Gender Identity And Representation In Spain S Golden Age

The essays in this collection provide new material to enable the continuing recuperation of the complex social ambiance that both created and was reflected in the literature of Spain's Golden Age.

An identification and analysis of Spanish Golden-Age drama's preoccupation with the woman who will not accept marriage as her natural role.

By engaging in dialogue the voices of both male and female writers who participated both in the broader courtly love tradition and in the theatrical production of early modern Spain, this book demonstrates that all representations of desire are gender-inflected.

In early modern Spain, theater reached the height of its popularity during the same decades in which Spanish monarchs were striving to consolidate their power. Jodi Campbell uses the dramatic production of seventeenth-century Madrid to understand how ordinary Spaniards perceived the political developments of this period. Through a study of thirty-three plays by four of the most popular playwrights of Madrid (Pedro Caldern de la Barca, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, and Juan Bautista Diamante), Campbell analyzes portrayals of kingship during what is traditionally considered to be the age of absolutism and highlights the differences between the image of kingship cultivated by the monarchy and that presented on Spanish stages. A surprising number of plays performed and published in Madrid in the seventeenth century, Campbell shows, featured themes about kingship: debates over the qualities that make a good king, tests of a king's abilities, and stories about the conflicts that could arise between the personal interests of a king and the best interest of his subjects. Rather than supporting the absolutist and centralizing policies of the monarchy, popular theater is shown here to favor the idea of reciprocal obligations between subjects and monarch. This study contributes new evidence to the trend of recent scholarship that revises our views of early modern Spanish absolutism, arguing for the significance of the perspectives of ordinary people to the realm of politics.

Despite the increasing popularity of queer scholarship, no major work in English thus far has explored the evidence of male homosexual behaviour found in the inquisitorial court records of early modern Spain. This absence seems all the more glaring considering the wealth of available archival material. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status aims to fill this gap by comprehensively examining the Aragonese Inquisition's sodomy trials. Using court records, Cristian Berco provides an analysis of male sexuality and its connection to public social structures and processes. His study illustrates how male homosexual behaviour existed within a widespread gendered system that extolled the penetrative act as the masculine pursuit of an emasculated passive partner. This sexual hierarchy based on masculinity constantly intersected in a potentially subversive manner with notions of public hierarchy and posed a threat to local sexual economies. Yet, Berco demonstrates how the views of private denouncers and magistrates in the sodomy trials produced divergent sexual economies that rendered persecution unstable and diffuse. By focusing on how hierarchies were created both within sexual relationships and in the public eye, this investigation traces the significance of homosexual desire in the context of daily social relations informed by status, ethnic, religious, and national differences.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.

As well as dealing with the lives and major works of the most significant playwrights of the period, this text focuses on other aspects of the growth and maturing of Golden Age theatre, reflecting the interests and priorities of modern scholarship.