Spain from Court to Country

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In attempting to represent the world’s unity and diversity, early modern geographic and travel texts enlarged the field of knowledge about the world as theatre. At the same time, the description of foreign spaces and peoples involved various forms of distancing and promoted a quest for wisdom and tolerance of difference. The cultural and political perception of Spain in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, however, is marked by ambivalence: Spain is a powerful nation, at once vilified and discreetly revered. Moreover, in this particular case — that of familiar Western European affinity — English identity could best be defined by contrast and comparison, since similar values and practices were common to all European nations. In discussing the discourses of trade and exploration in early modern England, Lena Cowen Orlin notes that, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was the least developed of the trading nations of the West, but the character of her ‘contact narratives’ the discourses of discovery and travel, were ‘formed in print, polemic, and propaganda’.1 In what way did relations with Spain contribute to this identification by opposition and similarity with things English? In the Elizabethan political context, England’s arch-enemy and competitor on the seas was constructed as the racial other through Spain’s association with the oriental Moors, while religious opposition to Catholicism and the persecutions of the Inquisition were exacerbated by stories of atrocities perpetrated in Spain.