The extent to which contemporary rhetorics of nation and kingship reflected the realities of social, economic and cultural life in Habsburg Spain. Early modern Spain's insistent rhetorics of nation and kingship, of a monolithic body of shared values and beliefs, especially in respect of racial and gender stereotypes, and of a centralized and ostensibly absolutist legislativeapparatus did not map unproblematically onto the complex topography of everyday life. This volume explores the extent to which these rhetorics and the ideology they helped to construct or underpin reflected or failed to reflect the realities of social, economic, and cultural life. It sets against their typically exorbitant claims the lived, messy, and sometimes contradictory experience of Spaniards across a broad social spectrum, both at the centre and atthe margins, not just of peninsular society, but of the Hispanic world overseas. Confronting ideology were questions of economic pragmatism, executive feasibility, jurisdictional competence, and, above all, the social and political complexity of the Spain of the period. RICHARD J. PYM is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: TREVOR J. DADSON, MARGARET RICH GREER, BARRY IFE, ALISTAIR MALCOLM, MELVEENA MCKENDRICK, RICHARD J. PYM, HELEN RAWLINGS, ALEXANDER SAMSON, JULES WHICKER

When, why and how did Spain fall from its pre-eminent position as a leading world power in the seventeenth century? These fundamental questions have exercised the minds of distinguished historians such as Prescott, Merriman, Hamilton, Braudel, Vilar, Vicens Vives, Elliott and Kamen and produced a prolific amount of writing. But while the subject of Spain's decline has been subject to rigorous historical research, the debate between scholars underpinning it has not thus far been analyzed from a historiographical perspective. What are the methodologies and schools of inquiry that have shaped the discourse? How have historians' perceptions been influenced by time and circumstance? Why has the 'Two Spains' phenomenon endured as a historical paradigm against which to measure its fortunes? These are some of the issues this book will address in its appraisal of the historians of Spain's decline and their discourse. -- .