Abstract
The traditional Catholic vision of the gates of Heaven was crowded with familiar faces. Just as Dante caught the comforting glance of Beatrice among other acquaintances during his journey to Paradise in the Divine Comedy, so did people count on the support of the righteous both in heaven and on earth to assuage their fears. In the early sixteenth century a townswoman in Zamora, Francisca de la Peña, prepared for her own death in her will through
faith, hope and charity in God and in his holy mercy that compassion will greet me; and in supplication of the always glorious Virgin Holy Mary, his mother, our intercessor, to whom I humbly pray, and to all the saints who are before the eternal throne of God, [I pray] that they be my lawyers and persuade my Savior that he receive my soul....
At the Last Judgment, Francisca, like most of her contemporaries, did not imagine herself confronting God directly and alone; rather, she was escorted by the good wishes of loved ones on earth and by the good will of the blessed, to whom friendly recognition had been offered during her life.
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Notes and References
Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Despoblación y repoblación del Valle del Duero (Buenos Aires, 1966) p. 253.
Amando Represa, ‘Génesis y evolución urbana de la Zamora medieval’, Hispania, cxxii (1972) 528–30.
Juan de Villuga, Repertorio de todos los caminos de España (Medina del Campo, 1546), several copies of which are in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, in the section Libros Raros.
Bartolomé Bennassar, Valladolid au siècle d’or (Paris, 1967) p. 80.
The land of the province of Zamora was similar in fertility to that of other regions in Spain. The sedimentary soils bordering the Duero were particularly rich for agriculture, and only the region of Sayago contained extremely poor soil, suitable solely for sheep-grazing or forestry. To the north of the city, the Tierra del Pan supplied cereals and some meat; to the east, the Tierra del Toro provided wines as well as cereal and meat; and the southern Tierra del Vino provided wine, wheat, legumes and fruits. Except during times of scarcity, Zamora was self-sufficient in subsistence items. But such times of scarcity, usually produced by inadequate rainfull, occurred regularly. José Antonio Alvarez Vázquez has calculated that almost every three years residents sought permission from the cathedral chapter to engage in petitionary processions for rain due to serious droughts. (José Antonio Alvarez Vázquez, ‘Diezmos y agricultura en Zamora, 1500–1840 [Doctoral thesis, University of Salamanca, 1977] pp. 55–9.)
Luis G. de Valdeavellano, Curso de Historia de las Instituciones españolas (Madrid, 1977) p. 268. Chroniclers of the Reconquest in the eleventh century noted that the Moors, for administrative purposes, carefully segregated workers into districts according to craft. Some of these crafts advanced to the stage of guild organization, with selected men of the profession enforcing government regulations on production, prices, and weights. They also inspected handicraft techniques and working conditions.
See Julius Klein, ‘Medieval Spanish Gilds’, Facts and Factors in Economic History (Cambridge, Mass., 1932) p. 164 and 168.
Although voluntary fraternal organizations of craftsmen did not emerge in the Muslim towns in Spain, nor in Africa before the thirteenth century (see S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions [Leiden, 1966], pp. 267–70), the practise of segregating crafts may have given craftsmen the impulse to form guild corporations.
G. Meersseman, ‘Etudes sur les anciennes confréries dominicaines’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, xxii (1951) pp. 275–93; and ‘Pénitents ruraux communitaires en Italie au XIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, xlix (1954) pp. 343–90.
Teófanes Egido, ‘Religiosidad popular y asistencia social en Vallodolid: Las Cofradías Marianas del s. XVI’, Estudios Marianos, xXLV (Salamanca, 1980) 198;
and Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain (Cambridge, 1983) p. 159.
Sara Tilghman Nalle, ‘Religion and Reform in a Spanish Diocese: Cuenca, 1545–1650’ (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1983) p. 255.
The ratio for the city of Toledo taken from Linda Martz’s study is affirmed by William Christian as representative of the entire region of Toledo in Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J., 1981) p. 149.
Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina (Florence: Salani, 1963) pp. 9 and 36.
Population figures come from David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles (Paris, 1978) p. 183, using a coefficient of 6.21 for 9527 hearths.
Monika Zmyslony, Die Bruderschaften in Lübeck bis zur Reformation (Kiel, 1977);
and Edith Ennen, The Medieval Town (New York, 1979) p. 200. Population statistics for Lübeck are cited in Ennen, p. 188. Her estimation of the population of Hamburg is for the mid-fifteenth century (p. 88). Over 100 confraternities existed in Northamptonshire in the early sixteenth century, with fourteen in Northampton. Lincolnshire had 120 confraternities with five in both Stamford and Louth.
Leicester had seven. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984) p. 28.
See Olinda Celestino and Albert Meyers, Las cofradías en el Perú: Región central (Frankfurt, Main, 1981) p. 117.
A. Sicroff, Les Controverses des statutes de ‘pureté de sang’ en Espagne du XV au XVII siècle (Paris, 1960) pp. 20–32 and 95; and
and Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La close social de los conversos en Castilla en la Edad Moderna (Madrid, 1955) vol. III, pp. 9–17.
Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982) pp. 212–13;
and Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975) p. 75.
In Spain, women enjoyed full legal rights to dispose of property, and they were among the most important grantors of land to the confraternities. According to the Visigothic codes of the early Middle Ages, women in Spain had the same juridical rights as men over their properties. Upon the death of their husbands, they recovered full ownership of dowries from their husbands, and inherited one half of the goods acquired during the marriage, in addition to goods directly willed to them. See Law XVI of the Leyes de Toro, 1505; and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘La mujer española hace mil anos’, in España y Islam (Buenos Aires, 1943) pp. 116–18.
On the guilds in Zamora, see María del Carmen Pescador del Hoyo, ‘Los gremios de Artesanos en Zamora’, in the Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas, Museos (Madrid) LLxxv (1968–1972) pp. 183–200; lxxvi (1973) pp. 13–60; and lxxvii (1974) pp. 67–101.
Bernard H. Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers, 1830–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976);
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).
William H. Sewell, Jr. Work and Revolution in France, (Cambridge, 1980) pp. 77–113.
R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1953) p. 248. Stories of the miracles of the Virgin show that she did not withhold her aid from thieves, vagabonds and miscreants of any sort. See, for example, the codices of the Cantigas de Santa Maria in the Escorial;
Jesús Montoya Martínez, Las colecciones de milagros de la Virgen en la edad media: el milagro literario (Granada, 1981) pp. 152–3;
and Johnannes Herold, Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, edited by Eileen Power (London, 1928).
For a critical examination of the thought of several Salamancan theologicans, see Karl Deuringer, Probleme der Caritas in der Schule von Salamanca (Freiburg, 1959).
Proceedings of the public vow of the Immaculate Conception, recorded in Luis Calvo Lozano, Historia de Villalpando y su tierra. (Zamora, 1981) pp. 126–9.
Ibid.
On the strict requirements of virginity for woment to enter the ranks of sainthood in the Middle Ages, see P. Bröwe, Beitrage zur Sexualithik des Mittelalters (Breslau: 1932);
and André Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge (Rome: 1981) pp. 442–5.
Ordenanzas de Nuestra Señora de San Antolín y del Señor Santiago de la Cuidad de Zamora. Año de 1503 in E. Fernández-Prieto, Nobleza de Zamora (Madrid, 1953) pp. 33–45.
Pierre Duparc places the origins of confraternities of the Holy Spirit before the Carolingian age, although the oldest texts which he uses mentioning the Holy Spirit date from the thirteenth century. Pierre Duparc, ‘Confréries du Sant-Esprit et communautés d’habitants au moyen-âge’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4th series, 36 (1958) p. 350; The Hospital order of friars of the Holy Spirit was founded in the mid-twelfth century in Montpellier, after which time it spread throughout Europe.
Joseph Duhr, ‘Confréries’, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris, 1953) p. 1472.
AHPZ, Municipal, Libro de Actas (12) 17 April 1589. On the growth of the cult of the Virgen de los Remedios, see B. Porres Alonso, ‘Advocación y culto de la Virgen de los Remedios en España’, Hispana Sacra, xxiii (1970) pp. 3–77.
Valdeavellano, Curso de Historia de las Instituciones españolas, p. 247. Sánchez-Albornoz’s study of church cartularies in the tenth and eleventh century anticipates the conclusions made by his student, Valdeavellano, in Despoblación y repoblación del Valle del Duero (Buenos Aires: 1966) pp. 284–9 and in El regimen de la tierra en al reino Asturleonés hace mil años (Buenos Aires, 1978) pp. 19–57, where he stresses the spiritual motivations behind the hundreds of donations to monasteries which he has examined. Other scholars argue, however, that much land was turned over to secular princes and counts from peasant proprietors whose main concerns were to secure protection against dynastic and baronial warfare and violence. Documentation to support the latter thesis is not cited, but by its nature is less likely to have survived.
See Robert Smith, ‘Spain’, chapter VII of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I, edited by M. M. Postan (Cambridge, 1966).
The early church fathers recommended that one-third to one-half of one’s estate, ‘the share of the soul’, be given for pious purposes, as donations to church institutions or alms to the poor, and these were frequently administered by confraternities. Augustine directed that bequests in alms should not exceed a son’s share if children survived. Gratian returned to Augustine’s position, although other canonists argued that Augustine’s intention had been to dissuade but not to prohibit donations larger than an inheritor’s share. Roman law imposed definite minimal limits on inheritances for children (pars legitima) of one-half to one-third of estates. See Michael M. Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England (Toronto, 1963) pp. 8, 123, and 127. In 1505, Spanish secular legislation restricted the amount that could be bequeathed for the welfare of one’s soul to one-fifth of one’s estate (Leyes de Toro, leyes 12 and 32); and according to Moralists (not stated in Canon Law), testators could leave up to one-third of the ‘legítimo’, and the ‘mejora’, (usually used to favor one son in a system in which primogeniture was not encouraged) to the church for pious causes so long as it would not harm descendents. Natural law required that parents give to their children only that which they needed. If they left more than one-third to the church, and inheritors took it to court, the will of the civil judges prevailed. Property holdings of the cathedral chapter in Zamora and its management of lands is explored in detail in José Antonio Alvarez Vázquez’s thesis, Diezmos y argicultura en Zamora’, already cited. In 1546, Bishop Antonio de la Aguila confirmed that the church in Zamora was worth more than 5000 ducats, ranking twenty-fifth in wealth among peninsular cathedral churches. AG Simancas, Patronato Eclesiástico, No. 1.
Archivo Particular de Don Enrique Fernández-Prieto, Orden 1891, no. 7, Estatutos de Nuestra Señora del Rosario y Purificación, 1544; tít. 13 and 14.
AMZ, Archivo de Santa María de la Horta, Santo Tomás, no. 17. The ordinances of Santo Cristo are from the eighteenth century.
AMZ, Archivo de los Ciento, Ordenanzas de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Antigua; Estatutos de la Cofradía de la Vera Cruz, in Luis Calvo Lozano, Historia de la Villa de Villalpando y su Tierra (Zamora: Diputación Provincial, 1981).
The New Catholic Encylopedia, ‘Meals, Sacred’. And Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965) p. 378.
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© 1989 Maureen Flynn
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Flynn, M. (1989). The Confraternal Structure of Zamora. In: Sacred Charity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09043-3_2
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