Theater in France: A Challenge!

I’ve just recently read two great new works on the place of theater and plays in French history, Carol Symes’s A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell, 2007), and Sara Beam’s Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Cornell, 2007). Both of these books do a fantastic job of integrating the content and performance of drama into the wider cultural and social trends of medieval and early modern France, both of them taking cliches about “theatricity” and “performance” in European history and making them come to life. Both have won prestigious prizes. With such a rich tradition in Spanish history of studying culture, on the one hand and such a rich tradition studying Golden Age drama, on the other, I feel like we need to take up this challenge! We need to emulate these path-breaking works that bring theater and performance into the realm of cultural and social history of early modern Spain.

Of course, Jodi Campbell has already taken a giant step in this direction, in Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation (Ashgate, 2006). But more needs to be done to tear down the boundaries between the stage es of the corrales and the stages in the streets.

Is there anyone currently working on a project like Symes’s and Beam’s? Is there something published already that I’ve missed? Are there any graduate students out there looking for a dissertation topic?

Poska on Masculinity

Here’s an essay from last year: Allyson M. Poska, “A Married Man Is a Woman: Negotiating Masculinity in Early Modern Northwest Spain,” in Masculinity in the Reformation Era, ed. Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008). Here Poska finds that the demands placed on men in Galicia by elite notions of masculinity – and the inability of these men to meet these demands -  encouraged their emigration from Galicia. A nice overview of elite Spanish  concepts of masculine virtues.

Classics on “The Medieval Frontiers” by Variorum

Ashgate/Variorum has produced The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500, Vol. I, The Medieval Frontiers of Latin Christendom: Expansion, Contraction, Continuity, ed. James Muldoon and Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Included within are essays dating back to the early twentieth century from scholars such as Robert I. Burns and Charles Julian Bishko.

Iberian Cities in the Atlantic World: Ashgate

Ashgate has two new books on Iberian cities in the Atlantic World and beyond.

Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 1500-1900, ed. Patrick O’Flanagan.

Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World, ed. Liam Matthew Brockey.

Historical Journal: Fall of the Spanish Empire

Gabriel Paquette has a historiographical review on ”The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy” in the latest Historical Journal 52 (2009).

Gender & History April 2009: Reviews

No articles, but several reviews for us in Gender and History 21 (April 2009):

Janka Rodziewicz reviews The Wealth of Wives: Law and Economy in Late Medieval London, by Barbara Hannawalt, and Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain, by Allyson M. Poska.

Gabriel B. Paquette reviews Education and Women in the Early Modern Hispanic World, by Elizabeth Teresa Howe.

And Jocelyn Olcott reviews Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina, including the volume El mundo moderno, ed. Margarita Ortega, Asunción Lavrin, and Pilar Pérez Cantó.

Beyond the Catch

Two chapters of Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900-1850, ed. Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (Brill, 2009), feature Iberian themes.

Peter Pope’s “Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape of Atlantic Canada by Migratory European Fisherman, 1500-1800,” includes Portuguese and Basque fishermen and their fishing camps in Newfoundland.

Inês Amorim’s “The Evolution of Portuguese Fisheries in the Medieval and Early Modern Period: A Fiscal Approach”  looks at local fishing grounds, taxation, and argues that the regulation  of fisheries devolved to local governments over the early modern period and that the argument that high taxation caused the fisheries to decline in the eighteenth century is wrong.

Journal of Modern History: March 2009 Reviews

There are two reviews for us in the Journal of Modern History 81 (March, 2009):

Sara T. Nalle reviews Richard J. Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425-1783.

And Paula de Vos reviews Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World.

Hispanic Review Special Issue: Re-Envisioning Early Modern Iberia

The Hispanic Review: 77 (Winter 2009) is a special issue, featuring articles first given as papers at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, and now collected under the title, “Re-Envisioning Early Modern Iberia: Visuality, Materiality, History” (link requires Project Muse). It looks like a very interesting attempt to fuse the concerns and approaches of cartography, literature, art, and history. The issue includes five articles, with comment on each one:

Ricardo Padrón, “A Sea of Denial: The Early Modern Spanish Invention of the Pacific Rim,” with a comment by Amanda Wunder.

Karina Galperin, “The Dido Episode in Ercilla’s La Araucana and the Critique of Empire, with a comment by Elizabeth R. Wright.

Elizabeth R. Wright, “Narrating the Ineffable Lepanto: The Austrias carmen of Joannes Latinus (Juan Latino),” with a comment by Karina Galperin.

Laura R. Bass and Amanda Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” with a comment by Enrique García Santo-Tomás.

And Enrique García Santo-Tomás, “Outside Bets: Disciplining Gamblers in Early Modern Spain,” with a comment by Laura R. Bass.

SCJ Winter ‘08: Book Reviews – Updated

No articles on Spain in the current Sixteenth Century Journal, but seven book reviews:

Frank A. Domínguez reviews Daniel Castro’s Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism.

R. Jovita Baber reviews Titu Cusi Yupangui’s History of How the Spaniards Arrived in Peru, ed. and trans. Catherine J. Julien.

William A. Christian, Jr. reviews Benjamin Ehlers’ Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568-1614.

Miranda Howard reviews Marta V. Vicente’s Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic.

Guy Lazure reviews Jorge Bergua Cavero’s Francisco de Enzinas: Un humanista reformado en la Europa de Carlos V.

James S. Amelang reviews Paintings for the Planet King: Philip IV and the Buen Retiro Palace, ed. Andrés Ubeda de los Cobos, and Velázquez, by Dawson W. Carr, Xavier Bray, John H. Elliott, Larry Keith, and Javier Portús, with additional catalogue entries by Simona Di Nepi, Gabriele Finaldi, Giorgia Mancini, and Wolfgang Prohaska.

And José F. Bañuelos-Montes reviews El Humanismo español, su proyección en América Latina y Canarias en la época del Humanismo, ed. Antonio María Martín Rodríguez and Germán Santana Henríquez.

Update: Here’s one I missed: Robert A. Maryks reviews Julia A. Fleming, Defending Probabilism: The Moral Theology of Juan Caramue.