El confesor real en la Castilla de los Trastamara: 1366-1504

The knowledge about the figure of royal confessor has been, until recent times, very limited for the period of medieval Castile. A lot of studies have been done for Modern Age, when the institution of the kinǵs confessor played an important role in the Court of the Hispanic Crown. It is evident that this figure didńt appear ex nihilo in the Sixteenth Century and there existed some origins. Many historians mentioned some medieval confessors in their studies about any other subjects. Actually, it was not clear if those clerics could be properly considered as confessors. Our first aim has been to find all the references which exist in the sources and bibliography about kinǵs confessors in the Middle Ages and verify their nature as confessors. We fixed the beginning of the period of study with the reign of Enrique II, and its end with the death of Isabel I in 1504. The main reason is the fact that both sovereigns are the first and last monarchs of Trastamara dinasty, a very significant period in the origin of Modern State in Castile. The Church was an essential element in this process, on account of the service which many clerics enlisted to the Crown in different tasks (diplomacy, bureaucracy, Counsel and Counselling, etc.) and their ideological support to this endeavour. In this context, the royal confessor could perform an important work as personal advisor and a loyal subject to the person of the king in so many activities. This is well-known for Modern Age and also fort the reign of transition between this period and the precedent: the period of Catholic Kings. But it isńt for the times backwards...

Madurez sintáctica: influencia de las TIC en sus índices y estudio comparativo entre las generaciones pre y post-internet

There is a growing concern about the poor quality of the writing of children and teenagers because of the continuous and constant exposure to the new technologies. Increasingly parents complain that their children spend too much time with their phones, tablets, computers, video games, etc. There is also an increase in the number of teachers who complain about their students’ writing skills. Some of the most prominent criticisms are loss of vocabulary, simplified syntax and the poor spelling of the compositions. To verify if these criticisms are motivated or not by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is what moved us to initiate this doctoral dissertation entitled “The influence of ICT on ratings of syntactic maturity: a comparative study between pre- and post-internet generations”. We aim to know if a daily and constant exposure to the ICT can affect the syntactic maturity rates of children and teenagers. We also want to find out if there are differences between the levels of syntactic maturity of today’s students and those of the 1990s, when there were no ICT and internet. In order to do this, we have carried out a quantitative analysis taking as a reference previous studies by generativist researchers in the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic world and we have used the same units of measure (T-unit and clause). We collected a corpus of 382 essays, half argumentative and half descriptive, from 191 individuals. We have analyzed them according to ten dependent variables or syntactic maturity rates and other independent variables (Hours in internet, Course, Sex, Location, Type of school) by applying techniques of descriptive and inferential statistics...

La ciudad en la narrativa latinoamericana: 1950-1975

The representation of the city has always been present in the literature. A clear example of this is the famous city of Troy. The city in terms of where the actions take place, a novel in this case, despite the efforts of some works of the contemporary narrative to eradicate or reduce to its barest minimum expression, has continued to sit as a strong element of differentiation that gives the characters certain linguistic, historical, social and cultural characteristics. In the Hispanic narrative, according to historical features of the continent, the conquest, independence, and subsequently the constitution of the republics, the representation of the city acquires some unique characteristics, whose dimensions and implications, toward the second half of the twentieth century, transcend the simple notion of 'place' in which occur the facts narrated to acquire a central notion in the works, changing from being a support to become the central structure of the novel, which is able to articulate different situations, confront characters and articulate historically to the entire countries. This paper will talk mainly about the representation of the city in the published narrative between 1950 and 1975. We will try to have a transverse reading over these works through the analysis of the representation of the city that in them we can find, and that basically divided into three broad categories, each with its own specific functions: * The royal city. Corresponds to the cities that we can actually find in the American territory, and whose spaces and descriptions, historical references and territorial, it is possible to identify the reality or in any encyclopedia: streets, historical events, places, characters, etc...