You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
This 1996 book, based upon a vast range of documentary and secondary sources, shatters the disproven but persistent myth of the closed immobile village in the early modern period. It demonstrates that even in traditionalist Castile, pre-industrial village society was highly dynamic, with continuous inter-village, inter-regional, and rural-urban migration. The book is rich in human detail, with many vignettes of everyday life. Professor Vassberg examines such topics as fairs and markets, the transportation infrastructure, rural artisans and craftsmen, relations with the state, and life-cycle service. The approach is interdisciplinary, and pays special attention to how rural families dealt with economic and social problems. The rural Castile that emerges is a complex society that defies easy generalizations, but one which is unquestionably part of the general European reality.
In Jesuit Polymath of Madrid D. Scott Hendrickson offers an account of the life and literary enterprise of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), who drew from his formation in the Jesuit Order to engage the cultural currents of seventeenth-century Spain.
This book contrasts the portrayal of kings and kingship in the drama of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81), concentrating on the ways in which both dramatists use the individual complexities of their kingly characters to address the intellectual and moral dilemmas of the ideological backgrounds that helped to create them. Against the background of seventeenth-century Europe, when religious and political reformation was leading to reconstructions of concepts of authority and personal and national identity, these two dramatists of early modern England and Spain use the increasingly theatrical facades of absolutist power to explore the internal drama of individual psychology and the kinship of flawed humanity.
The theatrum mundi metaphor was well-known in the Golden Age, and was often employed, notably by Calderón in his religious theatre. However, little account has been given of the everyday exploitation of the idea of the world as stage in the mainstream drama of the Golden Age. This study examines how and why playwrights of the period time and again created characters who dramatize themselves, who re-invent themselves by performing new roles and inventing new plots within the larger frame of the play. The prevalence of metatheatrical techniques among Golden Age dramatists, including Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca and Guillén de Castro, reveals a fascination with role-playing and its implications. Thacker argues that in comedy, these playwrights saw role-playing as a means by which they could comment on and criticize the society in which they lived, and he reveals a drama far less supportive of the social status quo in Golden Age Spain than has been traditionally thought to be the case.
"Inventing the Sacred" analyzes the Spanish Inquisition's campaign to ferret out "false saints and scandalous impostors" whose claims of divinely inspired visions and revelations threatened the Catholic church's efforts to monopolize access to the supernatural.
Offers an original and holistic approach to understanding the impact of the plague in late sixteenth-century Spain.