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Medieval labor guilds encompassed various forms of mutual aid in their coverage, including health, accident, widowhood, orphanage, old age, and poverty insurance. They also addressed situations typical of commercial insurance, such as bankruptcy, theft, assault, and captivity. These provisions included private and family actions (like organizing burials and funerals) and maintained a pious character through charitable and benevolent activities. Not all guilds offered the same level of protection; thus, this paper will examine exceptional cases where labor formations guaranteed their members a high degree of mutualistic commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the features and practices of military command during a war of conquest, as exhibited by Castilian captains at the dawn of Iberian Atlantic expansion between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Focusing on Castilian royal chronicles of military campaigns against the aboriginal people of the Canary Islands, such texts demonstrate continuities with the military discourse developed during the war against the Muslims in medieval Spain, as well as adaptation to a new geographical, social and cultural context, embodied in the experiences of the conquest of the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the use of a documentary source from the 18th century, the Ensenada Cadastre, as a tool of geohistorical study. This documentary source provides a way of furthering knowledge about the economy of each town in the crown of Castile. The town of Cubillas de Santa Marta, in the province of Valladolid, has been used as an example here. Thanks to this analysis of the cadastral documentation, it has been possible to analyse the agricultural activity and the distribution of crops, to determine the resulting landscape, and thus to be able to compare that with its current state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the characteristics of maritime borders, as a way to consider the development of specific forms of sociability in medieval societies. I inquire into the determinant factors attached to military activity at the maritime frontier, since the presence of armed vessels, their crews and mercenary companies was a typically distinctive element of social interaction in Iberian maritime regions during the Late Middle Ages. I examine some of the particularities of military enrolment, as well as the relationship between menat- arms and local authorities and communities in the cities and coastal areas of the Iberian Peninsula, Sardinia and Sicily around the turn of the 15th century. Examplars of mercenary military service taken from the General Archive of the Crown of Aragon and pertaining to King Ferdinand I's reign are used for this purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]