This work is set within the extensive framework of the renewed studies on European nobility and its target is the complex relationship between the Castilian nobility and Catholic moral theology in the period that goes from 1550 to 1650. Its main purpose is to investigate the extent to which the Castilian nobles inhabited a moral universe where certain rules were applied with respect to what was morally legal; rules that generated many and constant doubts. The study thus focuses on the nobles and their activity in the world: activity that falls within some concrete and specific economic, social and political margins of the time, but also, and this is what we aim to put forward, moral margins. All of this within the context of the post-Tridentine Catholic Europe: increase in the frequency of confession, expansion of the examination of conscience, detailed analysis of sins, etc. By analysing the consultations made by the Castilian nobles to theologians, the work presents a group of nobles submitted to continuous uncertainty about practically all the aspects of their lives as lords and as individuals: the sale of offices on the manors, the payment of fair salaries to servants, the payment of debts, compliance with the legislation on luxury, the persecution of public sins, the non-shooting (game), etc. In these aspects and others, the modern noble is situated in a moral topography with well-defined contours that impose limits on their political, social, and economic action. The principles of natural law (not harming others, seeking good, distributive and commutative justice, superfluous goods, etc.), the maxims of positive divine right (thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal, etc.) and the positive human, civilian and canonical law (restitution, obligation in the knowledge of complying with human laws, etc.) are all interconnectable for the conscience of the nobles who must be subjected to frequent judgements in the tribunal of penance. The moral discourse is an ambivalent discourse for the Castilian nobles of the Modern Age, because, on the one hand, it legitimises their position, but, on the other hand, it sometimes restricts their capacity to act.

This dissertation examines the making of the WWII disabled as agents of memory focusing on the experience of mutilation of the specific group of war veterans. A large part of the research is based on oral testimonies, various ego-documents, legal documentation, newsletters and material from disabled associations. Starting from a presentation of the declaration of the war and its process it seeks to find the main constitutive elements of the Greek-Italian war legend in the period of its consolidation. The way in which invalids conceptualize this legend in their memories and the interaction between those memories and the legend’s thematic structure is put forward in a concise unit. What follows is an attempt to track the invalids’ trajectory from the front to the hospitals and further on to their life in the post liberation years, the period of their rehabilitation. Importance is given in the process of hospitalization. Hospitals, far from being a space of confinement, acquire new meanings through the social interaction developed among patients, visitors and the medical staff forming thus a locus of their constitution as war-disabled. It is in this exact place, the hospital, that the disabled form their associations, get involved into the resistance and finally suffer the repression of the occupational government. In the first decade of the post-war years, disabled rehabilitation is examined within a political, social and legal framework. There is an analysis of the war veterans’ survival strategies, the political discourse, the structure of the associations and the economic and social positioning of the disabled subjects. The final chapter offers an historical perspective and functions as an introduction to the prehistory of the subject, dealing mostly with policies, legal regulations and institutions of the war-disabled in the interwar years.

Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) was a significant female writer of the mid to late eighteenth century who is now becoming a figure of scholarly interest. Two recent monographs by Bridget Hill, (1992) and Kate Davies, (2005), have looked at Macaulay as primarily a biographical subject, with the latter incorporating a nuanced interpretation of the cultural contexts of the late eighteenth century ‘Atlantic World’. This thesis aim to complement these two books by providing a close reading of Macaulay’s own work with particular emphasis on her eight volume History of England, (1763-83). The first part of the thesis contrasts Macaulay’s magnum opus, the eight volume History of England (1763-83) with the major works of history that preceded her publication: including Clarendon, Rapin, and Hume. It argues that Macaulay was not hindered by her gender, or lack of education, producing a work of studied empiricism that rivalled these major male historians, and that Macaulay was engaged in a competitive literary venture to overwrite these works and establish a whig history of grand proportions detailing the battle between the two forces of Tyranny and Liberty. The second part of the thesis takes a detailed examination of specific aspects of her History and Macaulay’s political philosophy. It examines Macaulay’s rhetoric and her republicanism, looking specifically at her use of oratory, her planned constitutional reforms, and her promotion of Liberty. It argues that Macaulay was welded to gendered representations of political and national virtue, but that she measured virtue only in accordance to her republican ideals. These ideals were gained from a variety of sources and demonstrate not only her extensive reading and referencing but also how the commonwealth tradition in which she wrote were dependent on both the neo-classical works of the seventeenth century and Lockean liberal thought. It argues that unlike the commonwealth tradition as a whole, Macaulay saw monarchy as inherently gi