Social Relations, Formation of the State at the beginning of the Modern Era, and Religious Cleansing: a Contribution to the Social Closures of Historical Sociology
This article offers an analysis of the social origins of the religious and political conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula during the XVth century. The theoretical argument mobilizes both an analysis of social closures and an analysis of the generative grammar of social property regimes in order to reconstruct the logic of social conflicts during the era of absolutist consolidation. The empirical section reconstructs the contentions and conflicts which lead to the framing of the Conversos under the statutes of pure blood. The author argues that even though Medieval Spain did not developed a scientific theory of “races”, the administrative authority did developed a form of social closure grounded on heredity with lethal consequences for the Jewish population of Spain.