Drawing on history, literature, and art to explore childhood in early modern Spain, the contributors to this collection argue that early modern Spaniards conceptualized childhood as a distinct and discrete stage in life which necessitated special care and concern. The volume contrasts the didactic use of art and literature with historical accounts of actual children, and analyzes children in a wide range of contexts including the royal court, the noble family, and orphanages. The volume explores several interrelated questions that challenge both scholars of Spain and scholars specializing in childhood. How did early modern Spaniards perceive childhood? In what framework (literary, artistic) did they think about their children, and how did they visualize those children’s roles within the family and society? How do gender and literary genres intersect with this concept of childhood? How did ideas about childhood shape parenting, parents, and adult life in early modern Spain? How did theories about children and childhood interact with the actual experiences of children and their parents? The group of international scholars contributing to this book have developed a variety of creative, interdisciplinary approaches to uncover children’s lives, the role of children within the larger family, adult perceptions of childhood, images of children and childhood in art and literature, and the ways in which children and childhood were vulnerable and in need of protection. Studying children uncovers previously hidden aspects of Spanish history and allows the contributors to analyze the ideals and goals of Spanish culture, the inner dynamics of the Habsburg court, and the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that Spanish society fought to overcome.

Drawing on history, literature, and art to explore childhood in early modern Spain, the contributors to this collection argue that early modern Spaniards conceptualized childhood as a distinct and discrete stage in life which necessitated special care and concern. The volume contrasts the didactic use of art and literature with historical accounts of actual children, and analyzes children in a wide range of contexts including the royal court, the noble family, and orphanages. The volume explores several interrelated questions that challenge both scholars of Spain and scholars specializing in childhood. How did early modern Spaniards perceive childhood? In what framework (literary, artistic) did they think about their children, and how did they visualize those children’s roles within the family and society? How do gender and literary genres intersect with this concept of childhood? How did ideas about childhood shape parenting, parents, and adult life in early modern Spain? How did theories about children and childhood interact with the actual experiences of children and their parents? The group of international scholars contributing to this book have developed a variety of creative, interdisciplinary approaches to uncover children’s lives, the role of children within the larger family, adult perceptions of childhood, images of children and childhood in art and literature, and the ways in which children and childhood were vulnerable and in need of protection. Studying children uncovers previously hidden aspects of Spanish history and allows the contributors to analyze the ideals and goals of Spanish culture, the inner dynamics of the Habsburg court, and the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that Spanish society fought to overcome.

Early Modern Childhood is a detailed and accessible introduction to childhood in the early modern period, which guides students through every part of childhood from infancy to youth and places the early modern child within the broader social context of the period. Drawing on the work of recent revisionist historians, the book scrutinises traditional historiographical views of early modern childhood, challenging the idea that the concept of ‘childhood’ didn’t exist in this period and that families avoided developing strong affections for their children because of the high death rate. Instead, this book reveals a more intricately detailed character of the early modern child and how childhood was viewed and experienced. Divided into five parts, it brings together the work of historians, art historians and literary scholars to discuss a variety of themes and questions surrounding each stage of childhood, including the household, pregnancy, infancy, education, religion, gender, illness and death. Chapters are also dedicated to the topics of crime, illegitimacy and children’s clothing, providing a broad and varied lens through which to view this subject. Exploring the evolution in understanding of the early modern child, Early Modern Childhood is the ideal book for students of the early modern family, early modern childhood and early modern gender.

Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status quo, defended certain causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers. Such women did not necessarily engage in masculine pursuits, but often used cultural production and engaged in social subversion to exercise resistance in the home, in the convent, on stage, or at their writing desks. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain’s fall from imperial power after 1640. This book culls genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose fiction, to restore the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court to the history of masculinity. Refuting the current conception that Spain’s political decline precipitated a ’crisis of masculinity’, Masculine Virtue maps changes in figurations of normative masculine conduct from 1500 to 1700. As Spain assumed the role of Europe’s first modern centralized empire, codes of masculine conduct changed to meet the demands of global rule. Viewed chronologically, Shifra Armon shows Spanish conduct literature to reveal three axes of transformation. The ideal subject (gendered male in both practice and law) became progressively more adaptable to changing circumstances, more intensely involved in currying his own public image, and more desirous of achieving renown. By bringing recent advances in gender theory to bear on normative rather than non-normative masculinities of early modern Spain, Armon is able to foreground the emergence of energizing new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.

In this groundbreaking study, Diana Berruezo-Sánchez recovers key chapters in the history of Afro-Iberian diasporas by exploring the literary contributions and life experiences of black African communities and individuals in early modern Spain. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, international trade involving chattel slavery led to significant populations of enslaved, free(d), and half-manumitted black African women, men, and children in the Iberian Peninsula. These demographic changes transformed Spain's urban and social landscapes. In exploring Spain's role in the transatlantic slave trade and its effects on cultural forms of the period, Berruezo-Sánchez examines a broad range of texts and unearths new documents relating to black African poets, performers, and black confraternities. Her discoveries evince the broad yet largely disregarded literary and artistic impact of the African diaspora in early modern Spain, expanding the scope of linguistic practices beyond habla de negros and creating space for early modern black poets in the Spanish literary canon. These textual sources challenge established understandings of black Africans and black African history in early modern Spain. They show how black Africans exerted significant cultural agency by collectively contributing to and shaping the literary texts of the period, including those of the popular genre villancicos de negros, and by developing artistic traditions as musicians, dancers, and poets. As both creators and consumers of cultural forms, black African men and women navigated a restrictive, coercive slave society yet negotiated their own physical and cultural spaces.

The title comes from three domains within the bounds of early modern Spain and follows from the renewal of historical studies dedicated to the Iberian peninsula. The book is divided into three parts: religious control and its limits in the Iberian world; images of the body in Spanish society; and women, gender, and family in Hapsburg Spain. The volume includes nine essays which are revised versions of papers originally presented at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in New Orleans.

Although scholars have recognized the picaresque figure as a transgressive and subversive model, the queer effect of the figure is yet to be examined. Considering class, generation, and topography, the contributions assembled in this volume explore Spanish, French, English, and German novels from the perspective of gender and cultural theory.

This volume presents expanded versions of papers read at a bi-national symposium convened in Jerusalem in December 1992. Organised within the framework of meetings held world-wide in remembrance of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, this conference focused on aspects of the profession and ethics of medicine. The major topics explored at the symposium were the relationships among physicians of different denominations and between them and the authorities; the image and status of the converso physician; questions of medical licensing and compensation; attitudes regarding suffering, pain and the care of infants; and the influence of medieval Jewish and Moslem religious law concepts underlying the care and treatment of patients. Other papers relate to the early modern period and to current problems of medical ethics, illustrating the impact of historical approaches on the development of the discipline of medical ethics today.