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In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache, who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. Before that, he had tried to return with his family to Spain, and to this end he tried to convert to Catholicism and worked as an informer, intermediary, and spy in Moroccan affairs for the Spanish court. Later he became a privateer against Spanish ships and was tried in London for that reason. His religious identity proved to be as mutable as his political allegiances: when in Amsterdam, he was devoutly Jewish; when in Spain, a loyal converso (a baptized Jew). In A Man of Three Worlds, Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers view Samuel Pallache's world as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, A Man of Three Worlds is history at its most compelling.

Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janes, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions.Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal \"father of the nation\" and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.

Queen María of Castile, wife of Alfonso V, \"the Magnanimous,\" king of the Crown of Aragon, governed Catalunya in the mid-fifteenth century while her husband conquered and governed the kingdom of Naples. For twenty-six years, she maintained a royal court and council separate from and roughly equivalent to those of Alfonso in Naples. Such legitimately sanctioned political authority is remarkable given that she ruled not as queen in her own right but rather as Lieutenant-General of Catalunya with powers equivalent to the king's. María does not fit conventional images of a queen as wife and mother; indeed, she had no children and so never served as queen-regent for any royal heirs in their minorities or exercised a queen-mother's privilege to act as diplomat when arranging the marriages of her children and grandchildren. But she was clearly more than just a wife offering advice: she embodied the king's personal authority and was second only to the king himself. She was his alter ego, the other royal body fully empowered to govern. For a medieval queen, this official form of corulership, combining exalted royal status with official political appointment, was rare and striking.The King's Other Bodyis both a biography of María and an analysis of her political partnership with Alfonso. María's long, busy tenure as lieutenant prompts a reconsideration of long-held notions of power, statecraft, personalities, and institutions. It is also a study of the institution of monarchy and a theoretical reconsideration of the operations of gender within it. If the practice of monarchy is conventionally understood as strictly a man's job, María's reign presents a compelling argument for a more complex model, one attentive to the dynamic relationship of queenship and kingship and the circumstances and theories that shaped the institution she inhabited.

No detailed description available for \"Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America\".

Juan Rana was the most famous buffoon of his time. An actor working during the years 1617-1672, he achieved a status similar to that of the Italian Harlequin and was a favourite of the ruling monarchy and the general populace. Over fifty short plays were written especially for Rana by some of the most important playwrights of the day, including Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who crowned Rana the most famousgraciosoof the baroque era. Juan Rana was arrested in 1636 for the 'nefarious sin' of homosexuality and thereafter played more gender bending, transvestite, and homosexual roles. Many of his roles wrestle with issues of gender, sexual, and biological difference but, surprisingly, little work has been done on the important issue of his sexuality. InThe Triumphant Juan Rana, Peter E. Thompson examines the actor's sexuality both on and off the stage and demonstrates that his homosexuality was tolerated, even understood and applauded, by the public. Thompson challenges many preconceived ideas about the Spanish Golden Age and fills an existing void in queer studies of this important period in European theatrical and literary history.

Christine Arkinstall’s historical and literary study of female freethinking intellectuals in fin-de-siècle Spain examines the contributions of three intellectuals, Amalia Domingo Soler, Angeles López de Ayala, and Belén Sárraga, to the development of feminist consciousness and democracy. These women wrote for, edited, and published radical and feminist periodicals that, until now, have been left unstudied. This significant gap in the scholarship has left us without an accurate sense of Spanish women’s involvement in the public realm. Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879 –1926  recovers the lost history and literary contributions these women made to the so-called Generation of 1898. Using their extensive published works, Arkinstall not only illuminates the lives of Domingo Soler, López de Ayala, and Sárraga, but traces the connections between feminism, freethinking, republicanism, freemasonry, anarchism, and socialism. By placing these women’s work in the broader literary, social, and political context of the period, Arkinstall’s study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the central role of women in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century democracy in Spain.

To Tilt at Windmills is the memoir of Briton Fred Thomas who served with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (July 1936-March 1939). Inspired by a memorable return to Iberian battlefields forty years later, and based on diaries kept during the many months Thomas spent as a gunner with the British Anti-Tank Battery, the narrative moves eloquently along a journey into the war zone, through the several campaigns in which he fought and where he was twice wounded, and finally to the withdrawal of the Brigades from the conflict. What distinguishes Thomas' account is the remarkable detail provided by the diaries and the measured tone of his reminiscence, There is, as well, the poignant inquiry of the veteran into the shape and meaning of experience as a young soldier. The historian Paul Preston has cited the \"warmth, directness and deep humanity\" of To Tilt at Windmills, \"an important contribution to the collective memory of the war.

The Second Spanish Republic (1931-36) was the only new liberal democratic regime to emerge in Europe during the 1930s. Historians, however, have focused primarily on the Civil War of 1936-39 that followed, devoting much less attention to the parliamentary regime that preceded it. This book deals with the history and failure of the democratic polity in Spain through a detailed examination of the initiatives of its president, Niceto Alcala Zamora. As civil servant, lawyer, politician and writer, by 1931 he had become one of the most successful men of Spain. He played the leading role in the downfall of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Republic, which he served for eight months as initial prime minister and then as the first president. Stanley Payne's study argues that the failure of the Republic was not inevitable but depended on the policy choices of its president and the key party leaders. Alcala Zamora's professed goal was to center the Republic, stabilizing the new regime while avoiding extremes, but he failed altogether in this project. The Constitution of 1931 stipulated the double responsibility of parliamentary government both to the president and to a voting majority. Though Alcala Zamora resisted strong efforts from the left to cancel the results of the first fully democratic elections in 1933, he subsequently used his powers recklessly, making and unmaking governments at will, refusing to permit normal functioning of parliament. This first critical scholarly account of the presidency of Alcala Zamora casts new light on the failure of democracy in interwar Europe and on the origins of the Spanish Civil War.

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) wrote the first comprehensive history of Spanish America, the Historia general y natural de las Indias, a sprawling, constantly revised work in which Oviedo attempted nothing less than a complete account of the Spanish discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas from 1492 to 1547, along with descriptions of the land's flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples. His Historia, which grew to an astounding fifty volumes, includes numerous interviews with the Spanish and indigenous leaders who were literally making history, the first extensive field drawings of America rendered by a European, reports of exotic creatures, ethnographic descriptions of indigenous groups, and detailed reports about the conquest and colonization process. Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America explores how, in writing his Historia, Oviedo created a new historiographical model that reflected the vastness of the Americas and Spain's enterprise there. Kathleen Myers uses a series of case studies—focusing on Oviedo's self-portraits, drawings of American phenomena, approaches to myth, process of revision, and depictions of Native Americans—to analyze Oviedo's narrative and rhetorical strategies and show how they relate to the politics, history, and discursive practices of his time. Accompanying the case studies are all of Oviedo's extant field drawings and a wide selection of his text in English translation. The first study to examine the entire Historia and its evolving rhetorical and historical context, this book confirms Oviedo's assertion that \"the New World required a different kind of history\" as it helps modern readers understand how the discovery of the Americas became a catalyst for European historiographical change.