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Essays on festive drama - plays, pageantry and traditional ceremonies - of the European middle ages, with comparative material.
In this completely updated edition of Henry Kamen’s classic survey of the Spanish Inquisition, the author incorporates the latest research in multiple languages to offer a new—and thought-provoking—view of this fascinating period. Kamen sets the notorious Christian tribunal into the broader context of Islamic and Jewish culture in the Mediterranean, reassesses its consequences for Jewish culture, measures its impact on Spain’s intellectual life, and firmly rebuts a variety of myths and exaggerations that have distorted understandings of the Inquisition. He concludes with disturbing reflections on the impact of state security organizations in our own time.
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.
First published in Portuguese in 1969, this is the only work by Antonio Jose Saraiva available in English and the only single-volume history devoted primarily to the working of the Portuguese Inquisition, a most lucid and compact survey. "The Marrano Factory" argues that the Portuguese Inquisition s stated intention of extirpating heresies and purifying Portuguese Catholicism was a monumental hoax; the true purpose of the Holy Office was the fabrication rather than the destruction of "Judaizers."
Describes the structure and methods of the Spanish Inquisition. Ch. 4 (p. 143-183), "Cristianos nuevos portugueses ante el Santo Oficio", focuses on the situation of Portuguese Conversos in Spain between 1643-1730. The secession of Portugal from Spain in 1640, the fall of the Conde de Olivares in 1643, and the general decadence of the country resulted in changes in the tolerant policy of the Spanish Crown toward the influential Portuguese Conversos, allowing the Inquisition to impose a policy of persecuting heterodoxy. Many Conversos were imprisoned or executed, and their property confiscated. A great number emigrated to other countries, resulting in the disappearance of this social group as a relevant factor in Spanish society. States that it is impossible to know from the Inquisitorial documents if the Conversos actually committed the offenses they were accused of.
The canon of Hispanic mysticism is expanding. No longer is our picture of this special brand of early modern devotional practice limited to a handful of venerable saints. Instead, we recognize a wide range of marginal figures as practitioners of mysticism, broadly defined. Neither do we limit the study of mysticism necessarily to the Christian religion, nor even to the realm of literature. Representations of mysticism are also found in the visual, plastic and musical arts. The terminology and theoretical framework of mysticism permeate early modern Hispanic cultures. Paradoxically, by taking a more inclusive approach to studying mysticism in its marginal manifestations, we draw mysticism---in all its complex iterations---back toward its rightful place at the center of early modern spiritual experience. Contributors: Colin Thompson, Alastair Hamilton, Christina Lee, Clara Herrera, Darcy Donahue, Elena del Rio Parra, Evelyn Toft, Fernando Duran Lopez, Piancisco Morales, Freddy Dominguez, Glyn Redworth, Jane Ackerman, Jessica Boon, Jose Adriano de Freitas Carvalho, Luce Lopez-Barat, Maria Mercedes Carrion, Maryrica Lottman, and Tess Knighton.
This book charts the history and influence of the most vitriolic and successful anti-Semitic polemic ever to have been printed in the early modern Hispanic world and offers the first critical edition and translation of the text into English. First printed in Madrid in 1674, the Centinela contra judíos (“Sentinel against the Jews”) was the work of the Franciscan Francisco de Torrejoncillo, who wrote it to defend the mission of the Spanish Inquisition, to call for the expansion of discriminatory racial statutes and, finally, to advocate in favour of the expulsion of all the descendants of converted Jews from Spain and its empire. Francisco de Torrejoncillo combined the existing racial, theological, social and economic strands within Spanish anti-Semitism to demonize the Jews and their converted descendants in Spain in a manner designed to provoke strong emotional responses from its readership.
Why are forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide an enduring feature of state systems? In this book, Heather Rae locates these practices of 'pathological homogenisation' in the processes of state building. Political elites have repeatedly used cultural resources to redefine bounded political communities as exclusive moral communities, from which outsiders must be expelled. Showing that these practices predate the age of nationalism, Rae examines cases from both pre-nationalist and nationalist eras: the expulsion of the Jews from fifteenth century Spain, the persecution of the Huguenots under Louis XIV, and in the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide, and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. She argues that those atrocities prompted the development of international norms of legitimate state behaviour that increasingly define sovereignty as conditional. Rae concludes by examining two 'threshold' cases - the Czech Republic and Macedonia - to identify the factors that may inhibit pathological homogenization as a method of state-building.
Textual Agency examines the massive proliferation of poetic texts in fifteenth-century Spain, focusing on the important yet little-known cancionero poetry – the largest poetic corpus of the European Middle Ages. Ana M. Gómez-Bravo situates this cultural production within its social, political, and material contexts. She places the different forms of document production fostered by a shifting political and urban model alongside the rise in literacy and access to reading materials and spaces. At the core of the book lies an examination of both the materials of writing and how human agents used and transformed them, giving way to a textual agency that pertains not only to writers, but to the inscribed paper. Gómez-Bravo also explores how authorial and textual agency were competing forces in the midst of an era marked by the institution of the Inquisition, the advent of the absolutist state, the growth of cities, and the constitution of the Spanish nation.