Staging Brotherhood: Confraternities and Processions in Early Modern Iberian Cities.

This paper considers the different policies of inclusion and exclusion for Jews, Muslims, and converts in cities around Iberia, in order to inquire about the use of confraternities and Iberia in the late medieval and early modern periods was a place of social malleability, where Iberians, non-Iberians and peoples of various faiths lived, traded, and fought with each other. This paper considers the social dynamics of religious confraternities, and religious processions in early-modern Iberia.

Religion as a tool for unity, is a common theme in studies of early-modern Iberia. However, religion is but one piece in a complex social web that includes social hierarchy, economics, politics, etc. I argue that more nuanced analyses of the social dynamics within religious confraternities and religious processions, will provide a better understanding of the complex relationship between religion, society, as well as the racialization and exclusion of religious minorities in early modern Iberia.

This paper challenges the idea of static communal borders between Christian, Jew, Muslim, and convert, in order to show how confraternities and religious processions were more fluid than current studies suggest. In early-modern Iberia, the integration and exclusion of religious converts, Muslims, and Jews differed from region to region. Using examples from multiple cities, I encourage scholars to look beyond religious organizations and processions as tools for religious unity, in order to consider the possibilities for resistance and social validation confraternities and processions provided. space as sites for resistance and social validation.