Power : Entailment, status, and social mobility (14th-17th centuries)

Abstract

This book focuses on power, one of the components that characterise entails as corporate bodies. It analyses how entailment practices and social power functioned, combined and rivalled each other and what was the role of entails in maintaining aristocratic status and power and in the processes of social ascension of lower groups who aspired to achieve nobility, especially the urban elites. Based on the study of four Portuguese cities – Santarém, Évora, Porto and Lisbon –, between 1300 and 1700, it presents a sociological characterisation of the entail founders and their social mobility, their connections to other power circles, their motivation to establish an entail, and the elites’ awareness of their power manifested in the entail foundation documents. This books shows that the entails were associated with various forms of power and were a privileged means of access to the highest groups in the social hierarchy.