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.
Soldadas, situados y fisco regio en el reinado de Alfonso VIII de Castilla (1158–1214)
This article analyses the system of salaries and regular payments in cash during the reign of Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214), a system that many historians consider distinctive to the later Middle Ages but that was already well developed by the end of the thirteenth century and whose origins, even 100 years earlier, we will reveal in the following pages. The salaries used to sustain a permanent army (“soldadas”) and the annual concessions of royal rents and taxes (“situados”) conditioned the development of the political relationships between the king and the nobility, both secular and ecclesiastical. In its origins, the system appears to be connected to some specific taxes, amongst which the salt mines and rents from Toledo stand out; its development is also parallel to the beginning of the leasing out of royal taxes, which led to important changes in the management system of the treasury.
Looking for regional words in late seventeenth-century England: Bishop White Kennett and his glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695) 1
The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent dearth of direct textual evidence which might provide trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical setting of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might contribute to bridging the gaps still existing in the history of lexical provincialisms at the time.