Counter-Reformation Spain Research Articles

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain ed. by Enrique García Santo-Tomás

Reviewed by: Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain ed. by Enrique García Santo-Tomás Shifra Armon Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain. Edited by Enrique García Santo-Tomás. U OF TORONTO P, 2019. 296 PP. IN ELEVEN ESAYS BY SCHOLARS from North America and Spain, this volume investigates the dynamic interplay between early modern science and comedia. Taken in its entirety, Science on Stage refutes the view that Counter-Reformation Spain spurned the epistemic paradigm shifts loosely referred to as the “Scientific Revolution.” The traditionalist disparagement of Spain’s contributions to science, as García Santo-Tomás recounts in his introduction, derives both from vestiges of anti-Spanish sentiment among Anglo-American historians and from the belief that Spain’s economic and political losses during this period precipitated intellectual decline as well. Science on Stage is divided into three parts comprised of three chapters each. Part 1, “Technologies of Knowledge,” recognizes comedia stagecraft’s debt to Spain’s legacy of Islamic science and to contemporaneous advances in geometry and engineering. Part 2, “Stages of Science,” highlights dramatic works that wove innovations in medicine, pharmacology, and warcraft into their dramatic plots. The third trio of essays, “Performing Numbers,” inquires into the “challenges of uncertainty” (Jeremy Robbins, The Challenges of Uncertainty. An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998) posed by rapidly changing commercial, mechanical, dramatic, and pictorial practices; the common theme here is not numbers per se, but new habits of thought (quantification, skepticism, circumspection, empirical observation, and so forth) required to navigate illusive new topographies of knowledge. To do justice to the diversity of critical approaches that the nine core chapters of Science on Stage represent, it will be useful to offer a synopsis of each. Ryan Szpiech’s essay, “From Mesopotamia to Madrid: The Legacy of Ancient and Medieval Science in Early Modern Spain,” aptly opens part [End Page 149] 1 by exploring myths and frameworks that have encumbered the study of Spain’s scientific past. Szpiech eschews the Western bias implicit in elevating Greek science above its Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian precursors as well as the Enlightenment bias favoring post-Cartesian science above earlier admixtures of physics and metaphysics. Notational systems, both mathematical and alphabetical, or “technolog[ies] of information storage” (31), developed in several ancient civilizations, thereby facilitating the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge. Later, the Baghdad and Andalusian caliphates and the great Library of Alexandria became sites of knowledge translation, transmission, and refinement. This archive nourished Iberian scientia more thoroughly than its non-Arabized neighbors to the north. Szpiech highlights numerous Golden Age comedias that registered the ongoing prestige that Islamic mathematics, medicine, and science enjoyed even in inquisitorial Spain. Following Szpiech’s essay, Alejandro García-Reidy’s contribution on the materiality of staging, “The Technological Environment of the Early Modern Spanish Stage,” provides a helpful update to John Jay Allen and José María Ruano de la Haza’s Los teatros comerciales del siglo XVII y la escenificación de la comedia (Castalia, 1994) and José María Díez Borque’s Teatro cortesano en la España de los Austrias (Cuadernos de teatro clásico, 10, 1998). Rounding out part 1, John Slater discerns the same mathematizing zeal that was breathing new life into Renaissance engineering, gardening, and fencing in both the built space of the corrales and in comedia plotlines that pitted erotic chaos against geometric order. Geometric or “gridded” conceptualization informed many facets of theatrical culture. Slater notes for example that Lope de Vega composed a sonnet for Ginés Rocamora y Torrano’s Sphera del Universo of 1599 that illustrates the dramatist’s keen awareness of contemporary geometric thought (81–82). Part 2 turns to dramatic works that drew upon the poetic power of early modern medical science and technology. Leading off this part, Julio Vélez-Sainz assembles eclogues and plays by Juan del Enzina, Lucas Fernández, and Torres Naharro, all of which approached lovesickness as a physiological condition that demanded specialized medical intervention. Next, Lourdes Albuixech’s chapter focuses on poison, a morbidly fascinating pharmacological subfield, to be sure, but also an ideologically charged signifier associated with...

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, written by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, written by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain

Spain's infamous false chronicles were alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 in a monastic library deep in the heart of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire by the Jesuit priest Jeronimo Roman de la Higuera. Though rife with anachronisms and chronological inaccuracies, these four volumes of invented truths about Spanish sacred history radically transformed the religious landscape in Counter-Reformation Spain and were not definitively exposed as forgeries until centuries later, after nearly two hundred years of scholarly debate. In this fascinating study, Katrina B. Olds explores the history, author, and legacy of one of the world's most compelling and consequential frauds. The book examines how a relatively obscure Jesuit priest so successfully fabricated a set of supposedly historical documents that they were accepted as authentic for generation after generation. The chronicles' influence was so powerful, in fact, that they continued to shape scholarly discourse, religious practice, and local heritage throughout Spain well into the twentieth century, despite having been debunked as forgeries in the eighteenth. Olds's fascinating analysis brings together intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history while reinvigorating an ongoing debate on the uses and abuses of history and the nature of historical and religious truth.

Forging the Past. Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, written by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past. Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, written by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain, by Katrina B. Olds

Forging the past. Invented histories in Counter-Reformation Spain. By Katrina B. Olds . Pp. xv + 422 incl. 17 ills, 1 table and 2 maps. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2015. £40. 978 0 300 18522 5

Forging the past. Invented histories in Counter-Reformation Spain. By Katrina B. Olds . Pp. xv + 422 incl. 17 ills, 1 table and 2 maps. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2015. £40. 978 0 300 18522 5 - Volume 68 Issue 1

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain. Katrina B. Olds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. xvi + 422 pp. $65.

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Exotica, ornaments and idolatry in the poetry of Jan Six van Chandelier (1620-1695)

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic occupied a central position in the world trade in exotica. Exotic goods were not only popular as foodstuffs, medicines, and curiosa, but also as artistic ornaments in Dutch art and literature. The literary representation of exotica in the poetry of drug merchant Jan Six van Chandelier (1620-1695) reveals how these exotic materials did not only promote scientific curiosity, but also gave rise to moral unease. This article analyses a series of eulogy poems Six wrote to the Royal Entry of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana in Madrid in 1649, where he over-ironizes exotic oil and incense as poetic means to apotheosis. The article shows how these poems are not just meant as criticism on Counter-Reformation Spain, but also served as a means of selfrepresentation, with self-scrutiny as literary strategy. Jan Six articulates criticism both of the literary hype of exotica in the Dutch Republic and of his own identity as drogist-dichter.

Katrina B. Olds. Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain .

In 1572, Elizabeth I of England’s first Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, with a team of collaborators, published a massive work in Latin, entitled On the Antiquity of the British Church and the Privileges of the Church of Canterbury, with [biographies of] Seventy of its Archbishops. In 1595, a Jesuit scholar in Toledo, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, published four supposed chronicles of early Spanish Christian history from Roman times to the late Middle Ages. The Spaniard claimed to have found them in a German monastic library at Fulda, and attributed them to Flavius Lucius Dexter, a contemporary of Saint Jerome (ca. 345–420), and his “continuators” Marcus Maximus, Luitprand, and Julián Pérez (1). Archbishop Parker’s intention was to demonstrate, using a wide range of documentary and archaeological evidence, that Britain, and later England, had been genuinely Christian from the very beginnings of that religion, and had done so without any intervention from the Popes of Rome. Thus Queen Elizabeth’s break with Rome in 1559 was historically justified, and her reformed Church of England was fully Catholic. In the Spain of Philip II and Philip III, Higuera’s purpose was very similar. His “Fulda” cronicones, as they were called, were intended to prove to his compatriots that their native land, too, had an authentic, independent Christian history, even though it remained under the jurisdiction of the Apostolic See of Rome.

Forging the past: invented histories in Counter-Reformation Spain

Forging the past: invented histories in Counter-Reformation Spain

La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco by Enrique García Santo Tomás

Reviewed by: La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco by Enrique García Santo Tomás Bradley J. Nelson Enrique García Santo Tomás, La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco, Madrid; Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2015. 366 pp. Enrique García Santo Tomás’s most recent book situates itself among a number of recent studies dedicated to contesting traditional historical perspectives that have emphasized Spain’s purported exceptionalism where modernity—economic, political, scientific, etc.—is concerned. More specifically, the author uses the many figurative, metaphorical, allegorical and emblematic representations of scientific and technological developments in optics, i.e., spectacles, telescopes, etc., to support his claim that Spanish letters and science were well versed in, if not universally well disposed towards, Galileo’s fervent and problematic propagation of Copernicanism. The Preliminares section draws a fine line between the censure of Copernicanism in Counter Reformation Spain and possible apertures in what Francisco Sánchez would call the ‘literary republic,’ with the goal of showing that “el ingenio barroco ni era tan dogmatico ni tan reaccionario como a veces se ha creído” (15). Statements like this appear throughout the study, which attempts to redefine the Spanish baroque genius, all the while overlooking the problematic—and exceptionalist—nature of the concept of a national ingenio itself. One of the more interesting rhetorical moves is the way in which García Santo Tomás [End Page 553] reads pro-Aristotelian (Ptolemaic) and anti-Copernican diatribes as symptoms of the internal struggle to come to terms with the impending—and necessary, in impeccably Historicist terms—scientific revolution. The Introduction begins with an allusion to Galileo’s attempt, ultimately unsuccessful, to install himself in Spain as the court astronomer/philosopher in response to the Spanish monarchy’s announcement of a ‘reward’ for whoever could find a systematic way to determine oceanic longitude. Rather than read this as an allegory of Spain’s ultimate refusal of Galilean science, as played out in the Court as well as the De Auxilis controversy, the author reads it as an indication of Galileo’s influence, an influence that is almost impossible to detect directly in the Golden Age archive in spite of the fact that published studies of astronomy were second only to medicine in the growing field of scientific publishing. To supplement this discursive absence, García Santo Tomás focuses on the abundance of optical metaphors in Spanish Baroque letters, metaphors that are used more often than not to establish morally, politically, or ethically authoritative perspectives as opposed to empirical facts or scientific truths. The body of the book consists of the enumeration and analysis of optical metaphors, double-entendres, and wordplay in a wide range of genres and texts, some well known and others that were previously unknown to this reader. Chapter One follows the technical and scientific history of optics from the late Middle Ages to the Baroque, dwelling on Galileo’s role as both a scientist and optical technician of the first order as well the importance of scientific theory and practice in his negotiation of the political obstacle course of early modern scientific thought. It also maps the growth in Spain of the field of mathematics, as the monarchy endeavoured to enhance mathematics and its strategic importance in matters of national security, while seeking to limit its potentially progressive impact on traditional thought and social hierarchies. Chapter Two begins the consideration of optical literary tropes by underlining the fantastic and speculative motifs and plots of works by authors such as Lope de Vega and Cervantes as well as by teasing out the scientific knowledge offered by their fictional works. García Santo Tomás’s erudition helps guide the reader through a veritable catalogue of baroque authors and works that the author resituates according to an emergent definition of ‘local science fiction’ (104). It is here where optical devices are analyzed as a way to both focus the reader’s attention on specific details as well as provide a distancing mechanism for the author/narrator, who, in modern fashion, often occupies a superior perspective on the ‘reality’ around him. Garc...

The “False Chronicles,” Cardinal Baronio, and Sacred History in Counter-Reformation Spain

The forged histories known as the “false chronicles” touched upon many controversial matters in early-modern Spain. Less familiar to scholars is that the forger, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, was also reacting to the Roman reforms spearheaded by Cardinal Cesare Baronio. Higuera’s 1589 letter to Baronio reveals his principal preoccupations, as well as the maneuvers that he would later employ in the false chronicles. These included direct interventions by Higuera on behalf of communities such as Sigüenza, which were attemptinag to protect local historical and hagiographic traditions that they believed were jeopardized by Baronio’s revisions of the Church’s liturgical texts.

Las palabras del silencio de santa Rosa de Lima o la poesia visual del inefable

Las palabras del silencio de santa Rosa de Lima o la poesia visual del inefable

En el origen de la novela corta del Siglo de Oro: Los <i>Novellieri</i> desde sus paratextos

This paper is complementary to a previous article published in Arbor, “On the origin of the short story of the Golden Age: the novellieri in Spain”. This work is an anthology, with a initial note indicating selection and publication criteria for a series of prologues, and dedications, and their censorship, in which problems translating some passages from Italian works that were difficult to assimilate in Counter-reformation Spain manifest themselves, the inquisitorial censors’ suspicions are apparent, and we can also glimpse, in the final decades of the sixteenth century, the idea of doing something new, something that could awaken the genius of Spanish writers to rise to the level of Italian novels.

‘Taming Don Juan’: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter‐Reformation Spain

Gender & HistoryVolume 24, Issue 2 p. 333-352 ‘Taming Don Juan’: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain Edward Behrend-Martínez, Search for more papers by this author Edward Behrend-Martínez, Search for more papers by this author First published: 10 July 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2012.01685.xCitations: 4Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume24, Issue2August 2012Pages 333-352 RelatedInformation

Cross-cultural Movement in the Name of Honour: Renegades, Honour and State in Miguel de Cervantes’ Barbary Plays

Miguel de Cervantes’ work displays a broad range of people who transgress the limits defined by gender, ethnicity, nation and religious denomination. In recent Cervantes scholarship, this motley crowd of cross-cultural identities has been seen as examples of Cervantes’ opposition to the racially based identity politics of State and Church in Counter-Reformation Spain. However, Cervantes’ Barbary and Turkish captivity plays suggest that cross-cultural identities may also, and quite to the contrary, be viewed in relation to the limited reach of the State's power and its limited capacity to define, shape and control its subjects. This becomes particularly clear in El gallardoespañol where the soldier Fernando de Saavedra,in an act of disobedience to the king, crosses the border between the Christian and the Muslim world to become a renegade in order to defend his anachronistic and self-assertive idea of honour. If we are to understand the connection between honour and cross-cultural identity in El gallardoespañol, we should not look at the identity politics of State and Church, but at the way in which the play is concerned with the Spanish maurophilia.

Taming Madness: Moral Discourse and Allegory in Counter-Reformation Spain

In the early modern period, madness assumed an important role in European thought and to a certain extent replaced the obsession with death which had characterized the preceding centuries. Like death before it, madness was seen as a means of accessing truth, but this was now an incomplete truth full of ambivalence and ambiguity since folly was being reclaimed as a relative form of reason. This article examines how this new vision of madness influenced Spanish thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Overall, it can be said that the positive and liberating view of madness, as conveyed by Erasmus, predominated in Spain until the end of the sixteenth century. Thereafter, the spirit of the Counter-Reformation tried gradually to constrain the omnipresent madness, associating it with the most reprehensible of vices, while understanding sanity to be the cultivation of Christian virtues. Despite attempts by a reductionist moral discourse to tame madness, however, it proved to be an unmanageable beast which continued to multiply and display a thousand and one difference faces.

MISCHIEVOUS LOVERS, HIDDEN MOORS, AND CROSS-DRESSERS: PASSING IN COLONIAL BOGOTÁ

Dona Catalina Acero de Vargas, a 16-year-old Spanish noblewoman from Santafe in the Nuevo Reino de Granada (today, Bogota), escaped in 1675 from her brother's house and ran off with Francisco Suare...

Scent of a Mystic Woman: Teresa de Jesús and the Interior Castle

AbstractIn 1577 Teresa de Jesús composed the Interior Castle, an account of her spiritual experiences that deployed architectural images designed to incite readers to piety and devotion. Critical readings have identified the castle as a spiritual and aesthetic emblem of Christian hegemony, emplotting de Jesús's works in the rhetorical frame of Reconquista narratives. But the Castle, like the houses in the 1562 Book of Life and the palaces in the 1562-1564 Way of Perfection, moves readers to remember landscapes that differ from a monocultural event, as it narrates the ultimate spiritual encounter in frank dissidence with the hegemonic politics and aesthetics of Catholicism that became the law of the land in Spain after 1492. In line with a diversity of medieval mystical traditions from Europe and the Middle East, the choice of a castle—a key architectural sign of the Middle Ages—as the place of paradox, memory, and experience of the sublime offers clues that de Jesús figured out a way to communicate what seemed to be an unaccountable event in Counter-Reformation Spain: being in the presence of divinity and living to tell such story in cross-confessional terms. This essay analyzes the polysemic traces of the castle built by this mystic woman with the figurative fragrance of multicultural medieval Iberia, a space where she carefully negotiated war, crusades, and other kingdoms of heaven with contemplation, survival (pervivencia), and adaptation.