The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.

Sheds new light on what the WHO described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded," focusing on social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to thepandemic. Situating the Iberian Peninsula as the key point of connection between Europe and the Americas, both epidemiologically and discursively, The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 sheds new light on what the World Health Organization described as "the single most devastating infectious disease outbreak ever recorded." The essays in this volume elucidate specific aspects of the pandemic that have received minimal attention until now, including social control, gender, class, religion, national identity, and military medicine's reactions to the pandemic and relationship with civilian medicine. While World War I, as the authors point out, is the context for these discussions, the experiences of 1918-19 remain persistently relevant to contemporary life, particularly in view of events such as the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic and the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Contributors: Catherine Belling, JosepBernabeu-Mestre, Liane Maria Bertucci, Ryan A. Davis, Esteban Domingo, Magda Fahrni, Hernan Feldman, Pilar Leon-Sanz, Maria Luisa Lima, Maria de Fatima Nunes, Mercedes Pascual Artiaga, Maria-Isabel Porras-Gallo, Anny Jackeline Torres Silveira, Jose Manuel Sobral, Paulo Silveira e Sousa, Christiane Maria Cruz de Souza. Maria-Isabel Porras-Gallo is professor of history of science in the Medical Faculty of Ciudad Real at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). Ryan A. Davis is assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University.