Early Modern Iberia Research Articles

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. ix + 260 pp. $65.

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. William D. Phillips. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. ix + 260 pp. $65.

Introduction. The Qur’ān in Early Modern Iberia and Beyond

Introduction. The Qur’ān in Early Modern Iberia and Beyond

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. By William D. Phillips, Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 272 pp. $65.00

Phillips has produced an excellent survey of slavery as practiced in Iberia (with an emphasis on Spain) for nearly a millennium. Ranging from the Roman period to the nineteenth century, Phillips offers a thematic, rather than an argument-driven, overview of the contours of the institution within Spain and Portugal. His synthesis of existing scholarship, including a helpful bibliography, will be of great use to (Anglophone) scholars less familiar with published work in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and French.The book opens with a concise but rich historiographical introduction followed by six chapters—“The History of Slavery in Iberia,” “To Become a Slave,” “To Traffic in Slaves,” “To Live as a Slave,” “To Work as a Slave,” and “To Become Free”—and concludes with a brief epilogue entitled “The Wider Extensions of Iberian Slavery.” As Phillips acknowledges in the introduction, “The history of slavery in Spain is complex and lacks a clear narrative line” (9). The looping chronology of the work, a product of its thematic organization, sometimes makes it repetitive and hard to follow. Readers might not always be able to keep track of what happened when and why. Although Phillips’ stated focus is the variability of life under slavery, his tendency is to highlight the institution of slavery rather than the changing experiences of slaves. Although Philips includes profiles of enslaved individuals when he is able to do so, the particular cultural, intellectual, and material concerns of slaves are not part of the story.Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia will be required reading for scholars of Iberia and for those interested in European slavery, but it will be most useful when considered in conversation with emerging scholarship about slavery throughout the Americas. Masterful work of synthesis though it is, the book might have engaged more with new scholarship that examines slavery throughout the Iberian and Atlantic worlds. Phillips offers no substantive consideration of how American slavery and resistance might have influenced the Iberian version of the institution—intellectually, culturally, or demographically. He alludes to this scholarly discussion only fleetingly in the text and offers only a brief overview of slavery in the Americas in the epilogue. The thoughts and actions of the enslaved do not figure largely in his account of the rise and fall of the institution. In a telling omission, his short closing discussion of the emancipation era fails to mention the Haitian Revolution. Similarly, the tone of master narrator that Phillips employs sometimes prevents him from capturing the contested nature of slave regimes. For example, his references to slavery in Iberia dying “a natural death” and “slavery’s peculiar development in the Americas” distance the reader from the contingent, lived realities of enslaved people (145, 160).

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Slavery in medieval and early modern Iberia

The enslaved population of medieval Iberia composed only a small percentage of the general populace at any given point, and slave labor was not essential to the regional economy during the period. Yet slaves were present in Iberia from the beginning of recorded history until the early modern era, and the regulations and norms for slavery and servitude shifted as time passed and kingdoms rose and fell. The Romans brought their imperially sanctioned forms of slavery to the Iberian peninsula, and these were adapted by successive Christian kingdoms during the Middle Ages. The Muslim conquest of Iberia introduced new ideas about slavery and effected an increase in slave trade. During the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, slave owners in Christian Spain and Portugal maintained slaves at home, frequently captives taken in wars and sea raids, and exported their slave systems to colonies across the Atlantic. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a magisterial survey of the many forms of bound labor in Iberia from ancient times to the decline of slavery in the eighteenth century. William D. Phillips, Jr., examines the pecuniary and legal terms of slavery from purchase to manumission. He pays particular attention to the conditions of life for the enslaved, which, in a religiously diverse society, differed greatly for Muslims and Christians as well as for men and women. This sweeping narrative will become the definitive account of slavery in a place and period that deeply influenced the forms of forced servitude that shaped the New World.

Swearing by God: Muslim Oath-Taking in Late Medieval and Early Modern Christian Iberia

Abstract This paper examines Muslim oaths found in Christian legal texts in late medieval and early modern Iberia, especially in the Crown of Aragon. Whereas lawmakers in Castile used Castilian to record Muslim oaths, in the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia these formulas appeared in Arabic, though written in Latin characters. This paper traces the evolution of these Arabic formulas during four centuries, from the abbreviated forms of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as “baylle ylloe,” to the more elaborate forms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which include references to the qibla (the direction of prayer), the Qurʾān, and Ramadan. Comparing these formulas with those found in Muslim legal compilations produced in Christian Iberia shows that despite different emphases (on location, timing, and manner of oath taking), both Christian and Muslim legal texts recognized and established that Muslims swear by God. Although attitudes towards Muslims grew increasingly hostile in the latter Middle Ages, this analysis of Muslim oaths shows that Arabic continued to mediate the legal interaction between the two communities and that Islamic rituals, as mentioned in the oaths, were still very much a part of the multicultural landscape of late medieval and early modern Iberia.

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips Heather Dalton Phillips, William D., Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014; cloth, pp. 272, R.R.P. US$65.00, £42.50; ISBN 9780812244915. This study encapsulates the complexity of slavery in Spain and Portugal during the medieval and early modern periods. The first recorded slaveholders on the Iberian Peninsula, the Romans and the Visigoths, shared the view that those who were part of the dominant group should not be enslaved. When the Muslims conquered the Peninsula early in the eighth century, citizens of towns that had resisted them were enslaved. Although the situation was reversed during and after the re-conquest, it varied across regions. While most slaves in Castile were Muslim, those in the maritime areas of the Crown of Aragon were generally from the southern and eastern Mediterranean and beyond the Black Sea. Although there were Muslim slaves in Portugal, little is known about slavery here prior to the 1440s, when the trade in Sub-Saharan slaves began. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were bringing African slaves to the Iberian Peninsula directly from Africa’s west coast. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, these slaves were joined in Spain by enslaved captives from the war in the Canary Islands. William Phillips points out that although there were often large numbers of slaves in Spain and Portugal, they could not be called slave societies. Indeed, during the sixteenth century slaves probably made up only 10 per cent of the population of the city with the largest number of slaves, namely Seville. Phillips emphasises that the Iberian experience of slavery varied enormously. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike could be slaves, slave owners, or traders. One could be born into slavery, kidnapped and enslaved, or captured and enslaved as a result of conflict. Moreover, slaves could find themselves ‘at any number of points between full slavery and full freedom’. Phillips brings his survey of slavery to life with examples taken from notarial documents. This means that he is able to provide rather more examples of the Spanish owner/slave relationship than the Portuguese. He does so in the full knowledge that such documents were almost always drawn up at the instigation of the owner rather than the slave. Indeed, when it comes to documents that promise or grant manumission, Phillips rightly points out that the majority of slaves freed in this way actually bought their freedom while others were freed once they became too old and frail to work. In the latter case, manumission was likely to result in destitution and starvation. While the Roman tradition of having domestic slaves continued on the Iberian Peninsula into the early modern period, their practice of maintaining slave gangs did not. By the medieval period, slaves who worked outside the home did so alongside free workers. Even those who manned the galleys toiled with convicts and free labourers. However, things were very different beyond the Peninsula. The trade in African slaves expanded as the demand [End Page 202] for labour grew in the American settlements. During the first two centuries of the colonial period, the medieval Mediterranean style of domestic slavery and plantation slavery coexisted. However, slavery on the Peninsula declined during Portugal’s war with Spain, which lasted until 1668. The death knell came in the 1760s when Carlos III established diplomatic relations with Morocco. Laws were passed in Portugal in 1773, and in the early nineteenth century in Spain, freeing the last slaves. As slavery declined and died out on the Iberian Peninsula, it flourished in the empires, lasting until the late nineteenth century in Brazil. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a richly textured overview of the development of slavery in Spain and Portugal. It is aimed at those interested in slavery in the Americas, as well those concerned with the Iberian Peninsula, illustrating why the experience of slavery came to vary so much across South America, North America, and the Caribbean. Heather Dalton The University of Melbourne Copyright © 2014 Heather Dalton

Sancho's Courtly Performance: Discreción and the Art of Conversation in the Ducal Palace Episodes of Don Quijote II

Sancho's Courtly Performance:Discreción and the Art of Conversation in the Ducal Palace Episodes of Don Quijote II Ryan Schmitz To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.1 In conjunction with the vast social changes of the early modern period in Iberia, particularly the mass movement of socially ambitious individuals to burgeoning urban centers, there emerged a proliferation of conduct manuals that aimed to teach their readers the nuances of impression management, the art of conversation, and how to successfully deal with people in diverse social contexts. While many of these treatises were written specifically for courtiers, others were intended for a more general audience, including young social climbers.2 As one literary scholar has observed, "Villanos wanted to become cortesanos, and their efforts were satirized by a traditional aristocracy determined to maintain a distinction between the truly gentleborn and would-be cortesanos" (Preto-Rodas 231). Sancho Panza, undoubtedly the most [End Page 445] well known villano of the period, is similarly obsessed with social and economic ascendency, particularly during his stay at the ducal palace.3 Sancho's efforts to overcome his rustic upbringing, utilizing don Quijote's detailed lessons on courtesy and discretion, both reflect a significant social reality of the day and humorously engage some of the most important values and ideals of early modern Spanish society. There is, perhaps, no concept of greater importance or more illustrative of the system of values of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Spain than discreción. The full meaning of this term, however, often eludes modern commentators and translators alike, due to its complex polyvalence and the fact that it encompassed a much wider range of qualities than it does in modern usage.4 Damasio de Frías y Balboa, a writer whom Cervantes praises in "El Canto de Calíope," defines the term with meticulous detail in his understudied "Diálogo de la discreción" (1579). It is an intellectual habit engaged in practical decisions; while it is similar to the Aristotelian definition of prudence, "right reason applied to practice," it differs in that discretion, unlike prudence, does not imply use for morally virtuous ends.5 Exceptionally broad in its scope, discretion encompassed such diverse qualities as mental sharpness (agudeza); ingenuity (ingenio); clear judgment (juicio); and good sense (cordura). Additionally, discretion referred to social intelligence and the art of conversation; it was often paired with forethought, caution, and dissimulation (circunspección, recato, disimulación); grace and affability (gracia, donaire); and eloquent communication appropriate for the social context, including the use of witticisms, clever repartee, and the proper use of humor, such that it would not harm third parties (avisado, advertido, elocuencia, cortesanía).6 [End Page 446] In the pages that follow, I aim to examine Sancho's attempts to overcome his rustic origins, transforming himself from ignorant peasant to discreet courtier and governor at the ducal palace. Additionally, through a careful comparison of Cervantes's fictional court and representative conduct manuals of the period, I intend to elucidate the complicated concept of discreción, which emerged as a fundamental ideal in early modern Iberia. It seems that Sancho Panza is at a distinct disadvantage with regards to the acquisition of discretion. As a sedentary and rustic villano, the level and variety of discourse to which he is exposed inherently limit his educative opportunities. As the well-travelled canine Berganza of El coloquio de los perros observes: "el andar tierras y comunicar con diversas gentes hace a los hombres discretos" (II 332). As an additional handicap, the Panza stock appears to be ingrained with a penchant for irrelevant and excessive discourse: the priest observes, "todos los deste linaje de los Panzas nacieron cada uno con un costal de refranes en el cuerpo" (905). It comes as a surprise, then, that Sancho should be called "discreto" in his first encounter with the duchess: De que Sancho el bueno sea gracioso lo estimo yo en mucho, porque es señal que es discreto; que las gracias y los donaires, [ . . . ] no asienten sobre ingenios torpes, y pues el buen Sancho es gracioso y donairoso, desde aquí le confirmo por discreto. (760; emphasis added) That her syllogism is...

‘For Honor and Defence’: Race and the Right to Bear Arms in Early Colonial Mexico

The right to bear arms was one of the most exclusive sumptuary rights in early modern Iberia. The privilege of carrying weapons was transferred to Spanish America where it became a right reserved to Spaniards. This article examines over one hundred and fifty licenses to bear arms granted to non-Spaniards in New Spain during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These licenses preserve the rhetoric of honor used by supplicants in order to justify the award. The varied content of these petitions provides a vivid illustration of how non-Spaniards sought to undercut the negative stereotypes imposed by society. By tracing the changing distribution of these licenses among various socio-racial groups, this article helps illustrate important changes in colonial racial attitudes and demographics. In particular, this study shows that over time men of African descent came to account for a larger percentage of recipients. These men demonstrate that the negative perception of African ancestry did not create an insurmountable barrier to individual advancement. Ultimately, these licenses highlight the personal pride and determination shown by these men as they sought to elevate their status in a highly stratified and discriminatory society.

Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800 (review)

Reviewed by: Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800 Timothy J. Coates Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800. Edited by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. 456 pp. $65.00 (cloth). There is a very large and curious museum in Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the Azores. The Carlos Machado Museum (begun in the 1880s) is a sprawling natural history collection that contains examples of most seaborne animals in the North Atlantic as well as land animals living in the Azores, birds, botany, geology, mineralogy, ethnography, and many other materials that completely fill the large former monastery of Santo André, where the collection is housed. Wandering from room to room, the visitor is struck by the wide-ranging scientific curiosity of the original curator, Dr. Carlos Machado. One's first reaction to such a collection might be its perceived uniqueness and to question its utility. This collection of essays shows how both impressions are erroneous. In a very real sense, Machado was continuing the work outlined in this important and pathbreaking new work, which introduces the reader to the nearly totally ignored topic (in English-speaking works) of science (in a very broad sense) in the early modern Iberian world. The work is divided into four parts: "Reassessing the Role of Iberia in Early Modern Science," "New Worlds, New Sciences," "Knowledge Productions: Local Contexts, Global Empires," and "Commerce, Curiosities, and the Circulation of Knowledge." [End Page 153] After a brief introduction to the collection of essays by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, part 1, "Reassessing the Role of Iberia in Early Modern Science," presents two historiographical overviews of the literature. David Goodman ("Science, Medicine, and Technology in Colonial Spanish America") discusses Spanish Colonial America, and Palmira Fontes da Costa and Henrique Leitão ("Portuguese Imperial Science") do the same for the Portuguese side. Both essays are very strong and quite complete. Goodman notes that the Spanish have produced a wide range of scientific works ranging from cartography to botany, while Fontes da Costa and Leitão note that the Portuguese have produced a great deal in nautical-related publications at the expense of neglecting many other areas. If anyone wanted an orientation to the current state of scientific-related publications in early modern Iberia or these former empires, I would highly recommend these essays, which also include complete references in their notes. The editors state that "a second aim of the volume is to challenge traditional core/periphery models that place Europe at the center of scientific knowledge production by characterizing colonial science as essentially subordinate, derivative, or imitative" (p. xxi). Part 2 of this collection, "New Worlds, New Sciences," then challenges these assumptions by "focusing on the ways in which the natural world of the Americas served to complicate and alter European categories of knowledge . . ." (p. xxi). The three essays that make up this section all deal with science in Iberia itself. María Portuondo ("Cosmography at the Casa, Consejo, and Corte during the Century of Discovery") discusses the tension among the overlapping locales of scientific inquiry in early modern Spain: the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), the Consejo de Indias (Council of Indies), and the Royal Court. In her discussion, she also clarifies the roles played by each of these three institutions and how they supported each other. Onésimo Almeida ("Science during the Portuguese Maritime Discoveries") examines the interaction between what he labels "experimenters and theoreticians" and those who sailed the seas and made written observations and those who stayed behind in Portugal and examined these findings. Almeida quite correctly notes the remarkable figures of D. João de Castro and Pedro Nunes, excellent examples of this interaction. Juan Pimentel ("Baroque Natures") delves into the writings of the Jesuit scholar Juan E. Nieremberg and his understanding and explanations of the unfolding natural history of the Americas. Part 3, "Knowledge Productions: Local Contexts, Global Empires," is the flip side of part 2 in that it "focuses on the importance of local scientific traditions that developed in the empire," with emphasis on [End Page 154] the reality that...

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America ‐ Edited by González, O. E. and Premo, B. (eds.)

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America ‐ Edited by González, O. E. and Premo, B. (eds.)

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. Gonzalez and Bianca Prerno (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. xi plus 258 pp. $24.95)

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. Gonzalez and Bianca Prerno (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. xi plus 258 pp. $24.95)

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America

Youth is coming of age in Latin American history, or so it seems with recent studies on children and childhood. González and Premo’s edited volume contributes to the field by studying children as an extension of empire in the early modern Iberian world. The editors set out to present various alternatives for the study of childhood in the Iberian world. The first alternative is to unhitch the history of childhood from the history of modernity, a connection proposed by Philippe Ariès in his pioneering work on European childhood. Rather than assuming children to be hidden and silent, researchers can find them in often-used sources such as criminal, notary, and institutional records and court cases. By reading such sources for children, they emerge not only as objects of historical research but as “key colonial subjects” (p. 243).Two chapters, by Isabel dos Guimãres Sá and Valentina Tikoff, look at children in the Iberian Peninsula. While Sá’s chapter is largely an overview of children in Portugal, in particular children in the royal court, Tikoff examines elite and common children placed in Seville’s various institutions for children and the strategic use of institutions, even orphanages, by parents as a means to educate and feed children. A flexible interpretation of the category of “orphan” made it possible for parents to secure social mobility through state beneficence and discipline.The theme of strategies for survival is raised again in the chapter on indigenous migration to Lima in the early colonial period. Using principally the 1613 census of Lima, Teresa Vergara asks us to assume that indigenous parents migrated to the city for a better life for their children, and that they subsequently placed their children in the homes of other people whom they “trusted would treat [their children] well.” While this might have been “a strategy that allowed them [indigenous families] to cope with the colonial system,” this explanation might risk downplaying the very coercive actions of the colonial state for labor extraction that pushed some families to take such extreme measures.The argument that the labor needs of adults determined the lives of some children is made by Laura Shelton, who describes the “adoption” of children to fill the labor shortages suffered by Sonoran ranchers and agriculturalists. This ad hoc labor scheme took advantage of an informal social practice of passing along children to family members and non-kin. According to Shelton, when it came down to who held the rights of patria potestad in custody battles, the colonial courts tended to side in favor of patron-guardians. Yet, the fact that parents who could afford to repay childcare expenses could thus recover their children suggests another possible interpretation, that parents maintained their rights (if they had the money).The connection between the maintenance of empire and the fate of children comes to the foreground in the chapters by Ondina González and Ann Twinam. González studies the establishment of a foundling home in Havana, the apparent need for such an institution, and its doomed fate as a consequence of lack of financial support from the local elite. Twinam’s chapter moves to the late eighteenth century and gives a nuanced study of the racial and gender considerations of abandoned babes (expósitos) and Bourbon legislation that wished to erase the stain of illegitimacy suffered by those of unknown parentage. The potential collapse of racial hierarchy due to such blanket legislation led to an ultimately successful battle by local elites to protect “white” privilege.The fragility and insecurity of children’s lives is most heart-wrenchingly described in Elizabeth Kuznesof’s thoughtful chapter on slave children in Brazil. This chapter successfully combines a historiographical overview with new readings of established research into children. While the fortune of poor Brazilian children was bleak in general, children born into slavery were “vulnerable to being separated from family members at any point” (p. 189).It is perhaps in terms of the editors’ goal of hearing children’s voices (or at least their “echoes”) that this collection of essays falls short. In the chapter “Ursula: The Life and Times of an Aristocratic Girl in Santiago, Chile (1666 – 1678),” Jorge Rojas Flores comes the closest to directly citing a child, though not in a child’s voice but that of an adult woman reflecting on her childhood for the purposes of a religious autobiography. For the most part, children remain on the margins of adults’ lives as contested property (in custody battles over child servants), as normalized citizens formed in institutions, or as the subjects of legal and religious prescriptions. However, as this volume shows, we can learn much about social practices, normative views of childhood, labor systems, and indeed the building and maintaining of empire through the study of the smallest of subjects, a colonial child.

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (review)

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (review)

Preface. Re-Envisioning Early Modern Iberia: Visuality, Materiality, History

Preface. Re-Envisioning Early Modern Iberia: Visuality, Materiality, History Barbara Fuchs The essays collected in this special issue of Hispanic Review were first presented at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 2008, where they were followed by the roundtable “Grounding Interdisciplinarity.” Probing the boundaries of the field, this volume includes some of the most exciting new directions in early modern Hispanic studies. The essays collected here are not just interdisciplinary but intellectually expansive: they take as their purview the culture of the early modern Hispanic world without dividing it up according to our own anachronistic paradigms. These critics look broadly at textual, pictorial, cartographic, and material representations. They engage closely with the period’s multifaceted imaginary, recovering the considerable ideological force that shaped even the most “objective” of representations, as in Ricardo Padrón’s study of the cartographic creation of a Hispanic Pacific Ocean. They probe in a highly self-conscious manner the problems attendant upon writing marginal histories, or the histories of figures marginalized by the canon, such as the black freedman poet Juan Latino, in Elizabeth Wright’s essay, or, in Karina Galperin’s, the much-maligned Dido, queen of Carthage. They recover urban practices, such as the tapado, anatomized here by Amanda Wunder and Laura Bass, or gambling, analyzed by Enrique García Santo-Tomás, too disreputable to figure into mainstream historical scholarship, and note how those practices nonetheless contributed to fashioning the everyday existence of early modern men and women. Most importantly, perhaps, these studies revisit cultural touchstones—the battle of Lepanto, the city of Madrid—with a skeptical eye, showing how the literary and pictorial texts that record them can fundamentally re-envision their ideological valence. In an effort to reproduce the dialogic and collaborative nature of the initial [End Page v] symposium, I have asked each of the presenters to write a response to one of the other essays in the collection. These responses usefully educe the potential of each essay, imagining the disciplinary vector that leads from it to new work, in novel articulations of the field. [End Page vi] Barbara Fuchs University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2009 University of Pennsylvania Press

<i>Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America Tobias Hecht Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. xi plus 258 pp. $24.95). In the early days of the history of childhood the debate mostly hinged on whether childhood existed in a recognizable form before a given time and whether parents loved their issue or grieved when they died. Children themselves were not the marrow, and their lives came to us filtered through the sentiments, beliefs, and acts of adults. We know remarkably little about how children in Latin America lived and prematurely died; only recently have historians made them an explicit focus of their research. Raising an Empire enriches our understanding of children's lives in Latin America considerably. The volume opens with a chapter by Isabel dos Guimarães Sá on children in Portugal between 1500 and 1800. The scope of this essay (work, play, education, religion, abandonment, and beyond) is more than a little ambitious. Yet the piece works well in this book, framing many of the topics treated in the chapters that follow and touching on the types of sources available to historians of childhood. [End Page 1056] Fully three chapters concern orphans. Valentina Tikoff explores the orphanages of Seville between 1681 and 1831. Rather than offering a history of the institutions, she seeks to "rethink the identities of the children who resided in them and how they came to be there" (43). This insightful piece ultimately invites us to look both inward at these heterogeneous institutions where the children lived, learned, labored, and languished, and outward at society. The other two chapters are about foundlings in Havana. Despite some overlap, the essays by Ondina González and Ann Twinam mostly reveal different things. González traces the development of the Casa Joseph foundling home, inaugurated in 1711, arguing that church-state struggles over the upkeep of the house "mirrored societal attitudes toward children" (138) As church, state, and local elite eschewed responsibility for the home its charges fared dismally, few surviving infancy. Twinam offers a broader look at expósitos, or foundlings, revealing the conflict between a 1794 decree by Charles IV and local laws and mores. The royal edict was meant to erase discrimination against expósitos and was applied to the entire empire; whereas peninsulars had little to lose with the presumption that babies born in Seville or Burgos were white and the progeny of legitimate union, the scenario was different in the new world where pardos and mulatos were hardly welcomed into the upper echelons of society. Local law and practice chipped away at the order, with racial and other prejudices prevailing even over the royal decree. A chapter on Indian children in Lima between 1570 and 1640 and another on the life of an aristocratic girl born in Santiago, Chile, in 1666 are at opposite methodological extremes. The first offers a glimpse at a broad cross-section of Indian children in Lima whereas the other is tightly circumscribed, not unlike the subject's own monastic life. But as Jorge Rojas Flores intimates in his essay on the child in Santiago, the close study of the individual can tell us important things about society. The essay by Teresa Vergara, in contrast, suggests that impersonal social data can reveal much about individuals. Vergara's chapter on Lima relies on a 1613 census of indigenous people in the city, labor contracts, and wills, while the Santiago chapter draws primarily on the subject's spiritual autobiography, or vida. Indian parents in Lima would place their children in the households of Spaniards so they would learn practical and cultural skills, according to Vergara. She notes that Indian children only began to work officially and to be paid a salary at the age of nine or ten, though they often arrived at a much younger age. It would be difficult to believe that the seven and eight year olds were not working, effectively in a regime of slavery. From there to suggest that these children "became members of their masters...

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 258. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $24.95 paper.

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 258. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $24.95 paper. - Volume 65 Issue 3

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2007) 258 pp. $24.95

<i>Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America</i>. Edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2007) 258 pp. $24.95

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America edited by Ondina González and Bianca Premo

Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America edited by Ondina González and Bianca Premo

Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Jean Dangler

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsMaking Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Jean Dangler Montserrat PieraMontserrat Piera Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 83, Number 2Apr., 2008 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400013518 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright 2008 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.