This chapter surveys how individuals were identified and whether their movement was controlled in early modern Spain and Spanish America. It argues that because Spanish structures assumed the existence of a freedom to immigrate, most processes aimed at registering identities were concerned not with immigration but with distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ movement, fraudulent changes in identity from honest reshaping of who individuals were. Although similar rules were applied in both the Old and the New World, nevertheless new (...) regulations did emerge in the Americas, requiring identifying individuals as ‘Spaniards’ on the one hand, and limiting movement by natives as long as their civic and religious conversion was not guaranteed, on the other. As a result, in the New World, processes of identification were more acute and more frequent than in Spain. (shrink)

Medieval and Renaissance humanist political discourse and Machiavelli -- Machiavelli and Spanish imperialist discourse in the sixteenth century -- Machiavelli and the foundations of the Spanish reason-of-state tradition : Giovanni Botero and Pedro de Ribadeneyra -- Machiavellian discourse in the Hispanic Baroque reason-of-state tradition -- Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo's rereading of the Prince -- Conclusion.

For several decades, historians have realized the limitations of analysing the historical past of science as a mere succession of theories. One of the most stimulating messages that the reinvention of the discipline has launched is that although there are obvious intellectual elements that promote the development and progress of science, there are also social, economic, and institutional aspects to consider. The history of science is no longer just a history of scientific ideas and theories, but also a history of (...) institutions, communities, spaces, objects, and practices as well as a history of the complex interaction among all these dimensions. Accompanying this new panorama is a broad consensus among scholars to accept that major social changes have inexorably some impact on scientific practice and vice versa. This premise, now widespread, is especially relevant to the history of early modern science and the question of its roots because it has allowed the introduction of new agents and spaces previously excluded from the domain of scientific development. In other words, this enriched perspective has multiplied both the processes of knowledge construction and the arenas in which these processes were undertaken. More specifically, historical research is no longer limited to spaces traditionally linked to the construction of science; it now embraces less orthodox ones. Within this broadened field of inquiry, practical knowledge and the objects of material culture have come to occupy a central place. This special issue explores how the new directions in which the history of science has expanded have a direct impact on the study of Iberian science in the Atlantic world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gothicism and Early Modern Historical EthnographyKristoffer NevilleGothicism: Problems and PossibilitiesEarly-modern Gothicism, or self-identification with the Gothic peoples described by classical authors, has usually been considered a Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, affair. Particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Swedish court and universities insisted militantly that the kingdom was the Gothic homeland, and this has fostered an assumption that Gothicism represents a kind of embryonic nationalism. (...) This interpretation was almost inevitable given the circumstances of modern interest in the phenomenon. Scandinavian scholars were the first to pick up the Gothic thread in the earlier twentieth century, and Swedes in particular have dominated the literature on Gothicism. At least in the early years, this may be [End Page 213] related to a general trend to interpret the past in terms of a relatively inflexible, modern concept of nation. These earlier studies accordingly relied largely on the same, mostly Swedish, sources. Later work has generally not expanded the framework of the discourse, however.1 A number of important early modern texts that show the much broader appeal of Gothicism are not accounted for in the standard narrative of the rise of the phenomenon in the early modern period. I will show that the Scandinavian interpretation has been allowed to overshadow a much broader Gothic tradition that encompassed a broad part of Europe, including the German lands and Spain. Gothicism has thus been reduced to just one aspect of its original scope, and the scholarly nuances and historical jockeying that shaped the narrative have largely been lost. This reduction has had consequences not only for the familiar version of the story, largely derived from Swedish texts, but also for our understanding of history writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The Gothicism debate may be unique in its breadth and in the intensity of interest that it elicited. It is also remarkable for the variety of approaches to historical writing that scholars applied as each tried to develop a more impregnable argument than the last. Linguistic, geographical, archaeological, antiquarian, and textual methods intersected freely, inviting shifting and overlapping versions of the Gothic narrative that sometimes trace the linguistic legacy of the tribe, sometimes the ethnic legacy, and sometimes bind the two together. All of these narratives were basically concerned with the antiquity of the Goths and their legacy in early modern Europe. The implications of this were different for various regions and rulers, but most wanted to claim for themselves the strength, prestige, and antiquity of the tribe that toppled the Roman Empire, thus enhancing their own often dubious historical legitimacy. [End Page 214]This debate often took a polemical character, particularly in the political sphere, where there were fierce disputes over which region was the true homeland of the tribe, and thus which area (or people or ruling dynasty) could claim the greatest honor from their exploits and claim to be their most direct descendants. But there was also a very clear corollary to this contentious discourse. As scholars from across a wide area produced mountains of evidence pointing to the Gothic origins of their own regions, it became possible to think of Gothic origins not only in terms of difference—which kingdom, dynasty, or geographic region could claim the greatest antiquity and eminence—but also in terms of shared history and common identity across political, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. In general, the polemic was restricted to the origins of the Goths. Many writers seem to have accepted that the Gothic lands cumulatively formed a sort of historical unity that was lost through later political divisions, but which could still be traced through other means. Particularly in the Holy Roman Empire—a largely political boundary encompassing many smaller states ruled by famously fractious princes of different confessions and languages—the more conceptual notion of deep-seated Gothic origins opened the way for a different alignment of identity both within and without the boundaries of the Empire, and especially with Scandinavia, which contributed such rich arguments to the debate.There are several significant problems in a study of the early-modern view of the Goths beyond the historiographical ones outlined above. They were widely associated with other tribes... (shrink)

The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the (...) carnal and the divine, the senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires. (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” argues, on the basis of recent research, that religious polemic is a phenomenon closely associated only with monotheist traditions. Focusing on religious polemics in medieval and early modern Islamic and Christian Spain, it analyzes polemical texts of diverse natures and from different centuries to see how their authors, by attacking both dogmatic and legal opinion, aimed to harden the amorphous boundaries between groups. On the Christian side, polemicists argued (...) for the restriction of the rights of Muslims and Jews in Christian territories, or for the outright expulsion or conversion of these groups. On the Islamic side, a number of Muslim authors voiced the claim that Muslims should emigrate from Christian territories. The article seeks to show how these polemical voices argued against known opponents but also against anonymous Christians, Muslims, and Jews who, untouched by such polemics, had lived close to one another and, without conflict, had accepted the undefined character of their daily life together. In support of this argument, the author makes use of hitherto unknown archival documents regarding how adherents of the three religions interacted in medieval Christian Spain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Veritas Filia Temporis: Experience and Belief in Early Modern Culture *Brendan DooleyFew observers in the seventeenth century had any illusions about the reliability of political information imparted by the sources newly minted or voluminously increased during the course of the century. The newsletters appeared to be concocted from malicious gossip. 1The newspapers seemed to be published at the bidding of powerful political interests with little inclination to (...) tell the truth, 2and histories of recent events seemed to be based on faulty sources even when the writers endeavored to procure faithful accounts. “Truth is by nature elusive and slippery,” history theorist Agostino Mascardi admitted. All he could recommend as a defense for the inaccurate historian was the injunction against throwing the first stone: “Omnis homo mendax,” said David the holy king; and those who are such harsh critics of historians’ involuntary lies may well be astute trammelers of perfidy and deceit in their own lives.” 3He had no answer about historians who deliberately distorted the truth. In fact just when readers might have desired it most, from the earliest episodes of the Thirty-Years War to the last episodes of the Turkish Wars at the end of the century, the possibility of [End Page 487]gaining a realistic picture of the contemporary world seemed to be getting more and more remote.The argument of this article centers around a discussion of the cultural consequences of this late seventeenth-century trend. To some of the readers, writers, thinkers, and theorists in this period, the unreliability of information about their own time or about the past, however compounded by contemporary political and social circumstances, was nothing but a minor nuisance. To others it was a hint about the bad faith of the governments who influenced writers. To still others, this same unreliability raised deeply troubling questions about human nature and existence. It provided social and political reasons for historical skepticism, quite apart from one’s familiarity with Sextus Empiricus or the elite intellectual trends of the time. It placed everyday social and political reality in a new light, thus adding a more mundane element to the uneasy feeling produced by the new science and cosmology—the feeling, that is, of being borne along in uncontrollable currents whose exact nature the best minds nonetheless seemed incapable of understanding. It added to the disquiet produced by confessional disputes, suggesting that truth might be beyond human capacity to grasp. 4Not only in Italy but throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century this discussion will show, existing methods of ascertaining facts in political and military affairs both in the present and in past times came under a new sort of scrutiny as part of what some scholarship has regarded as no less than a wide-ranging “crisis of consciousness” at the threshold of the Enlightenment. 5The conclusion opens briefly onto the sequel of these episodes. The crisis was resolved at least in part by a corresponding movement for methodological change as well as by a reform of ideas about the proper place for intellectual improvisation in the formation of narrative in order to make historical writing persuasive as well as civically useful again. If the product of error and fraud was skepticism, the product of skepticism was modern historiography. 6 [End Page 488]History and ExperienceObviously, the elusiveness of political truth that helped touch off the late seventeenth-century crisis was no novelty of the age. Deliberate misinformation was a fully-recognized political strategy at least by the time that Machiavelli made it an explicit part of prudence by recommending the cultivation of good appearances and expressing his admiration for Pope Alexander VI and Ferdinand I of Spain as being the best liars of their time. 7In the late sixteenth century theorists all over Europe sought to join Machiavelli’s insights about the inner workings of state power to those of Tacitus in the light of conventional morality. 8In Italy it was the Piedmontese writer Giovanni Botero who, exploring these Tacitist perspectives in his Reason of State, expressed the fewest reservations about insisting on the propriety of a policy of state secrecy and misinformation. 9Florentine political theorist... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern EuropeNoah J. EfronAlmost a quarter-century ago Benjamin Nelson published his famous plea for what he called a “differential” and “comparative historical sociology of ‘science’ in civilizational perspective.” 1 Like Max Weber, Robert Merton, and Joseph Needham, Nelson believed that the growth of western science could be better understood when compared to the ways “science” fared in other cultures with (...) other intellectual and institutional and economic sensibilities and structures. A particularly propitious case study for such a differential and comparative historical study of science, as Hillel Levine observed in his 1983 essay about Jewish reactions to heliocentrism, are the Jews of early modern Europe, who constituted “a society geographically and culturally contiguous with those who framed and advanced occidental ‘science.’” 2Since about the time of Nelson’s plea, David B. Ruderman has been writing the history of Jewish attitudes towards, and engagements with, science during the period in which modern western science was constituting itself. It is no exaggeration to say that he established this as a field of study, producing a steady stream of historical studies, initially of Italian Jews who read and wrote about nature and its study, but continually expanding his compass. 3 The field [End Page 719] Ruderman established and the studies he produced have been “repercussive” (to borrow his own adjective) in many directions—shedding light on Jewish-Christian relations, on early-modern Jewish intellectual history, on the deployments of Kabbalah and magic in early modern times, and so on. One of Ruderman’s achievements—perhaps not the most important in his view (for he considers himself a historian of Jewish thought and culture and not a historian of science) but of great importance nonetheless—has been to begin to lay the groundwork for a comparative history of Jewish and Christian attitudes towards and participation in the “new sciences.”Ruderman’s newest book is a big step towards Nelson’s desideratum, using Jewish attitudes as the comparative case. It is a collection of twelve linked essays (five of which have appeared elsewhere in one form or another) framed by a synthetic introduction and epilogue. The essays are individual or group portraits of Jews who evinced interest in natural philosophy or medicine, in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruderman describes his subject as “three distinct but interrelated groups among early modern Jews”: (1) “converso physicians and other university-trained intellectuals who fled Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Holland, Italy, Germany, England, and even eastern Europe, serving as doctors and purveyors of scientific learning throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, while yielding considerable political and economic power,” (2) “certain circles of Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe [who] pursued scientific learning, especially astronomy, in more informal settings as a desirable supplement to rabbinic study,” and (3) “the hundreds of Jews who attended Italian medical schools, primarily the University of Padua, from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.” 4In fact Ruderman covers even more ground than this. As background, he includes a brief essay on the attitudes of tenth- to fifteenth-century Jews towards nature and its study, surely the best survey of the sort available. Of the thirty or so early modern Jews that he describes in the remainder of the book, about twenty fit in at least one of the three camps upon which he focuses. 5 Nine [End Page 720] emerged from different circumstances (though these too were often highly influenced by one or more of the focus populations). This fact does nothing to impugn Ruderman’s typology—the groups he described were, in fact, of particular importance, and his identification of them as the principle populations contemplating and promulgating natural philosophy among Jews is in itself an advance of some moment. But the fact that a third of the cases Ruderman described do not fit into his own typology is testimony both to the complexity of his subject, and to his agility in addressing it.By anthologizing a dozen depictions of different thinkers in different milieus, Ruderman affords what might be called a “hawk... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good (...) than harm.—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern artists who did not have access to Roman Antiquity or needed quick access to it could refer to prints after monuments such as those issued by Antoine Lafréry. But Du Choul's Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains [ … ] De la Religion des anciens Romains was also successful among artists, particularly painters. It was in vernacular language and widely available in French, Spanish and Italian; it was affordable and compact in format ; it (...) had plenty of woodcuts; and it focused on the Roman military life, besides the monuments, for which information could also be found in travel guides. The present essay aims to study how Du Choul's volume circulated, with several examples from Spain and Italy. The Discours will be used as a case study of artists as readers, and I will study aspects previously overlooked such as the book's market price in the early modern period, examples of use of copies of the book by artists and, more broadly, the troubles and challenges encountered by these readers when representing subjects from ancient history. (shrink)

In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could (...) be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence--from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment--this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of 'the canon' in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

It is useful to be reminded that Spain produced, according to several estimates, about 10,000 plays during its literary Golden Age. Indeed, one of the many positive results from this enterprising b...

Clandestine philosophical manuscripts, made up of forbidden works including erotic texts, political pamphlets, satires of court life, forbidden religious texts, and books about the occult, had an avid readership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming objects of historical research by the twentieth century. The purveyors of the clandestine could be found in the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and not least in Paris or London. Despite the heavy risks, including prison, the circulation of these manuscripts was a prosperous (...) venture. After Ira Wade's pioneering contribution (1938), Clandestine Philosophy is the first work in English entirely focused on the philosophical clandestine manuscripts that preceded and accompanied the birth of the Enlightenment. Topics from philosophy, political and religious thought, and moral and sexual behaviour are addressed by contemporary authors working in both America and Europe. These manuscripts shed light on the birth of pornography and provide an important avenue for investigating philosophical, religious, political, and social critique. (shrink)

. In his writings, Francis Bacon emphasized the interrelatedness between the migration of people and knowledge, arguing that Europeans of his time had surpassed the greatest civilizations because of their ability to traverse the world freely. Concentrating on Spanish observers who investigated New Spain’s flora, this article bridges theory and practice by examining the Iberian roots of Bacon’s views. The article examines scientific approaches for acquiring bioknowledge by Iberians who specialized in European medicine, including Francisco Hernández, Juan de Cárdenas (...) and Francisco Ximénez. While the article recognizes the contribution of travellers and expatriates to Spain’s bioprospecting project, it also points to the ways in which the limitations of the transfer of botanical information was acknowledged and discusses its meaning. By presenting the complexities in the communication of knowledge, I argue, naturalists in the colonies could highlight their unique vantage point in relation to “armchair” specialists in the metropole. (shrink)

An exploratory qualitative research was carried out in Madrid, Spain, focusing on early adolescents and adolescents from low-income families, most of them with a migration background. The main subject was to describe their perceptions about risk and harm in the use of information and communication technologies. Focus groups and creative workshops were conducted in order to identify risk perceptions, conflicts, solutions and the main agents involved in each case. Despite their lack of financial resources, these adolescents intensively use (...) media and modern technologies with the support of formal and informal institutions outside the family. In this context, they use technology as a set of different resources coordinated in a network in order to achieve specific goals of early adolescence and adolescence. Risks emerge as this network affects their family rules, the social construction of age, and the status inside the family and among peers. (shrink)

Summary 1898 marked a crucial point in the end of the nineteenth-century Spanish crisis. The military defeat ending the Spanish-American War was seen as proof that the country was in terminal decline. With the ideals of regeneration spreading throughout Spanish society, the State became more interested in supporting and sponsoring science and technology, as well as in creating a modern educational system. The resulting reforms reflected this strong interest in scientific education, and consequently, the first decades of the twentieth (...) century saw a turning point in the development of science and technology in Spain. Some recent papers have discussed various initiatives taken by Spanish governments, particularly in the creation of new official institutions. Such institutions played an important role in the development of science and technology, but their activity in the promotion of scientific education was very limited. However, other governmental initiatives were taken in order to develop this area, particularly focusing on the acquisition of scientific instruments. Scientific instruments were needed not only to improve Spanish scientific research but also to improve the teaching of experimental sciences. These instruments were specifically adapted for use by students. This paper aims to present some of the lesser-known individuals and firms who, in the new social and cultural context, provided scientific instruments for educational centres in order to meet the increasing demand for this material in Spanish educational institutions during these years. (shrink)

This article is a study of the survival of scribal culture in nineteenth-century Spain in the form of the so-called ‘memory books’ (libros de memorias). I analyse their relationship with the educational developments of the period, as well as the material characteristics and the content of these texts, in order to define their typical features. These texts were the products of hybrid writing practices, in the sense that several elements were frequently superimposed on one another: economic news, personal, family (...) and social events and even historical details. Hence the similarity between the memory books and other genres such as account books (libros de cuentas) and family books (libros de familia). Lastly, I will examine some nineteenth-century examples as epigones of a writing genre which had its origins in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period. “One morning, while tidying up the bedroom, Rosa opened the drawer in the trunk where Cholo kept his papers. There she found the papers about the property and, in a corner, together with the Family Book and the social security booklet, the papers from the bank […]. And she was about to put it away when it occurred to her to take off the elastic band around the big folder which Cholo had kept from his time in Switzerland. There were things, names and so on that she didn’t understand, but in the middle there were also some of the cards she had sent from Aran.”1. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado – long considered to (...) be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters. (shrink)

Juan de Vera’s El Enbaxador (1620) was one of the main treatises on the role of the ambassador in Early Modern Europe and the first one published in Spanish. At the time, Spain was no exception to the influence of Tacitus as a significant ancient author to inspire the political practice of the age. Juan de Vera, a nobleman and writer, soon an ambassador and entitled count, incorporated his own reading of Tacitus into El Enbaxador. Justus Lipsius, (...) the outstanding editor of Tacitus’ works, was also a main source for this book which was defined by John Elliott as a ‘quintessentially Lipsian handbook for diplomats’. The focus of this article is on Tacitus’ citations in El Enbaxador and their contexts within the book. My aim is to identify the specific themes for which Tacitus served as an exemplary source of guidance according to this particular text. Notably, some of such themes pertain to ambassadorial affairs, while others are common political topics in Early Modern Europe. Vera's reading of Tacitus in El Enbaxador gained wider dissemination beyond Spain as the work was subsequently translated into French and Italian. (shrink)

The concepts “dispositive” and “intermediality” emerged at the same time and are becoming increasingly prominent. In this article, I propose to consider what intermediality brings to the dispositive, based on a case study of the diptych El Otro Lado de la Cama and Los Dos Lados de la Cama, two mainstream films from contemporary Spain in the early twenty-first century. Dispositive theory has been developed in France by academics working in the fields of modern literature and theater (...) at the University of Toulouse, notably Marie-Thérèse Mathet, Stéphane Lojkine, Philippe Ortel and Arnaud Rykner. In the late 1990s, this group adapted Foucault’s concept of the dispositive 2 to the fields of literature and.. (shrink)

Astrology, its legitimacy, and the limits of its acceptable practice were debated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Many of the related arguments were mediated by the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the responses to it. Acknowledging the complexities of the relationship between astrological ideas and Christian teachings, this paper focuses on the Catholic debates by specifically considering the decisions about astrology taken by the Spanish Inquisition. The trials of astrologers are examined with the aim of understanding the role (...) of experts in astrology in early modern Spain. This study brings into view the specific nature of the debate on astrology in Spain, the consequences of the actions of the Inquisition and the social control it exerted. The historical events discussed comprise a particular case and also mirror the general debates about astrology taking place in early modern Europe. The experts’ opinions expressed in trials and in reports about the discipline received by the Inquisition reveal two key traits of the debate: the dispute about who had the authority to decide on the legitimacy of astrology and the disagreement about what constituted natural and judicial astrological practices. These led to different opinions about what was to be done with each defendant and about what content in their books ought to be forbidden. (shrink)

This contribution to a symposium “on the consequence of blur” deals with the case of Agustín de Ribera and his followers in sixteenth-century Castile. Inquisition trial records report the appearance, around 1535 among the Moriscos (Catholic converts of Muslim origin) in Toledo, of a boy who had ecstasies and visions in which he traveled to the Hereafter and received revelations. Though considered by his followers and also by the Inquisition a prophet of Muhammad, Agustin and his visions appear to have (...) arisen in a context held in common with the Christian majority of Castile. This case thus reveals the existence of a hybrid form of Catholic Muslim religiosity, but only to scholars who do what is required to de differentiate — that is, to blur — the categories of identity and orthodoxy that were established by the Inquisition. Scholars have for too long allowed the Inquisition to overclarify for posterity the distinctions that existed between ethno religious groups and to define for us the nature of religious dissidence in early modern Spain. (shrink)

The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of (...) disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts – movies, television shows, and infotainment – alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy. (shrink)

This volume explores the relevance of decline within the republican tradition. The essays in this volume focus on the Dutch Republic during the revolutionary era, as well as early modern Spain and Venice, the German Enlightenment, and the Weimar Republic.

The self-worth of political communities is often understood to be an expression of their position in a hierarchy of power; if so, then the desire for self-worth is a source of competition and conflict in international relations. In early modern German natural law theories, one finds the alternative view, according to which duties of esteem toward political communities should reflect the degree to which they fulfill the functions of civil government. The present article offers a case study, examining (...) the views concerning confederation rights and the resulting duties of esteem in diplomatic relations developed by Christoph Besold (1577–1638). Besold defends the view that confederations including dependent communities—such as the Hanseatic League—could fulfill a stabilizing political function. He also uses sixteenth-century conceptions concerning the acquisition of sovereignty rights through prescription of immemorial time. Both strands of argument lead to the conclusion that the envoys of dependent communities can have the right to be recognized as ambassadors, with all the duties of esteem that follow from this recognition. (shrink)

From the late-fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works - which often take surprisingly modern-sounding positions - grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, most (...) scholars gradually forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr’s celebrated and icononclastic Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?, and will appeal to a broad readership of students, scholars and historical enthusiasts. Anthony Grafton is one of the most celebrated historians writing in English today, and What Was History? is a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. (shrink)

This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of jurisprudence and science in early modern Europe. Taking an interdisciplinary approach these articles stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.

The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez was an eminent philosopher and theologian whose _Disputationes Metaphysicae_ was first published in Spain in 1597 and was widely studied throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The _Disputationes Metaphysicae_ had a great influence on the development of early modern philosophy and on such well-known figures as Descartes and Leibniz. This is the first time that Disputations 17, 18, and 19 have been translated into English. The _Metaphysical Disputations_ provide an excellent philosophical introduction (...) to the medieval Aristotelian discussion of efficient causality. The work constitutes a synthesis of monumental proportions: problematic issues are lucidly delineated and the various arguments are laid out in depth. Disputations 17, 18, and 19 deal explicitly with such issues as the nature of causality, the types of efficient causes, the prerequisites for causal action, causal contingency, human free choice, and chance. (shrink)

Critically exploring medical thought in a cultural milieu with no discernible influence from the European Enlightenment, _Being Human_ reveals an otherwise unnoticed intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious values in traditional Tibetan medicine. It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization. Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials,_ Being Human_ adds a crucial chapter in (...) the larger historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary, and institution building during the period of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a strategically astute dialectic between scriptural and empirical authority on questions of history and the nature of human anatomy. It follows key differences between medicine and Buddhism in attitudes toward gender and sex and the moral character of the physician, who had to serve both the patient's and the practitioner's well-being. _Being Human_ ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal systems and absolutes, instead embracing the imperfectability of the human condition. (shrink)

In this paper we examine titles of early modern German dissertations with regard to their ‘interdiscplinarity’, challenging the established consensus that interdisciplinarity evolved only in the 18th century. Based on the construction and analysis of a co-occurrence network of 909 dissertation titles published in the 17thc entury it can be shown that various dimensions of early modern interdisciplinarity should be distinguished. This concerns dissertations that connect philosophical disciplines to the ‘higher’ faculties of the early (...) class='Hi'>modern university (theology, jurisprudence, medicine) as well as titles that connect theoretical and practical subdisciplines of philosophy itself. We also observe that the emerging disciplines of historiography and philology seem to play a prominent role in the emergence of early modern interdisciplinarity. On a structural level it seems to be misguided to construe the early modern system of knowledge as a ‘tree’. It rather seems that relations betweeen disciplines in this period exhibit both tree-like and lattice-like features. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to My CriticsExperience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in NatureAnik Waldow (bio)I would like to thank Dario Perinetti and Hynek Janoušek for their thoughtful comments and the time and effort they invested into my work. Their reflections drive attention to important questions and make helpful suggestions about how some of the arguments of the book can be further developed and clarified. In what (...) follows, I will first discuss the proposal to distinguish between a narrow and a broad sense of experience, then specify how I understand the connection between having a body and being able to engage in experiences. In this context, I will also discuss Janoušek’s suggestion to draw further distinctions between the different senses in which the concept of body relates to experience in Descartes and Hume. In the last section, I address the question of whether the focus on bodies risks undermining the claim that experience is intersubjectively constituted.1. Narrow versus Broad Concept of ExperienceDario Perinetti raises the worry that during the early modern period, and even before, the concept of experience was mainly used to discuss epistemological questions, and that therefore the Broad Experience Thesis fails. According to this thesis, it is reductive to think of experience in exclusively epistemological terms, since this ignores that many early modern writers approached questions about the benefits and dangers of experience from a wider moral perspective. This perspective, as I argue in [End Page 329] Experience Embodied, was concerned with the training of the mind’s intellectual and moral capacities, the role of pleasure and pain (and other affects) in epistemic and moral judgement, and, more generally, the question of how it is possible to be self-determined agents who do more than simply respond to the experiences they have.To support his claim, Perinetti cites the Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Cauvin’s Lexicon Rationale sive Thesaurus Philosophicus, but also Aristotle, Bacon, and Hobbes. The approach I pursue in my book is based on the usage of the concept of experience by the authors examined (Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, Kant). I will turn to the analysis of this usage in a moment, but before this let me say a few words about dictionaries.It is in principle not surprising that a dictionary like the Historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie—and its discussion of Aristotle, Bacon, and Hobbes—supports the traditional approach to experience as a centrally epistemological concept. Its entry on “experience” revolves around the idea that philosophers are either empiricists or rationalists.1 Yet it is precisely the establishment of this distinction that has substantially contributed to promoting a reductive concept of experience. After all, rationalism and empiricism are labels typically used to describe competing epistemological positions.2 It is also worth noting that the dictionary’s entry is from the 1970s. Because of this, it operates with a picture of the history of philosophy that has long been challenged by studies that show that there is far more to early modern philosophy than the standard works of some selected canonical figures.3 When dealing with Locke, the entry for instance exclusively focuses on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and does not even mention that experience is a key concept in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.The rather short and general entry on experience in Chauvin’s Lexicon Philosophicum (1692) is not very telling either—at least not if treated in isolation from other dictionaries and encyclopedias of the period, such as D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encylopédie: a tremendously influential work, that, according to its editors, is in itself committed to the Baconian method.4 And here César Chesneau Du Marsais’s entry on experience straightforwardly highlights the moral dimension of the knowledge acquired through experience:Experience, abstract term, commonly means the knowledge acquired through a long life, combined with the reflections made on what one has seen, and on the good and bad that has happened to us. In this sense, reading history is a highly profitable way of gaining experience; it tells us of events, and shows us the good or bad repercussions and consequences of these events.5The... (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of women's engagement with Stoic ethics in early modern England (c. 1600–1700). It builds on recent literature in the field by demonstrating that there is a positive gender‐inclusive narrative to be told about Stoic philosophy in this time—one that incorporates women's specific concerns and responds to women's lived experiences. To support this claim, we take an interdisciplinary approach and examine several different genres of women's writing in the period, including letters, poems, plays, educational (...) texts, and moral essays. In these writings, we argue, a distinctive conception of Stoic therapy emerges. Women embrace well‐known aspects of the Stoic philosophy—such as living in agreement with nature, the importance of self‐government, and the ideal of freedom from the passions—but they also allow room for the cultivation of eupatheiai or life‐affirmative feelings, such as feelings of respect, affection, and good will toward other people. (shrink)

The novel use of symbolism in early modern mathematics poses both philosophical and historical questions. How can we trace its development and transmission through manuscript sources? Is it intrinsically related to the emergence of symbolic algebra? How does symbolism relate to the use of diagrams? What are the consequences of symbolic reasoning on our understanding of nature? Can a symbolic language enable new forms of reasoning? Does a universal symbolic language exist which enable us to express all knowledge? (...) This book brings together a collection of papers that address all these and related questions which were initially posed at a conference held in Ghent (Belgium) in August 2009. Scholars working on philosophy of science, history of philosophy and history of mathematics provide an insight into the role and function of symbolic representations in the development of early modern mathematics. The papers cover the period from early abbaco arithmetic and algebra (14h century) up to Leibniz (early 18th century). (shrink)

This paper examines the pressures leading two very different Early Modern philosophers, Descartes and Locke, to invoke two ways in which thought is directed at objects. According to both philosophers, I argue, the same idea can simultaneously count as “of” two different objects—in two different senses of the phrase ‘idea of’. One kind of intentional directedness is invoked in answering the question What is it to think that thus-and-so? The other kind is invoked in answering the question What (...) accounts for the success of our proper methods of inquiry? For Descartes as well as Locke, the two kinds of “ofness” come apart as a result of strong rationalist commitments. However, I will suggest that even if we reject such commitments, we go wrong if we assume that a single kind of intentional directedness suffices to address both questions. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Renaissance and early modern readings of Aristotle’s _Meteorologica_ I 7.344a5-8, showing how the various interpretations of this passage were foundational for the establishment of an epistemology based on hypotheses and conjectures, and how this passage informed major philosophical and scientific elaborations of the time, extending its influence beyond the original field of application. The paper considers authors such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Philoponus, Nifo, Pomponazzi, Wurstisen, Descartes, Galileo, Charleton and Boyle.

The article discusses in a broader historical context the well-known thesis of V. I. Lenin that capitalism was formed as a result of a change in the behavior of large merchants, who, after the state achieves political unity and forms a unified market, switch from trade to the organization of production. Researchers of the 17th century Siberia do not find historical confirmation of Lenin’s scheme, however, it is quite applicable to other countries of the early modern period and (...) to the mechanism of the early stage of the colonial expansion of European powers (I. R. Sokolovsky, 2019). At the same time, J. Diamond’ research pointed out the boundary between “normal” human behavior in the new lands and the behavior of the colonizers of the early modern period. This boundary is a rational or quasi-rational accounting of one’s actions. M. Heidegger calls this approach Gestell. Gestell considers the surrounding world as a calculated resource for self-increasing profit. Using the example of a Swiss wine merchant who died in North America in 1736, the Italian micro-historian K. Ginzburg showed how the merchants and “capitalists” actually acted and what the Gestell that determined their actions looked like in everyday life: predatory appropriation of material and labor resources is gradually getting a solid base of rational calculation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusī Narrative Practice in the Conde LucanorDavid A Wacks (bio)In the tenth century, when Cordova was the richest and most populous city in Europe, and the Umayyad Caliphate was setting the standard for cultural florescence in the Islamic world, a group of Christian nobles in the rocky precincts of northernmost Spain sought to expand their territorial holdings southward, into al-Andalus. Their aim was to unseat (...) Islamic political power on the Iberian Peninsula, and they sought to authorize this project by discrediting Muslim leaders as the usurpers of lands to which the Christians were rightful heirs. In their view, Christian conquests of al-Andalus were the recuperation of lands that, in the eyes of God himself, belonged to them.Spanish culture as we know it today is the product of this medieval frontier society, in which Christians and Muslims—during a span of some 700 years—continuously negotiated a political border that was culturally quite porous. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Christian rulers had gained control of the large majority of the Iberian Peninsula, including the populous and important cities of Cordova and Seville in the south. The Christians who populated these newly conquered lands found themselves in close contact with a sizeable population of Andalusī Muslims (and Jews and Christians) who had remained. The conquering Christians were great consumers of Andalusī culture in general, especially arts and sciences, and even literature. At the same time, they viewed Islam, the dominant religion of al-Andalus, as a purely illegitimate basis for political power and social organization. If the official narrative of Reconquest argues for tidy cultural purity and conformity, the reality on the ground is, in contrast, a messy and emergent pluralism, one that resonates with early modern and modern colonial experiences.1While medievalists have been slower to embrace postcolonial theoretical approaches than their colleagues working on modern and contemporary texts, they have begun to adapt the ideas of thinkers such as Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha, Spivak, and others to medieval European perceptions of and experience in the East.2 However, it is curious [End Page 87] that Hispanists (with what may be the sole exception of David Hanlon) have completely avoided reading the Christian conquest of al-Andalus as a colonial project. Despite the substantial differences between medieval and modern colonialisms as regards political reality, public discourse, and the construction of subjectivity, one may safely argue that the Christian conquests of al-Andalus were a colonial endeavor, one of several studied by historians of medieval Europe.3 The case of medieval Christian Iberian colonialism was distinct from other medieval colonialisms (such as French and English crusading in the Middle East) in that it contributed fundamentally to the formation of a Spanish national identity, and served as a domestic proving ground for the conquest of Spanish territories in the Americas.Don Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor (1340) [CL],4 was the most powerful nobleman of his time. He held extensive lands in Murcia, which retained a far higher proportion of its preconquest Muslim population than did neighboring Castile and Leon [O’Callaghan, History 459]. While his military and political career depended on eradicating Islam from the Iberian Peninsula, he earned his literary renown—in part—by imitating and incorporating Andalusī narrative tradition and history into his own writings. In Juan Manuel’s adaptation of the frametale genre, the CL, this dissonance between the religious and political agendas of the Reconquest manifests in narrative. If the CL shows us the ideology of the Reconquest, it also offers the reader a reflection of the more complicated and nuanced reality of daily life and human behavior characteristic of Reconquest-era Castile-Leon [Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier” 53]. In it, Juan Manuel distills the political realities, religious discourse, and cultural interaction of the time into the first original frametale in any European vernacular.5Juan Manuel’s religious agenda and frontier political philosophy come across quite clearly in the 50 exemplos of the CL. The idea of the Christian nobleman’s duty to wage war against Islam permeates the work, most starkly in these words of the Count’s advisor Patronio: “... Dios vos poblo... (shrink)

In optics, real images can be projected onto a screen, while virtual ones always remain behind mirrors. This apparently straightforward distinction is based on complex premises which emerged in the Early Modern period, and its development went hand in hand with a transformation of the notion of image, which became detached from sensual perception. In this article I will outline this historical process, and argue that the distinction between a real and virtual image still implies a reference to (...) visual perception which makes it problematic, yet useful for didactic purposes. (shrink)

Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology: From Early Modern to Modern Sino-Japanese Medical Discourses. Edited by Benjamin A. Elman. Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Studies, vol. 12. Boston: Brill, 2015. Pp. viii + 232. $135.