Love Customs In Eighteenth Century Spain

It was customary for the wife of a nobleman in eighteenth-century Spain to be courted fervently and seemingly forever, by a man who was not her husband. This liaison, accepted and even encouraged by the husband, was presumably platonic, though that may not always have been the case. It was carried on according to a complex, if ambiguous, code of companionship and whispered conversation. With the help of a lively blend of archival documents and literary sources, Carmen Martín Gaite admits us to the intricacies of the code and unravels its significance for the women who enjoyed the attention of a cortejo, or escort. Why was the cortejo tolerated, by society and by the woman's aristocratic family, even though it infringed traditional religious precepts? What did woman and her friend talk about at such length? Was their flirtation intellectual, reflecting the effects of Enlightenment rationalism on Spanish culture? Letters, memoirs, and travel journals as well as dramatic works of the period offer invaluable clues to the nature of these relationships, in which the woman was almost ritually adored and placed on a pedestal. The conversation, we learn, was generally frivolous, focusing on possessions and luxuries in a way that clearly signals economic change and the dawn of a material age. At the same time, the cortejo did represent a taste of symbolic liberation for women whose social lives were rigidly constrained. Clarifying details from a great variety of historical sources are presented with the urgency and fluidity of a novel in this excellent English translation -- Book jacket.

She calls attention to the hypocrisy of the system, to the image versus the reality, and to how certain watchwords like "rationing" and "restriction" went beyond their economic applications to touch on personal behavior and attitudes." "Themes she touches on in the nine chapters (and epilogue) include proper dress and behavior for women; a young woman's limited future; the influence of the Falange (Fascist) party on society and on individual behaviour; the "rebel" girl; family life; sex; cinema and the Spaniard; and courtship and the stages of relationship."

The contents of this book cover what a Canon is and why it matters, the Canon backstory, modern Canons, factors that make a work Canonical, the literary Canon, and much more.

The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. Paradoxically, the art of the era continues to be a relatively neglected field within art history. While women's private lives, their involvement with cultural production, the project of Enlightenment, and the public sphere have been the subjects of ground-breaking historical and literary studies in recent decades, women's engagement with the arts remains one of the richest and most under-explored areas for scholarly investigation. This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage during the eighteenth century. By opening up the specific problems and conflicts inherent in women's artistic involvements from the perspective of what was at stake for the eighteenth-century women themselves, it also acts as a corrective to the generalizing and stereotyping about the prominence of those women, which is too often present in current day literature. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where "The Woman Question" was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme Adélaïde and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.

Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.

" The Politics of the Essay is that rare scholarly work that provides both a history of this relatively new field and of its formal characteristics and inspires its readers to want to participate in the making of this history." --Signs The first in-depth study of the relationship between women and essays. Employing gender, race, class, and national identity as axes of analysis, this volume introduces new perspectives into what has been a largely apolitical discussion of the essay. Includes an original essay by Susan Griffin.

The beginning of the eighteenth century opened Spain to an influx of people, books and ideas and gave the country its own brief age of Enlightenment. At this time of momentous change, the three authors represented in this volume contributed to the Europe-wide debate over the nature of women and their position in society. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo was an admired scholar and a prolific author. One of his most controversial essays was Defence of Women, which argued that women were men's intellectual equals. This sparked a pamphlet war that continued for twenty-five years. Josefa Amar y Borbón was a writer and translator who submitted her own spirited argument, the Defence of the Talents of Women, to a debate on whether women should be admitted to the new Economic Societies. She also demanded in her Discourse on the Education of Women that women should be given the opportunity to study and learn. At the very end of the century, Inés Joyes y Blake published an Apology for Women, arguing that women should develop self-respect, support each other and refuse to be manipulated by insincere lovers and domineering husbands. All three writers wrote with verve and imagination about one of the most important social questions of their day

The authors in this anthology explore how we are to rethink political and social narratives of the Spanish Civil War at the turn of the twenty-first century. The questions addressed here are based on a solid intellectual conviction of all the contributors to resist facile arguments both on the Right and the Left, concerning the historical and collective memory of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship in the milieu of post-transition to democracy. Central to a true democratic historical narrative is the commitment to listening to the other experiences and the willingness to rethink our present(s) in light of our past(s). The volume is divided in six parts: I. Institutional Realms of Memory; II. Past Imperfect: Gender Archetypes in Retrospect; III. The Many Languages of Domesticity; IV. Realms of Oblivion: Hunger, Repression, and Violence; V. Strangers to Ourselves: Autobiographical Testimonies; and VI. The Orient Within: Myths of Hispano-Arabic Identity. Contributors are Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, Álex Bueno, Fernando Martínez López, Miguel Gómez Oliver, Mary Ann Dellinger, Geoffrey Jensen, Paula A. de la Cruz-Fernández, María del Mar Logroño Narbona, M. Cinta Ramblado Minero, Deirdre Finnerty, Victoria L. Enders, Pilar Domínguez Prats, Sofia Rodríguez López, Óscar Rodríguez Barreira, Nerea Aresti, and Miren Llona. Listed by Choice magazine as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2014