There are three essays in Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe, ed. Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo (Berghahn, 2008), that focus on cities in Spain or its empire.

Thomas Dandelet, “Searching for the New Constantine: Early Modern Rome as a Spanish Imperial City,” argues that Rome’s revival in the 16th century sprang from its new dependence on the Spanish monarchy. Spain supported Rome by providing peace, funds for building projects like St. Peter’s, immigration to replenish its population, and Spanish backing for papal claims of political and ecclesiastical legitimacy. Charles V and his successors through Carlos II were the new Constantines that Rome needed to refound itself as a great urban capital and stage.

John A. Marino, “The Zodiac in the Streets: Inscribing ‘Buon Governo’ in Baroque Naples,” describes how processions in Naples to mark the feast of St. John the Baptist were designed to reinforce the idea of good government by the Spanish viceroys, and how these processions broke down during the 17th century, mirroring the breakdown of Spanish authority in general.

David Ringrose, “A Setting for Royal Authority: The Reshaping of Madrid, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries,” argues that during the 16th century, Spanish monarchs left Madrid alone, preferring to assert their authority through temporary displays during entrance processions, in the tradition of peripatitic medieval kings. It was not until the 18th century, really, when new forms of sociability arose among the elite that the Bourbon monarchs, especially Carlos III, redesigned Madrid in a permanent way through buildings and broad avenues (paseos) designed to incorporate that sociability with royal authority.

While all the essays from In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past, ed. Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman (Palgrave, 2008), look interesting, there are two essays of particular relevance to early modern historians:

Mary Elizabeth Perry’s “Memory and Mutilation: The Case of the Moriscos” examines the historical memories that the Moriscos forged for themselves in the context of political and religious oppression.

David Coleman’s “The Persistance of the Past in the Albaicín: Granada’s New Mosque and the Question of Historical Relevance” examines the relationship between current debates about ethnicity and religion in Granada and the medieval legacy of Granada’s religiously plural past.

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.

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.

In The Reach of the Republic of Letters: Literary and Learned Societies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Arjan van Dixhoorn and Susie Speakman Sutch (Brill, 2008), Francisco J. Álvarez, Ignacio García Aguilar, and Inmaculada Osuna present “Seventeenth-Century Academies in the City of Granada: A Comparatist Approach.” Mostly descriptive – who attended, what types of poetry they produced, etc. – but still interesting.

This essay by Jim Amelang has been out for a little while, but I’ve just come across it.

In Public Power in Europe: Studies in Historical Transformations, ed. by James S. Amelang and Siegfried Beer (Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2006), Amelang himself has a chaper entitled, “The Peculiarities of the Spaniards: Historical Approaches to the Early Modern State.” It’s a historiographical piece, focusing on three main issues: absolutism in Castile, the nature of the Spanish state, and the issue of unity and disunity.

This is a very useful essay for a number of reasons. First, it’s comprehensive and exhaustive, yet clear and well organized. Second, it shows the links between Spanish historiography and contemporary Spanish politics and culture. And third, it combines the scholarly traditions of the US and Britain, Spain, and Italy.

A must-read for grad students!

There are four chapters dealing with religious women in Spain in a recent book, Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdiscplinary View, ed. Cordula van Whye (Ashgate, 2008).

Margit Thøfner examines depictions of Teresa of Avila before the famous Bernini sculpture in “How to Look Like a (Female) Saint: The Early Iconography of St. Teresa of Avila.

Colleen Baade explores the tensions over the question of whether nuns should sing and play music in “Music and Misgiving: Attitudes towards Nuns’ Music in Early Modern Spain.”

Jodi Bilinkoff revisits the complex relationships between holy women and their confessors in “Soul Mates: Spiritual Friendship and Life-Writing in Early Modern Spain (and Beyond).”

Lastly, in a moving essay that humanizes Teresa of Avila and her fellow reformers, Alison Weber finds that despite their rigor, some Discalced Carmelite convents took in small girls to raise and care for in “‘Little Angels’: Young Girls in Discalced Carmelite Convents (1562-1582).”

New work from Cristian Berco in The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kenneth Borris and George S. Rousseau (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). The article is entitled, “Syphilis and the silencing of sodomy in Juan Calvo’s Tratado del morbo gálico,” and it explores the gap between the practial knowledge that syphilis could be spread through male homosexual sex and the absence of that knowledge in the Valencian physician’s treatise. While Calvo was writing, Valencia was undergoing some high-profile trials for sodomy. This, plus the wide-spread knowledge among medical care-givers that syphilis could result from anal sex between men, leads Berco to conclude that Calvo, in his discussion of the transmission of syphilis, left out male homosexual sex intentionally, not thanks to ignorance.

From 2007, there are three chapters in John Jeffries Martin’s The Renaissance World that concern us. Anthony Grafton assesses José de Acosta’s place in humanist historiography, especially vis a vis Bodin, in José de Acosta: Renaissance historiography and New World humanity.” Katherine Elliot van Liere’s “‘Shared studies foster friendship’: humanism and history in Spain” looks at a network of 16th-century antiquarians, including Ambrosio de Morales, Antonio Agustín, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Diego de Covarrubias, Hernán Núñez de Guzmán, and Jerónimo de Zurita. Charles V plays an important role in Thomas Dandelet’s “The imperial Renaissance.”