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.
“Plange, Castella misera”: meaning and mourning at the royal abbey of Las Huelgas de Burgos in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries
ABSTRACT Royal burial sites, besides functioning as resting places for rulers, offer repositories of emotions associated with royal death. One such site was the abbey of Las Huelgas de Burgos, founded in 1187 by Alfonso VIII of Castile and Leonor of England, which served as their and their children's burial site. Just as it housed their bones, Las Huelgas also housed the record of royal grief, displayed in laments and tombs within the abbey. These sources, alongside contemporary chronicles, describe acts of mourning performed at the abbey during the early decades of Las Huelgas’ existence (1187–1214). They reveal public displays of grief by the royal family and on their behalf. This royal grief functioned on an individual and corporate scale, the collective mourning of the kingdom intersecting with the emotional reactions of the Castilian rulers. This article, adopting the perspective of the history of emotions, demonstrates that the expressions of royal grief at Las Huelgas were not only imbued with dynastic and religious significance but revealed the complex interactions between individual grief and collective rituals of mourning. These demonstrations of emotion displayed the collaboration between rulers and their subjects in constructing and memorializing royal grief in twelfth and thirteenth-century Castile.
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.