Yanay Israeli

My research centers on the social and legal history of the Iberian world between the 13th and 16th centuries. I am particularly interested in how non-elites used courts, judicial procedures, and documents to navigate social conflicts and power relations within their communities. My current book project, titled "Popular Justice in Late Medieval Iberia: Petitioners, State Power, and Legal Culture in the Crown of Castile," examines the Castilian system of petition and response to revisit questions of state formation, access to justice for non-elites, and the ways religiious and ethnic minorities egnaged with the judicial system. Apart from this monograph, I have been studying a variety of other topics pertaining to the history Jews and Jewish converts in late medieval Iberia.

Publications:

"Petition and Response as Social Process: Royal Power, Justice, and the People in Late Medieval Castile (c.1474-1504)." Past & Present (2023).

"The Requerimiento in the Old World: Making Demands and Keeping Records in the Legal Culture of Late Medieval Castile." Law and History Review 40, no.1 (2022): 37-62.

"Defining 'Conversos' in Fifteenth-Century Castile: The Making of a Controversial Category." Speculum 97, no.3 (2022): 609-648. [With Yosi Yisraeli].

"The Politics of Records: Petitions and Depositions in the Legal Struggle of a Fifteenth-Century Converso." Viator 48, no.2 (2017): 279-303.

"Between Tyranny and the Commonwealth: Political Discourses and the Framing of Violence Against Conversos in the Gesta Hispaniensia of Alfonso de Palencia." In Contested Inter-Religious Conversion int he Medieval World, eds. Yaniv Fox and Yosi Yisraeli, 229-244. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Courses:

Winter 2023. Rebels and Outlaws in Late Medieval Europe (History 328, section 7).

Winter 2023. From Mass Conversions to the Inquisition: Religion and Violence in Early Modern Spain (Judaic 318, section 15 / History 328, section 3)

Fall 2022. The Jews of Medieval Spain (Judaic Studies 150 / History 197).