Strategies of the Elite of the Ancien Regime for Obtaining Prebends: The Chapter of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (original) (raw)

Nobility, kinship and memory in Santa Eufemia de Cozuelos, the first female convent of the Military Order of Santiago

ORDINES MILITARES COLLOQUIA TORUNENSIA HISTORICA Yearbook for the Study of the Military Orders, 2022

This paper refers to the noble patronage around Santa Eufemia de Cozuelos, the first female house of the Military Order of Santiago since 1186, based in the north of the Kingdom of Castile, during the second half of the thirteenth century. This patronage provided the convent with funerary spaces to perpetuate the memory of some noble Castilian and Leonese families whose members effected important land donations to the monastery, thus assuring prayers for the salvation of their souls. Unlike the vast majority of the many female monastic houses founded in the kingdoms of Castile and León in the Middle Ages, the lack of aristocratic founders, patrons or benefactors in all the female Jacobean convents in Castile and León since their founding until the second half of the thirteenth century, Santa Eufemia among them, is striking. The subject of this paper aims to determine how the Military Order of Santiago managed to attract to its first female house a whole group of noble lineages. The patronage of these noble families along the second half of the thirteenth century provided the Jacobean monastery with the noble prestige that many other Castilian female convents had from their origin and of which Santa Eufemia lacked, and furthermore, also provided the Jacobean convent with the most relevant territorial expansion of its monastic domain, precisely along this same period. A detailed revision of the available source material and bibliography allowed us to put together enough information to follow and verify this process.

Placing sons and daughters in the church: Strategies used by the gentry of Central Catalonia to maintain social status in the 17th and 18th centuries

The History of The Family, 2008

This study analyses strategies for placing sons and daughters used by Notaries, Doctors of Law and Honorary Citizens of Manresa in the 17th and 18th centuries. Reconstructions of several family trees show that all of the sons, except the heir, went into the church and many of the girls remained single or went into convents. The consistency of this behaviour has led to an interpretation in terms of how these families maintained their social status, given their particular way of gaining access to resources. This study traces the way the younger generations entered the church and how they returned resources to the families they came from. Celibacy excluded many sons and daughters from inheriting the family patrimony and opened the way to combining patrimonies with other families. This happened if the heir had no children and the inheritance went to the eldest daughter married to the heir of another family. Combining patrimonies was one of the strategies used to deal with the problem of declining incomes suffered by these families.

The Viseu and Lamego Clergy: clerical wills and social ties.

From the documentation collated under the auspices of the Fasti Ecclesiae Portugaliae project, we selected as the object of this paper the as yet unpublished series of wills of the Viseu and Lamego Sees, penned between the years 1147 and 1325.We focusfocused on the analysis of the final wills inscribed in the testaments of the bishops, dignitaries, canons and other clergy of these two cathedrals, with a particular interest in the bequests through which these clergymen reveal some type of connection to their family group or to other social groups or networks. By means of these data, we study whether the entrance of these clergymen into the Church of Viseu and Lamego implied a breaking off from kinship ties, replacing them with new bonds of confidence and dependence established within the clergy or whether, on the contrary, these men simultaneously continued with distinct levels and modes of relationship, whether within or beyond the Church. Should this latter position be confirmed, we seek to identify the various relational networks and evaluate the influence they exerted on the clergymen’s social life, through the importance that, as testators, they ascribed to these relationships at the moment of preparing for death and dividing up their worldly possessions.

Canons and cities: Cathedral Chapters and Their Social composition in medieval Portugal

There has been recently a notable growth in the number of studies written on the nature of cities in the medieval period and, at the same time, a rise in the number of analyses of cathedral clergy, both of which have unquestionably contributed to an advance in our knowledge of these areas. In this context, conclusions centering on the existence of spaces of intersection and influence between urban and ecclesiastic elites are relatively common. One of the main objectives of this study is to identify, in the Portuguese case, the spaces of intersection, influence or differentiation between these elites and to establish trends and chronologies in the social composition of these institutions. For this purpose, use will be made of the data collected in four case studies carried out for the dioceses of Braga, Lamego, Lisbon and Évora between the second half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century. This attempt to establish a global and comparative vision will still allow for the identification of several main questions that remain open, namely those relating to the presence of certain social groups inside these cathedral chapters and the importance of ecclesiastic careers for the strategies adopted by some families.

Proprietary churches, episcopal authority and social relationships in the diocese of León (11th–12th centuries) - Iglesias propias, poder episcopal y relaciones sociales en la diócesis de León (siglos XI-XII)

Journal Of Medieval Iberian Studies, 10/2, 2018, pp. 195-212.

This article analyzes the subordination of proprietary churches to the bishopric of León in the eleventh and twelfth centuries from a social perspective that considers the consolidation of episcopal authority in relation to the social dynamics operating at the local level. The transfer of proprietary churches to ecclesiastical authority was usually accomplished through donations that were part of a wider process of gift-giving and social bonding that in turn allowed the proprietors to obtain certain concessions. However, from the mid-eleventh century the emergence of a newly defined episcopal authority, in the context of the Gregorian Reform, gave new meaning to these practices and gave way to more coercive modalities of episcopal imposition over proprietary churches. [Ask for PDF]

Patron-Client Relations and Ecclesiastical Careers: Securing a Place in a Portuguese Cathedral (1564–1640)

The Catholic Historical Review, 2015

In this study on the role of patronage in ecclesiastical careers, the central role of Rome in the distribution of benefices in Portuguese cathedrals is highlighted. Kings, bishops, and others used canonries as payment for services rendered. Although the virtues of the applicants for canonries were important, patronage ties could override personal qualifications. There also were alternative routes to obtaining an office in a cathedral that circumvented the power of the appointment holders, which allowed some to overcome possibly weaker patronage ties.

Blood, Land and Power. The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period

Blood, Land and Power. The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021

The analysis of land management, lineage and family through the case study of early modern Spanish nobility from sixteenth to early nineteenth century is a major issue in recent historiography. It aims to shed light on how upper social classes arranged strategies to maintain their political and economic status. Rivalry and disputes between old factions and families were attached to the control and exercise of power. Blood, land management and honour were the main elements in these disputes. Honour, service to the Crown, participation in the conquest and ‘pure’ blood (Catholic affiliation) were the main features of Spanish nobility. This book analyses the origins of the entailed-estate (mayorazgo) from medieval times to early modern period, as the main element that enables us to understand the socio-economic behaviour of these families over generations. This longue durée chronology within the Braudelian methodology of the research aims to show how strategies and family networks changed over time, demonstrating a micro-history study of daily life.