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A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of commu...
"The well-known mythographer Marina Warner has described the process of reading fairy tales and folktales as 'tasting the dragon's blood' - a magical and transformative process by which one's ears are opened to the voices of the past and of other worlds. Roman exempla, which constitute a national story-telling tradition, are very different in many ways from the dream-like fantasies of fairy-tales and other narrative folk traditions that have been the subject of Warner's studies. In (supposedly) true stories from history, battle-hardened warriors, noble maidens and honourable sons of the soil face impossible dangers, take terrible decisions and sacrifice their lives, their limbs and even their own children for the sake of justice, discipline and the Roman community. Yet for the ancient Romans too, hearing the blood-soaked stories of their ancestral heroes was an intimate and potent experience, and this 'taste of the hero's blood' had an intoxicating effect similar to the blood of Warner's dragon: evoking other worlds, shaping understanding of their own world"--
Hercules and the King of Portugal investigates how representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity, scrutinizing ways that gender performances of two early modern male icons—Hercules and King Sebastian—are structured to express enduring nationhood. The classical hero Hercules features prominently in Hispanic foundational fictions and became intimately associated with the Hapsburg monarchy in the early sixteenth century. King Sebastian of Portugal (1554–78), both during his lifetime and after his violent death, has been inserted into his own land’s charter myth, even as competing interests have adapted his narratives to promote Spanish power. The h...
Since its publication in 1561, an anonymous tale of love, friendship, and chivalry has captivated readers in Spain and across Europe. "The Abencerraje" tells of the Moorish knight Abindarráez, whose plans to wed are interrupted when he is taken prisoner by Christian knights. His captor, a Spanish governor, befriends and admires the Moorish knight, ultimately releasing him to marry his beloved. Their enormously popular tale was repeated or imitated in numerous ballads and novels; when the character Don Quixote is wounded in his first sortie, he imagines himself as Abindarráez on the field. Several decades later, in the tense years leading up to the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, Mate...
By reading the works of Miguel de Cervantes through the history of emotion, this book defies a series of long-standing commonplaces about the author's writing and the Mediterranean region at large.
10 Isabel Farnese and the Sexual Politics of the Spanish Court Theater -- Index
Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing examines the intricate bond between poetry and history writing that shaped the theory and practice of empire in early colonial Spanish-American society. The book explores from diverse perspectives how epic and heroic poetry served to construe a new Spanish-American elite of original explorers and conquistadors in Juan de Castellanos’s Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. Similarly, this book offers an interpretation of Castellanos’s writings that shows his critical engagement with the reformist project postulated in Alonso de Ercilla’s LaAraucana, and it elucidates the complex poetic discourse Castellanos create...
The fictional Don Quixote was constantly defeated in his knightly adventures. In writing Quixote's story, however, Miguel Cervantes succeeded in a different kind of quest — the creation of a modern novel that ‘conquers’ and assimilates countless literary genres. /spanDon Quixote among the Saracens considers how Cervantes's work reflects the clash of civilizations and anxieties towards cultural pluralism that permeated Golden Age Spain. Frederick A. de Armas unravels an essential mystery of one of world literature's best known figures: why Quixote sets out to revive knight errantry, and why he comes to feel at home only among the Moorish ‘Saracens,’ a people whom Quixote feared at the beginning of the novel. De Armas also reveals Quixote's inner conflicts as both a Christian who vows to battle the infidel, but also a secret Saracen sympathizer. While delving into genre theory, Don Quixote among the Saracens adds a new dimension to our understandings of Spain's multicultural history.
Cervantes’ Architectures is the first book dedicated to architecture in Cervantes’ prose fiction. At a time when a pandemic is sweeping the world, this book reflects on the danger outside by concentrating on the role of enclosed structures as places where humans may feel safe, or as sites of beauty and harmony that provide solace. At the same time, a number of the architectures in Cervantes trigger dread and claustrophobia as they display a kind of shapelessness and a haunting aura that blends with the narrative. This volume invites readers to discover hundreds of edifices that Cervantes built with the pen. Their variety is astounding. The narrators and characters in these novels tell of...
Don Quixote Explained focuses on seven topics: how Sancho Panza refines into a good governor through a series of jokes that turn earnest; how Cervantes satirizes religious extremism in Don Quixote by taking aim at the Holy Roman Catholic Church; how Don Quixote and Sancho Panza check-and-balance one anothers excesses by having opposite identities; how Cervantes refines Spanish farm girls by transforming Aldonza Lorenzo into Dulcinea; how outlaws like Roque Guinart and Gines Pasamonte can avoid criminality and why; how Cervantes establishes inter-religional harmony by having a Christian translator, on the one hand, and a Muslim narrator, on the other; and lastly, how Cervantes replaces a medieval view of love and marriage?where a woman is a housekeeper, lust-satisfier, and child begetter?with a modern view of equalitarian marriage typified by a joining of desires and a merger of personalities. "AN ERUDITE EXAMINATION OF THE THEMES AND IDEAS IN DON QUIXOTE. I THOROUGHLY ENJOYED THE WRITING AND EXPOSITION OF THIS WELL-REASONED CRITIQUE. BUY IT AND STUDY IT. GERALD J. DAVIS, AUTHOR OF DON QUIXOTE, THE NEW TRANSLATION BY GERALD J. DAVIS" WWW.DON-QUIXOTE-EXPLAINED.COM