The professionals who teachs History, at any level in which their teaching is exercised, are increasingly threatened in their activity and challenged in their essential condition of exercise – the mobilization of the public – by a growing sense of contempt for the past, especially the more remote, within the framework of capitalist societies that are only recognized in projections for the future. To this we dedicate, more and more, our greatest feeling of empathy! The ‘daily dismantling in the air of any and all expressions of historical solidity’ frees us from the feeling of the weight of time on our backs, accelerating history in a present that is experienced as a constant change that only links us to the future, only projects us ahead. Historicity increasingly seems to reside in science fiction, and past tense in novels that celebrate a lost world or that may not have even existed! In view of this scenario, historians in general, and medievalists (and antiquists!) in particular, need to reflect on the conditions, perspectives, practices and meanings of the study and teaching of our ‘time slices’ in all levels of education in Brazil. How is the present and what will be the future of this past in the intellectual formation of Brazilians?

In this article, I develop a reflection on the projections of the Iberian Middle Ages in Latin American history by an angle currently “almost” neglected if it were not for the recent challenge of its mobilization by a French medievalist. Jérôme Baschet attaches to European feudalism the motor force of the colonization process of the new world, addressing especially the case of the Spanish colonization of Mexico. I will begin by considering the analytical strand of “historians-essayists” represented not by medievalists, but by leftist militant intellectuals dedicated to the study of Latin American and Brazil history, following by its criticism and the update of the issue to, after considering the “restoration” of the theme on the agenda thanks to the Baschet’s “thesis”, conclude this study with my personal pro- position.

Pre-capitalist societies have been hit by several epidemics, notably the frequent epidemic cycles of plague since the outbreak of the great epidemic of 1348, promoting sudden and systematic increases in mortality rates, and causing destruction, fear and social chaos. In Portugal, there was at least one epidemic every decade throughout the period. The disease was a factor of destabilization and social disorder that caused royalty to promote clashes through various actions. In this article, we rehearsed the proposition that the public health policy forged by the state contained in itself an intrinsic expression of what Achille Mbembe characterized as «necropolitics».

O livro fornece extratos de documentos medievais e os subsídios para sua interpretação e entendimento do contexto de produção documental. Permite o acesso, em língua portuguesa, aos documentos originalmente escritos em latim, árabe, castelhano medieval, português medieval e outras línguas. Mais do que somente disponibilizar a tradução das fontes para o português, é uma dupla via analítica para elas. A primeira tem um viés mais metodológico, na qual é feita uma breve tipologia, que situa os documentos apresentados diante de um panorama mais amplo relativo à sua produção e, por isso mesmo, permite analisar outros documentos para além dos aqui apresentados. A segunda via se centra na análise dos conteúdos dos documentos a partir de temáticas definidas, e assim a obra se constitui como uma ferramenta de auxílio no ensino reflexivo da história medieval. Organizado de forma cronológico-espacial para facilitar a busca de seus conteúdos, destaca temas diversos, desde as Forças Produtivas Ideais no período visigótico até a arquitetura funerária na Castela Baixo-Medieval, passando por assembleias nórdicas e relatos de al-Andalus. O leitor perceberá a variedade dos suportes - fontes -, desde legislações a iluminuras, passando por esculturas funerárias, crônicas e estelas