Converso Houses in the 16th Century in the Former Jewish Quarter of Seville

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Very interesting article and thorough archival studies. I would like it to be published almost as is with the help of an English copy-editor. One of my major concern is the concept of emotions:

The concept of 'emotions' and specifically 'emotions in architecture' is an idea that was studied extensively. However, your paper does not elaborate on it, and does not include that kind of research. Therefore, I suggest to omit the word "emotions" from the article's title to read: Converted Houses in 16th Century in the former Jewish Quarter of Seville. This will strengthen the focus on the history of the families involved and on the good analysis of the houses. More so, the mentioning of 'fear' etc will be part of the houses analysis and not part of a different concept that needs more elaboration and maybe a different direction.

Author Response

We have worked on improving the description and contextualization of the previous and current theoretical background as well as our arguments and discussion of our results.

As requested, we have changed the approach to emotions, working on it not as something separate but as included in the analysis of the houses themselves. Finally, as suggested, emotions have been removed from the title of the article.

Reviewer 2 Report

The reviewed article “Converted Houses in 16th Century: Emotions in the former Jewish Quarter of Seville” is an interesting piece of scholarship, but it cannot be published in its present form. The presentation of the materials and their discussion are written not in a logical way, they miss coherent structure and lines of arguments bringing to conclusions.

I would suggest to rewrite the article so that main argument of the authors became clear. For the sake of clarity, I would recommend to take out the description of the seven houses with their owners and place it into appendix to the article, for the sake of those who are interested in such details.

In the following discussion I was able to understand, how women’s quarters are connected to Jewish theme, but this connection in the case of “receptions” (there should be a better English term for this space) and main rooms remained unclear.

In the first part of the article, the discussion of decorative features is also extremely unclear and not convincing. For example, defining deer as a Jewish symbol on the basis of Psalms, which are also part of the Hebrew Bible does not hold water. Almost all books Old Testament are part of the Hebrew Bible and they mention many different animals.

I also think that the like aljamas and apeos should be explained at their first appearance, for the sake of those readers who are not familiar with local realities, or you have to mention that the explanation is provided below.

Author Response

We have worked on improving the description and contextualization of the previous and current theoretical background and also on the description of our arguments and discussion of our results. We have improved the work with the references so that all of them are relevant and we have worked on the design to clarify the questions, hypotheses, research methods, etc. Finally, we have also improved the presentation of the conclusions based on the results presented.

It is strongly believed that the new layout of the article has improved the presentation and discussion of the material, with an emphasis on establishing a more coherent structure and clearer lines of argument.

The idea of extracting the history of the houses from the article has been rejected, as it is thought that this is the very basis on which the whole article is based; although the advice has been taken into account and some documentation has been extracted outside the article, which has been considered more complementary, seeking to provide future readers with a greater ease of reading the article.

It is considered that all the spaces treated are relevant in the Jewish context, perhaps it is clearer in women's quarters, but also in the receptions and courtyards because the ostentation and improvements that were made as explained in the paper. However, it is true that these spaces are not unique to the converted houses, but they are a singularity that should be highlighted, as it is said in the text.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper raises an interesting issue: the adjustment of existing houses to an altered situation in life such as occured in the course of the expulsion of Jews from Seville (and other parts of the Iberian Peninsula) in 1492 for the remaining converts to Christian belief.

I looked forward to reading it and to transfer its insights into my courses  since it would extend my student's understanding of housing. Indeed, the paper hints at a knowledge of historical background and source material, the maps and floorplans are well done, but the promised content is missing. The text reads like a compilation of fragments with the critical parts of communication and moderation missing while the issue of emotions hovers entirely unconnected but for the reference at the very beginning.

Emotion is a broad and methodologically complex field of study that came to influence discourses on architecture, urban planning and especially contemporary heritage discourses. In relation to reconstructed house plans of the 16th c., however, the idea seems far fetched and would need more methodological background than presented so far to become convincing.

Author Response

We have worked on improving the description and contextualization of the previous and current theoretical background and also on the description of our arguments and discussion of our results. We have improved the work with the references so that they are all relevant and correctly referenced and we have worked on the design to clarify the questions, hypotheses, research methods, etc. Finally, the presentation of the conclusions based on the results presented has also been improved.

It is strongly believed that with the new layout of the article the presentation has been improved so that the text is not a mere compilation of fragments and explanation of the history of the houses and critical work on them can be seen. The approach to emotions has been changed, working it not as something separate but as included in the analysis of the houses themselves in a transversal way.

Reviewer 4 Report

The study of the history of emotions linked to everyday life in the Early Modern Age is of great interest and has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. The social minority of Jews who survived in Spain after the expulsion in the time of the Catholic Monarchs is a very interesting social group on which much has been published in recent years. The authors have ample experience in this field of work.
That said, the article presents a morphological description of the preserved houses, accompanied by diagrams, maps and illustrations that allow their reconstruction. The most interesting part is the part where the reader can get a closer look at the emotional character of everyday life. However, the evidence and sources for the latter are much less solid than the morphological reconstruction work: it is therefore recommended to either lower initial expectations in the recreation of Jewish emotions or to provide a more solid justification of their emotional component from more documentary sources.

The symbolic allusion to the image of the deer should be reconsidered in the feminine form. The significance of the deer in the medieval imagination is different from that of the animal hind. Moreover, the psalm quoted alludes to the hind seeking streams of water, not to a hind.

It is recommended that figure 1 be cited correctly, taking into account the code and foliation of the corresponding manuscripts.

The link to the R&D project should be introduced in the funding section and not in the acknowledgements section, because although the article may not have been paid for by the project, the previous research is linked to this source of funding.

Author Response

The work with the references has been improved so that they are all relevant and correctly referenced. Work has been done on the presentation of the conclusions based on the results presented.

It is firmly believed that the approach of emotions is inherent to the casuistry of the Jewish houses so it has not been eliminated, although the work has been changed in part by introducing these emotions not as something separate but as included in the analysis of the houses themselves.

The presented apeos have been correctly cited and the linkage with the R&D project has been correctly placed.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The revised version of the text provides a better introduction into the historical context and the intention of the research.It allows the reader to learn about the specific situation of converted jews and their houses.

The interconnection between public and hidden parts of the house in relation to the specific situation of the converted families and their interaction with society is still more of a statement than cleanly derived by a sythesis of literature and spatial analysis. The historical part is convincing but the evidence of the houses is still comparatively weak. To be clear: I do not doubt that the families might have changed the houses to allow for their hidden practices. The analyses of the houses, however, do not show this yet beyond the decorative features. The reconstrcutions are interesting but they but claim these supposed changes based on emotions.