Dr Rosa Vidal Doval has been awarded a one-year Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to study the development of purity of blood.
Abstract: This project provides a new understanding of discrimination and intolerance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. It investigates limpieza de sangre, the idea that descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity were spiritually tainted by their impure blood and ought to be excluded from public life. This project demonstrates that limpieza was a racialised system of discrimination, turning doubts about the bona fides of new converts into an inherited defect, carried in the body of the believer. Moreover, though limpieza is often seen as a distinctively Spanish phenomenon, it drew strength from well-established European ideas about heredity, descent, and status.
