The death penalty was unusual in medieval Europe until the twelfth century. From that moment on, it became a key instrument of rule in European society, and we can study it in the case of Catalonia through its rich and varied unpublished documentation. The death penalty was justified by Roman Law; accepted by Theology and Philosophy for the Common Good; and used by rulers as an instrument for social intimidation. The application of the death penalty followed a regular trial, and the status of the individual dictated the method of execution, reserving the fire for the worst crimes, as the Inquisition applied against the so-called heretics. The executions were public, and the authorities and the people shared the common goal of restoring the will of God which had been broken by the executed person. The death penalty took an important place in the core of the medieval mind: people included executions in the jokes and popular narratives while the gallows filled the landscape fitting the jurisdictional limits and, also, showing rotten corpses to assert that the best way to rule and order the society is by terror. This book utilises previously unpublished archival sources to present a unique study on the death penalty in late Medieval Europe.

The death penalty was unusual in medieval Europe until the twelfth century. From that moment on, it became a key instrument of rule in European society, and we can study it in the case of Catalonia through its rich and varied unpublished documentation. The death penalty was justified by Roman Law; accepted by Theology and Philosophy for the Common Good; and used by rulers as an instrument for social intimidation. The application of the death penalty followed a regular trial, and the status of the individual dictated the method of execution, reserving the fire for the worst crimes, as the Inquisition applied against the so-called heretics. The executions were public, and the authorities and the people shared the common goal of restoring the will of God which had been broken by the executed person. The death penalty took an important place in the core of the medieval mind: people included executions in the jokes and popular narratives while the gallows filled the landscape fitting the jurisdictional limits and, also, showing rotten corpses to assert that the best way to rule and order the society is by terror. This book utilises previously unpublished archival sources to present a unique study on the death penalty in late Medieval Europe.

The urgent need for the study of exclusive identities in conflict is ever more apparent in a globalizing world in which societies are becoming multicultural and complex and in which inter-cultural contact and the co-existence of languages and cultures comes increasingly to bear on the construction of plural identities. The present book considers perversion in the construction of identity and the perverse usage of identity in areas such as social cohesion - xenophobia, racism, ostracism, rejection, ageism, marginalisation - and the mismanagement of linguistic identity, language groups and associated discriminatory practise arising out of historical and culturally based discrimination. The texts were submitted in an international meeting held in the Institute for Identities and Societies of the University on Lleida (Catalonia, Spain) in November 2012.

Between 2010 and 2013 the European Science Foundation project "Cuius Regio" undertook a study of the reasons for cohesion of some European regions, including the analysis of the ways for cohesion of two peripherical Iberian entities: Portugal and Catalonia. A scientific meeting held in Lleida in 2012 facilitated the collection of contributions from outstanding researchers in order to analyse how specific identities in the periphery of the Iberian Peninsula were created in the Middle Ages and how they evolved until the 19th century. History, Literature and Language are being discussed in this book in order to understand the reasons for creating specific territorial identities and also to compare their different evolutions, that have resulted in different political realities in our current times.

This book contains selected papers from the meeting "Conditioned Identities. Wished-for and Unwished-for Identities", held in the Institute of Research in Identities and Society (University of Lleida) in 2013 and attended by participants representing different disciplines, discussing the imposition and acceptance of identities. The different chapters of the book, written by scholars and researchers from all over the world, analyse the conflict between attributed and chosen identities in History, Language, Literature, Sociology and Anthropology across various historical periods and geographical regions. Theoretical and practical studies are combined in order to contribute to a renewal of perspectives regarding a key issue for understanding the roots of our current society and the problems surrounding conviviality in today's world.

The book derives from an European Science Foundation project about the cohesion of European regions developed between 2010 and 2013. Flocel Sabate led into this framework a team of fourteen scholars looking for the reason of the cohesion and permanence of Catalonia from Middle Ages to current days. This collective book arrives at an updated explanation, far from neoromantic visions and attentive to social vectors, such as socioeconomical convergence, external and internal perception, social representation, institutional development, creation of a justificative discourse and influence of the law, the language, the art and other cultural items.

Archives are the documentary memory of each society and so they become one of the pillars of its identity. Its destruction is sometimes accidental, but it is often deliberate in order to remove the ties with the past. The new times that revolutions attempt to reach usually involve forceful and symbolic ruptures with former identity, including the destruction of the economic, administrative and historical documentation. This book collects updated texts written by outstanding researchers from an initial Congress held in Moscow in 2006 in order to analyze the causes and consequences of the destructive violence against archives boasted during revolutionary turmoils. The studies pay special attention to the first important contempt and destruction of documentation, during the French Revolution; continue studying the damages to archives during 19th century; and culminated analyzing the effects of Russian Revolution over the documentation and the evolution until the end of the Soviet period.

Los procesos de intercambio cultural han marcado durante siglos el devenir de las numerosas culturas que entraron en contacto por diversas razones. El intenso proceso de globalizacion de hoy es el final de un largo camino que comenzo con los desplazamientos de larga distancia. Rutas que permitieron la transferencia de objetos, personas e ideas, iniciando una transculturacion que hoy en dia puede ser estudiada. Entrados ya en el siglo XXI, las miradas al pasado fijan su atencion en los acontecimientos que se desarrollaron en los primeros anos del siglo XVI en America, de los que se cumplen quinientos anos desde que acontecieron. Esto nos permite reflexionar sobre las verdaderas dimensiones de los acontecimientos que tuvieron lugar en aquellos territorios. Este libro reune las reflexiones de un grupo de profesores de las Universidades de Granada y Barcelona sobre la verdadera dimension del proceso de descubrimiento americano. Son un conjunto multidisciplinario de trabajos alrededor del mismo objeto, la presencia de lo hispano en el contexto americano y asiatico, como reflejo de una huella cultural que habla de un acontecimiento historico que duro mas de trescientos anos.