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The historical relationship between the Catalan and Occitan languages had a definitive impact on the linguistic identity of the powerful Crown of Aragon and the emergent Spanish Empire. Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents, linguistic treatises and literary texts, this book offers fresh insights into the political and cultural forces that shaped national identities in the Iberian Peninsula and, consequently, neighboring areas of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The innovative textual approach taken in these pages exposes the multifaceted ways in which the boundaries between the region’s most prestigious languages were contested, and demonstrate...
Queering the Medieval Mediterranean analyzes the forgotten exchange of sexualities that was brought forth through the Mediterranean and its bordering landmasses. It highlights the importance of queerness and sexuality developed on the Mediterranean trade routes.
Queer Exoticism: Examining the Queer Exotic Within joins the growing bibliography of queer postcolonial and queer race studies. The authors assembled here examine the queer tendency to visit decidedly different and unusual subjects of desire in an effort, partially at least, to find oneself. The identity quest that is inherent in the search for the exotic often results in something quite the opposite of foreign since it forms and articulates that which is ourselves. Thus experiencing the exotic becomes a path to self-knowledge, not unlike the work of therapy wherein the examination of elements that appear at first peculiar or unfamiliar end up opening channels to self-discovery. In this way,...
The Splendor and Opulence of the Past traces the career of Jaume Caresmar (1717–1791), a church historian and a key figure of the Catalan Enlightenment who transcribed tens of thousands of parchments to preserve and glorify Catalonia's medieval past in the face of its diminishing autonomy. As Paul Freedman shows, Caresmar's books, essays, and transcriptions—some only recently discovered—provide fresh insights into the Middle Ages as remembered in modern Catalonia and illustrate how a nation's past glories and humiliations can inform contemporary politics and culture. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, Catalonia was a thriving, independent set of principalities within what would...
This book analyzes the coloniality of the concept of taste that gastronomy constructed and normalized as modern. It shows how gastronomy’s engagement with rationalist and aesthetic thought, and with colonial and capitalist structures, led to the desensualization, bureaucratization and racialization of its conceptualization of taste. The Coloniality of Modern Taste provides an understanding of gastronomy that moves away from the usual celebratory approach. Through a discussion of nineteenth-century gastronomic publications, this book illustrates how the gastronomic notion of taste was shaped by a number of specifically modern constraints. It compares the gastronomic approach to taste to con...
The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Is...
“Constitution” is a rich term in Western political culture, encompassing political and juridical doctrine as well as government practices through the ages. This volume examines “constitutional moments” in history, those occasions or episodes when significant steps were taken in the definition or redefinition of polities. Their actors were writers or politicians, rulers or ruled, who found inspiration in a distant past or instead looked towards a future to be drawn anew. This book sheds light on such moments from Ancient Greece to the present day, mostly in Europe but also in the Ottoman world and the Americas, thereby uncovering a revealing variety of constitutional thinking and action throughout history. Contributors are: Jon Arrieta, Niall Bond, Luc Brisson, Peter Cholakov, Nora Chonowski, Angela De Benedictis, F. Sinem Eryilmaz, Hakon Evju, Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Javier Fernández Sebastián, Merieke Gebhardt, Xavier Gil, Mark J. Hill, Ferenc Hörcher, Jaska Kainulainen, Thomas Lorman, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Ere Nokkala, Brian Kjaer Olesen, András Pap, Nikola Regent, Alberto Mariano Rodríguez Martínez, Pablo Sánchez León, José Reis Santos, and Ersin Yildiz.
This book argues that Aelian's important work on animals, the De natura animalium, represents a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. His fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics.
Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages t...
The Iberian Peninsula has always been an integral part of the Mediterranean world, from the age of Tartessos and the Phoenicians to our own era and the Union for the Mediterranean. The cutting-edge essays in this volume examine what it means for medieval and early modern Iberia and its people to be considered as part of the Mediterranean.