Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean

This book recovers a missing chapter in the history of Afro-Iberian diasporas. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, black women and men—enslaved, free(d), and half-manumitted—resided in the Iberian peninsula, particularly as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. This renovated the period’s human, urban, and social landscapes. In exploring Spain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, and the cultural forms of the period, the book pictures the black African diaspora’s broad yet unexplored literary impact. It transforms our understanding of blackness in early modern Spanish literary activities by providing new readings of the era’s literary texts, unearthing new documents about black communities, and creating a space for black poets in the literary cannon of early modernity. This book stands at the crossroads between the history of Spanish literature in Spain and that of black African diasporas, two disciplines that have not fully entered into dialogue before. While the study of Spanish literature in Spain has disregarded the black African presence or seen it as merely echoing the voices of white poets of early modernity, the studies of black African diasporas have focused on more recent times and on different geographical areas such as English- and French-speaking countries, and the Caribbean where the Hispanic world is concerned. Black Voices builds a bridge between these two fields and promote a lively scholarly debate in an area that clearly merits academic study. The archaeological explorations of all manners of archives that form the research behind this book bring to the fore a meaningful Black archive long forgotten.

The research group DICAT (http://www.uv.es/dicat/index_en.html) has been working for almost twenty years on the creation of research instruments that will enhance scholars' knowledge of Early Modern Spanish theater through the use of digital tools that create new ways to combine and apply data.1 The database Diccionario biografico de actores del teatro clasico espanol (DICAT) (Ferrer Valls) was the result of work done during nearly fifteen years. The DICAT group created a database with almost five thousand entries, which document the activity of actors, actresses, heads of companies, and musicians who worked in Spanish professional theatrical companies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We also included five hundred digitized signatures and a visual database with two hundred images and videos, together with a digitalized edition of the unpublished manuscript Confirmacion de la Cofradia de la Novena, which includes the documents and regulations related to the 1634 foundation of the actors' guild.The project CATCOM. Database of plays mentioned in theatrical documentation (1540-1700), which we are currently developing, is based on our previous experience of creating the database DICAT. It is important to point out that Spanish theatrical documentation is exceptionally abundant, especially if we compare it to other European countries of the early modern period. We find a lot of documents regarding contracts between actors and the heads of the companies; contracts with the lessors of the playhouses; contracts with municipal or with ecclesiastical authorities for religious festivities and the Corpus; receipts for performances at the royal palace; documents reporting expenditures or inventories of costumes and plays; inquisitorial processes or lawsuits that sometimes offer interesting information for the history of Spanish classical theater, etc. In these documents we can often find titles of plays, which can sometimes be difficult for researchers to track due to the vast number of plays in the Golden Age corpus. The objective of the CATCOM project is to collect, classify, and critically analyze the information on these titles, and make it available to researchers in the form of a database that will make it easier to access a calendar of performances, offer information on these performances (name of the company who performed the play, town where it took place, type of theatrical space where it was performed), locate titles and relate them to alternative titles of the same play and adaptations, and provide a current state of the question regarding their authorship. The large amount of information concerning the performance of plays in early modern Spain makes the use of digital tools especially valuable, as the database becomes an extremely useful instrument that enables researchers to connect data in ways that would otherwise be extremely difficult (or even impossible) to do. By gathering, comparing, and analyzing all this information in a single database, we can sometimes detect interesting and relevant issues that the dispersion of documents made difficult to perceive, which then allows researchers to offer a solution to these problems.On our web page we explain the methodology of the project in the section titled Projects (http://www.uv.es/dicat/catcom_en.html), and we offer a selection of our database (http://catcom.uv.es/). In short, our research focuses on two essential issues:1) Critically treating the data in order to create a digital calendar of performances.2) Identifying the titles that are mentioned in the documents with particular plays and their authors, which can present some difficulties specific to early modern Spanish theater.The documents we work with are not usually of a literary nature, but rather are legal and historical documents. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the titles that are mentioned with specific plays, which often present one or more alternative titles, or have controversial attributions. …

The current work is an intellectual history of how blood permeated early modern Spaniards' conceptions of morality and purity. This paper examines Spanish intellectuals' references to blood in their medical, theological, demonological, and historical works. Through these excerpts, this thesis demonstrates how this language of blood played a role in buttressing the church's conception of good morals. This, in turn, will show that blood was used as a way to persecute Jews and Muslims, and ultimately define the early modern Spanish identity.

Notes on Contributors

Herzog, Tamar: Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America

A Glimpse of Sibilant Shift in Early Modern Spanish in Seventeenth-century Manuscripts through the Lens of Hokkien Sinographs was published in Vernacular Chinese-Character Manuscripts from East and Southeast Asia on page 37.

This article deals with the patterns of variation and change undergone by a syntactic variable in Early Modern Spanish grammar, namely the alternation betweendeber‘have to, must, should’ anddeber de + infinitive ‘have to, must, should’ as a modal periphrasis. Based on a 1,500,000-word corpus of immediacy texts (private letters, memories) the results of this variationist study suggest that throughout the 16th century, but more especially during its second half, the prepositional periphrasis gradually became more common, above all in stylistic contexts predominated by the spontaneity and proximity of the relationships between the interlocutors. It was also more frequently found in contexts involving members of northern speech communities, particularly males, the young and the middle-low social strata, the incidence being especially high at the points where some of these groups intersect. All this suggests a change from below in the Golden Age period, which reached considerable dimensions in a relatively short time but was destined to stagnate and later decline just as quickly in the centuries that followed as a result of some structural features, such as the special “visibility” of the preposition, which could have led to the stigmatization of the periphrasis in a similar way to what happened in other Spanish syntactic phenomena.

Within the framework of Historical Sociolinguistics and using a corpus of ego-documents written by Spaniards from different social backgrounds, this study analyses the sociolinguistic profiles of three phenomena of variation and change that took place in two critical periods in the history of Spanish: the Golden Age and the Early Modern Spanish. The study focuses on three standard variants that would end up displacing several vernacular forms whose use was much more widespread in Golden Age Spanish: (a) the use of the complementiser que in doxastic predicates depending on the verb creer [’believe, think’], to the detriment of the variant creer + Ø; (b) the analogical pronoun quienes in relative clauses with an explicit human antecedent (’estos son los niños a quienes me dirigí’ [‘these are the children I spoke to’]), as opposed to the traditional relative quien; (c) the diffusion of the demonstrative pronoun allí [‘there’] at the expense of allá. Despite the success of the standard variants in the eighteenth century, the three cases of variation show different sociolinguistic conditioning, which in turn is closely related to several parameters, such as the speed and robustness of the respective changes, the typology of the variables and the linguistic constraints at work in each case.

This book brings the latest research and evolving historiographical developments on the Hispanic Atlantic world to a student audience. It highlights how the histories of diverse groups of individuals under Spanish rule were integral to Atlantic developments and dynamics.<br/><br/>The Hispanic Atlantic was a profoundly interconnected and dynamic region whose history is central to understanding the broader Atlantic and the early modern world. Traditional histories of the Atlantic often marginalize the Hispanic sphere, while those focusing on Colonial Latin America can downplay the region’s connections to, and interactions with, the wider world. Examining the region's past from a broad range of perspectives provides deeper appreciation of its complexity. Topics covered range from imperial governance to Catholic practices and institutions; the importance of contraband and smuggling; the impact of Atlantic dynamics on Indigenous people and children; the challenges of studying the African diaspora; the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in hybrid cultures; the importance of transoceanic circulation of knowledge and plants; and new approaches to the collapse of Spain’s Atlantic empire and the abolition of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean.<br/><br/>This engaging volume will be an exciting addition to advanced undergraduate courses on Atlantic, Global, or Latin American History.

Philip Lorenz. The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 379. $45.00. The central concept of this book hinges around a play on words in the title: specifically, a double entendre for the word tears, which can mean the product either of weeping or shredding of fabric. What is conveyed by this word play is at once a destruction and a nostalgia for what has been destroyed. So what we have here is a narrative--trendily postmodern, with an After-Image instead of a conclusion--but nonetheless a fairly teleological narrative of disintegration and reconstruction/restoration of the sovereign ruler. The pattern here is cyclical, as may be seen in the (mostly) alliterative titles for the chapters: Breakdown, Reanimation Resistance, Transformation, and Return. The author offers a unique take on Ernst Kantorowicz's famous formulation of the king's two bodies with the introduction of such complicating metaphors as organ transplant. The spice he adds to this updating of an old and familiar, but yummy, recipe consists of apparently farfetched but relevant cinematic allusions, such as to Pedro Almodovar's 1999 film All About My Mother. Combine this with a very au courant theoretical framework of a hodgepodge of European political philosophers, most notably Giorgio Agamben, and you have what is in the end a substantial, well-nuanced, and sophisticated comparative study of representations of sovereignty in early modern Spanish and English drama. The authors offered for consideration here are the familiar ones: William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderon de la Barca. And one potentially regrettable fact is that the plays discussed in each case are the same old worn-out canonical fare: Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale for Shakespeare; Fuenteovejuna for Lope de Vega; and Life is a Dream for Calderon. But this is the rare book that actually manages to say something relatively new about each play. This is no small accomplishment, and the author is to be congratulated both for his incisive analysis of each of the works in question and for the creative ways in which he combines disparate elements from two distinct national dramatic traditions. Seldom has this reviewer seen so genuinely comparative a study as this one. The haunting the entire text of this book is the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez. I say phantom not because he is not there explicitly, but because he got burned--literally, or at least his work did, in a spectacular bonfire scene that opens this book. On December 1, 1613, almost exactly 400 years ago, King James I of England ordered a ritual burning of work Defensio fidei in front of Saint Paul's Cathedral As Lorenz so eloquently states, Suarez's book landed in England like a bomb, not only challenging Royalist claims that James's power was directly derived from God but also threatening to undermine the king's authority over the bodies and souls of his subjects (1-2). In essence, Defensio fidei was a casuistical defense of revolution and civil disobedience; it authorized the use of violent force, under certain circumstances, to resist and even overthrow a king. Basically, it justified regicide. For those erudite readers such as James who could understand enough Latin to grasp fully the implications of his argument, this was heady stuff indeed. One possible weakness of Lorenz's presentation is that by the time of King James's reign, Latin had already ceased to be so pervasive as it was in former eras. (Clear evidence of this appears in George Ruggle's contemporaneous play Ignoramus [1615], in which Latin is literally demonized by association with demonic possession.) There is probably a limit to how pervasive his ideas could really be if fewer and fewer people were able to read and comprehend them. But nonetheless, Lorenz is right to identify Suarez as the most important anti-sovereignty thinker of his era; and as such, he hovers over the text of this book like an avenging fury. …

Reviewed by: Performing the King Divine: The Early Modern Spanish Aulic Festival by Lucas A. Marchante Aragón Alejandra B. Osorio Lucas A. Marchante Aragón. Performing the King Divine: The Early Modern Spanish Aulic Festival. EDITION REICHENBERGER, 2017. 300 PP. THE STUDY OF EARLY MODERN COURTLY CEREMONIES has experienced a significant surge in the last decade or so, revealing their centrality in the public and political cultures of Europe and its empires. These studies have, among other things, identified early modern courts as centers of great artistic production that enriched material and cultural life, while also enhancing the power of their monarchs or princes. Monarchs and nobles often commissioned artistic works from painters, architects, and musicians—as well as writers, historians, poets, and philosophers—for inclusion in courtly plays and ceremonies. As these events conveyed the patrons’ habits, tastes, and worldviews, they shaped early modern societies, delineating the hierarchies that ordered them and those of the more private sphere of the court. The production and staging of royal triumphal entries, masques, ludic games, and plays employed all the arts available to rulers to exercise their authority and instruct wider audiences on the workings of social and political power. In the specific case of court theater, new techniques combining music, dance, architecture, perspective scenery, and sophisticated stage machinery enhanced written texts, producing great works of “magical illusion at the service of the exaltation of the monarch” (6). Performing the King Divine examines these various techniques in Spanish court theater, not just as printed literature but also as dramatic texts that came to life through a “net of communicative strategies, verbal and otherwise, that formed part of the [overall] spectacle” (8). Moving chronologically, Marchante Aragón examines transformations in court theater from the late Middle Ages, during which it conveyed the king’s physical proximity to the divine, to the end of the seventeenth century, when it presented the Spanish Habsburg king Charles II as himself a divine being. In examining this process, the author draws from speech act theory the notion of the “performative utterance.” This approach informs the title of the book, Performing the King Divine; in other words, onstage performances of kingship produced monarchical divinity. [End Page 165] One characteristic of early modern court theater that made these transformations possible was the inclusion of the patron in the audience as part of the spectacle, dissolving the boundaries between the “real” and the “performed” worlds. Such blurring of boundaries conveyed to audiences the special link between the worldly and the divine, as found, for example, in the court dramas created at the turn of the sixteenth century by Juan del Encina and Gil Vicente. Such associations worked within a larger courtly ceremonial language derived both from political thought and from ritual performances aimed at legitimating kingly rule. Under the reign of Charles I (1516–56), as part of the claim to the imperial title that in 1519 made him Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Habsburg dynastic language came into use in Spanish court theater. According to Marchante Aragón, this language was founded on “fabulous genealogical arguments” (87–95) entrusting the Spanish Habsburg with the “providential mission of restoring the earthly Paradise represented with images of the classical Golden Age” (10). These genealogies connected the emperor with Jesus Christ via the Roman emperors, gods of antiquity, and priest-kings of the Old Testament the Habsburg claimed as their ancestors, ultimately transforming him into the ruler best positioned to bring back the Golden Age. Charles V’s divine descent and genealogical rights along with his inherited virtues were made explicit in plays by means of the use of mythological imagery. Habsburg genealogies and mythological imagery were imbued in larger fields of meaning. The salón de saraos, the theatrical space built circa 1605 in the royal palace in Valladolid, was designed in such a way that its decorative and architectural programs were essential components of the “performative text” (105). The building itself was part of a dynamic creation of meaning, as for Marchante Aragón, this space was intended “to create and fix the memory of a divinely ordained imperial dynasty by displaying a series of symbols in its architecture...

Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. By Elizabeth B. Davis. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2000. 244 pages. La epics colonial. By Juan Bautista de Avalle-Arce. Anejos de Rilce 35. Pamplona: U de Navarra, 2000. 116 pages. Both studies propose a canon of epic poems encourage readers revisit a corpus that, with the exception of La Araucana, failed attract significant attention in late twentieth-century literary studies. Yet throughout the Early Modern period, the epic form retained its cultural capital; in fact, Frank Pierce's catalogue lists some 150 different Spanish poems (not counting reprints and translations) published in the seventeenth century alone (Davis 3). As her point of departure, Elizabeth Davis historicizes and theorizes the process of canon formation that marginalized Spanish-language epics, and then urges scholars and students examine anew the narrative poetry that imperial agents used to forge a sense of unity and script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest (10). She then provides five chapters, each of which reads a poem using historical analysis and literary theory. Specialists will want read the whole study, as Davis builds important theoretical and thematic bridges that link the different sections; at the same time, each chapter could stand alone as a case study for a graduate seminar because of the clarity with which Davis explains her methodology. The first chapter argues against David Quint's influential classification of La Araucana as an epic of the defeated, tracing Ercilla's project as it evolved from part I (1569) part III (1589); over two decades, Davis finds an increasingly panegyrical view of the Habsburg state. In this regard, she analyzes how the poet marshals a discourse of service script a relationship Philip II, drawing attention a little-known prefatory letter found in the princeps, but not reprinted in editions after 1579. Also in support of her thesis, Davis contemplates the poet's strategy of self-- positioning when he narrates the execution of Caupolican. As well, she draws connections sixteenth-century political theory argue that the poem represents the Mapuches as barbarians whom the Spanish monarchy has a providential justification subdue. One demurral with this chapter is the use of the adjective modernist classify the poet's position (59); theoretically correct, it seems so firmly associated with the past century that early-modernist might be preferable, if less wieldy. Nevertheless, the analysis of Ercilla as a contradictory subject provides a convincing demonstration of La Araucana's participation in Habsburg myth-making. The second chapter reads Juan Rufo's La Austriada through the filter of Renaissance theories on imitation. In a tour de force of explication, Davis sifts through the stock lexical items and newer, Ercillan set pieces that Rufo borrows narrate the battle of Lepanto. I would recommend this section anyone learning interpret Early Modern poetry, because it brings alive the process of writing through the imitation and emulation of authorities. The chapter also discusses how the poem interrupts its own celebration of Lepanto with a narration of the tragic aftermath of the Alpujarras rebellion. Chapter iii most explicitly confronts the problems that critics today face when reading Early Modern Spanish epics. Analyzing Cristobal de Virues's El Montserrate, Davis uses a feminist, resistant reader as a heuristic device with which interpret the foundational narrative built on rape and murder. While she validates resistance the work's reconciliation of rape and murder within a national teleology, Davis also draws attention the rhetorical and narrative elements of the hagiographies that would have framed an Early Modern reader's reception of this story. The fourth chapter contemplates Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada. Davis begins with a discussion of the theological underpinnings of the Dominican friar's epic of the Passion, discussing medieval debates about representations of the suffering messiah as they played out, first in Dominican circles in Europe, and then in Hojeda's American milieu. …

Reviewed by: Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature ed. by Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon Luis F. López González Jaén, Isabel, and Simon, Julien J., eds. Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-0-19025-657-9. Cognitive literary studies represent an interdisciplinary effort to create a conduit through which the humanities and the sciences may communicate and share ideas and methodologies with the purpose of establishing new connections and discourses between diverse disciplines. Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature aims to consolidate and diversify the epistemological field of cognitive literary studies. Editors Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon bring together an array of eleven academic studies that exemplify the multiplicity of discourses conflating in the dynamic multidisciplinary field, in which "Embodiment" and "Theory of Mind" are the two primary lines of inquiry. This monograph primarily seeks to explore the way in which a blend of cognitive theories can facilitate "our understanding of the relationship between the mind and the arts" in early modern Spain (5). Jaén and Simon divide the book into five sections, each covering a specific branch of cognitive studies. The first section offers an outline of the epistemology of cognitive approaches to early modern Spanish literature. Simon's "Introduction" offers a theoretical framework and [End Page 149] expounds the historical backdrop of the studies in order to understand how cognitive embodiment helps the reader navigate through early modern texts. Three studies comprise section two. In the first study, Howard Mancing explores the ways in which the reader interacts with fictional characters as embodied human beings. Mancing analyzes the battle between Don Quijote and the Basque squire, and he concludes that readers cannot read Don Quixote without understanding "the embodied realities of the characters" (42). Mancing applies Maturana and Varela's neurobiological concept of autopoiesis (self-creation) and argues that Don Quijote creates himself as a knight-errant. The process of becoming "Don Quijote" is fraught with a series of difficulties because he has to "couple" with his imagined world of knight-errands, princesses, and wizards. Katherine Connor-Swietlicki offers an analysis of the current state of autopoietic research and neuroscience updates, as well as an analysis of Cervantes's artfully crafted literary debate between the "armas y las letras." The first part has intrinsic scientific and literary values, but it also serves as the theoretical framework from which she fashions a forceful interpretation of Don Quijote's poetic insight of arms and letters. Julia Domínguez closes the second section with a study about the role of memory and imagination in Don Quijote's (mis-)perception of his "real" world. Domínguez's thesis is that the interplay between memory and imagination is central in Cervantes's novel, and she supports her argument by deploying the Janus Hypothesis, which contends that the mind has the capacity of recording the past while imagining the future (75). Don Quijote resorts to memories collected through his readings, and these memories allow him to imagine future scenarios. Section three deals with "Embodied Cognition and Performance," which contains the studies of Bruce R. Burningham and Elizabeth M. Cruz Petersen. Bruningham opens the section by calling into question the pre-established notion that the Spanish Middle Ages did not have dramatic texts, written to be staged to the public. Burningham revisits his book Radical Theatricality, which argues that a theatrical performance does not depend solely on the plurality of actors. Performances do not need to take place on an "architectural stage" to be considered "theatrical." Instead, the essence of theater "is simply one person watching one person do something interesting" (94). Elizabeth M. Cruz Petersen explores the dynamics of shared spaces in corrales in the context of embodied spectatorship. Using Richard Shusterman's theory of pragmatic somaesthetics, Cruz Petersen argues that early Spanish theatergoers played an active role in the way they experienced theater: "Spectators exercised an embodied aesthetics by merging their own experiences with representational forms" (114). Rather than passive viewers, spectators played an active role in the spatial and interpersonal configuration of the playhouse. The response of the people, which was affected by...

Soldiers' Tales: On Soldiers' Writing in Early Modern Spanish Literature–On Miguel Martínez's Front Lines:Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World and Faith Harden's Arms and Letters, Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain Andrea Nate Martínez, Miguel. Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 320 pp. Harden, Faith. Arms and Letters, Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain. Iberic, 2020. 200 pp. Miguel Martínez's Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World and Faith Harden's Arms and Letters, Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain are welcome contributions to Hispanic Studies and the military and literary history of Spain. These thorough and illuminating monographs on soldiers' writing in the early modern Spanish empire gather unique corpuses of an understudied area of Golden Age Spanish literature. The two books dialogue with each other, as well with the larger field of Golden Age Spanish literary studies. At the same time, they explore diverse literary works and authors, each thus offering unique and varied contributions to the field. Martínez's book is as imaginative as it is based on solid evidence, as he reconstructs the lives and personal situations of the writers that he examines. In this ample survey, he is interested in how soldiers of varying backgrounds and social class wrote and received literary texts. His main goal is to show how soldiers experimented with new modes of writing and how they called into question military practices through this writing, thus contributing significantly to Spanish Renaissance literature. Arranged into five chapters and including an introduction, an epilogue, and end notes, Front Lines encapsulates several exciting stories of soldiers whose work exposes the injustices and harsh conditions that they endured for the sake of imperial expansion. Highlighting the biographies of soldier writers and subsequently linking their life experiences to the texts that they wrote, Martínez argues that soldierly literature was essential in the articulation of what he eloquently describes as a society or republic of soldiers and their collective identity (37). Martínez debunks the commonly accepted image of the illiterate soldier and conquistador by providing evidence and statistics that attest to more widespread literacy among soldiers of the hidalguía and plebeian classes who dedicated commentaries and war narratives to their commanders. Notable, [End Page 529] too, is his discussion of the new practice of war reporting and disciplinary socialization among the ranks, which may have contributed to literacy, and is central to Martínez's project. These soldier writers employed popular Spanish Medieval and Golden Age rhetorical conventions, such as false humility, which the early modernist argues suggests that they were not only familiar with other Golden Age genres, but that they were also reading each other's work. The monograph branches out to canvas the written work of soldiers on the edges of the far flung Early Modern Spanish empire: the New World and the Mediterranean. Martínez then discusses contrasting types of heroic discourse while adroitly situating Spanish soldierly writing within its greater European literary context. For example, his analysis of how Spanish plebeian soldiers and arquebusiers appropriated medieval French and Italian epic convincingly shows how soldiers' poetry circulated through, and despite, the imperial spaces of war and all their geographical and political complexity. With a particular focus on Spanish plático soldier writers in Italy, Martínez comments on images of and tensions between the courtier and the soldier, as well as new literary forms that better fit the popular soldiery than previous trends. Particularly valuable about Martínez's reading of these works is the way that he juxtaposes canonical texts, such as the Quijote, alongside lesser-known works such as Baltasar de Hierro's autobiographical epic poem La Destruición de África, one of first accounts of mutiny told from inside a garrison in the understudied battle of Mahdia, Tunisia. In this original part of the project, Martínez looks at how the author appropriates the classical and medieval epic into the Spanish Golden Age. Indeed, his analysis achieves a clear exposition of how several Spanish Golden Age phenomena come to light in...

Critical Cluster:Early Modern Theater and Theatricality Harry Sieber and William Egginton With this Hispanic Issue of MLN, the editors introduce a new section—a "critical cluster"—on the general topic of Early Modern Spanish literature. (Future issues will include clusters about other periods of the literatures of Spain and Latin America). The common thread among the following articles is theater and theatricality in Golden Age Spanish drama and fiction. Enrique García Santo-Tomás, in his review article of Jesús Pérez-Magallón's recent book on Calderón, provides us with a brief history and an assessment of critical trends and reactions to Calderonian drama from the late seventeenth century to the present. His primary interest is to determine what constitutes a "classic" in the formation of literary canons, the focus and tastes of readers and critics, and the political implications and contexts over an extended time period. Esther Fernández concentrates on the importance of the use of puppets in the theatrical productions of comedias de santos, a genre embraced by the Church, often to celebrate Cuaresma and its religious and theological interests. Mira de Amescua's El esclavo del demonio is her play of choice, first presented as a puppet show as early as 1692 and received enthusiastically by its original audience. Its recent puppet performance in 2010 inspires her to conclude that the medium is as crucial as the message and that the recuperation of the mechanics of performance are integral to an understanding of Golden Age theater. The remaining two articles in this cluster are devoted not to theater but to prose, even though both deal with performance and plot, and both follow an invented script in which characters assume acting roles [End Page 406] in which they are invited or coerced into playing a part. Seth Kimmel concentrates on the episode of the "bodas de Camacho" (Don Quijote II) in his analysis of "industria" and its relationship to post-Tridentine Spanish fiction, and concludes that the use of ritual and belief are subject to the power of human artifice to transform reality. A staged performance and a questionable wedding beyond the purview of the Church are legitimized for the reader as the result of the force of "industria" to incorporate the exchange of ritual sacramental vows. Ryan Schmitz also focuses on Cervantes (Don Quijote II) in his analysis of "discreción" and the "art of conversation" in the episode of the Duke and Duchess. Manuals of social and courtly conduct, whose relevance and ubiquitous presence in Golden Age Spain has been somewhat neglected, supplie him with a context to approach the question of social and economic ascendency of the period. His focus on ritualized and coded rules of conversation and behavior (and their hilarious challenge by Sancho Panza), display a cutting critique by Cervantes of the power of language (speech) to acquire or maintain honor or respect within the increasing "fluidity" of a highly ritualized and restricted social order. [End Page 407] Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press