Social networks, promotion strategies and religious minorities in 16th-century Castile: the case of the converso practitioner Francisco López de Villalobos

Abstract

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". I have chosen to begin my paper with this quotation borrowed from the novelist L. P. Harley in order to emphasize mat in going back to pre-industrial and pre-modern Europe -to be precise to early sixteenth-century court medicine in the Crown of Castile, the biggest and most influential Iberian kingdom at the time -we are actually travelling to a very «foreign country» where things were done in a rather different way by comparison with modern societies. This historical approach to a racher «remote» territory is, nevertheless, intended to supply a better comprehension of the welfare systems in early modern Europe by focusing on the dynamics of family, social and institutional networks at the noble and royal court settings of the Castile Crown through the career of a converso medical practitioner -Francisco L6pez de Villalobos.