Early Modern Spanish World Research Articles

Thinking with the Spanish Empire: The Religious Orders and World Evangelization

ABSTRACT This article argues that in order to achieve a fuller and more accurate understanding of the history of the early modern Spanish world, we need to study the Spanish Empire as an integrated and coherent unit of analysis, instead of separating it into nation-state fragments or simply placing it in the background of our studies. It was an empire that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was not only European and American but also African and Asian, especially during the period of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns between 1580 and 1640. An imperial mindset, great mobility, and a global perspective characterized the lives and mentalities of many inhabitants of the empire. This was especially evident in the case of the religious orders, which played a fundamental role in the history of the Spanish Empire. Many of their members, both male and female, thought and acted within a worldwide framework, not only because they saw the conversion of all the peoples of the world to Catholicism as their inescapable, pressing task, but also because they inhabited a polity whose mental horizons were equally global in scope.

Introduction: “ongoing” mobilities in the Early-Modern Spanish world

ABSTRACT Lives characterised by staggered, stepwise or “ongoing” mobility were ubiquitous in the Early-Modern Spanish world. However, individuals who repeatedly alternated long-distance relocation with prolonged periods of sojourn in different places have attracted limited attention from historians. Contemporary migration studies, by contrast, increasingly stress the importance of considering experiences of mobility from a longitudinal perspective. By doing so, they highlight how, over time and through repeated migrations, individuals and families often transcend official immigration categories, acquire and deploy skills, rely on, create and destroy relational networks, and produce narratives that allow them to make sense of both their trajectories and their experiences of social and place insertion. Drawing on insights from this scholarship and the “new mobilities paradigm,” adopting a narrative, biographical or life-cycle approach, to the mobile lives of enslaved individuals in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, of mestizo children travelling to and from Spain, of Canarian migrants, royal officials and merchants, the contributors to this special issue aim to further our understanding of how the experiences of these individuals were central to the construction and transformation of religious ideas, personal and political identities, and familial, commercial and patronage networks that articulated the early modern Spanish world.

Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World

In Bad Christians, New Spains, Byron Ellsworth Hamann has attempted an ambitious goal—comparing the experiences of Indigenous Mesoamericans and Spanish moriscos (descendants of Muslim converts to Christianity)—through a tightly focused monograph on two sets of Inquisition trials, one on each side of the Atlantic. Hamann analyzes these trials in dialogue to provide evidence of the interconnections across the Spanish empire in the sixteenth century. His focus on a “Mediterratlantic world” provides concrete examples of the global vision of early modern Spaniards, thus carrying forward the work of scholars such as Francisco Bethencourt and Kimberly Lynn on the Inquisition, Henry Kamen on Spain’s empire, and Sabine MacCormack on the legacy of antiquity in the early modern Spanish world. Hamann’s monograph contributes to the ongoing project of destabilizing the assumption that ideas, knowledge, and power flowed exclusively from the center to the periphery. He also highlights the ways in which relations between local authorities and minority populations were more complex than commonly imagined, building on the work of scholars such as James Tueller and Patrick O’Banion.His two microstudies are both focused in the 1540s. One set of trials took place in Oaxaca, located today in Mexico; while the other set of trials occurred in Valencia, Spain. Comparing these trials is productive, although at times Hamann underestimates the differences between the episcopal trials in Oaxaca (under the authority of the bishop and ultimately the Pope) and the Spanish Inquisition trials in Valencia (a state office under the authority of the inquisitor general and ultimately the king). Hamann rightly notes that the Spanish Inquisition was not established in New Spain until 1571, and in any event did not have the authority to try Indigenous people in the Americas—but the implications of this key difference between the experiences of Indigenous Americans and moriscos could have been considered in more detail throughout the monograph.Hamann begins his book with a brief introduction and a first chapter introducing his case studies, together with a broad overview of historiographical comparisons of Spanish interactions with Muslims and Native Americans. His second chapter maps out these two communities, introduces a summary of inquisitorial procedures, and establishes his analytical approach. From there, Hamann moves to the heart of his analysis, namely, a series of thematic chapters addressing the diversity of Catholic practices (chapter 3); material culture, particularly mosques and sculptures of Indigenous deities (chapter 4); iconoclastic violence (chapter 5); practices regarding the dead (chapter 6); and a discussion of various linguistic means of discussing time and the relationship between past, present, and future as a mechanism of exerting authority over subject populations (chapter 7). Chapter 5, “Ruination,” with its discussion of the destruction of mosques, “idols,” temples, and even clothing, emphasizes the experience of sacred violence and the relative importance of public practices rather than interior beliefs. Hamann also points out that by destroying these items and consigning them to the past, the destroyers also created something new, namely, the ruin, which continued to have an impact on surrounding communities. This is his most compelling chapter.Comparative transatlantic scholarship is complex and involves mastering multiple historiographies. Hamann is relatively new to inquisitorial research and inquisitorial historiography, and as a result he is cautious in how he reads, transcribes, and analyzes the documents. But despite that occasional hesitance he has provided an interesting window into the exercise of authority and resistance to that authority across a religiously and ethnically diverse mid-sixteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world.

Contradicción, aculturación y celebración en El negro del serafín de Vélez de Guevara

Abstract: This article draws new attention to El negro del serafín , by Luis Vélez de Guevara, a hagiographic drama focused on the struggle for freedom and the rise to fame as a Franciscan friar of a Black protagonist. Despite evidence of enthusiastic reception at its time of composition and staging (ca. 1642–43), the comedia has remained obscure in recent times. In considering the historical and cultural contexts of the notion of Black sainthood in early modern Spain and Sicily overall and the theatrical subgenre of plays celebrating Black saints ( comedia de santos negros ), the article finds the comedia serves as a window through which to examine how religious beliefs and cultural practices informed representations of Blackness. Through a close reading of the play, I explore how Vélez de Guevara builds a hagiographic drama that epitomizes the fundamental duality of Renaissance and Baroque comedies that is the interplay of contradiction and celebration. As well, I ponder how the representation of the comedia's protagonist, Rosambuco, illustrates elements of the Franciscan order's quest to bring about the acculturation of Blacks in the early modern Spanish world.

Missionaries in the Early Modern Spanish World

Missionaries in the Early Modern Spanish World

Court Cities Celebrate Prince Baltasar Carlos: Loyalty, Status, and Identity in the Early Modern Spanish World

Upon the birth of the Spanish prince Baltasar Carlos in 1629, Spanish subjects feasted and put on pageants and processions in celebration. Numerous relaciones , or official reports, recounted the responses to the royal birth in the court cities of Madrid and Lima. Although the authors of these relaciones sought to project royal power, they also alluded to the ways in which local experiences, rank, race, and the particular aims of Spanish subjects complicated their imperial identities and their performances of loyalty. Subjects were not merely spectators; they were also participants and actors in these festivals. By performing loyalty to the new prince, people in court cities advanced their own corporate and individual agendas. In the process, they rewrote their relationships to the crown and each other.

Women of the Page: Convent Culture in the Early Modern Spanish World.

<i>Women of the Page: Convent Culture in the Early Modern Spanish World</i>.

Women’s Power and Material Exchange in Transatlantic Spain, 1550s–1650s

The early modern dowry letter constituted a panoramic vision of the material and consumer life of a woman upon entering into marriage. It also contained a subjugating discourse that converted her into a possession belonging to her husband. At the same time, these letters publically exposed her material potency within the home. Correspondence couples exchanged after settling into conjugal life, particularly when considerable distance separated the couple, subsequently reveals women’s authority and domain over matrimonial materiality and suggests that husbands relied upon it to a significant degree, such that, once separated from their wives, men’s quality of life significantly worsened despite sustaining the means to generate income. This article approaches the subject of material possession as a source of power and authority exercised by women of varying backgrounds over men in the early-modern Spanish world and uncovers a number of archival sources located in Mexico and Spain.

The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima

This article examines the controversial fashion of veiling in the early modern Spanish world. Working across the media of art, literature, and the law, it explores the intersecting ways in which moralists, legislators, playwrights, painters, and poets constructed the figure of the veiled lady ( tapada ) as a social type at once alluring and deeply unsettling. We provide an explanation of the terminology and taxonomy of veiling, with illustrations to show the various styles of face-covering popular in early modern Spain. We then argue that this fashion and the controversy—as well as the entertainment—it generated were closely tied to Spain’s rise as an imperial power, especially to the new forms of urbanism that developed in the ancient city of Seville and the much younger capitals of Madrid and Lima. As these rapidly expanding cities offered their inhabitants new spaces of social interaction and new possibilities for social mobility, wealth, and consumerism, their changing urban landscapes and complex demographics also generated anxieties of failure and deception. Cultural concerns regarding religious practice, the regulation of domestic and public space, and racial and class distinctions coalesced around the figure of the tapada . Seductive, mysterious, and rebellious, she absorbed the fantasies and fears of urban life in three of the most dynamic cities of imperial Spain.

“The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima” by Laura Bass and Amanda Wunder

“The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima” by Laura Bass and Amanda Wunder

Navigating Identities: The Case of a Morisco Slave in Seventeenth-Century New Spain

In 1660 Cristóbal de la Cruz presented himself before the commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Veracruz, Mexico, claiming to be afflicted by doubts about the Catholic faith. Born in Algiers and captured at the age of nine or ten by a Spanish galley force, he was taken to Spain, where he was quickly sold into slavery and baptized. Thirty years later, De la Cruz denounced himself to the Mexican inquisitorial tribunal and proceeded to recount to the inquisitors a detailed and fascinating story of his life as he crossed Iberian and Mediterranean landscapes: escaping from his masters and being re-enslaved, encountering Muslims and renouncing Christianity, denouncing his guilt remorsefully before the Inquisitions of Barcelona and Seville, and moving between belief in Catholicism and Islam. His case provides important insights into the relationship between religious identity and the regulatory efforts of powerful institutions in the early modern Spanish world.

:Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World

Contents: Women in texts: From language to representation, Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera Sclaves molt fortes, senyors invalts: Sex, lies and paternity suits in 15th-century Spain, Debra Blumenthal The gender of shared sovereignty: texts and the royal marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt Writing (for) her life: Judeo-conversas in early modern Spain, Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau Representing madness: text , gender and sexuality in early Habsburg Spain, Bethany Aram Patience and pluck Job's wife, conflict and resistance in Morisco manuscripts hidden in the 16th century, Mary Elizabeth Perry The three lives of the Vida: The uses of convent autobiography, Alison Weber Visualizing gender on the page in convent literature, Sherry M. Velasco Forms of authority: women's legal representations in mid-colonial Cuzco, Kathryn Burns The making of a visionary woman: The life of Beatriz Ana Ruiz, 1666-1735, Luis R. Corteguera textual uncertainties: the written legacy of women entrepreneurs in 18th-century Barcelona, Marta V. Vicente, Index.

Review: Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World

Review: Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World

Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (review)

Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (review)