Doctor María Luisa García Valverde describes in her book “The archives in female enclosed convents of Granada”, published by Universidad de Granada Press, in the Humanities Library supervised by professors María Pinto Molina and Antonio Ángel Ruiz Rodríguez, seven of the female monasteries and convents of Granada from the final years of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century after the Christian conquest of the city and the kingdom.
The volume, with more than 300 pages, expands and enriches the doctoral thesis read by the author read on monastic organization in Granada in an essential moment for the history of Granada and an important period of monastic reforms.
According to professor Vicente Pons Alós, the inventories provided by the author of the book are “the tip of the iceberg of a large work of search, identification, classification, arranging and cataloguing of the documentation of the different monasteries, a work not without its problems, given the particularities of monastic life and access difficulties”. The work now edited is a part, substantially extended and detailed, of her doctoral thesis, read in the Universidad de Granada.
According to Professor Vicente Pons, of the Universidad de Valencia, “recent historiography has abandoned a habitual topic in the sixties: the study of the monasteries. Cartularies and, especially, monastic diplomatic collections of the High Middle Ages have been for a long period the object of study of palaeographers, archivists and diplomatists. However, there are few research works on monasteries and convents in the Modern Age beyond punctual problems linked to agricultural history and the stately world, or specific moments, like the beginning of the 19th century and the sale of Church lands. These historiographical problems were due to the lack of archive works which described this monastic documental collection”.
According to María Luisa García, “at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century Granada was a symbol for Western Christianity, at the same time that it soon became the cultural and artistic centre of the Renaissance, where the most representative thinkers, ideas and artists of the moment coincided. It was the new ideal city to experience old Europe’s longing for renovation as the newly conquered city started its course with the spirit of the modern times, the awakening of a national awareness and of the sovereign and independent State, of subjective critic and secularizing humanism against the universalism and clericalism that dominated the stale Middle Ages, in a period in which an only idea unified different conflicting environments: The all-embracing Reformation of the Church”.
According to the author of the book, “the religious Reformation together with the reduction of the unruly nobility and the expulsion of the Arabs, were the means used by the Catholic Monarchs to achieve the «territorial unity» which was, at the end of the day, their reasons of State. Ferdinand and Isabella considered the political entity they ruled as a community that needed an egalitarian sign, a common agglutinative. They thought that only the Catholic unity, without any other faith, could give the community the desired stability, order and solidity. The application of these concepts involves incalculable consequences in all the areas of the Spanish History, not only after the Middle Ages, but also in the Modern Period”.
Reference:
Professor María Pinto Molina. Department of Librarianship and Documentation. Universidad de Granada. Phone numbers: 958 243 933 y 243 490. E-mail: mpinto@ugr.es