Spanish Armada Research Articles

Lost in Translation; The Evolution of Spanish Translations and the Black Legend in England from 1578 to 1740

This paper traces the evolution of the Black Legend using Spanish accounts of the colonization of the Americas published in English from 1578 to 1740. The Black Legend, largely spread by English, Dutch, and German Protestants, was an anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish narrative demonizing the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Relying in particular on the English appropriation of Spanish Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, originally published in Spanish in 1552, the thesis argues that English editions of the text reflect England's political and religious turmoil in the 16th and 18th centuries. Previous work on the Black Legend centered on how the authors of New World accounts intended to have their work received in Europe. By studying printed paratexts, including dedicatory letters to patrons, letters to the readers, and the translations themselves, I show how English publishers and translators, and the statesmen who sponsored these publications sought to use Bartolomé de Las Casas's accounts as political. The conquest of the New World brought enormous wealth and power to Spain. At the same time, throughout this period, England suffered religious and political conflicts that boiled over into civil war in the mid-17th century. Many in England feared being overrun by a Catholic Empire or overthrown by Catholics from within. Facing various religious and political crises at home English leaders and booksellers used translations of Las Casas's work to advance their own hopes of British imperial expansion in the New World and to encourage the English to unite in the face of the Spanish threats, such as the Netherlands Civil War and Spanish Armada.

Sixteenth century recessed armour: evaluating links with the Spanish Armada

Several black and white Italian cabassets, and associated armours, are described. All share an unusual, recessed construction and typically bear an etched family crest on the front. The cabassets also have (1) a predominantly Spanish distribution, (2) a high frequency of damage, including tears (that may reflect exposure to ballistic projectiles), (3) a high frequency of paired holes in the brim (for conversion into make-shift buckets?), and (4) distinctive copper-alloy plume-holders. We critically evaluate the stylistic, historical, geographic, ballistic and archaeological evidence that may link these recessed cabassets with the 1588 Spanish Armada. Furthermore, the distinctive family crest on the cabassets, and one breastplate, may provide specific links with a Spanish infantry company commanded by Captain Fernando de Ayala on the Armada’s flag galleass, the San Lorenzo. In combination, these independent lines of evidence suggest that the recessed cabassets were used by troops on the Spanish Armada.

Intelligence, Strategy and Governance in the Twenty-first Century

In Decision Advantage: Intelligence in International Politics from the Spanish Armada to Cyberwar, Jennifer E. Sims seeks to correct popular misconceptions of how espionage operates and rebut the views of those who dismiss its importance in international politics. Examining several well-documented historical cases, she argues that intelligence is widely misunderstood, on the common assumption that it consists of only what intelligence institutions do. With this in mind, she concludes that the proper goal of a government in utilising intelligence should be ‘the orchestration of intelligence in light of the competitive moment’ – ‘orchestration’ being a two-way street where communications pass up and down the chain between decision-makers and intelligence professionals, whom she believes should be encouraged to express strong views. Sims understands that an intelligence community reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the society it represents, and the abilities of the officials appointed to manage it and elected to oversee it. But she remains cautiously optimistic, providing an erudite road map for how ‘decision advantage’ can be realised.

Decision advantage: intelligence in international politics from the Spanish Armada to cyberwar

Decision advantage: intelligence in international politics from the Spanish Armada to cyberwar

Joyce, Galway and the Spanish Armada

James Joyce visited Galway and the Aran Islands in 1912 and took advantage of the occasion to write two articles in Italian that he published in Il Piccolo della Sera in 1912. I analyse the vision that Joyce conveyed of the Spanish Armada both in these articles and later in Ulysses (1922) and in Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s knowledge of the 1588-Armada episode and of the shipwrecks of several Spanish vessels in the vicinity of Galway are the result of both the propagandistic narration usually provided by pro-British historiography and by his presumed readings on the history of the city and the nearby Aran Islands. In such writings, Joyce may have intended, on the one hand, to reflect his tacit acceptance of the imperialism exercised by post-Victorian Britain over Ireland, fully convinced that the decline of the Spanish Empire had begun with the Armada’s defeat against Elizabethan England in 1588. He believed this event gave rise to the birth of the British Empire. On the other hand, Joyce reflects in them his only moderate Irish pride for the supposed humanitarian actions of the population of Galway (the birthplace of Nora), a city he described both as “Spanish” and as sympathetic towards the Armada castaways in Ireland. Joyce’s employment of the Irish chapter of the Gran Armada’s historical episode contributes with a relevant insight about his perception of British imperialism in Ireland.

The propagandistic narration of the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the mythical construction of sir Francis Drake in Romantic Britain

The propagandistic narration of the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the mythical construction of sir Francis Drake in Romantic Britain

Lope de Vega Really Did Embark on the Spanish Armada

«A perplexing lacuna in the story of Lope’s life is the year 1588» wrote Rudolf Schevill in 1941. He found particularly perplexing the question of whether or not El Fénix sailed with the Spanish Armada. In 2015, RTVE attempted to fill this lacuna in episode 2 of their series El ministerio del tiempo. Using Fax, Skype and an Internet search, the “ministry” checks the embarkation lists of the Armada and is horrified to find that Lope de Vega has embarked on San Esteban, a ship that will be wrecked in Ireland, where the whole ship’s company will die. The “ministry” manages to move him to San Juan de Portugal, but only «a última hora» because «Las listas de tripulación nos llegan a última hora». The scriptwriters came surprisingly close to the truth.

A legyőzhetetlenség listája

Owing to the propaganda campaign which accompanied the actual military campaign of the Invincible Armada against England in 1588 and which was employed very consciously by both belligerent parties, a huge amount of sources has come down to us representing a wide variety of genres from ballads to spy letters and from paintings to coins. The topic of the paper is the analysis of a single news pamphlet containing a detailed list regarding the size and the equipment of the fleet as well as the names of the most important participants. These data were gathered and recorded at the muster of the Spanish Armada held in Lisbon in May 1588, and consequently quickly published and distributed throughout Europe. The paper examines both the content and the form of the pamphlet. What was the point of publishing and distributing such a rather dull text full of numbers and data? What kind of readership might it have been interesting to and what could they learn from it? And finally, what was the significance and function of using the form of the list?

SOPRENE: Assessment of the Spanish Armada’s Predictive Maintenance Tool for Naval Assets

Predictive maintenance has lately proved to be a useful tool for optimizing costs, performance and systems availability. Furthermore, the greater and more complex the system, the higher the benefit but also the less applied: Architectural, computational and complexity limitations have historically ballasted the adoption of predictive maintenance on the biggest systems. This has been especially true in military systems where the security and criticality of the operations do not accept uncertainty. This paper describes the work conducted in addressing these challenges, aiming to evaluate its applicability in a real scenario: It presents a specific design and development for an actual big and diverse ecosystem of equipment, proposing an semi-unsupervised predictive maintenance system. In addition, it depicts the solution deployment, test and technological adoption of real-world military operative environments and validates the applicability.

A Study of Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)

In this study, the researcher has mentioned the writers and their major works in Elizabethan age (1558-1603). The researcher has mentioned almost nineteen writers and their famous works. By reading this research paper, any general reader can easily understand that who are the major writers of the age and what are their famous works. The language and method of presenting the data are very easy. The researcher also has mentioned the major contributions of this era’s writers. As we know that University Wits also fall in this era, thus the researcher has mentioned them and their works too. S. Dutta (2014) declared that The University Wits is a phrase used to title a group of late 16th-century English pamphleteers and playwrights who were studied at the universities Cambridge and Oxford. They appeared famous worldly writers. This era has reminisced for its richness of drama and poetry. This era ended in 1603. Elizabeth turns out to be one of the greatest prominent royals in English history, mainly after 1588, when the English beat the Spanish Armada which had been sent by Spain to reestablish Catholicism and defeat England. All the way through the Elizabethan age, English literature has changed from a shell into a delightful being with imagination, creativeness, and boundless stories. It was not about mystery or miracle plays and the poetry was not nearby religion and the principles addressed in the Church.

After the Armada: thanksgiving in Ireland, 1589

Abstract Following the failure of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I ordered a formal and public thanksgiving for England’s deliverance. Soon after, the queen and her privy council determined that her kingdom of Ireland should also give thanks. This Irish thanksgiving, celebrated in late January 1589, represents a rare example of a government-ordered national event that sought to draw together Elizabeth’s subjects in Ireland to give thanks to God and to pray with one voice for their queen and the continued success of her reign. This article explores the circumstances surrounding Ireland’s first thanksgiving to see what this national day of commemoration can tell us about the state of English rule in later Elizabethan Ireland. The very fact that a public display of this kind was held in Ireland at all is significant. It was indicative of the confidence of a government which had at last exerted its control over most of Ireland and which could reasonably expect the queen’s subjects there to behave as they had in England.

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider

Reviewed by: The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider Matt D. Childs (bio) The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World elena a. schneider University of North Carolina Press, 2018 360 pp. In June 1762, Britain brought the Seven Years’ War to Havana, Cuba, the largest city in the Caribbean, the third largest in the Americas, and Spain’s gateway to its vast empire in mainland Latin America. Assembled outside of Havana’s harbor was a British force that would number 28,400 sailors, soldiers, and enslaved Africans—amazingly more people than lived in any British colonial city in the Americas at the time. After a six-week siege that even involved digging a tunnel under the famous Moro military fortress that guarded Havana’s deep harbor to dynamite its walls, the Spanish finally surrendered. The British would occupy Havana for nearly a year before it would be returned to Spain in exchange for Florida in 1763. Spain and Britain alike recognized the siege and occupation of Havana as a watershed moment in the history of the Atlantic world, often giving it as much historical weight as the arrival of Columbus in the 1490s and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given the importance of the occupation of Havana for shaping Caribbean, Imperial, and Atlantic history, scholars have analyzed the event from military, political, economic, and diplomatic angles, which has produced a long and detailed historiography. Historian Elena Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana is the latest addition to this largest body of scholarship, and without a doubt it is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of the siege and occupation of Havana, but mainly to illustrate a different story. For example, the event often figures as one of the last battles of the Seven Years’ War that forced Spain to the peace table, or the resistance by Cuban colonists is [End Page 499] highlighted as an early form of nationalism, or most frequently the economic changes initiated by the British during their brief occupation is portrayed as the first step in the development of the Cuban plantation system. Schneider breaks with this scholarly tradition whereby the occupation of Havana is leveraged to make an argument about a different historical topic. Instead, she explains that methodologically her study is a longue durée history of the preceding interactions between the British and Spanish in the Caribbean before the siege, a detailed narrative and analysis of the occupation and of the long-lasting consequences after Havana returned to Spanish rule. In developing this line of analysis, Schneider has performed exhaustive research in over two dozen archives in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean working in sources that range from papers relating to heads of state discussing political and military events down to the minutiae of individual sale transactions recorded by notaries. Drawing on this diverse source base, she skillfully juggles multiple levels of analysis that range from the macro analysis of global-structural events to the micro scale of individual actions by the enslaved produced out of contingency and expediency. Utilizing these sources and examining the occupation of Havana from a long historical view, Schneider argues that “the British invasion and occupation of a Spanish colonial space was not the radical rupture in Cuban history that it was once depicted as being . . . [but rather] the intensification of existing patterns and processes of interactions . . directly connected to slavery, the slave trade, and population of African descent . . . before during and after the events that transpired in 1762 and 1763” (9). In buttressing her argument on how the occupation of Havana was an intensification of preexisting patterns and accelerated interactions between colonies and empires in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Schneider has structured her book through six detailed chapters separated into three parts. In part 1, “Origins,” the author provides an intellectual and cultural history of what she wittingly labels the “Deep History of British Plots against Havana,” which traces schemes, conspiracies, and actions to take Havana and New World Spanish lands fueled by religious and imperial rivalries. Collectively, these early...

Building a Wall Around Tudor England: Coastal Forts and Fantasies of Border Control in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

This article examines the border wall and the image of fortress England in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and early 1590s nationalist discourse. While Greene recognizes the need for an international outlook in geopolitics, Bacon’s wall speaks to contemporary interest in coastal fortifications and brass ordnance in the wake of the Spanish Armada. Greene lampoons the wall as magical thinking, but the play clings to metaphorical walls as more cost-effective symbols of national security and autonomy. The play’s awkward combination of pan-European sentiment and strident nationalism offers a prophetic commentary on post-Brexit Britain.

TRA DON GIOVANNI D’AUSTRIA E IL DUCA DI GUISA. ALCUNE RIFLESSIONI SUL CARDINAL FILOMARINO DURANTE LA RIVOLTA NAPOLETANA DEL 1647-48

The Cardinal and Archbishop of Naples Ascanio Filomarino was one of the main protagonists of the so-called of Historians have emphasized above all his role of mediator during the first ten and most celebrated days of the revolt, that were characterized by the presence of the pescivendolo at the head of the rebels. The article proposes to show that the Archbishop of Naples was much more than a simple mediator between the warring parties, because he played a key role and openly took position in the course of the revolt. In particular, the attention will be focused on the period between October 1647 and April 1648, when Filomarino had to confront two illustrious characters: Don Juan of Austria, sent from Madrid to the command of the Spanish Armada, and the French noble Henri II of Guise, one of the many leaders who tried to impose themselves as head of the revolt after the death of Masaniello.

The University Archive: Early Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library

The University ArchiveEarly Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library Alexander Kupfer (bio) Well before the National Archives or Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures, a December 1910 article in the Olean [N.Y.] Evening Times proposed that famed itinerant lecturer and exhibitor Lyman H. Howe establish a National Film Library. The author was impressed by the positive press and enthusiastic public reception to Howe’s moving pictures of the funeral of England’s King Edward. The Evening Times’s suggestion to create a film library was also an attempt to legitimate Howe’s pictures as important historical documents worthy of long-term safekeeping. The author proclaimed, “Think of what it would be if we could see the funeral of Julius Caesar, a gladiatorial contest, the maneuvers of the Spanish Armada, the street life of ancient Athens or even a simple Babylonian or Egyptian walking to his business.”1 [End Page 1] Howe never established a motion picture library. However, throughout the 1910s, the idea of forming a collection of significant American films was still frequently raised. Perhaps recognizing the magnitude of this mission, film industry leaders often sought to involve the federal government in the efforts to save early movies. In a widely reprinted interview in 1919, Thomas Edison suggested that the government build a library of educational and industrial motion pictures in Washington, D.C., to provide access to “all institutions in the United States, even to the most rural schoolhouses.”2 Industry support for a film library continued with Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Shortly after he was hired in 1922, Hays began lobbying for a government-funded archive of motion pictures produced by Hollywood studios. Hays discussed with Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover plans to construct a nitrate vault in the basement of the White House to preserve historically important movies of “national cultural value.”3 Will Hays’s lobbying efforts have been singled out by historians of the film preservation movement in the United States as illustrative of the first wave of efforts to create a federal motion picture collection through an appeal to nationalistic discourse. Individuals outside the film industry were likewise interested in forming a national collection of American motion pictures. Scholars interested in the early history of film preservation have particularly focused on the efforts of the federal government. As a result, Janna Jones explains, the history of archiving has been primarily defined by the efforts of the National Archives and the Library of Congress to build a national film library for the purpose of enhancing the reputation of the United States at home and abroad.4 This focus on the federal government’s role in film preservation has meant that the history and importance of university collections of educational, industrial, and sponsored motion pictures have been largely overlooked. Film collections in universities preceded these other archives by decades, as numerous colleges started acquiring motion pictures in the 1910s. The largest collections, both in terms of number of reels of film and audience size, were operated by university extension divisions that established visual instruction programs to distribute educational films and media to schools and off-campus groups. The circulating libraries at institutions including the Universities of Indiana, Wisconsin, California, and Texas were headed by largely unknown administrators who were not archivists or cinephiles but rather valued cinema for its utility as an educational tool. Although contemporary scholars, particularly ones interested in the history of educational and nontheatrical cinema, have explored cinema’s incorporation in university curricula beginning in the mid-1910s, the importance of these early [End Page 2] collections to the history of motion picture preservation in the United States requires further exploration. University film collections offer an alternative site from which to consider the origins of motion picture preservation. In 1920, two years before Hays was hired by the MPPDA, administrators of visual instruction programs proposed the establishment of a National Film Negative Library (NFNL) in Washington, D.C. They sought to connect the goals of long-term film preservation to the more established project of visual education. The library...

‘Maymd soldiours or poore schollers’

The present article suggests that war and peace are explored in the works of Thomas Nashe as figures for the condition of the writer. Throughout his career, including his troubles with the authorities and his conflict with Gabriel Harvey, Nashe makes use of the war metaphor in order to elaborate on the condition of authorship. However, war is also a literal presence in Nashe’s texts, which frequently reference events like the Spanish Armada or the campaign in Ireland. Thus, the article examines the complex interplay between social reality and self-referential metaphor that characterizes Nashe’s use and descriptions of warfare.

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author

A Historical View of Motion Sickness-A Plague at Sea and on Land, Also with Military Impact.

Seasickness and its triggers, symptoms, and preventive measures were well known in antiquity. This chapter is based on an analysis of descriptions of motion sickness, in particular seasickness, in ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese literature. A systematic search was made from the Greek period beginning with Homer in 800 BC to the late Roman period and ending with Aetios Amidenos in 600 AD, as well as in the Chinese medical classics dating from around 300 AD. Major aspects are the following: body movements caused by waves were identified in all cultures as the critical stimuli. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that other illnesses and the mental state could precipitate seasickness and that experienced sailors were highly resistant to it (habituation). The Chinese observed that children were particularly susceptible to motion sickness; they first described the type of motion sickness induced by traveling in carts (cart-sickness) or being transported on a litter or in a sedan chair (litter-sickness). The western classics recommended therapeutic measures like fasting or specific diets, pleasant fragrancies, medicinal plants like white hellebore (containing various alkaloids), or a mixture of wine and wormwood. The East knew more unusual measures, such as drinking the urine of young boys, swallowing white sand-syrup, collecting water drops from a bamboo stick, or hiding earth from the kitchen hearth under the hair. The Greek view of the pathophysiology of seasickness was based on the humoral theory of Empedokles and Aristoteles and differed from the Chinese medicine of correspondences, which attributed malfunctions to certain body substances and the life force Qi. Many sources emphasized the impact of seasickness on military actions and famous naval battles such as the Battle of the Red Cliff, which marked the end of the Han dynasty in China, or the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588. A peculiar form of motion sickness is associated with Napoleon’s camel corps during the Egyptian campaign of 1798/1799, a sickness induced by riding on a camel. Thus, motion sickness in antiquity was known as a physiological response to unadapted body motions during passive transportation as well as a plague at sea.

Waterloo and British Romanticism

Waterloo and British Romanticism INTRODUCTION I N THE FALL OF 1989 ROBERT M. MANIQUIS EDITED A SPECIAL ISSUE OF Studies in Romanticism on the subject of “English Romanticism and the French Revolution.” Published in the wake of that year’s bicentenary events, the issue was headed by Marilyn Butler’s article “Telling it Like a Story: The French Revolution as Narrative,” in which she observed the disparity between “the media’s zest for anniversaries” and “the compulsion of the modern academic historian to de-narrativize history.”1 A veteran of numerous anniversary events in the 1980s—from the quincentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the 400th birthday of Cambridge Univer­ sity Press—Butler noted wryly, “Being an academic at these parties is being the bad fairy at the christening. We want to replace historical folklore, which is at the heart oftheir celebration, with a more complex, fragmented impression of the past.” Butler’s endorsement of academic skepticism to­ wards “the explanatory power” of “the simple memorable narrative” did not go unqualified, however. As she went on to note, if “our refusal of narrative is meant to defend knowledge from the non-professional, we use it at quite a high cost . . . academics at the present time badly need a lan­ guage with which to intervene in the public sphere.”2 While a quarter of a century separates the bicentennial events of 1989 and 2015, Butler’s comment that media interest in the French Revolution had “got out ofhand” could be applied no less forcefully to the media hype informing the commemoration of Waterloo. Buoyed along by a flood of commemorative books, concerts, exhibitions, and celebratory events, the governing attitude to Waterloo, at least outside of France, seemed un­ equivocally supportive; aside from the usual suspects at academic confer­ ences muttering mordantly on the human costs ofvictory, as well as its re­ actionary aftermath, critical commentary in the public sphere was, at best, I. Butler, “Telling it Like a Story: The French Revolution as Narrative,” SiR 28, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 343-642 . Butler, “Telling it Like a Story,” 346. SiR, 56 (Fall 2017) 309 310 INTRODUCTION framed as glibly provocative.3 Thus in 2015, as in 1815, for every Hazlitt, Hunt, or Byron expressing dismay at the decisive termination of the revo­ lution, several hundreds more, echoing the establishment attitudes of Scott, Southey, and Wordsworth, could be found declaring their support. For many of these commentators, the run-up to the British referendum on membership in the European Union provided a context in which to draw parallels between the Holy Alliance and the European Union, with both institutions proclaiming “the right to intervene in the internal affairs of subject nations, in the name of humanitarian principles: ‘Justice, Christian Charity and Peace,’ ” albeit this time, as the sociologist Marco D’Eramo observed, with “fraternal bankers” rather than “fraternal armies.”4 While the Battle of Waterloo, in the wake of Brexit, will no doubt be shaped in reactionary political discourse as a preemptive strike against the perni­ cious effects of the European experiment, in a manner intended to quell the force ofleft-wing analyses of the relations between the defeat ofNapo­ leon and the drive towards economic and monetary union, the unsettled significance of the battle, both as a military event and as an object of commemoration, will continue to expose contradictions in conservative narratives. As example, we may consider the narrative tensions encoded in an early history of the battle, Lieutenant General W. A. Scott’s Battle of Waterloo; or, Correct Narrative of the Late Sanguinary Conflict on the Plains of Waterloo. Written and published within a few weeks of the Allied victory, the ex­ tended title of Scott’s history signals a fascination with the intense violence of the battle, while proclaiming a sustained concern with “correct,” “au­ thentic,” and “minute detail.”5 Framed by a description of the rise and fall, and rise again, ofthat “extraordinary person” Napoleon Buonaparte, “from the beginning, to the end, of his political career,” Scott’s narrative remains curiously episodic, with short passages of self-authored narrative forming the connective tissue for an assemblage of extracts from previously pub­ lished, multi-authored...

Multidirectional war narratives in history textbooks

This article aims to contribute to the field of textbook research by exploring a new approach in textbook analysis. Inspired by Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, this article examines multidirectional narratives in history textbooks: narratives that combine different histories, places and times in a productive way. They generate new meanings by combining histories and help us understand new, unknown situations by putting them in familiar frames of reference. The study of multidirectional textbook narratives precisely brings to light how authors make sense of the past and how continuity and meaning interact with interpretations of the present and the future. The analysis of multidirectional textbook narratives enables textbook researchers to examine how past experiences and future expectations are organised. To illustrate this, this article examines how textbook authors generated continuity and meaning by establishing narrative links between the past, the present and the future in English history textbooks for 11- to 14-year-old students in the 1920–1960 period. A case study presents the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588: how and why does the narration of the 1588 event interact with the narration of other historical events, and do these interactions change after the Second World War?