Reappraising the Origins of Exclusion in Late Medieval Castile: Across the Boundaries Between Religion, Politics and Customs

Over the past two decades, research on issues of agency and liminality around borders has highlighted the mutual permeability, fluidity and overlapping of spheres such as religion and politics, providing arguments on the construction of identity and otherness that allow us to reappraise long-standing historical debates. This framework is particularly illuminating for the case of 15th-century Castile, when consolidation of a pioneering centralized monarchy in Europe witnessed the end of the coexistence between Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, eventually leading to the persecution of converts and the expulsion of cultural and religious minorities. Drawing upon both primary and secondary sources, and adopting the analytical framework of frontier-crossing, this article identifies the conditions under which particular social agents reconfigured the boundaries between religion and politics in 15th-century Castile. It further examines the process by which border crossing by various agents made customs and everyday practices crystallize into a third sphere for the construction of alterity and exclusion and analyzes the specific context in which the intersection of these three domains contributed to the stigmatization of Jews, Muslims and converts, ultimately leading to their exclusion and expulsion. Initially subordinated to theological and legal concerns, social practices, rituals and ceremonies became central to discourse intersecting the political, religious and moral domains, underpinning social stigmatization and the institutional mechanisms of rising monarchical centralization.