Women and Communal Discipline in the Portuguese Nation of Hamburg during the Seventeenth Century

• Autor(a) principal: Martins,Hugo
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1645-64322020000200022
• topic: Sephardic diaspora; Portuguese nation; Communal discipline; Women; Hamburg

Abstract Transgressions and their related punishments are among the most important tools for analyzing the values that have been imprinted within a given community. In addition to identifying the norm and the relative deviations therefrom, they also make it possible to interpret the occurrence of these phenomena in a specific place, reflecting a reality in constant evolution over time. In this article, I focus on the discipline exercised by the governing council of the Portuguese community of Hamburg between 1652 and 1682, in order to understand what this reveals to us about the social, cultural and religious history of that community in one of the most important periods of its history. My research focuses specifically on the role of women as the agents and targets of transgressive and disciplinary practices, respectively, in order to understand what these cases reveal to us about the attitudes and perceptions shared by the ruling class about women and their condition in the Portuguese-Jewish communities of Western Europe during the early modern period.