Category: Religion

Early Modern Monday: Where In the World is Tecamachalco?

11/05/2012

Spaniards in town came from different regions of the Peninsula, including Andalusia, the Basque country, Castile, and Extremadura. Among them, a Portuguese migrant could settle, marry a local mestiza, and have a castizo son (strictly speaking, the offspring of Spanish and mestizo parents); that son would eventually marry a mestiza and expect his share of the Indian service to which Spanish landowners were entitled. By the 1570s, the casta system developed by Spanish authorities to establish a clear racial hierarchy was only beginning to take shape. Yet life in a small community like that of Tecamachalco could breed a familiarity that often wrested importance from those racial differences.

Medieval Monday: Five Myths about Medieval Women and Power

08/27/2012

The Middle Ages isn’t generally thought of as a period friendly to women at all, much less to powerful ones. Still, we’re all familiar with a handful of medieval and early modern women who had extraordinary influence: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of Castile, Elizabeth I of England. The subject of my book, Berenguela of Castile, is one of their lesser-known peers. But the focus on women like Berenguela as “exceptions to the rule” has the strange effect of reinforcing old myths about medieval women.