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Ransoming For The Faith: Medieval Perceptions Of The Role Of Mercedarians In Catalan Society, Spencer Thomas Hunt

Masters Theses

The Medieval advent of institutionalized religious ransoming marked a clear shift in popular concern for captive aid. The present study examines the Catalan based Order of Merced in an attempt to reevaluate the role of religious ransoming in Christian communities. This project reconstructs internal and external perceptions of the Mercedarian brothers and their chosen vocation of ransoming through an analysis of contemporaneous discourse about the order and patterns of lay engagement with the brothers. The first section utilizes published collections of papal and royal records. These documents, combined with the polemic and apologetic texts of the thirteenth-century Christian author Pedro …