Preliminary Programme

This paper will focus on donations made in sixteenth century Portugal either by clergymen or by lay people (men and women) for parish churches andchapels.
A wide range of donations was made, including textiles, metal objects, sculpted images, paintings but also buildings (or parts of them), land and cattle. Whenever documentary sources allow, gender, social status or levels of income shall be related to the kind of donations made in order to enquire if there are patterns of behaviour, and tackle systems of value ascribed to the assets donated. (Show less)

The analysis of last wills coupled with the post-mortem inventories of the deceased is a good means of analysing the conversion of material goods into spiritual assets. By providing lists of objects, together with the purpose they would fulfill in their afterlives, testators ascribed different systems of value to the treasured possessions they had owned during their lifetimes. For instance, a bedchamber chest would be donated to a church where it would be used to store liturgic instruments; candlesticks would be donated to be put on altars. This paper will try to study such transformations, in order to tackle the logics presiding over them. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the religious values and emotions which emerge from pardon letters written during Felipe III´s reign in Portugal between the years of 1598-1621. As a legal instrument, pardon letters have been studied by many historians as a mean to approach complex social and economic relations during Early Modern period. This research focuses on conflicts which aroused amongst daily exchange relations - purchases, rents, donations and loans – enacted in cities and small villages throughout Portugal. Those daily life conflicts ended up getting caught in the royal justice system and, therefore, provide us with a window of observation over people´s feelings and perceptions concerning religion and the circulation of economic resources in the period. (Show less)

In last wills, testators often transformed themselves into the organizers of their own funerals and commited their inheritances into the saying of masses, thus revealing the confraternities that they belonged to, and their own specific devotions to saints or to different impersonations of Mary or Christ. This paper will try to focus on last will pertaining to widows in order to detect their strategies concerning the success of their afterlives, but, most important, the ways in which they channeled their assets to ensure the care of their souls. (Show less)