Counter-Reformation Spain Research Articles

Acislo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco’s Immaculate Conception

Acislo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco’s <i>Immaculate Conception</i>

Maladies up Her Sleeve? Clerical Interpretation of a Suffering Female Body in Counter-Reformation Spain

Maladies up Her Sleeve? Clerical Interpretation of a Suffering Female Body in Counter-Reformation Spain

Carmen Rabell. Rewriting the Italian novella in counter-reformation Spain. Tamesis, London, 2003; 172 pp.

Se reseñó el libro: Rewriting the Italian novella in counter-reformation Spain.

More Iberian discoveries

If it's still sadly true that music from the Iberian peninsula—and by colonial extension the New World—features very little in histories of European music, in the recording world the steady stream of interesting CDs continues to flow unabated. The eight recent releases under review here all explore otherwise little-known repertory; indeed, most present music recorded for the first time on disc. It's also true that world premières of works from the hidden corners of the historical cupboard of western art music appeal to recording companies and collectors alike, making for a limited yet viable market. Market forces are not, on the whole, predominant here, however; rather it would seem that a genuine enthusiasm for this repertory exists among performers and researchers, an enthusiasm that is communicated through their carefully prepared performances and often enlightening liner notes. The music dates from c.1500 to the 18th century, an extended Golden Age in music in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking lands; almost none of the composers represented could claim household-name status, even in the most cultured of homes. Almost all the music, however, is of very high quality, much of it truly inspired, its roots in a polyphonic tradition watered by the wealth, resources and prestige accorded to church music in Counter-Reformation Spain and fertilized by northern European and Italian stylistic elements that circulated freely throughout the most important empire of the age. Morales, Guerrero and Victoria may have been the beacons, but in the shadows below and around these sources of light were Alonso Lobo, Sebastián de Vivanco, Hernando de las Infantas, Pedro Rimonte, Mateo Romero, Manuel Cardoso, Juan de Araujo and many, many others.

Rewriting the Italian Novella in Counter-Reformation Spain

As they reshaped the Italian novella under the inquisitorial atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation, Spanish narrators labelled their texts as exemplary. However, critics have usually agreed that there is a contradiction between the morals preached in the narrative frames, prologues and sententiae of Spanish novellas and the content of the plots. Rabell sees this ambiguity as a result of the use of the rhetoric of the fictitious case: Spanish novellas rewrite the Italian genre with the specific purpose of either challenging or validating the rules regarding marriage introduced by the Council of Trent.Since civil, canonical and family hierarchies were based on the same metaphor that conceives power as one body in which, by analogy, the husband is the head of his family, as the monarch is the head of the state and the Pope is the head of the church, Spanish novellas explore the contradictions between civil and canon laws regarding the private context of marriage in order to suggest further contradictions within the public sphere of state and church. The fictitious case provides a rhetoric to test the validity of the legal grounds of Counter-Reformation Spain. Carmen R. Rabell is associate professor, department of comparative literature, University of Puerto Rica - Rio Piedras.BR> En la atmosfera sofocante y inquisitorial de la Contrarreforma, los narradores espanoles - al reformular la novela italiana - tenian la costumbre de llamar sus textos 'ejemplares'. Sin embargo los criticos por lo general han estado de acuerdo en senalar que existe una contradiccion entre la etica que se promulga en estas naracciones espanolas, incluyendo los prologos y las sententiae, por un lado y, por otro, el contenido de la trama. En esta monografia Rabell arguye que esta ambiguedad nace a raiz de la manipulacion sutil de la retorica de la ficcion: las novelas espanolas reformulan el genero italiano con el proposito especifico o de desafiar las reglas y las normas de la Contrarreforma en Espana o de validar las mismas.

Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe

1. Introduction: the dimension of sacred space in Reformation Europe Will Coster and Andrew Spicer 2. Sacred church and worldly tavern: reassessing early modern divide Bert Kumin 3. Sacred image and sacred space in Lutheran Germany Bridget Heal 4. Places of sanctification: the liturgical sacrality of Genevan reformed churches, 1535-66 Christian Grosse 5. 'What kinde of house a kirk is': conventicles, consecrations and the concept of sacred space in post-Reformation Scotland Andrew Spicer 6. Psalms, groans and dog-whippers: the soundscape of sacred space in the English parish church, 1547-1642 John Craig 7. A microcosm of community: burial, space and society in Chester 1598-1633 Will Coster 8. 'Apud Ecclesia': church burial and the development of funerary rooms in Moldavia Maria Craciun 9. Reading Rome as a sacred landscape, c. 1575-1635 Simon Ditchfield 10. Gardening for God: Carmelite deserts and the sacralisation of natural space in counter-Reformation Spain Trevor Johnson 11. Holywell: contesting sacred space in post-Reformation Wales Alexandra Walsham 12. The sacred space of Julien Maunoir: the re-Christianising of the landscape in seventeenth-century Brittany Elizabeth Tingle 13. Sacralising space: reclaiming civic culture in early modern France Amanda Eurich 14. Breaking images and building bridges: the making of sacred space in early modern Bohemia Howard Louthan 15. Mapping the boundaries of confession: space and urban religious life in the Diocese of Augsburg, 1648-1750 Duane Corpis.

Icons of Honor: Cervantes, Lope, and the Staging of Blind Faith

The goal of this paper is to initiate an analysis of the commonalities between secular and sacred theatrical institutions and conventions by focusing on a few moments in Cervantes's El retablo de las maravillas in which the socio-economic embeddedness as well as the aesthetic conventions of both dramatic genres are foregrounded. Thus, rather than pursue a reading of the ways in which the religious themes and images described in the empty retablo satirically subvert the rhetoric and ideology of racial purity (Molho, Wardropper, Zimic, Moner, Reed), I am more interested in how Cervantes's staging of Chanfalla and Chirinos's engaño uncovers the commercial and political compromises of baroque theater, including religious theater. My thesis, in short, is that Cervantes's devastating critique of the debilitating enfermedades of honor and limpieza de sangre can and should be understood within the context of the entire array of institutionalized theatrical practices in Counter Reformation Spain, including—perhaps even especially—its most powerful expression of ethno-religious triumphalism, the auto sacramental .

Embracing Hercules / Enjoying Ganymede: The Homoerotics of Humanism in Góngora's "Soledad Primera"

In his manual on grammar and rhetoric titled Elocuencia espanola en arte (1604), Bartolome Jimenez Paton discusses the five levels of meaning in a fabula —the literal, the moral, the allegorical, the anagogical, and the tropological—giving as example the myth of Per­ seus slaying the Gorgon. Curiously, he shifts myths when discussing the anagogical level. Instead of focusing on Perseus, he turns to Ganymede: Anagogicamente es cuando por el rapto Ganimedes entendemos el arrobado espfritu en contemplation cosas celestiales, y que la sabiduria humana es ignorancia con (232). With one stroke of the pen, Jimenez Paton makes this youth from antiquity an apt subject of Counter-Reformation Spain, something that fits well with a treatise de acusado corte contrarreformista(Martin 11). Any hint of pagan otherness is censored, absented. The reader may know that Ganymede was abducted by Jupiter because of his beauty, but Jimenez Paton does not mention this. Mythographers such as Natale Conti had taken great care to transform Ganymede's bodily beauty into spiritual greatness: En efecto, Ganimedes es el alma los hombres, a la que, segiin hemos dicho, Dios lleva junto a si debido a su notable prudencia. ... Pero, realmente, el alma mas hermosa es la que no esta en absoluto contaminada por las suciedades humanas y con las acciones vergonzosas del cuerpo (695-96). Conti, then, counteracts any hint of sodomy, or what he calls the shameful actions of the body, with the spiritual beauty of the soul. While mythographers create lengthy apolo­ gies for Ganymede, rejecting his physical beauty in favor of spiritual splendor, Jimenez Paton simply eliminates all previous argument. The anagogical meaning is gathered from the youth's ascent to the heav­ ens, regardless of cause. No longer do we have a text that condemns the event, like the fourteenth-century Ovide Moralise, where the abduc­ tion is seen as: Against law and against nature (Saslow 42); nor do we have the Neo-Platonic apologetics of Conti. In Jimenez Paton, it is as if the erotic abduction never happened. This brief statement says

Negotiating Sanctity: Holy Women in Sixteenth-Century Spain

The past ten years have seen great strides in our understanding of the many forces at work in Counter-Reformation Spain. Historians and hispanists have demonstrated clearly that the Spanish religious landscape was complex and have elucidated several problems of interpretation. How readily did Spanish monarchs, religious leaders, and laity follow the decrees of the Council of Trent? How influential was the Spanish Inquisition in enforcing religious beliefs and behaviors? In what ways did religious reform involve assumptions about gender and differing religious roles for men and women? Finally, and more to my point, how did men and women respond to such assumptions and roles?

"Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain", ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Book Review)

"Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain", ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Book Review)

:Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville

In this exploration of crisis in Counter-Reformation Spain, Mary Elizabeth Perry reveals the significance of gender for social order by portraying the lives of women who lived on the margins of respectability--prostitutes, healers, visionaries, and other deviants who provoked the concern of a growing central government linked closely to the church. Focusing on Seville, the commercial capital of Habsburg Spain, Perry uses rich archival sources to document the economic and spiritual activity of women, and efforts made by civil and church authorities to control this activity, during a period of local economic change and religious turmoil. In analyzing such sources as art and literature from the period, women's writings, Inquisition records, and laws and regulations, Perry finds that social definitions of what it meant to be a woman or a man persisted due to their sanctification by religious ideas and their adaptation into political order. She describes the tension between gender ideals and actual conditions in women's lives, and shows how some women subverted the gender order by using a surprisingly wide variety of intellectual and physical strategies.

The Religious Life in the Spain of Philip II and Philip III

From the vividly autobiographic Life of St Teresa famous images of conventual life in sixteenth-century Spain have been derived; both the dark impression of unreformed monastic existence and the heroic profile of reformed regulars. Before and after that era the social, not to say political prominence of certain figures, friars and nuns, in Spanish life is notorious, from the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs to that of Philip IV and beyond. Modern historical research has indeed highlighted the contribution to political and ecclesiastical development, to early Catholic reform above all, of key members of the regular clergy under the Catholic Monarchs. For monastics, as opposed to mendicants, in post-medieval Spain, the extensive and meticulous researches of Linage Conde have put all Iberian scholars in his debt. The fascinating origins of the essentially Iberian phenomenon of the Jeronymites have recently received new attention from J.R.L. Highfield, but further insights into the true condition of the religious life in the Iberian peninsula of the supposedly Golden Age are perhaps still possible, when unpublished material is consulted in the Roman archives and in those of Spain, such as Madrid, Simancas, Barcelona and Valencia. Considerations of space necessarily limit what can be suggested here, but the development of monastic life in Counter-Reformation Spain is arguably best considered in its extended not just in its stricter sense: for parallels and contrasts, as well as direct influences, were not confined by the normal distinctions between the eremitic and the monastic, the monastic and the mendicant, the old and the new orders, or even the male and female communities. Furthermore the intervention of Spanish royal authority in Portuguese affairs between 1580 and 1640, not least in ecclesiastical and regular life, provides a useful comparative basis for consideration of truly Iberian conditions.

Close Encounters of Another Kind

It is not so long ago that mysticism was a dirty word, the Reformation was regarded as a ‘good thing’, and a scientific education was seen as having more value than one in the ‘humanities’. But fashions change, and even genuine perspectives alter. The current fortunes of St John of the Cross are an example of what can happen and will repay examination, for this mystic, poet, and outstanding representative of Counter-Reformation Spain is again becoming popular and arousing interest. Lectures about him are attended eagerly and received with enthusiasm; books once again are being published about him.But there is danger in this if what is happening is simply a reversion to earlier perspectives. One suspects this, for example, with regard to the reappearance from the early 1950s of Thomas Merton’s introduction to and presentation of the Maxims, Cautions and Counsels of St John of the Cross (Counsels of Light and Love, Burns &amp; Oates, 95 pages, £1.50). Perhaps this book represents the most attractive of old-style presentations of John and his teaching, based as it is on a liberal humanism tailored to the inadequacies of modern urbanised man; but whether it really represents what John stood for is another matter. Apart from anything else, as with so much that has been written about him, it suffers from an almost total failure to take account of the appropriate context. The lesser writings of St John of the Cross presented in this book, as also his letters, arose from a very particular cultural and social situation which must be appreciated if the nature and significance of his ‘advice’ is to be understood. Even more perhaps than with his major works it is necessary to realise that these writings were addressed to particular people, or groups of people, in very special circumstances, and are dependent upon a very close relationship between him and them.

Poet, Mystic, Reformer

A strict ascetic mystic belonging to a religious reform movement in the heady atmosphere of counter-reformation Spain; a writer of treatises on the techniques of contemplative and mystical prayer; esoteric, strict, demanding, even dry and humourless—strange for a close intimate of the great Teresa, so human, witty and compassionate—but undoubtedly at the same time a man consumed by the love of God. This is most probably the image conjured up by the name of John of the Cross.And yet he is also well known, even famous, for his poems—you will find them tucked in at the back of Professor Allison Peers’ magisterial presentation and translation of the Complete Works, though you will also find them published in the Penguin Classics series. What sort of poet is he? A real poet, or one of those religious versifiers who present their ideas on the life of prayer in this superficial, yet attractive, form for the sake of their simpler listeners? There were many of these to be found in 16th Century Spain.A real poet many will claim; but those who take this side of him seriously and acclaim him as one of the peninsula’s greatest poets are more likely to be found amongst the unreligious, the secular, students of Spanish literature than amongst those who follow his doctrine.John of the Cross was indeed a poet of stature, together with being most of the other things mentioned; but not many people have attempted to present this so that it can be seen as a whole, so that we can get what he has left to posterity in perspective.