Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Spain

In the early seventeenth-century, when Spanish interests often competed with those of the House of Austria, three women in the court of Philip III of Spain--Empress Maria, Philip's grandmother; Margaret of Austria, Philip's wife; and Margaret of the Cross, Philip's aunt--worked behind the scenes to win favor for the causes of the Austrian Habsburgs.

In The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun, historian Magdalena Sanchez offers an intriguing examination of the political power wielded by these three women. Sanchez examines the ways that women used religious piety, childbearing,...

The 250 years covered by Silver, Trade, and War marked the era of commercial capitalism, that bridge between late medieval and modern times. Spain, peripheral to western Europe in 1500, produced American treasure in silver, which Spanish convoys bore from Portobelo and Veracruz on the Carribbean coast across the Atlantic to Spain in exchange for European goods shipped from Sevilla (later, Cadiz). Spanish colonialism, the authors suggest, was the cutting edge of the early global economy. America's silver permitted Spain to graft early capitalistic elements onto its late medieval...

In Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance, Lu Ann Homza rejects the traditional view of the Spanish Renaissance as a battle of strict opposites in favor of a more nuanced history. Through analyses of Inquisition trials, biblical translations, treatises on witchcraft, and tracts on the episcopate and penance, Homza illuminates the intellectual autonomy and energy of Spain's ecclesiastics, exploring the flexibility and inconsistency in their preferences for humanism or scholasticism, preferences which have long been thought to be steadfast.

In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache, who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. Before that, he had tried to return with his family to Spain, and to this end he tried to convert to Catholicism and worked as an informer, intermediary, and spy in Moroccan affairs for the Spanish court....

Spain as a political entity can be traced to the joining of the two largest Iberian kingdoms through the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469. Over the course of the next centuries, Spain rose to European dominance, presided over the world's largest empire, and saw its power and wealth decline until it was finally conquered and occupied by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century. Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, the first broad-ranging collection in English of writings from the entire period from 1469 to the end of the eighteenth century,...