Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Spain

This book examines labouring-status women in late medieval Valencia as they negotiated the fundamentally defining experience of their lives: marriage. Through the use of notarial records and civil court cases, it argues that the socio-economic and immigrant status of these women greatly enhanced their ability to exercise agency not only in choosing a spouse and gathering dotal assets, but also in controlling this property after they wed. Although the prevailing legal code in Valencia appeared to give wives little authority over these assets, court records demonstrate they were still able...

For nearly two centuries Spain was the world s most influential nation, dominant in Europe and with authority over immense territories in America and the Pacific. Because none of this was achieved by its own economic or military resources, Henry Kamen sets out to explain how it achieved the unexpected status of world power, and examines political events and foreign policy through the reigns of each of the nation s rulers, from Ferdinand and Isabella at the end of the fifteenth century to Philip V in the 1700s.

He explores the distinctive features that made up the Spanish experience,...

Offers a critical reassessment of the Reconquest of Castile from the Moors in the fifteenth century. Explores the land and climate of northern Castile, the urban and rural society, and the demography and fiscal oppression of the Reconquest.

The writers and artists of the Spanish avant-garde, enthralled with the streamlined, mass-produced commodities of the Machine Age, incorporated these objects into their literary and visual works. In doing so, they launched a broad inquiry into the relations between mind and matter, people and things, words and world. In Modernism and Its Merchandise, Juli Highfill traces that dissonant but productive line of inquiry by focusing on the objects of obsession for the Spanish vanguardists--starting with the fruit bowls of cubist still life; continuing with the merchandise, machines,...

Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, focusing particularly on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade.

Gerben Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement in the left and...

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, debating the acceptability of games and recreation was serious business. With Lector Ludens, Michael Scham uses Cervantes's Don Quijote and Novelas ejemplares as the basis for a wide-ranging exploration of early modern Spanish views on recreations ranging from cards and dice to hunting, attending the theater, and reading fiction.

Shifting fluidly between modern theories of play, little-known Spanish treatises on leisure and games, and the evidence in Cervantes's own works, Scham illuminates Cervantes's intense...

Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane. Kabbalistic Revolution proposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a...

The Avila of Saint Teresa provides both a fascinating account of social and religious change in one important Castilian city and a historical analysis of the life and work of the religious mystic Saint Teresa of Jesus. Jodi Bilinkoff's rich socioeconomic history of sixteenth-century Avila illuminates the conditions that helped to shape the religious reforms for which the city's most famous citizen is celebrated.

Bilinkoff takes as her subject the period during which Avila became a center of intense religious activity and the home of a number of influential mystics and...