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Description
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This Project proposal aims, firstly, at reassessing the role and the importance of the ecclesiastics, particularly the members of the secular clergy, in the construction of a space for its social mobility and for the circulation of cultural and political models, which are common to all the European Christianitas and secondly, in a more global comparatist mode, it wishes to study, at the level of case studies, the contribution of such an elite of Power for the affirmation of the Iberian Monarchies in Portugal, Castile and Aragon for the centuries above mentioned. For such purpose, five basic objectives were established: 1 – reconstitution of the universe of the elite of ecclesiastics, with a special attention given to those serving the King’s private chapel, who receive and exercise administrative and diplomatic roles, either as administrative officials in the Kings own curia or as his representatives near the other royal houses or the Papacy; 2 – definition and analysis of the mobility circuits of the Portuguese, Castilian and Aragonese episcopacy at the Iberian and European scale, with special attention given to the university training, the holding of benefices in different places of Christendom and the securing of offices in the ecclesiastic and/or the political structures; 3 – characterization of the social and cultural profile of those ecclesiastics closely connected to the political structure, i.e., to define typologies of careers and the ways in which the political and ecclesiastic parcourses interacted and influenced each other in the 13th to 15th centuries, in a comparatist perspective, for the several different kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula; 4 – expand the knowledge we have on the ways used by the ecclesiastical elite in order to exert pressure or use political influence and intervene in political affairs, within the context of Iberian monarchies for the period above mentioned;~ 5 – articulate the research with the work already developed - in the contexto of the colaboration of the IR and several of the researchers of this team- with the Groupe de Recherche Europeene (GDRE) do CNRS – on the project At the Foudations of the Modern European State: the Legacy of the medieval clergy. The concretization of these five objectives stems from the notional idea of the central importance of the ecclesiastics as instrumental elements in the constitution and definition of the Iberian monarchies, at multiple levels and scales, from the level of influence of the juridical expertise in the construction of political legitimacy, to the exercise of administrative office in the royal court, or external representation of the Kings to the very spiritual private care of the Monarchs. It is equally rooted in the absolute need to assess such influence envisaging not only the local or “national” importance and influence of such ecclesiastics, but especially the fact that they belonged in networks of influence which were not confined to the Kingdom’s political frontiers, and extended, with different degrees, to very different places and loyalties in Christendom. Bearing this context in mind, we will try and ascertain the weight of these networks of spiritual and physical kinship in the definition of preferential paths for mobility and choice of models for careers. Finally, this project proposal is also rooted in the urgent need to study, from a comparatist perspective, the processes of formation and affirmation of the Iberian Monarchies and the role that the clergy as a whole had in those processes. The progresses made in recent years, as analyzed in the state of the art, still leave many aspects unanswered, among which, the need to cross reference these men in different political structures, the correct identification of some of them, the definition of typical parcourses, the importance of the royal chapel as an element of projection of political careers, and the progress derived from being able to look at this from a comparatist geographically wider perspective. These objectives imply the study and analysis of a considerable quantity of varied evidence, especially the royal documentation, which will provide the first identification of the corpora above mentioned . The contribution of diocesan archival funds, will have to be assessed from a critical perspective, with the objectives leading the heuristics. The papal documents will complement this already vast quantity of material allowing for clarifications otherwise impossible to tackle. From a methodological perspective, the theoretically empirical, casuistic or individual approach which seems to derive from what was just said, will in fact allow for a better, deeper and more rigorous approach to the realistic establishment of a truly comparatist study, with a broader scope and enabling the establishment of a more global understanding of group strategies and the role of a group of power and the ways in which it exerted i
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