Spanish History Research Articles

El Quijote en la literatura española según Dámaso Alonso

AbstractThis paper analyzes the texts that Damaso Alonso wrote about Don Quixote. We deepen in two fundamental points: the role of the Cervantes’ novel in the spanish litterature history and the approach of Alonso to the work from the three differents levels according to his own theorical framework: the habitual reading, the critical Reading and the Stylistic or Literary Science.Keywords: Don Quixote, Damaso Alonso, Stylistic, Spanish realism.

Writing Spanish history in the global age: connections and entanglements in the nineteenth century

AbstractModern Spain has remained largely absent from the debates and narratives of global history. In sharp contrast to the early modern period, the case of Spain in the nineteenth century has been overwhelmingly studied from regional and national perspectives. Fortunately, valuable efforts to integrate this country into wider frames of analysis have emerged in the last decade. Building on these writings, this article will argue that connections and entanglements represent two valuable perspectives, which allow the insertion of the Spanish experience into contemporary narratives of global history. The article has two aims. First, it seeks to ‘decentre’ modern Spain, by moving beyond its territorial borders within the Iberian Peninsula, and by examining its global dimensions, through connections with territories, colonies, and nations on several continents. Second, it aims to reveal valuable insights for current debates on global history, which arise from a focus on a country that is usually considered to have been both marginal and peripheral.

30 años de la revista Historia Contemporánea

La revista Historia Contemporánea fue creada en 1988, dentro del departamento de Historia Contemporánea de la Universidad del País Vasco, por iniciativa de Manuel Tuñón de Lara, uno de los principales referentes de la historiografía española al final del franquismo. Desde entonces, ha sido una de las revistas españolas de historia más prestigiosas y, en los últimos años, también una de las que han alcanzado un mayor impacto editorial.Este artículo realiza una historia de los treinta años de esta publicación e identifica sus fases principales. Su evolución se inserta además en los cambios experimentados por la historiografía española de su tiempo, de la que ha sido uno de sus principales referentes. Tanto sus contenidos como su configuración actual resultan significativos de la progresiva asimilación por el medio académico español de las pautas seguidas a escala internacional por las publicaciones científicas.Palabras Clave: Historia de la historiografía; historiografía española; revistas de historia; Manuel Tuñón de Lara

Comparative variationism for the study of language change: five centuries of competition amongst Spanish deontic periphrases

AbstractBased on a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, mainly private letters from the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries (c. 1960), this paper analyses the results of a variationist study on the historical evolution undergone by the Spanish modal periphrases with three distinct auxiliary verbs (haber, tener, deber). Using the heuristic tools of the comparative method, the data show that variation has been constrained by a handful of common factor groups over almost five centuries. Nonetheless, with the odd exception, these factors have conditioned each verb in a different way. Moreover, the sense of this variation changes as time goes by, with especially relevant reorganisation in the first part of the twentieth century. Furthermore, there is a notable association between these constraints and the degree of markedness and the frequency of the conditioning contexts, giving support to a usage-based approach to language change in which cognitive processes such as entrenchment play a decisive role. These data also allow a particular profile to be traced for each modal verb in the history of Spanish, in whichtenerandhaberfinally undergo a complementary distribution, whereasdeberfollows a different pattern. After several centuries of stagnation,tenerbecomes the star in the deontic firmament of spontaneous communication, diffusing abruptly as a change from below in the twentieth century, and replacinghaber, which had been the unmarked variant for centuries.

La ciencia española en la Segunda República y la historiografía

Resumen: La historiografía no ha dedicado mucha atención a las particularidades de la ciencia española durante la Segunda República, quedando diluida esta etapa dentro de las visiones generales del primer tercio del siglo XX que suelen abordar las historias de la cien­cia española. A partir de la revisión de la bibliografía concerniente a este tema, se plantea aquí el interés de desarrollar una perspectiva historiográfica espe­cífica sobre el mismo.Palabras claves: Ciencia, JAE, Universidad, científicos, Segunda República.Abstract: Historiography has yet to pay enough atten­tion to specificity of science during the Spanish Second Republic. The period has been diluted within general visions of the early twentieth-century Spanish History of Science. Here we review the literature and highlight the impor­tance of developing a specific historiographical perspective on the topic.Key words: Science, JAE, University, scientists, Spanish Second Republic.

Satirical Panels against Censorship

In mid-1970s Spain, many new satirical magazines featured a strong political stance opposing Francisco Franco’s regime and in favour of democracy. Magazines with a significant amount of comics-based content constituted a space for political and social critics, as humour allowed them to go further than other media. However, legal authorities tried to censor and punish them. This article analyses the relationship between the Spanish satirical press and censorship and focuses on the difficulties their publishers and authors encountered in expressing their criticism of the country’s social changes. Various cartoonists have been interviewed, and archival research carried out. In-depth analysis of the magazines’ contents is used to gain an overview of a political and social period in recent Spanish history, in which the satirical press uniquely tackled several issues.

Los estados excepcionales

En el presente trabajo se analiza el derecho de excepción en España desde la perspectiva de los cuarenta años de vigencia de la Constitución Española de 1978: la opción del poder constituyente y del legislador, a la vista de la historia constitucional española y del derecho comparado. En particular, se estudia la única ocasión en que fue aplicado el estado de alarma declarado por Real Decreto 1673/2010, de 4 de diciembre, y prorrogado, previa autorización del Congreso de los Diputados, por Real Decreto 1717/2010, de 17 de diciembre, en respuesta a la crisis desencadenada por el cierre del espacio aéreo español como consecuencia del abandono masivo de sus puestos de trabajo por parte de los controladores de tránsito aéreo. El estudio apunta a que se declaró un estado de alarma para una emergencia que hubiera requerido, según la Ley, un estado de excepción, y que incluyó, sin intervención previa del Congreso, medidas propias de un estado de sitio, en contra de lo dispuesto por la Constitución. Se analiza también el procedimiento parlamentario y la problemática del control jurisdiccional y de constitucionalidad, que no existió. En vista de lo anterior se apunta una reforma del derecho de excepción para hacer frente a situaciones urgentes –por imposibilidad de convocatoria del Congreso–, en una dirección similar a la apuntada por la Constitución española de 1931.

The Spanish Civil Wars: A Comparative History of the First Carlist War and the Conflict of the 1930s, by Mark Lawrence

The Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 remains a theme of enduring interest and has generated an immense bibliography in numerous languages. Such attention is perhaps proportionately greater in the United Kingdom than anywhere else outside Spain, all of the major narrative accounts in English (by Hugh Thomas, Anthony Beevor and Paul Preston) having originated there, the first two appearing in two quite different versions a good many years apart. By comparison, even Spanish historians do not seem greatly interested in the First Carlist War (1833–40), a longer conflict that cost even more lives in proportion to the total population, though not such widespread economic destruction. Depending on how one counts, there were at least four different internecine conflicts between liberals and traditionalists in Spain between 1821 and 1876, making nineteenth-century Spain the ‘land of civil war’, but the First Carlist War was the mostly costly and also, in the long run, historically the most decisive. It has nonetheless failed to draw much attention outside the country, with the exception of John F. Coverdale’s The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (1984), and this dearth made very welcome Mark Lawrence’s commendable account, Spain’s First Carlist War, 1833–1840 (2014).

English in times of crisis. Mobility and work among young Spaniards in London

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of English in the decision of young Spaniards to leave Spain at the height of the economic crisis in 2012 when youth unemployment reached over fifty per cent. These young people in their twenties and thirties belong to one of the best trained generations in Spanish history and yet were obliged to migrate in order to try to fulfil their professional aspirations and to learn English in the hope of finding work. In this paper I analyse the ideologies that guide the decisions of these youths and the consequences of investing in a neoliberal logic where the stakes to learn English are high for those without the material and symbolic resources to survive in the city of London.

Pedro de Ribadeneyra's “Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England”: A Spanish Jesuit's History of the English Reformation, ed. and trans. Spencer J. Weinreich

<i>Pedro de Ribadeneyra's “Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England”: A Spanish Jesuit's History of the English Reformation</i>, ed. and trans. Spencer J. Weinreich

The Distracted Believer and the Return to the First Basilica: Marqués de Ureña’s Reflexiones sobre la Arquitectura, Ornato, y Música del Templo of 1785

A key text on Spanish architectural reform, Marques de Urena’s Reflexiones sobre la arquitectura, ornato, y musica del templo of 1785, contains a rich and layered discussion of the doctrinal and aesthetic foundations of ecclesiastical architecture. Urena’s Reflexiones appears at a moment of transition for Spanish architectural history by calling for a return to the ancient basilica type. The paper reconstructs a discussion waged by Urena and his contemporaries on problems within the contemporary Spanish church interior: its use of wooden ornament, ephemerals, transformable altars and other Spanish late-baroque ecclesiastical decor. Thus, the return to origins in Christian architecture might be framed in terms of a wider debate on usage, and the sense in which the basilica offered a corrective for the relationship between the religious building and religious practitioners. The integration of doctrine and aesthetic reason in this defence of the original basilica furthermore demonstrates Urena’s wish to modernize devices that had traditionally undergirded religious practice and featured materially in the education of the faithful. Finally, the paper argues for the importance, given Urena’s introduction of a framework that allowed for an aesthetic way of reasoning, of considering affective responses to architecture in the Iberian and Hispanic context.

Significados de la representación histórica en algunas novelas gráficas contemporáneas

One of the most important features of the recent Spanish production of graphic novels consists in its evident compromise with the historic and literary reality of the country. Many scriptwriters and sketchers, in fact, have chosen to analyze some of the more significant periods of the Spanish history and literature in order to reproduce them in their works through different graphic techniques and narrative strategies. The thin equilibrium which is reached between the representation of the historic and literary reality and the employment of the artistic fiction can be considered, then, one of the most impressive features within their works. The aim of this article is to analyze how some Spanish contemporary authors of graphic novels wish to reinterpret history of well-known personalities and to think about the different aims and techniques used in theirs works.

LEGAL PROTECTION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE PROPERTIES IN SPANISH STATE MUSEUMS

Property of cultural interest is a pearl in the crown of the Spanish Historical Heritage, covered by the highest level of protection granted on the basis of both state-wide and autonomous law. State museums are institutions that not only take under their wing the most valuable properties, but they also constitute, as a whole, the property of cultural interest. This article aims to describe the legal structure of the historical heritage protection in Spain, define the place of the museum in this system, the tasks imposed on museums, as well as issues pertaining to their management.

On the trail of grammaticalization in progress: hasel quebecome a compound relative pronoun in the history of Spanish prepositional relative clauses?

AbstractIn this paper, we examine the grammatical status ofel quein Spanish prepositional relative clauses (el lugaren el quevivo) [the place where I live] from a variationist perspective of the theory of grammaticalization. At least from the nineteenth century onwards, several authors have defended the nature ofel queas a compound relative pronoun, even if these forms continue alternating today with others without the article [el lugaren quevivo], in contrast toel cual, a fully grammaticalized relative since the late fifteenth century.Based on a 3,200,000 word corpus of immediacy text (mainly private letters), we test the hypothesis ofel quebeing a case of grammaticalization in progress from a variationist point of view, examining in depth what happens inside the grammar and the socio-stylistic matrix in different periods of history, from 1700 to 1960. The idea underlying this approach is that the structure of changes as well as the grammaticalization in progress can be inferred from the comparative analysis between different quantitative magnitudes of functionally similar variants. To do so, we have performed three independent mixed-effects regression analyses (Rbrul), one for each century.The results of these comparative analyses confirm the progression ofel quein prepositional subordinate clauses between the early eighteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Yet, this progression has taken place at a slow pace and, objectively, can only be described as moderate. Moreover, a number of elements of continuity in history are revealed, such as several conditioning factors that are systematically selected and with the same explanatory direction in all periods. This casts serious doubt on the existence of a grammaticalization in progress in the case ofel que, and sees the evolution as not essentially different from other morphosyntactic changes that have taken place in the history of Spanish.

La Diputación Permanente a la luz de cuatro décadas de vida parlamentaria

La Diputación Permanente, que reaparece en la historia constitucional española en 1978 como órgano de garantía, estabilidad y permanencia, en aquellos períodos en que las Cámaras no estén reunidas, hayan sido disueltas o haya expirado su mandato, ha ido perfilando sus contornos y llenando lagunas que existían en su configuración, a lo largo de cuatro décadas de vida parlamentaria. Al mismo tiempo ha ido ganando en dimension y presencia, puesto que cada vez tiene más miembros y se reúne con mayor frecuencia y en sesiones más largas, hasta el punto de resultar un factor adicional de lo que algún autor ha llamado, en referencia a un contexto más amplio, la continuidad del Parlamento como principio constitucional fundamental, consolidado y expansivo. Sin embargo, y pese a que en términos generales ha cumplido bien su papel en ambas Cámaras, hay buenas razones para pensar, a la vista de cómo ha crecido el órgano, que tanto la interpretación restrictiva predominante sobre el alcance de la más sustancial de sus funciones, “velar por los poderes de las Cámaras”, como la práctica seguida respecto de la más ejercitada de aquellas, “solicitar sesiones extraordinarias de las Cámaras”, que ha propiciado el afianzamiento de un tipo de debate que entra en el fondo de lo que originalmente se quiere discutir en el Pleno, pero sin la presencia del miembro del Gobierno a quién se pretende controlar, guiado además, casi exclusivamente, por la rigidez del criterio político de las mayorías de turno, ...

Representative Government and Constitutional Reality: Spain between Literature and Political Thought

Abstract The article analyses how the features of modern political representation have developed in Spanish constitutional history from a multidisciplinary perspective (political philosophy, political science, constitutional law and literature). Between the eighteenth- to the twentieth-century, indeed, the Kingdom of Spain experienced transformations in the concepts of sovereignty, periodic suffrage, free public opinion, and the free and non-revocable mandate. The article also takes into account how the evolution of concepts at stake affected the evolution of the others.

Actualidad de la renovación pedagógica en la Comunidad de Madrid: un estudio a través de centros escolares representativos

Resumen La historia de la renovación pedagógica española alberga una extensa y plural actividad que constata la búsqueda de una escuela configurada no solo con finalidad académica, sino también entendida como motor de transformación personal, cultural y social. Son numerosos los centros educativos que a lo largo de la historia española evidencian esta búsqueda, construyendo una mirada socio-educativa crítica e innovadora sobre la educación. A lo largo del artículo se estudian once centros escolares de educación primaria, representativos de la renovación pedagógica, que estaban activos durante el curso académico 2012-2013 en la Comunidad de Madrid. La investigación se ha realizado a través del estudio de bibliografía destacada, entrevistas a miembros significativos, observaciones de centros y análisis de contenido de proyectos educativos. Se establecen dos ejes de análisis: metodología e ideario pedagógico de los centros y principales dificultades en la realización de su proyecto educativo. Los resultados muestran que cada uno de los centros refleja una singularidad educativa propia. Sin embargo, todos revelan múltiples aspectos educativos comunes que ponen en cuestión elementos muy arraigados en la cultura pedagógica española, a saber: libro de texto como material exclusivo de trabajo, escasa participación de padres y madres, y por último, clase magistral como único método de relación pedagógica.

Ficciones víricas y ficciones sacrificiales. Notas sobre biopolítica y contagio en España

Este artículo examina los límites del discurso neoliberal tal y como se despliegan a lo largo de dos diferentes líneas narrativas, ubicuas en la cultura de masas de los últimos años: las ficciones de la infección vírica y las ficciones del sacrificio social. Las primeras incluyen películas sobre zombis y relatos sobre el contagio en general (28 Days Later, Land of the Dead, The Walking Dead, Contagion, Containment, Contracted, etc.); las segundas se centran normalmente en una civilización distópica cuya estabilidad sólo puede ser garantizada por el sacrificio de uno o varios de sus miembros, casi siempre bajo la forma de un juego (The Hunger Games, The Purge, The Cabin in the Woods, Elysium, The Thinning, or The Maze Runner). La atención que estas dos narrativas prestan a la inmunización las separa de aquellos relatos que se sustentan sobre la amenaza de – y el conflicto con – cierto género de alteridad, pero también las condena al callejón sin salida de la ideología neoliberal, donde el nuevo orden no parece dejar espacio a una alternativa viable. Como trato de mostrar, sin embargo, las ficciones víricas y las ficciones sacrificiales están ya asfaltando el camino hacia la superación de este callejón sin salida. Estudiando estas narrativas desde el punto de vista de dos hitos de la historia reciente española (el nacimiento de la telerrealidad a principios de los 2000 y el primer brote de ébola en 2014), defiendo que la ideología neoliberal es, en su forma más pura, un discurso traumático que sólo se puede manifestar como un estado de excepción siempre a punto de dar paso a otra cosa.

The Monarchy and the Transition to Democracy in Spain

In the 1970s, the Spanish monarchy, represented by King Juan Carlos I, appeared in an unexpected role of the initiator of radical social change. Juan Carlos, the grandson of King Alfonso XIII, deposed in 1931, was brought up by Franco. After the death of Caudillo in November 1975, he assumed the post of head of state. Initially, the king, who shared liberal views, was in a very difficult situation. He was considered as a heir of Franco, he was deprived of democratic and dynastic legitimacy. Juan Carlos managed to appoint his trustees – T. Fernandez-Miranda and A. Souares to key government posts. They had carried out a number of reforms and as a result dismantled the authoritarian Franco regime and led the country to democracy. The king himself, remaining behind the scenes, acted as an arbiter, a “motor” and patron of the process of changes. In Spanish society, the indifference and even the negative attitude towards the monarchy was replaced by confidence in the necessity and usefulness of this institution. Unfortunately, in the last years of the reign of Juan Carlos, his popularity fell sharply due to corruption scandals in the royal family. However, giving an overall assessment of the role of Juan Carlos in Spanish history, the first place should be given to his services, not mistakes. The Spaniards at one time adopted a monarchy, because they were subdued by the king, and not by the monarchy as an institution.

¿Qué liberaron las medidas liberales? La circulación de la tierra en la España del siglo XIX

The idea of “liberating or freeing up” land can be found in numerous studies of Spain’s economic evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many of the measures implemented by the liberals were related to land, some of which have been considered key by Spanish historians. However, recent empirical studies have shown very dynamic land markets even during the Ancien Régime, raising the question of whether the changes should be attributed to liberal measures. This article offers a broad view of the whole of Spain, combining statistics generated by land registry institutions with the most detailed analysis of a geographical area of marked economic vitality and registry activity –the judicial district of Figueres in north-eastern Catalonia. By pointing out the diversity of land ownership forms, practices and circulation, these two approaches call into question the idea that the latter accelerated in the liberal period, and invite us to radically reconsider the object of study and the very process of liberal revolution.