Containing essays from leading and recent scholars in Peninsular and colonial studies, this volume offers entirely new research on women's acquisition and practice of literacy, on conventual literacy, and on the cultural representations of women's literacy. Together the essays reveal the surprisingly broad range of pedagogical methods and learning experiences undergone by early modern women in Spain and the New World. Focusing on the pedagogical experiences in Spain, New Spain (present-day Mexico), and New Granada (Colombia) of such well-known writers as Saint Teresa of A vila, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and MarA a de Zayas, as well as of lesser-known noble women and writers, and of nuns in the Spanish peninsula and the New World, the essays contribute significantly to the study of gendered literacy by investigating the ways in which women"religious and secular, aristocratic and plebeian"became familiarized with the written word, not only by means of the education received but through visual art, drama, and literary culture. Contributors to this collection explore the abundant writings by early modern women to disclose the extent of their participation in the culture of Spain and the New World. They investigate how women"playwrights, poets, novelists, and nuns" applied their education both to promote literature and to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of church and state. Moreover, they shed light on how women whose writings were not considered literary also took part in the gendering of Hispanic culture through letters and autobiographies, among other means, and on how that same culture depicted women's education in the visual arts and the literature of the period.

In Spain, the two hundred years that elapsed between the beginning of the early modern period and the final years of the Habsburg Empire saw a profusion of works written by women. Whether secular or religious, noble or middle class, early modern Spanish women actively composed creative works such as poetry, prose narratives, and plays. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers covers the broad array of different kinds of writings - literary as well as extra-literary - that these women wrote, taking into consideration their subject positions and the cultural and historical contexts that influenced and were influenced by them. Beyond merely recognizing the individual women authors who had influence in literary, religious, and intellectual circles, this Research Companion investigates their participation in these circles through their writings, as well as the ways in which their texts informed Spain's cultural production during the early modern period. In order to contextualize women's writings across the historical and cultural spectrum of early modern Spain, the Research Companion is divided into six sections of general thematic interest: Women's Worlds; Conventual Spaces; Secular Literature; Women in the Public Sphere; Private Circles; Women Travelers. Each section is subdivided into chapters that focus on specific issues or topics.

Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. The term picaresque describes a specific set of early modern Spanish narratives relating the life story of a lowborn adventurer in a realist, ironic, and often humorous manner. The protagonist, the picaro or picara (rascal), seeks upward mobility in a resolutely hierarchical society determined to prevent his - or her - ascent, and both are rich targets of satire. Spanish picaros inspired Anglo-French rogues including Gil Blas and Tom Jones and paved the way for the modern novel. Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque novel from its origins to the present day, along with a treatment of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. After introductory chapters on the picaresque genre and the origin of the phenomenon, the book analyses canonical texts and their role in the picaresque spectrum. Further chapters then turn to critical approaches to the genre and manifestations of the picaresque in Hispanic America, France, England, and modern Spain. Overall, the book affords readers a broad sense of the range of this rich tradition and an in-depth view of the field and its major texts.

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain's comedia and Italy's commedia dell'arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women's participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain's comedia and Italy's commedia dell'arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women's participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.

As the first comprehensive volume devoted entirely to women of both the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg royal dynasties spanning the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates their complex and often contradictory political functions and their interrelations across early modern national borders. The essays in this volume investigate the lives of six Habsburg women who, as queens consort and queen regent, duchesses, a vicereine, and a nun, left an indelible mark on the diplomatic and cultural map of early modern Europe. Contributors examine the national and transnational impact of these notable women through their biographies, and explore how they transferred their cultural, religious, and political traditions as the women moved from one court to another. Early Modern Habsburg Women investigates the complex lives of Philip II's daughter, the Infanta Catalina Micaela (1567-1597); her daughter, Margherita of Savoy, Vicereine of Portugal (1589-1655); and Maria Maddalena of Austria, Grand Duchess of Florence (1589-1631). The second generation of Habsburg women that the volume addresses includes Philip IV's first wife, Isabel of BorbA(3)n (1602-1644), who became a Habsburg by marriage; Rudolph II's daughter, Sor Ana Dorotea (1611-1694), the only Habsburg nun in the collection; and Philip IV's second wife, Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), queen regent and mother to the last Spanish Habsburg. Through archival documents, pictorial and historical accounts, literature, and correspondence, as well as cultural artifacts such as paintings, jewelry, and garments, this volume brings to light the impact of Habsburg women in the broader historical, political, and cultural contexts. The essays fill a scholarly need by covering various phases of the lives of early modern royal women, who often struggled to sustain their family loyalty while at the service of a foreign court, even when protecting and preparing their heirs for rule a

Separated only by a narrow body of water, Spain and England have had a long history of material and cultural interactions; but this intertwined history is rarely perceived by scholars of one country with a view toward the other. Through their analyses of the various modes of exchange of material goods and the circulation of symbolic systems of meaning, the contributors to the anthology-historians and literary critics-investigate, for the first time, the two nations' express points of contact and conflict during these historically crucial fifty years. Focusing on the half-century period that began with the marriage of Mary Tudor to Prince Philip of Spain, and spanned the reigns of Philip II and Elizabeth I of England, the essays in this anthology demonstrate and problematize, from the perspective of Spanish cultural history, the significant material, cultural, and symbolic contacts between the two countries. The volume shows how the two countries' alliances and clashes, which led to the debacle of the 'Invincible Armada' of 1588 and continued for decades afterwards, held enormous historical significance by shaping the religious, political, and cultural developments of the modern world.

The essays in this collection represent the first effort in Hispanism to address the conflicted status of Cervantes studies by interrogating the possibility of continued critical dialogue in the context of postmodern theories that threaten to divide into oppositional discourses. Comprising broad historical overviews as well as close readings of texts, and wielding the rhetoric of scientific detachment and of impassioned political commitments, the essays at once exemplify and critique multiple critical positions. The collection takes a meaningful and timely look at the formation of "cervantismo "from the early twentieth century to the prevailing debates on postmodernism and the current crisis of literary studies.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In Spain, the two hundred years that elapsed between the beginning of the early modern period and the final years of the Habsburg Empire saw a profusion of works written by women. Whether secular or religious, noble or middle class, early modern Spanish women actively composed creative works such as poetry, prose narratives, and plays. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers covers the broad array of different kinds of writings - literary as well as extra-literary - that these women wrote, taking into consideration their subject positions and the cultural and historical contexts that influenced and were influenced by them. Beyond merely recognizing the individual women authors who had influence in literary, religious, and intellectual circles, this Research Companion investigates their participation in these circles through their writings, as well as the ways in which their texts informed Spain's cultural production during the early modern period. In order to contextualize women's writings across the historical and cultural spectrum of early modern Spain, the Research Companion is divided into six sections of general thematic interest: Women's Worlds; Conventual Spaces; Secular Literature; Women in the Public Sphere; Private Circles; Women Travelers. Each section is subdivided into chapters that focus on specific issues or topics.

The picaresque tale of Mother Andrea, a Golden Age brothel-keeper. The anonymous novella Vida y costumbres de la Madre Andrea [ca 1650, The Life and Times of Mother Andrea] is a fascinating account of the life of the owner/administrator of a Madrid brothel. Probably written bya Sephardic resident of Amsterdam, and following the picaresque mode of first person narrative, it details the amusing experiences of Mother Andrea, the prostitutes under her charge, and the varied social types who make up the brothel's clients. Emphasizing the corrupt practices of prostitution and the controversy over the licensing of brothels in early modern Spain, the novella proposes a highly entertaining view of the very life experiences it purportsto condemn. This bilingual edition, based on the novella's only extant text, an eighteenth-century copy discovered in a Utrecht bookstore in 1950 by the late Hispanist J. A. Van Praag, offers a thorough introduction that contextualizes the novella both historically and linguistically. Its modernized and annotated edition in the original Spanish with an admirably readable English translation on facing pages will have significant impact on the study ofSpanish Peninsular and Sephardic literatures and cultures, and on early modern gender studies, linguistics, and comparative literature. ENRIQUETA ZAFRA is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Trent University. ANNEJ. CRUZ is Professor of Spanish and Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami.

Women's poetry of the Spanish early modern period. This collection of fourteen scholarly essays on women's poetry from Spain's early modern period shows that women did indeed have a Golden Age, and that they were significant cultural actors in the realms of poetic production. Thestudies of secular verse demonstrate how female poets of this period devised strategies to confront the dominant masculine poetic discourse, while the essays on sacred poetry explore the multiple manifestations of female piety andmysticism. The women's words are brought to life and modern readers helped to understand the socio-cultural, interpersonal, and aesthetic components of the poets' oeuvre. The volume, a companion to Julian Olivares' and ElizabethBoyce's revised anthology "Tras el espejo la musa escribe": Lirica femenina de los Siglos de Oro, constitutes an authoritative critical enterprise focused on the recuperation of the female literary voice, and marks an important step forward in the battle to include women's writing as part of Spain's literary canon. Contributors: Electa Arenal, Aranzazu Borrachero Mendibil, Anne J. Cruz, Adrienne L. Martin, Rosa Navarro Duran, Julian Olivares, Inmaculada Osuna, Amanda Powell, Elizabeth Rhodes, Stacey Schlau, Lia Schwartz, Alison Weber, Judith Whitenack. JULIAN OLIVARES is Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and editor of Caliope, Journal ofthe Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry.

Edited by art historian Noelia Garcia Perez, this first-ever collection of essays on Juana of Austria, the younger daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and sister to Philip II of Spain, offers an interdisciplinary study of the Habsburg princess that addresses her political, religious, and artistic dimensions. The volume's contextual framework shows her sharing agency with other women of her dynastic family who governed in the sixteenth century and developed an outstanding reputation for promoting artists and works of art. The Making of Juana of Austria demonstrates how Juana's role as a leading patron of the arts offered her a means of creating her own image, which she then promulgated through the objects she collected and her crowning architectural endeavor, the Monastery-Palace of the Descalzas Reales. Drawing on early modern literature, archival documents, and artworks, the essays in this volume delineate a new portrait of Juana of Austria. Contributors not only highlight her multiple facets-princess of Portugal, regent of Castile, and the only female Jesuit in history-but also show her as a discerning art patron and collector who pursued an active role of patronage, through which she constructed her own art collection and used it to articulate a visual statement of her lineage, power, and religious convictions. Her role as an art promoter culminated with the foundation of the Descalzas Reales and the works of art she collected and displayed within its walls. The Making of Juana of Austria offers a new perspective on female rule and patronage, exploring the achievements of a crucial figure in the history of art, court, and gender in early modern Europe.

Born in a provincial city in the Peruvian Andes, the Franciscan linguist and theologian Luis Gerónimo de Oré (1554–1630) lived during a critical period in the formation of the modern world, as the global empire of Spain engaged in a nearly continuous struggle over resources and religion. In the first full-length biography of Oré, Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook reconstruct the friar's life and the communities in which he circulated, tracing the career of this first-generation Creole from his roots in Huamanga to his work in Andean missions, his activities at the royal courts of Spain and throughout Spanish America, until his final years as bishop of Concepción, Chile. While serving in Peru's Colca Valley, Oré composed multilingual texts, translating doctrinal concepts into the indigenous languages Quechua and Aymara, alongside Latin and Spanish, which missionaries and secular clergy frequently used in their conversion efforts. As commissioner to Cuba and La Florida, he inspected the frontier missions along the coast of what became the southeastern United States and wrote an influential history of these outposts and their environment. After Philip III dispatched him to Concepción, Oré spent his last years working in the southernmost end of the Americas, where he continued his advocacy for indigenous justice and engaged in heated arguments with the governor over defensive war, royal patronage, and Indian enslavement. Drawn from research conducted in Spain and Latin America over several decades, this consequential biography recovers from obscurity a colonial friar whose legacy continues in the Andean world today.

More than just an expression of religious authority or an instrument of social control, the Inquisition was an arena where cultures met and clashed on both shores of the Atlantic. This pioneering volume examines how cultural identities were maintained despite oppression. Persecuted groups were able to survive the Inquisition by means of diverse strategies-whether Christianized Jews in Spain preserving their experiences in literature, or native American folk healers practicing medical care. These investigations of social resistance and cultural persistence will reinforce the cultural significance of the Inquisition. Contributors: Jaime Contreras, Anne J. Cruz, Jesus M. De Bujanda, Richard E. Greenleaf, Stephen Haliczer, Stanley M. Hordes, Richard L. Kagan, J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Moshe Lazar, Angus I. K. MacKay, Geraldine McKendrick, Roberto Moreno de los Arcos, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Noemi Quezada, Maria Helena Sanchez Ortega, Joseph H. Silverman This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

In original essays drawn from a myriad of archival materials, Society Women and Enlightened Charity in Spain reveals how the members of the Junta de Damas de Honor y Merito, founded in 1787 to administer charities and schools for impoverished women and children, claimed a role in the public sphere through their self-representation as civic mothers and created an enlightened legacy for modern feminism in Spain.

Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World investigates the mystery and unease surrounding the issue of women called before the Inquisition in Spain and its colonial territories in the Americas, including Mexico and Cartagena de Indias. Edited by Maria Jesus Zamora Calvo, this collection gathers innovative scholarship that considers how the Holy Office of the Inquisition functioned as a closed, secret world defined by patriarchal hierarchy and grounded in misogynistic standards. Ten essays present portraits of women who, under accusations as diverse as witchcraft, bigamy, false beatitude, and heresy, faced the Spanish and New World Inquisitions to account for their lives. Each essay draws on the documentary record of trials, confessions, letters, diaries, and other primary materials. Focusing on individual cases of women brought before the Inquisition, the authors study their subjects' social status, particularize their motivations, determine the characteristics of their prosecution, and deduce the reasons used to justify violence against them. With their subjection of women to imprisonment, interrogation, and judgment, these cases display at their core a specter of contempt, humiliation, silencing, and denial of feminine selfhood. The contributors include specialists in the early modern period from multiple disciplines, encompassing literature, language, translation, literary theory, history, law, iconography, and anthropology. By considering both the women themselves and the Inquisition as an institution, this collection works to uncover stories, lives, and cultural practices that for centuries have dwelled in obscurity.

This collection brings a transnational perspective to the study of early modern women rulers and female sovereignty, a topic that has until now been examined through the lens of a single nation. Contributors juxtapose rulers from different countries, including well-known sovereigns such as Isabel of Castile and Elizabeth Tudor, as well as other less widely studied figures Isabeau of Bavaria, Jeanne d'Albret, Isabel Clara Eugenia, Juana of Portugal, and Catherine of Brandenburg. Several essays also focus on the representations of foreign rulers such as Catherine de' Medici in England and Elizabeth I in France.

Contributors are Tracy Adams, Anne J. Cruz, eva Deak, Mary C. Ekman, Catherine L. Howey, Elizabeth Ketner, Carole Levin, Sandra Logan, Magdalena S. Sanchez, Mihoko Suzuki, and Barbara F. Weissberger.

Rejecting marriage and the convent, the Spanish noblewoman, poet, and religious activist Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza ( Jaraicejo 1566-London 1614) led an uncommon life of adventure and spiritual devotion. Orphaned as a child, she lived first at Philip II's court, and then with an uncle, the Viceroy of Navarra, who enforced harsh discipline on his ward. Through her contacts with the English Jesuits, Carvajal traveled secretly to London as a self-appointed missionary, where she was jailed twice for preaching against Anglicanism. A tireless writer, Carvajal left a small but impressive collection of spiritual poetry, an autobiography, and over two hundred letters. This volume provides a scholarly introduction and translations of selections from her writings.

In 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes, a slim, unassuming little volume, unsigned by the author, made its first published appearance in the bookstalls of several important mercantile centers in Spain and the Netherlands. Since then, as narratives of picaros--and picaras--continued to follow in the footsteps of Lazaro's fictional life, picaresque literature developed into a major genre in literary studies that remains popular to this day.

Yet the genre's definition is anything but simple, as the diversity of this volume demonstrates. Part 1, "Materials," reviews editions and translations of Lazarillo and other picaresque works, as well as the critical and historical resources related to them. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," explore the picaresque's place in language and literature classrooms of all levels. Some contributors contextualize Lazarillo in the early modern Spanish culture it satirizes, investigating the role of the church and the marginalization of Muslims and Jews. Others pair Lazarillo with Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache or Quevedo's Buscon to concentrate on the genre's literary aspects. A cluster of essays focuses on teaching the picaresque (including the female picaresque) to nonspecialist students in interdisciplinary courses. The volume concludes with a section devoted to the picaresque novel's influence on other literary traditions, from early modern autobiographies, such as Teresa of Avila's Libro de la vida, to post-Spanish Civil War texts to twentieth-century Latin American novels and 1950s American beat narratives.