Description
This Research Group is indebted to the research experience in the sociability and associationism of the 18th-19th centuries of its original members, Drs. Elena Maza Zorrilla, Jesús María Palomares Ibáñez, Margarita Torremocha Hernández, Rafael Serrano García, Pilar Calvo Caballero from the University of Valladolid, and Félix Castrillejo Ibáñez from the University of Burgos. This team has obtained successive research projects in competitive public calls since 1998. Thanks to this support, translated into proven results (publications, conferences and direction of doctoral theses), the Group was in an ideal position to take advantage of the results achieved and to extend the spatial and chronological framework to more complex levels. These bases were the origin of the GIR approved by the Governing Council of the University of Valladolid on May 31, 2005, coordinated by Dr. Elena Maza Zorrilla and called “Asociacionismo y Acción Colectiva en Castilla, 1931-1975” (Associationism and Collective Action in Castile, 1931-1975). This research team became a reference in the region, expanded its objectives to study the networks and historical conditions of formal sociability in Castilla y León from the proclamation of the Second Republic to the death of Franco, and collaborated with other national and foreign teams (France, Italy and Portugal).
After long years of unraveling the threads of this autonomous community under the prism of sociability, its informal and collective action aspects led to the necessary reorientation of the objectives of the research group, now in line with the new historiographical trends that consider conflict as the axis, emphasize new characters, such as women and childhood, and new readings of social history, such as legal culture, taking advantage of the archival wealth of Valladolid, especially the Archive of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid, whose chronological arc favors the study from the Modern Age to the Contemporary Era. This ample time, a privileged record of permanence and change, together with comparative research, has been the backbone of the work of this Group for two and a half decades. Its results are reflected in the GIR Web, whose collectives led by Drs. Elena Maza Zorrilla and Margarita Torremocha Hernández integrate the collaboration of other comparative research teams (from the Universities of León, Salamanca, Extremadura, Zaragoza, Granada, Barcelona, Alicante, Santiago de Compostela, Huelva, Santander, the French Universities of Caen, Lorraine and Reims, the Argentine National University of Córdoba, the Mexican University of Puebla, the Portuguese Universities of Lisbon and Minho, the American University of Georgia and the Italian University of Messina). This commitment to comparative history has been consolidated with the last three MINECO projects directed by Dr. Margarita Torremocha Hernández, with an inter-university research team from the Universities of Valladolid and Salamanca in Modern and Contemporary History, and a working team from the Universities of Valladolid, the French Universities of Lorraine, Caen-Normandie and Reims Champagne-Ardennes, the Mexican University of Puebla and the Portuguese University of Lisbon.
The objectives of the Group are
a) To make social and cultural history. To know the past from a feminine perspective. Starting from the personal, family or social inclinations of women, their thoughts, feelings, aspirations and rights, we will delve into social history, the history of justice, of conflict, of the family, of daily life, of sexual behavior, etc. in the Castilian territories in comparison with the also Catholic territories of Portugal and France. The sources will be primarily those generated by the juridical culture and theological doctrine. This will allow us to know crucial aspects of the society and the lives of women for centuries, such as their youth, education, the transit when they leave the family environment, the decision of the state they will take, their bodies, the physical and sexual aggressions they suffer, the attacks to their rights and patrimony that they will defend in the courts of justice.
b) To know the binomial woman and conflict: the scope of female transgression. Institutional discourses mark an ideal feminine model, which not all women want to or can follow. Not perpetuating this model is a transgression, but it does not have to be a crime, which forces our work to combine our interest in social issues with the interdisciplinary perspective of the History of Law.
c) To analyze the space of women, preferably family, domestic and neighborhood, from the perspective of disagreements between marriages and kinships, and their attitude towards their offspring, with special attention to the fate of the illegitimate or helpless.
d) To trace family disagreements in which women play a leading role in rebuilding their lives.
e) To weigh the modifications in the feminine practices and lives introduced by the post-Tridentine doctrine when regulating marriage and religious life, from the Modern Age to the transition to Contemporaneity; by the transformations introduced since the seventeenth century (the enlightened culture, the juridical enlightenment, etc.) and consolidated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which mark the changes in some social uses, although in that cultural and mental society the permanencies predominated, only broken from the second decade of the twentieth century onwards.
f) Contextualize the social life of women, studied mainly with judicial sources, and therefore study the world of the administration of justice, judicial agents and legal culture.
Research Lines
a) Social history
b) Women, marriage and family
c) Feminine identity and transgression
d) Childhood, family and society: legitimacy, illegitimacy, abandonment, exposure
e) Justice, jurisdictions, judicial agents
f) Society and conflict
g) The construction of social history from the juridical culture
