Category: European & World History

Early Modern Monday: Where In the World is Tecamachalco?

Spaniards in town came from different regions of the Peninsula, including Andalusia, the Basque country, Castile, and Extremadura. Among them, a Portuguese migrant could settle, marry a local mestiza, and have a castizo son (strictly speaking, the offspring of Spanish and mestizo parents); that son would eventually marry a mestiza and expect his share of the Indian service to which Spanish landowners were entitled. By the 1570s, the casta system developed by Spanish authorities to establish a clear racial hierarchy was only beginning to take shape. Yet life in a small community like that of Tecamachalco could breed a familiarity that often wrested importance from those racial differences.

Beyond “Half the Sky”

Even if you take issue with the celebrity cameos and reporting style in the recent smash PBS documentary, Half the Sky, you can’t deny that the program increased the awareness of women’s rights, one of today’s paramount moral challenges. For a deeper understanding of women’s human rights, here are some additional resources by Penn Press to help navigate this complex issue:

Anti-slavery Day Reading

Today, October 18, is anti-slavery day in the United Kingdom and anti-trafficking day in the European Union. To mark the event, here are some recent books that take an in-depth… READ MORE

Medieval Monday: Five Myths about Medieval Women and Power

The Middle Ages isn’t generally thought of as a period friendly to women at all, much less to powerful ones. Still, we’re all familiar with a handful of medieval and early modern women who had extraordinary influence: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of Castile, Elizabeth I of England. The subject of my book, Berenguela of Castile, is one of their lesser-known peers. But the focus on women like Berenguela as “exceptions to the rule” has the strange effect of reinforcing old myths about medieval women.