Swine at the chancery and locks to chests: dispersal, destruction, and accumulation of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages

In the last twenty years, anthropologists, archivists, and historians have dedicated increased attention to the study of archives as objects of research themselves. In so doing, scholars have predominantly examined the emergence and transformations of archives during the early modern age, focusing mostly on political and diplomatic depositories. They have tended to neglect financial archives, which is unfortunate, as—alongside judicial archives—they were probably the largest documentary repositories of the pre-modern world and those that first faced the problem of managing huge masses of documentation. This article discusses the formation and development of the Kingdom of Sicily’s financial archives in the later Middle Ages, arguing that this repository evolved into a collecting archive by the early fifteenth-century, when it preserved not only the records and accounts produced by the central financial administration, but also those from a number of territorial officers and magistracies. This archival turn, I suggest, originated from the fact that the Crown of Aragon’s rulers constantly needed increased incomes to fund bureaucracies and warfare and exercise patronage, and thus needed financial information organized, at hand, and under their control. After briefly discussing the emergence of the financial archive in the thirteenth-century, this essay traces the Crown’s attempts to create a stable repository for storing financial records and accounts and its continuous struggles to prevent documentation from being scattered and dispersed. Finally, it examines the successful strategy that King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58), called the Magnanimous, pursued to organize financial documentation and concentrate records and accounts produced by financial administration into a stable building. The essay pays particular attention to the material aspects of preserving records, e.g., the restoration of buildings, construction of chests, and preparation of secure locks that were integral to the emergence of collecting archives for financial documents in the later Middle Ages.

The Communist Judicial System in China, 1927-1976

Drawing on hundreds of newly released judicial archives and court cases, this book analyzes the communist judicial system in China from its founding period to the death of Mao Zedong. It argues that the communist judicial system was built when the CCP was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the GMD, meaning that the overriding aim of the judicial system was, from the outset, to safeguard the Party against both internal and external adversaries. This fundamental insecurity and perennial fear of loss of power obsessed the Party throughout the era of Mao and beyond, prompting it to launch numerous political campaigns, which forced communist judicial cadres to choose between upholding basic legal norms and maintaining Party order. In doing all of this, The Communist Judicial System in China, 1927-1976: Building on Fear fills a major lacuna in our understanding of communist-era China.

A gender approach to housing loss in Spain: the case of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

In pre-pandemic times, Spain was one of the European countries where the economic crisis hit the real estate market hardest, leading to rising mortgage foreclosures and eviction of tenants, as highlighted by many scholars on the financial geography of housing. Its matched social effects reveal the outstanding role of gender, foreign status, and income levels, starting from the hypothesis that the intersection among these categories shows the dimension of inequality in the neoliberal configuration of cities. The aim of this article is to provide this evidence through the study case of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, using a GIS to implement statistical correlations of these categories on a microurban scale. The created database rests on information contained in judicial archives (women’s foreclosures and evictions) and on ethnicity and income level statistical information. This allows us to go deeper into the factors of exposure to vulnerability, in accordance with an established academic tradition regarding gender, housing and the city.

From Persecution to (Potential) Emancipation

This article deals with offences and crimes against female slaves, and those committed by female slaves, in Ottoman Istanbul (sixteenth-seventeeth centuries). Its main sources are imperial legislation and court records of the imperial capital, Istanbul, and its suburbs. Judicial archives remain the chief sources of early modern Ottoman historiography on gender. This contribution tackles slavery’s specificities regarding women, without ignoring the parallels with their male counterparts in the Ottoman Empire. By considering women as both objects and agents of legal violations and acts of violence, I simultaneously deal with the rights of slaveholders and slaves. Violations of these rights varied depending on the identity and juridical status of their authors, and were handled accordingly by the justice system. Thus, I consider violations committed by owners against their slaves, by slaves against their owners, and by third parties against the slaves of others. The rights and mutual obligations of masters and slaves were strictly defined in Ottoman law, although the judicial authorities upheld the preservation of private property above all. They dedicated themselves to fighting against the slightest doubt over masters’ quasi-absolute authority over their human possessions, whose unconditional obedience was required. Female slaves, in order to affirm their rights, had to provide irrefutable written proof or trustworthy verbal testimonies at the kadi courts.

Prodigality, Avarice and Anger

In a status society, such as early modern Europe, the development of the market economy threatened social hierarchies. At a time when religion was the source of power, priests and warriors strove to protect themselves from what was a foreseeable attack going to the very root of their domination, which was jeopardized by the potentialities of the capitalist economy. They therefore developed religious, legal and moral tools to counter capital accumulation and interest-bearing loans in order to break the motor of capitalism. Avarice, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and usury, which was punished by excommunication, were the moral weapons used to exclude those from the community who hoarded money or who charged, however little, interest on loans. But whereas greed, the disease of market exchange, was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins, prodigality, which lies at the heart of aristocratic exchange, was considered one of the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Contemporary theatre, with its misers and spendthrifts, is a perfect place to hear echoes of the struggles between the antagonistic values in society, and to follow the way in which individuals reacted to the conflicts that these struggles provoked.The essay is based on literary works reflecting behaviors that could also be echoed in judicial archives and in texts from writers of the time. It analyses plays from Shakespeare (Timon of Athens, The Merchant of Venice), Ben Jonson (Volpone) and Molière (The Miser).

华北乡村有女儿无儿子家庭的财产继承和赡养, 1949–2014

Based on the civil judicial archives of Changli county, Hebei, from 1949 to 1976, the judicial archives of the town of Li (Lizhen), Changli county, from 1992 to 2014, and seven re-investigations of Houjiaying village, which had been surveyed by Japanese Mantetsu researchers in the 1930s and 1940s, this article examines the changing patterns of property inheritance and old-age support of peasant families with only daughters in rural North China from 1949 to 2014, focusing on how the practice of inheritance rights for daughters was gradually formed by the rigid enforcement of the one-child policy and the promulgation of the 1985 Law of Succession. The proportion of peasant families with only daughters has rapidly risen from 15 percent to 20–30 percent due to the enforcement of one-child policy in the 1980s, which led to the abolishing of the old adoption (of a son) system and uxorilocal marriage, both of which had been practiced in the Mao era. Property inheritance in peasant families with only daughters also experienced a huge change from the Mao era to the Reform era. During the Maoist era, parents of peasant families with only daughters always adopted a son or took a son-in-law into their family to inherit their property and support them in their old age. They did so because of the subsistence pressure in families without enough adult male labor to earn sufficient workpoints. During the Reform era, parents of families with only daughters leave their village to live with their daughters in one or another of two patterns. In the first, the parents live with one daughter for the rest of their lives and the daughter who supports them inherits their property. In the second, all the daughters take turns providing support and all eventually inherit equally. This trend shows that because daughters are involved in supporting the parents in old age, the tightly intertwined relationship between property inheritance and old-age support remains unaltered in peasant families with only daughters. 本文使用了河北省昌黎县法院1949–1976年间的民事档案、昌黎县李镇1992年至2014年间的司法所档案，及对李镇侯家营村——满铁重点调查的六个村庄之一——的七次田野调查，探讨了1949年至今华北乡村有女儿无儿子家庭财产继承和赡养的演变。在比例上，因为计划生育政策的严格推行，华北乡村有女儿无儿子家庭从民国时期的15%增加到了当代的20–30%。 从集体化时期到改革开放时期，在财产继承模式上，华北乡村有女儿无儿子家庭的财产继承也经历了巨大的转变，在集体化时期，此类家庭中父母普遍同时采用招赘女婿和过继两种形式，让女婿或继子继承财产。在改革开放时期，在有女儿无儿子家庭中形成了所有女儿均分继承或由一个女儿继承所有财产。在赡养模式上，集体化时期由于以工分为核心的分配体制，使得家庭劳动力特别重要，招赘女婿和过继在社会后果上都增加家庭的男性劳动力，因而可以说是应对生存压力的重要途径，所以集体化时期流行的是赘婿或继子赡养;而改革开放时期华北乡村有女儿无儿子家庭则普遍由所有女儿均承担赡养义务或由一个女儿赡养，父母选择何种方式则和财产继承模式相关。 (This article is in English.)

Non-anachronism in the historical sociolinguistic study of Portuguese

This paper discusses the methods that historical sociolinguists can use in order to avoid anachronism. It is argued that there are four practical ways of triggering a sense of scale, both for external variables that correlate with past language use and for the linguistic data that we inherited from past societies: by learning from social and cultural historians, by visiting judicial archives, by making scholarly digital editions, and by using corpus linguistic statistical procedures. The case study focused on here is Portuguese in the Early Modern period, from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The size of an ideal sample of informants is discussed, based on the demographic history of Portugal. Furthermore, social categories are established relevant in the context of Portuguese cultural history, taking into account the social world that made sense to Early Modern people. Next, I introduce a corpus of Early Modern letters containing a close-to-conversational register, and discuss two case studies. An analysis of spelling variation in the corpus shows the diachronic dialectal spread of a merger of sibilants. The statistical analysis of keywords shows the pervasiveness of register markers as well as some typical uses found in epistolary communication by social actors from different social strata.