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Dystopias of Infamy
Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.
The Valiant Black Man in Flanders / El valiente negro en Flandes
A play about defiance of systemic racism. Juan de Mérida, an Afro-Spanish soldier aspires to social advancement in the Netherlands during the Eighty Years' War (1566-1648). His main enemies are not Dutch rebels but his white countrymen, whom he defeats at every attempt to humiliate him. In this play one encounters military culture, upward mobility, mistaken identities, defying destiny, royal pageantry, swordfights, cross-dressing, revenge, homosexual anxiety, and inter-racial marriage. Andrés de Claramonte’s El valiente negro en Flandes (c.1625) is an Afrodiasporic play that enjoyed great success and multiple stagings in Spain and in Latin America. Its 1938 negrista performance in Havana...
Spanish Romance in the Battle for Global Supremacy
Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in Aztec México? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Were faeries and Amazons hiding in Guiana, and where was the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of these tales of love and arms as reflected in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson, and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature, and how these circumstances primed the success of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.
Histories of Trade as Histories of Civilisation
This edited collection explores the histories of trade, a peculiar literary genre that emerged in the context of the historiographical and cultural changes promoted by the histoire philosophique movement. It marked a discontinuity with erudition and antiquarianism, and interacted critically with universal history. By comparing and linking the histories of individual peoples within a common historical process, this genre enriched the reflection on civilisation that emerged during the long eighteenth century. Those who looked to the past wanted to understand the political constitutions and manners most appropriate to commerce, and grasp the recurring mechanisms underlying economic development....
The Politics of Smallness in Modern Europe
Rather than simply assuming that some states are small and others are big, The Politics of Smallness in Modern Europe delves deep into the construction of different size-based hierarchies in Europe and explores the way Europeans have thought about their own state's size and that of their continental neighbours since the early 19th century. By positing that ideas about size are intimately connected with both basic discourses about a state's identity and policy discourses about the range of options most appropriate to that state, this multi-contributor volume presents a novel way of thinking about what makes one state, in the eyes of both its own inhabitants and those of others, different from others, and what effects these perceived differences have had, and continue to have, on domestic, European, and global politics. Bringing together an international team of historians and political scientists, this nuanced and sophisticated study examines the connections between shifting ideas about a state's (relative) size, competing notions of national interest and mission, and international policy in modern Europe and beyond.
Protagonists of War
Julián Romero, Sancho Dávila, Cristóbal de Mondragón, and Francisco de Valdés were prominent Spanish military commanders during the first decade of the Revolt in the Low Countries (1567–1577). Occupying key positions in this conflict, they featured as central characters in various war narratives and episodical descriptions of the events they were involved in, ranging from chronicles, poems, theatre plays, engravings, and songs to news pamphlets. To this day, they still figure as protagonists of historical novels: brave heroes in some, cruel oppressors in others. Yet personal, first-hand accounts also exist. Archival research into the letters written by these commanders now makes it possible to include their perspectives and the way they describe their own experiences. Looking through the eyes of four Spanish commanders, Protagonists of War provides the reader with an alternative reading of the Revolt, contrasting the subjective experiences of these protagonists with fictionalised perceptions.
Space, Drama, and Empire
Spanish poet, playwright, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was a key figure of Golden Age Spanish literature, second only in stature to Cervantes, and is considered the founder of Spain’s classical theater. In this rich and informative study, Javier Lorenzo investigates the symbolic use of space in Lope’s drama and its function as an ideological tool to promote an imagined Spanish national past. In specific plays, this book argues, historical landscapes and settings were used to foretell and legitimize the imperial present in Hapsburg Spain, allowing audiences to visualize and plot, as on a map, the country’s expansionist trajectory throughout the centuries. By focusing on connections among space, drama, and empire, this book makes an important contribution to the study of literature and imperialism in early modern Spain and equally to our understanding of the role and political significance of spatiality in Siglo de Oro comedia.
The Invention of Humboldt
The Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world. Rather than ‘follow in Humboldt’s footsteps,’ this book outlines the new critical horizon of post-Humboldtian Humboldt studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron’s epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary ‘adventurer’ and ‘hero of science’ surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron’s opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Hu...
España ante sus críticos
Analiza una serie de textos y momentos clave del origen y desarrollo de la Leyenda Negra durante los siglos XV, XVI y XVII, y explora la interacción entre estos textos y los que surgieron, como contrapropaganda, en los dominios de los reyes de España.
The Arts of EncounterThe Arts of Encounter
Images of crosses, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, among other devotional objects, pervaded nearly every aspect of public and private life in early modern Spain, but they were also a point of contention between Christian and Muslim cultures. Writers of narrative fiction, theatre, and poetry were attuned to these debates, and religious imagery played an important role in how early modern writers chose to portray relations between Christians and Muslims. Drawing on a wide variety of literary genres as well as other textual and visual sources – including historical chronicles, travel memoirs, captives’ testimonies, and paintings – Catherine Infante traces the references to religious visual c...
