Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was a mark of character among the royals and aristocrats in Early Modern Spain: it ranked with extravagant hospitality as a sign of nobility and with virtue as a token of princely power. Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain explores how the writers of the period shared the same impulse to collect, arrange, and display objects, though in imagined settings, as literary artefacts.

These essays examine a variety of cultural objects described or alluded to in books from the Golden Age of Spanish literature,...

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-Garcia argues that the figure of the shepherd takes on extraordinary importance in the reshaping of early modern Spanish identity.

The Spanish Arcadia...

Federico Garcia Lorca (1889-1936) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century; Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) is Spain's most performed composer of the same period. The two were very different - Lorca was gay, liberal, and a member of the avant garde, while Falla was a devout Catholic - yet they had a profound mutual influence. The two developed an intimate friendship, which ended when Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Lorca in Tune with Falla is the first book to trace Lorca's impact on Falla's...

In this fascinating book, Evelina Guzauskyte uses the names Columbus gave to places in the Caribbean Basin as a way to examine the complex encounter between Europeans and the native inhabitants.

Guzauskyte challenges the common notion that Columbus's acts of naming were merely an imperial attempt to impose his will on the terrain. Instead, she argues that they were the result of the collisions between several distinct worlds, including the real and mythical geography of the Old World, Portuguese and Catalan naming traditions, and the knowledge and mapping practices of the Taino...

Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the new poetry of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as...

Though neither king nor priest, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco nevertheless conceptualized his right to sovereignty around a political theology in which national identity resembled a sacred cult. Using Franco's Spain and la Espana sagrada as a counterpoint to European secularity's own development, By the Grace of God is the first sustained analysis within Spanish cultural studies of the sacred as a political category and a tool for political organization.

William Viestenz shows how imagining national identity as a sacred absolute within a pluralistic,...

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain brings the study of Europe's "culture of dissection" to the Iberian peninsula, presenting a neglected episode in the development of the modern concept of the self. Enrique Fernandez explores the ways in which sixteenth and seventeenth-century anatomical research stimulated both a sense of interiority and a fear of that interior's exposure and punishment by the early modern state.

Examining works by Miguel de Cervantes, Maria de Zayas, Fray Luis de Granada, and Francisco de Quevedo, Fernandez highlights the...

In Ghostly Landscapes, Patricia M. Keller analyses the aesthetics of haunting and the relationship between ideology and image production by revisiting twentieth-century Spanish history through the camera's lens. Through its vision she demonstrates how the traumatic losses of the Spanish Civil War and their systematic denial and burial during the fascist dictatorship have constituted fertile territory for the expressions of loss, uncanny return, and untimeliness that characterize the aesthetic presence of the ghost.

Examining fascist documentary newsreels, countercultural art...

In the second sentence of Don Quixote, Cervantes describes the diet of the protagonist, Alonso Quijano: "A stew made of more beef than mutton, cold salad on most nights, abstinence eggs on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and an additional squab on Sundays."

Through an inventive and original engagement with this text, Carolyn A. Nadeau explores the shifts in Spain's cultural and gastronomic history. Using cooking manuals, novels, poems, dietary treatises, and other texts, she brings to light the figurative significance of foodstuffs and culinary practices in early modern...

Known in early modern Europe by many names - the French Disease, the Bubas, and, eventually, syphilis - the Great Pox was a chronic disease that carried the stigma of sexuality and produced a slow and painful death. The main institution which treated it, the pox hospital, has come down to us as a stench-filled and overcrowded place that sought to treat the body and reform the soul.

Using the sole surviving admissions book for Toledo, Spain's Hospital de Santiago, Cristian Berco reconstructs the lives of men and women afflicted with the pox by tracing their experiences...