Casuistry and Early Modern Spanish Literature examines a neglected yet crucial field: the importance of casuistical thought and discourse in the development of literary genres in early modern Spain. Faced with the momentous changes wrought by discovery, empire, religious schism, expanding print culture, consolidation of legal codes and social transformation, writers sought innovation within existing forms (the novella, the byzantine romance, theatrical drama) and created novel genres (most notably, the picaresque). These essays show how casuistry, with its questioning of example and precept, and meticulous concern with conscience and the particularities of circumstance, is instrumental in cultivating the subjectivity, rhetorical virtuosity and spirit of inquiry that we have come to associate with the modern novel.

Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-SiEcle Spain argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession. Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo BazAn (1851-1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism's subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. The only woman author studied here, Pardo BazAn, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self-realization.

This thought-provoking collection of essays analyses the complex, multi-faceted, and even contradictory nature of Stalinism and its representations. Stalinism was an extraordinarily repressive and violent political model, and yet it was led by ideologues committed to a vision of socialism and international harmony. The essays in this volume stress the complex, multi-faceted, and often contradictory nature of Stalin, Stalinism, and Stalinist-style leadership, and. explore the complex picture that emerges. Broadly speaking, three important areas of debate are examined, united by a focus on political leadership: * The key controversies surrounding Stalin's leadership role * A reconsideration of Stalin and the Cold War * New perspectives on the cult of personality Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism is a crucial volume for all students and scholars of Stalin's Russia and Cold War Europe.

In Early Modern Thesis Prints in the Southern Netherlands, Gwendoline de Muelenaere offers an account of the practice of producing illustrated thesis prints in the seventeenth-century Southern Low Countries. She argues that the evolution of the thesis print genre gave rise to the creation of a specific visual language combining efficiently various figurative registers of a historical and symbolic nature. The book offers a reflection on the representation of knowledge and its public recognition in the context of academic defenses. Early Modern Thesis Prints makes a timely contribution to our understanding of early modern print culture and more specifically to the expanding field of study concerned with the role of visual materials in early modern thought.