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"Spain Civilization"
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Spain, a global history
\"From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centurires, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Sante Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalized era. This was true not only in an economic sense--the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system--but intellecutally and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various time a descendent of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes as writing 'Don Quixote', Velazquez was painting 'Las Meninas', or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment.\" --publisher's description, lower flap
Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom
This volume interrogates the assumption that Visigothic practices and institutions were mere imitations of the Byzantine empire. Contributors rethink these practices not as uncritical and derivative adoptions of Byzantine customs, but as dynamic processes in dialogue with not only the Byzantine empire but also with the contemporary Iberian context, as well as the Roman past. The goal of the volume is to approach Visigothic customs not as an uncritical adoption and imitatio of contemporary Roman models (an 'acculturation' model), but as unique interpretations of a common pool of symbols, practices, and institutions that formed the legacy of Rome. The contributors argue that it is necessary to reconsider the idea of imitatio imperii as a process that involved specific actors taking strategic decisions in historically contingent circumstances.
eBook
Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque
Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries-the period designated as the Baroque-new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities-a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.
Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, theLexikon of the Hispanic Baroqueis a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors-one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas-provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. TheLexikon of the Hispanic Baroquejoins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research-it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.
eBook
Disorientations
This book explores from a new perspective the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Focusing on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, Susan Martin-Márquez disputes received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans. Instead, she argues, Spaniards have sometimes denied and sometimes embraced this legacy, and that vacillation has served to destabilize presumably fixed borders between Europe and the Muslim world and between Europe and Africa.
Martin-Márquez analyzes a wealth of texts produced by Spaniards as well as by Africans and Afro-Spaniards from the early nineteenth century forward. She illuminates the complexities and disorientations of Spanish identity and shows how its evolution has important implications for current debates not only in Spanish culture but also in other countries involved in negotiating a modern identity.
eBook
Catalonia's Human Towers
The building of human towers (
castells ) is a centuries-old
traditional sport where hundreds of men, women, and children gather
in Catalan squares to create breathtaking edifices through a feat
of collective athleticism. The result is a great spectacle of
effort and overcoming, tension and release.
Catalonia's Human Towers is an ethnographic look at the
thriving castells practice-a symbol of Catalan cultural heritage
and identity amid debates around national autonomy and secession
from Spain. While the main function of building castells is to grow
community through a low-cost, intergenerational, and inclusive
leisure activity, Mariann Vaczi reveals how this unique sport also
provides a social base, image, and vocabulary for the independence
movement.
Highlighting the intersection of folklore, performance, and
sport, Catalonia's Human Towers captures the subtle
processes by which the body becomes politicized and ideology
becomes embodied, with all the desires, risks and precarities of
collective constructions.
eBook
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville
From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity.
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.
eBook