4 books found
The Spanish Arcadia analyzes the figure of the shepherd in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish imaginary, exploring its centrality to the discourses on racial, cultural, and religious identity. Drawing on a wide range of documents, including theological polemics on blood purity, political treatises, manuals on animal husbandry, historiography, paintings, epic poems, and Spanish ballads, Javier Irigoyen-García argues that the figure of the shepherd takes on extraordinary importance in the reshaping of early modern Spanish identity. The Spanish Arcadia contextualizes pastoral romances within a broader framework and assesses how they inform other cultural manifestations. In doing so, Irigoyen-García provides incisive new ideas about the social and ethnocentric uses of the genre, as well as its interrelation with ideas of race, animal husbandry, and nation building in early modern Spain.
Space, Drama, and Empire examines the role that space played as a vehicle to imperialize Spain's history in Lope de Vega's theater. Lope's national history plays, this book argues, used the landscapes and settings of the past to foretell and legitimize Spain's imperial present and to "map" or plot its expansionist trajectory throughout the centuries.
In the early seventeenth century, Spanish rulers were confronted by an avalanche of political satires. Beware the Poetry shows how these poetic libels helped articulate an early form of the public sphere, profoundly transforming political culture. Exploring a rich trove of mostly anonymous satirical works, together with newsletters, sermons, and plays, Javier Castro-Ibaseta reconstructs the experiences of Madrilenians during the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV. Castro-Ibaseta proposes an original theory of political publics that corrects approaches that assume early modern Spain’s public sphere mirrored the politics of England or France. Instead, he shows that in Spain publicness was distinct because the satires—about the king’s favorite, and even about the king himself—were consumed for pleasure and entertainment. They did not create political communities or stir rebellious movements. Read diachronically, the long, continuous, evolving collection of satires reveals not just the opinions of the poets but something far more difficult to reconstruct: the shifting demands, interests, uncertainties, and worldviews of the audience—that is, the structure and dynamics of Madrid’s emerging public sphere. Applying an interdisciplinary approach of literary criticism and historical method, Beware the Poetry presents an exciting new take on politics and poetry during the period often referred to as the Spanish Decadence. It will be of special interest to scholars of early modern politics and Spanish literature and culture.
Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious, political, and literary texts, including the works of Cervantes, Dystopias of Infamy reconsiders how insults and infamy were imagined as potential sites of resistance to subjectification in early modern Spain.