the dead ancestors through examples from southern Europe as a means of enriching and complicating our study of the Middle Ages; this is a region with a large amount of documentation but which to date has not been widely studied.

This book contains selected papers from the meetings «To think the Identity» and «Identities on the move» held in the Institute for Research into Identities and Society (University of Lleida) during 2010. The aim is to understand the reasons that allow social cohesion throughout the creation of identities and its adaptation. Identity is individual and collective, momentary and secular, apparently contradictory terms that can only coexist and fructify if they entail a constant adaptation. Thus, in a changing world, the identities are always on the move and the continuity of society requires a permanent move. Values, Culture, Language and History show the societies in permanent evolution, and demand an interdisciplinary perspective for studying. Attending this scope, outstanding historians, sociologists, linguistics and scientists offer here a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach to this phenomenon: how men and women have been combining the identity and the move in order to feel save into a social life from Middle Ages to current days, and how different items, in our present society, built the framework of identities.

This book dissiminates a selected collection of research texts from the Congress Hybrid Identities, held in 2011 in the Institute for Research into Identities and Society (University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain). Outstanding researchers from Social and Humanities fields adapted the hybridization of society such as a new perspective in order to study and understand the evolution of conviviality from the Middle Ages to current days throughout a comparative space and time. Taking the concept from the anthropology, the hybridization became a new approach for social studies and Humanities. Hybridization offers a historical perspective in order to renew perspectives for study different societies during all historical periods since Middle Ages to current days. At the same time, hybridization appears as a tool for analysing social realities in the different continents of the word. In any case, it is a new way in order to understand how the societies reaches its respective cohesions throughout mixted identities.

The urgent need for the study of exclusive identities in conflict is ever more apparent in a globalizing world in which societies are becoming multicultural and complex and in which inter-cultural contact and the co-existence of languages and cultures comes increasingly to bear on the construction of plural identities. The present book considers perversion in the construction of identity and the perverse usage of identity in areas such as social cohesion – xenophobia, racism, ostracism, rejection, ageism, marginalisation – and the mismanagement of linguistic identity, language groups and associated discriminatory practise arising out of historical and culturally based discrimination. The texts were submitted in an international meeting held in the Institute for Identities and Societies of the University on Lleida (Catalonia, Spain) in November 2012.

This book contains selected papers from the meeting «Conditioned Identities. Wished-for and Unwished-for Identities», held in the Institute of Research in Identities and Society (University of Lleida) in 2013 and attended by participants representing different disciplines, discussing the imposition and acceptance of identities. The different chapters of the book, written by scholars and researchers from all over the world, analyse the conflict between attributed and chosen identities in History, Language, Literature, Sociology and Anthropology across various historical periods and geographical regions. Theoretical and practical studies are combined in order to contribute to a renewal of perspectives regarding a key issue for understanding the roots of our current society and the problems surrounding conviviality in today’s world.

Between 2010 and 2013 the European Science Foundation project «Cuius Regio» undertook a study of the reasons for cohesion of some European regions, including the analysis of the ways for cohesion of two peripherical Iberian entities: Portugal and Catalonia. A scientific meeting held in Lleida in 2012 facilitated the collection of contributions from outstanding researchers in order to analyse how specific identities in the periphery of the Iberian Peninsula were created in the Middle Ages and how they evolved until the 19th century. History, Literature and Language are being discussed in this book in order to understand the reasons for creating specific territorial identities and also to compare their different evolutions, that have resulted in different political realities in our current times.

The book derives from an European Science Foundation project about the cohesion of European regions developed between 2010 and 2013. Flocel Sabaté led into this framework a team of fourteen scholars looking for the reason of the cohesion and permanence of Catalonia from Middle Ages to current days. This collective book arrives at an updated explanation, far from neoromantic visions and attentive to social vectors, such as socioeconomical convergence, external and internal perception, social representation, institutional development, creation of a justificative discourse and influence of the law, the language, the art and other cultural items.

Archives are the documentary memory of each society and so they become one of the pillars of its identity. Its destruction is sometimes accidental, but it is often deliberate in order to remove the ties with the past. The new times that revolutions attempt to reach usually involve forceful and symbolic ruptures with former identity, including the destruction of the economic, administrative and historical documentation. This book collects updated texts written by outstanding researchers from an initial Congress held in Moscow in 2006 in order to analyze the causes and consequences of the destructive violence against archives boasted during revolutionary turmoils. The studies pay special attention to the first important contempt and destruction of documentation, during the French Revolution; continue studying the damages to archives during 19th century; and culminated analyzing the effects of Russian Revolution over the documentation and the evolution until the end of the Soviet period.