Guadalupe: Political authority and religious identity in fifteenth-century Spain.

This thesis traces the emergence of a new kind of authority in Guadalupe, Spain, and demonstrates how political shifts at the important Marian shrine were linked to changing ideas about the state and religious minorities in late medieval and early modern Spain. Competition for power among factions in Guadalupe, new definitions of correct Christian practice, and the changing nature of Guadalupe' s relationship with the Crown came together in a new way with the arrival of the Inquisition in 1485. The presence of this royal institution accelerated the course of these changes and resulted in the consolidation of monastic temporal and spiritual authority in Guadalupe under the aegis of the newly-united Spanish Crown. Monastic records, municipal ordinances, trial records, and Inquisition files form the basis of the dissertation. Conflicts within the monastery, among different groups of tradesmen, and between descendents of Jewish converts and so-called "Old Christians" thwarted the monastery's attempts to gain more effective control over Guadalupe. Yet these local concerns reflected questions at issue across the peninsula, including the appropriate extent of local control, the place of royal control in local communities, and the role of minority religious populations. In 1485 the friars shifted the terms of the local debate by requesting the Inquisition. The Inquisitors distilled the village' s conflicts into a binary opposition between Old Christians and descendants of Jewish converts, known as "New Christians," or conversos. By the mid-sixteenth century, the friars in Guadalupe had parlayed royal favor into more absolute control over the village. Local conflicts typical of late-medieval Europe were transformed by widespread participation in the Inquisitorial court into the building blocks of the early modern state. Debate over the place of New Christians played a key role in this shift. Conversos held a variety of political and economic roles in town and engaged in a range of religious practices gleaned from Christianity and Judaism. Evidence from Guadalupe suggests that many conversos redefined "Christianity" and "Judaism" based on constantly shifting contextual clues. This depended in part on the shifting status of individual conversos, and political changes in Guadalupe heralded a change in religious attitudes also.Ph.D.HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105154/1/9635617.pdfDescription of 9635617.pdf : Restricted to UM users only