Portugal in a European Context Essays on Taxation And Fiscal Policies in Late Medieval And Early Modern Western Europe 11001700

For three hundred years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the nineteenth-century it was a free-floating concept which travelled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European "ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world.

This interdisciplinary volume takes as its subject the multi-faceted genre of didactic literature (the literature of instruction), which constituted the cornerstone of literary enterprise and social control in medieval and early modern Europe.