Ritos, maltrato y violencia en la vida estudiantil castellana de la Edad Moderna

Resumo

This paper analyzes practices defined as rites of initiation to student university life in the Modern period from an interdisciplinary perspective, using literature of the Golden Age. We have information of institutionalized, grotesque initiation ceremonies at the European level, and news of these violent practices for the kingdom of Castile can be gleaned from dictionaries and literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This material shows that the new students were represented as dehumanized according to constructions of classical references to the ferocitas vs. humanitas debate threaded with elements of the carnivalesque in popular culture. The undercurrent of such manifestations is tied to customs and expressions of what one can refer to as cultural or social violence, concomitant in all of Europe—hazing, bizutage, fagging, streich—and often related to other popular rituals of punishment, such as charivari, and games of mockery. In sum, the paper offers a history of university mistreatment from a cultural history perspective and building on ethnohistorical considerations.