The Shifting Profiles of Privilege: Exemption, Status, and Social categorization in Seville in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

Abstract

Historians for the past several years have begun rejecting the old paradigm that portrayed early modern society as motionless. Breaking with the legitimizing discourse of forbidding and immobile estates, they have revealed a highly dynamic society with roots in the late medieval period.2 But medieval historians, particularly in Spain, traditionally have not paid much attention to social mobility, though some important historians recently have pointed in that direction.3 Regarding the question of alleged stasis in the Crown of Castile, several studies have examined the royal court, municipal oligarchies, and tax structure.