Papers by Yanay Israeli
Past and Present, 2023
This article analyses the petition and response process in late medieval Castile, focusing on pet... more This article analyses the petition and response process in late medieval Castile, focusing on petitions of grievance submitted to the Royal Council during the reign of Isabel I and Fernando II (r.1474–1504). Studies published in recent decades have revised our understanding of petitionary practices and their significance to systems of governance in medieval and early modern Europe. One persistent gap in this scholarship, however, concerns the ‘aftermath’ of petitioning — that is, the occurrences that followed the grant of petitions and the issuance of royal decrees in response. Drawing on the rich documentation that has survived from late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Castile, this article highlights the importance of studying the local spaces of interactions where beneficiaries of royal decrees tried to bring them into effect through acts of claims-making. The evidence from Castile is mobilized to illuminate the forms of negotiation and contestation that informed the presentations of ‘letters of justice’ issued by the Royal Council, the mechanisms used by the royal authority to enforce its commands, and the ways that factors such as speed, publicity and violence shaped the meanings petitioning assumed in different contexts of dispute. The analysis of petitioning bears implications for understanding royal power in the Castilian monarchy, drawing attention to a pattern of intensifying communications between the central royal government and non-elites. As they petitioned the Royal Council, thousands of Castilians sought empowerment in local disputes. At the same time, mass participation in the petitioning process played a major role in legitimizing royal power and furthering its embeddedness in the localities.
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Speculum, 2022
This article recovers a fifteenth-century debate over the meaning of the category "conversos." De... more This article recovers a fifteenth-century debate over the meaning of the category "conversos." Departing from the standard account, in which "conversos" is seen as a neutral category designating Jewish ancestry, we demonstrate that in fifteenth-century Castile, the question of "who is a converso?" had a much less certain answer. Rather than a consistent view of how Jewish converts and their descendants should be classified, contemporary discourses reveal a myriad of options and a deep sense of consciousness about the implications of terminological choices. Drawing on a large range of historical sources, we analyze this terminological struggle, while paying special attention to the debates that followed the revolt of Toledo of 1449. We examine the arguments made by those who sought-or resisted-labeling the descendants of Jews as "conversos" or "neophytes." Furthermore, we explain how debates over such labels were linked to broader interpretations of the meaning of conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Finally, we demonstrate that although the descent-based interpretation of "conversos" eventually prevailed, the problem of classifying Christians of Jewish descent continued to haunt political discourses well into the reign of Isabel I and Fernando II (1474-1504).
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Law and History Review, 2022
Please use the following link to read/download the article (open access):
https://www.cambridge... more Please use the following link to read/download the article (open access):
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/requerimiento-in-the-old-world-making-demands-and-keeping-records-in-the-legal-culture-of-late-medieval-castile/7982E332915E9A260A4B26B7AF704103
This article analyses the place of the legal procedure known as requerimiento (requirement) in the social life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on archival sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it examines how Castilians deployed the requerimiento and what meanings and functions this procedure assumed, particularly in processes of conflict-management. While much has been written about the requerimiento as a ritual of conquest in Spanish America, the place of this procedure in the legal culture of late medieval Castile has received little scholarly attention. By examining how the requerimiento operated within the world of civic disputes in Castilian villages and towns, this study brings to light a rather unknown background for the more familiar requerimiento, the colonial ritual of the sixteenth century.
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Viator, 2017
This article analyzes the successful legal struggle of Lope Rodriguez, a Castilian converso who i... more This article analyzes the successful legal struggle of Lope Rodriguez, a Castilian converso who in 1478, following his banishment from his town, petitioned for royal justice. While Rodriguez's case offers new information on conflicts between Old Christians and conversos in pre-inquisitorial Castile, it also sheds light on Castilian legal culture more broadly [...]
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Contesting Inter-religious Conversion in the Medieval World, edited by Yaniv Fox and Yossi Ysraeli , 2016
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Dissertation by Yanay Israeli
Department of History, University of Michigan , 2017
In the fifteenth century, the Crown of Castile witnessed an unprecedented influx of petitions, as... more In the fifteenth century, the Crown of Castile witnessed an unprecedented influx of petitions, as tens of thousands of Castilians traveled to royal courts to present petitions to their monarchs. This dissertation focuses on petitioning for royal justice as a perspective from which to study the social and political life of late medieval Castile...
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Book Reviews by Yanay Israeli
Journal of Early Modern History , 2017
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Medieval Encounters, 2016
The flourishing field of premodern Mediterranean history has, for some time now, been marked by a... more The flourishing field of premodern Mediterranean history has, for some time now, been marked by an interest in the figure of the intermediary. Interpreters, ambassadors, merchants, converts, missionaries, and mercenaries have emerged in the past decades as the protagonists of new stories about a sea fraught with relations and forms of exchange across cultural and religious boundaries. Centering on the courtly personnel engaged in such forms of exchange, Cultural Brokers at Mediterranean Courts in the Middle Ages certainly fits into this pattern. However, whereas recent scholarship has increasingly moved away from the figure of the official intermediary, calling attention to the involvement of extra-courtly actors in practices of cultural mediation, the current volume can be read as an invitation to go back to—and perhaps rethink—the ruler's court as a key site for such practices, defined here in terms of " cultural brokerage. " My review cannot do justice to the extensive scholarly work packed into the thirteen essays that compose this volume, the majority of which concentrate on the period between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Overall, the essays unfold along two lines of investigation: one which centers on particular groups of brokers, analyzing their social and intellectual background, skills, and activities as intermediaries at court; and another, undertaken by only some of the essays, which examines the court itself as a space of cultural brokerage. The essays also display a broad geographical range: slowly but surely, the reader finds herself drifting across a variety of medieval cities and courtly venues, including the Mongolian court in Iran, the Abbasid and Fatimid courts in Baghdad and Cairo, the courts of the Frankish rulers of Cyprus and the Hospitallers in Rhodes, Constantinople, Venice, the Papal Curia and a number of Iberian courts.
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Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2012
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Conference Presentations by Yanay Israeli
The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 2017
Drawing on various literary and archival sources, this paper reconstructs a Castilian debate abou... more Drawing on various literary and archival sources, this paper reconstructs a Castilian debate about the collectivity of converts from Judaism to Christianity. The paper proceeds by examining the usages of the category “conversos” in pre-inquisitorial Castilian discourses. The tendency of modern historiography to employ “conversos” as an unproblematic category, designating converts and their descendants, has obscured a fifteenth-century debate, where competing meanings of “conversos” were in circulation. Through analyzing this debate, the paper draws a connection between notions of collectivity and the problem of heterodoxy. In fifteenth-century Castile, charges of heresy, as well as violent attacks against Christians of Jewish descent, were conducive for shaping new understanding of “conversos” as a social group. Overall, the paper proposes that instead of treating “conversos” as a monosemic category, we need to examine the historical process through which the prevailing meaning of the category has been forged and consolidated.
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"The Politics of Paper in the Early Modern World," the University of Groningen, 2016
This paper examines on the circulation of royal letters in fifteenth-century Castile. It argues t... more This paper examines on the circulation of royal letters in fifteenth-century Castile. It argues that in the course of the fifteenth century, the acquisition of royal letters through petitioning emerged as a widespread political practice by which Castilians were trying to bring royal authority to intervene in local conflicts. How extensive this practice was? Archival evidence suggests that in the final quarter of the fifteenth century alone, dozens of thousands of Castilians not only petitioned the Crown, but also gained royal letters in their favor. Such documents—papers sealed with the great seal of the Crown— were then carried by recipients to their localities, where they were used to make various political claims. Following a short introduction, the paper proceeds by making a methodological critique: political historians of Castile have tended to reduce royal letters to the orders enclosed in them. What has been overlooked is the social lives of such papers as textual artifacts, their complex roles in the political culture of the time. Considering a few examples, the paper then shows how reconstructing the concrete trajectories of royal letters, including the dynamics and performances they generated on the ground, leads to some new observations on contemporary patterns of communication, the social expectations of supplicants, the availability of royal institutions, and the Crown’s capacity to affect the localities. The paper concludes by making a number of suggestions as to how this perspective may contribute to our understanding of processes of state building in Castile. It underscores the participation of the Castilian masses in negotiating notions of state authority, and the letters themselves a key site for both the dissemination and negotiation of such notions.
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The Annual Symposium of Anthropology & History Program, University of Michigan, 2016
This paper follows the legal dispute between Martín Sánchez and Isabel González, a married couple... more This paper follows the legal dispute between Martín Sánchez and Isabel González, a married couple living in Gata, a village in Extremadura, Spain. At some point around 1490, not very long after their wedding, Martin began to pursue a criminal lawsuit against his wife, claiming that she was having an affair with another man. Martin was determined to have Isabel condemned in adultery, a crime that could have resulted in serious punishments for both her and her lover. To achieve his goal, Martin put great efforts. When he lost his case before a local judge, he appealed to the king's court, traveling hundreds of kilometers to the royal court, presenting petitions and obtaining all sorts of legal papers in his favor. For their part, Isabel and her family were not passive either. Not only that they have defended Isabel at court, they also used their influence in Gata to have Martin arrested and imprisoned for months. Both parties were trying to recruit the support of the people of Gata, collecting testimonies from many inhabitants of the village. This led to a long trail of paper in the Spanish archives. Thus, the conflict between Martin Sánchez and Isabel González sheds light on various questions of gender, matrimonial life and local politics in 15th-century Castile, as well on the legal strategies by which ordinary people were trying to use the central system of justice in their favor.
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Papers by Yanay Israeli
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/requerimiento-in-the-old-world-making-demands-and-keeping-records-in-the-legal-culture-of-late-medieval-castile/7982E332915E9A260A4B26B7AF704103
This article analyses the place of the legal procedure known as requerimiento (requirement) in the social life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on archival sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it examines how Castilians deployed the requerimiento and what meanings and functions this procedure assumed, particularly in processes of conflict-management. While much has been written about the requerimiento as a ritual of conquest in Spanish America, the place of this procedure in the legal culture of late medieval Castile has received little scholarly attention. By examining how the requerimiento operated within the world of civic disputes in Castilian villages and towns, this study brings to light a rather unknown background for the more familiar requerimiento, the colonial ritual of the sixteenth century.
Dissertation by Yanay Israeli
Book Reviews by Yanay Israeli
Conference Presentations by Yanay Israeli
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/requerimiento-in-the-old-world-making-demands-and-keeping-records-in-the-legal-culture-of-late-medieval-castile/7982E332915E9A260A4B26B7AF704103
This article analyses the place of the legal procedure known as requerimiento (requirement) in the social life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on archival sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it examines how Castilians deployed the requerimiento and what meanings and functions this procedure assumed, particularly in processes of conflict-management. While much has been written about the requerimiento as a ritual of conquest in Spanish America, the place of this procedure in the legal culture of late medieval Castile has received little scholarly attention. By examining how the requerimiento operated within the world of civic disputes in Castilian villages and towns, this study brings to light a rather unknown background for the more familiar requerimiento, the colonial ritual of the sixteenth century.