Reappraising the Origins of Exclusion in Late Medieval Castile: Across the Boundaries Between Religion, Politics and Customs

Abstract

Over the past two decades, research on issues of agency and liminality around borders has allowed to highlight the mutual permeability, fluidity and overlapping of such spheres as religion and politics, providing arguments on the construction of identity and otherness that allow for reappraising long-standing historical debates. This framework is particularly illuminating for the case of 15th-century Castile, when con-solidation of a pioneering centralized monarchy in Europe witnessed the end of the coexistence between Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, eventually leading to the persecution of converts and the expulsion of cultural and religious minorities. By observing the emergence of the Early Modern State and its policies toward religious groups from the literature on frontier crossing, this article identifies forms of agency circulating between the religious and political domains while accounting for the changes in their mutual frontiers. In so doing, the study highlights the gradual emer-gence —through a process that was neither linear, nor homogeneous or teleological— of the rising sphere of customs and habits. Initially subordinated to theological and le-gal concerns, social practices, rituals and ceremonies became central to discourses in-tersecting the political, religious, and moral domains, underpinning social stigmatiza-tion and the institutional mechanisms of rising monarchical centralization.