Leonor Plantagenet y la consolidación castellana en el reinado de Alfonso VIII
The kingdom of Castile experienced a process of political and territorial consolidation between the death of Sancho III in 1158 and the Curia of Carrion de los Condes in 1188, leaving behind the troublesome minority of Alfonso VIII and the subordination to the kingdom of Leon, and thus becoming a dominant power within the peninsula, and one that achieved considerable success in the Reconquest. The following article is part of a biographical approach to Eleanor Plantagenet, queen consort of Alfonso VIII, and by means of a specifi c focus offers an analysis of the role played by the English queen in this process of political consolidation of Castile. As we approach the eighth centenary of her death, the life and work of this little-studied woman emerges as a testimony to the important diplomatic and cultural tasks assumed by queens in twelfth-century Europe.
A Taste of the Feast: Reconsidering Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Female Descendants
Jacqueline Murray’s lovely video introduction to a study of medieval women describes the subject of this volume as “the remarkable Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of two kings and mother of two kings, and a powerful ruler in her own right.”1 But Eleanor was also the mother of two queens and grandmother of many more. Through her daughters and their female descendants, Eleanor had lasting influence—cultural and political as well as genetic—over a wider Europe than the empire built by her second husband, Henry II of England, and lost by their youngest son, King John.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.