The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain

The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain
Title The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain PDF eBook
Author Christina H. Lee
Publisher Manchester University Press
Total Pages 390
Release 2015-11-01
Genre History
ISBN 1784996351

Download The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book explores the Spanish elite’s fixation on social and racial ‘passing’ and ‘passers’, as represented in a wide range of texts. It examines literary and non-literary works produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that express the dominant Spaniards’ anxiety that socially mobile lowborns, Conversos (converted Jews), and Moriscos (converted Muslims) could impersonate and pass for ‘pure’ Christians like themselves. Ultimately, this book argues that while conspicuous sociocultural and ethnic difference was certainly perturbing and unsettling, in some ways it was not as threatening to the dominant Spanish identity as the potential discovery of the arbitrariness that separated them from the undesirables of society – and therefore the recognition of fundamental sameness. This fascinating and accessible work will appeal to students of Hispanic studies, European history, cultural studies, Spanish literature and Spanish history.

Identity and Violence in Early Modern Granada

Identity and Violence in Early Modern Granada
Title Identity and Violence in Early Modern Granada PDF eBook
Author Tanja Zakrzewski
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages 255
Release 2023
Genre Alpujarras (Spain)
ISBN 1666915351

Download Identity and Violence in Early Modern Granada Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In Identity and Violence in Early Modern Granada: Conversos and Moriscos, Tanja Zakrzewski argues that Conversos and Moriscos, despite being distinct socio-cultural groups within Spanish society, still employed the same arguments and rhetorical strategies to establish and defend their place within society. Both Conversos and Moriscos relied on contemporary notions of honour, authority, and loyalty to emphasize that they are true Spaniards - not despite their New Christian heritage but because of it. This book offers an entangled narrative of their history and examines how their notions of honor and hispanidad shaped their socio-cultural identities during the time of the socio-cultural identities during the time of the Alpujarras Rebellion.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood
Title Bad Blood PDF eBook
Author Emily Weissbourd
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages 225
Release 2023-06-20
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1512822892

Download Bad Blood Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Bad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference--that is, the notion of having Jewish or Muslim "blood"--and one concerned with Blackness and whiteness. Shakespeare's Othello tells us that he was "sold to slavery" in his youth, a phrase that evokes the Atlantic triangle trade for readers today. For many years, however, scholars have asserted that racialized slavery was not yet widely understood in early modern England, and that the kind of enslavement that Othello describes is related to Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean rather than the rise of the racialized enslavement of Afro-diasporic subjects. Bad Blood offers a new account of early modern race by tracing the development of European racial vocabularies from Spain to England. Dispelling assumptions, stemming from Spain's historical exclusion of Jews and Muslims, that premodern racial ideology focused on religious difference and purity of blood more than color, Emily Weissbourd argues that the context of the Atlantic slave trade is indispensable to understanding race in early modern Spanish and English literature alike. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, as well as Spanish picaresque fiction and its English translations, Weissbourd reveals how ideologies of racialized slavery as well as religious difference come to England via Spain, and how both notions of race operate in conjunction to shore up fantasies of Blackness, whiteness, and "pure blood." The enslavement of Black Africans, Weissbourd shows, is inextricable from the staging of race in early modern literature.

Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries

Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries
Title Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries PDF eBook
Author Raymond Fagel
Publisher Manchester University Press
Total Pages 379
Release 2020-04-02
Genre History
ISBN 1526140888

Download Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567–1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions. Over time the plethora of sources and interpretations faded away, leaving us with opposing canonical narratives. The Dutch and Spanish national myths were forged on the basis of two visions of the conflict: as a liberation war against cruel Spanish oppressors and as a glorious episode in the history of the Spanish Empire. This volume delves into the early, seemingly anecdotal stories of the war to map the great variety and interconnection of the narratives. It asks such questions as how did the Jesuits write about the Revolt, what can we find in Italian chronicles and how did the war look from the perspective of a local nobleman or a Spanish commander?

Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 9 Western and Southern Europe (1600-1700)

Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 9 Western and Southern Europe (1600-1700)
Title Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 9 Western and Southern Europe (1600-1700) PDF eBook
Author
Publisher BRILL
Total Pages 1068
Release 2017-12-05
Genre Religion
ISBN 9004356398

Download Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 9 Western and Southern Europe (1600-1700) Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 9 (CMR 9) is a history of everything that was written on relations in the period 1600-1700 in Western and Southern Europe. Its detailed entries contain descriptions, assessments and comprehensive bibliographical details about individual works.

The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition

The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition
Title The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition PDF eBook
Author François Soyer
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages 244
Release 2023-10-19
Genre History
ISBN 1350377619

Download The ‘Catalan Hermaphrodite’ and the Inquisition Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book examines the life of Maria Duran, who was born with female genitalia, but was accused of being a man and subsequently put on trial for sorcery by the Portuguese Inquisition during the 18th century. François Soyer uses Maria's story to open a window onto the world of the experience of 'transing' gender, as well as the gendered attitudes and responses to the transgression of gendered norms that were adopted by churchmen, medical practitioners and ordinary lay men and women. Drawing on the surviving (and staggeringly 736-page long) sorcery trial dossier, Soyer analyses the secretive life of an individual who actively and deliberately 'transed' gender. The dossier analysis enables insights into aspects of life so rarely recorded in early modern documents: the transgression of gender norms, transgressive sexuality and sexual violence in female religious institutions, in addition to the fears and debates about the power that the Devil could wield over the human body. The 'Catalan Hermaphrodite' and the Inquisition also reveals how the Inquisition gathered a number of doctors, surgeons and midwives to conduct careful examinations of Maria's body in general and genitals in particular. Their reports and the discussions of the inquisitors are discussed by Soyer and offer further fascinating evidence of attitudes towards sex and gender in early modern Europe.

Dystopias of Infamy

Dystopias of Infamy
Title Dystopias of Infamy PDF eBook
Author Javier Irigoyen-García
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Total Pages 209
Release 2022-07-15
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1684484006

Download Dystopias of Infamy Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.