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Diplomat, courtier, and heretic, Juan de Valdés (c.1500-1541) was one of the most famous humanist writers in Renaissance Spain. In this biography, Daniel A. Crews paints a lively portrait of a complex and fascinating figure by focusing on Valdés's service as an imperial courtier and how his employments in Italy - after brushes with the Spanish Inquisition - influenced both Spanish diplomacy and his own religious thought. Twilight of the Renaissance focuses on Valdés's political activities in Charles V's Italian alliance system and negotiations with the papacy, while painting a lively portrait of an intriguing and complex Renaissance figure. Crews examines how Valdés, who was praised by two popes and, the emperor, was also branded a heretic almost immediately after his death. By considering Valdés's spirituality, as well as egotism, this incisive work reveals how the libertine atmosphere of the late Renaissance challenges the saintly Socratic image Valdés fashioned for himself in his writings.
Iberian Books II & III presents an indispensable foundational listing of everything known to have been published in Spain, Portugal and the New World, or of items printed in Spanish or Portuguese elsewhere, during the first half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on library catalogues, specialist bibliographies and studies, as well as auction catalogue records, Iberian Books lists 45,000 items, and the locations of some 215,000 copies surviving in 1,800 collections worldwide. These volumes offer a powerful research tool which will appeal to researchers, librarians and to the book selling and collecting communities. They will prove invaluable to anyone with a research interest in the literat...
Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. Hi...
This book examines the religious and ideological consequences of mass conversion in Iberia, where Jews and Muslims were forcibly converted or expelled at the end of the XVth century and beginning of the XVIth, and in this way it explores the fraught relationship between origins and faith. It treats also of the consequences of coercion on intellectual debates and the production of knowledge, taking into account how integrating new converts from Judaism and Islam stimulated Christian scholars to confront the converts’ sacred texts and created a distinctive peninsular hermeneutics. The book thus assesses the importance of the “Converso problem” in issues such as religious dissidence, dissimulation, and doubt and skepticism while establishing the process by which religious dissidence came to be categorized as heresy and was identified with converts from Judaism and Islam even when Lutheranism was often in the background.
Casuistry and Early Modern Spanish Literature examines a neglected yet crucial field: the importance of casuistical thought and discourse in the development of literary genres in early modern Spain. Faced with the momentous changes wrought by discovery, empire, religious schism, expanding print culture, consolidation of legal codes and social transformation, writers sought innovation within existing forms (the novella, the byzantine romance, theatrical drama) and created novel genres (most notably, the picaresque). These essays show how casuistry, with its questioning of example and precept, and meticulous concern with conscience and the particularities of circumstance, is instrumental in cultivating the subjectivity, rhetorical virtuosity and spirit of inquiry that we have come to associate with the modern novel.
A craze for intricate metaphors, referred to as conceits, permeated all forms of communication in seventeenth-century Italy and Spain, reshaping reality in highly creative ways. The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe situates itself at the crossroads of rhetoric, poetics, and the history of science, analyzing technical writings on conceits by such scholars as Baltasar Gracián, Matteo Peregrini, and Emanuele Tesauro against the background of debates on telescopic and microscopic vision, the generation of living beings, and the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. It contends that in order to understand conceits, we must locate them within the early modern culture of ingenuity that was also responsible for the engineer’s machines, the juggler’s sleight of hand, the wiles of the statesman, and the discovery of truths about nature.
Hutchinson focuses initially on movement as concept and metaphor, affirming its centrality in the conceptualization of all discursive activities. He draws on an array of authors including Heraclitus, Plato, Longinus, Rabelais, Nietzsche, Saussure, Frances Yates, Kristeva, Meschonnic, and Deleuze to demonstrate the "motion" of discourse and of those engaged in it. He then turns to Cervantes' novels to show how metaphors of movement and travel, appearing on nearly every page, dominate the conceptualization of the soul, the self, desire, love, and life processes. Viewing travel as a composite of concurrent modes of experience with differing content and rhythms, Hutchinson considers the concept ...
Presenting an authoritative translation and analysis of the only surviving original document from the first months of the Spanish conquest, this book brings to life a decisive moment in the history of Mexico and offers an enlarged understanding of the conquerors' motivations.