Love Magic And Control In Premodern Iberian Literature

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

This volume explores how Colombian novelists, artists, performers, activists, musicians, and others seek to enact—to perform, to stage, to represent—human rights situations that are otherwise enacted discursively, that is, made public or official, in juridical and political realms in which justice often remains an illusory or promised future. In order to probe how cultural production embodies the tensions between the abstract universality of human rights and the materiality of violations on individual human bodies and on determined groups, the volume asks the following questions: How does the transmission of historical traumas of Colombia’s past, through human rights narratives in various forms, inform the debates around the subjects of rights, truth and memory, remembrance and forgetting, and the construction of citizenship through solidarity and collective struggles for justice? What are the different roles taken by cultural products in the interstices among rights, laws, and social justice within different contexts of state violence and states of exception? What are alternative perspectives, sources, and (micro)histories from Colombia of the creation, evolution, and practice of human rights? How does the human rights discourse interface with notions of environmental justice, especially in the face of global climate change, regional (neo)extractivism, the implementation of megaprojects, and ongoing post-accord thefts and (re)appropriations of land? Through a wide range of disciplinary lenses, the different chapters explore counter-hegemonic concepts of human rights, decolonial options struggling against oppression and market logic, and alternative discourses of human dignity and emancipation within the pluriverse.

This book offers a substantial examination of how contemporary authors deal with the complex legacies of authoritarian regimes in various Spanish-speaking countries. It does so by focusing on works that explore an under-studied aspect: the reliance of authoritarian power on medical notions for political purposes. From the Porfirian regime in Mexico to Castro’s Cuba, this book describes how such regimes have sought to seize medical knowledge to support propagandistic ideas and marginalize their opponents in ways that transcend specific pathologies, political ideologies, and geographical and temporal boundaries. Medicine, Power, and the Authoritarian Regime in Hispanic Literature brings together the work of literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of medicine, arguing that contemporary authors have actively challenged authoritarian narratives of medicine and disease. In doing so, they continue to re-examine the place of these regimes in the collective memory of Latin America and Spain.

Queer Rebels is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s This Breathing World (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.

This book studies the Early Modern Spanish broadsheet, the tabloid newspaper of its day which functioned to educate, entertain, and indoctrinate its readers, much like today’s "fake news." Parker Aronson incorporates a socio-historical approach in which she considers crime and deviance committed by women in Early Modern Spain and the correlation between crime and the growth of urban centers. She also considers female deviance more broadly to encompass sexual and religious deviance while investigating the relationship between these pliegos sueltos and the transgressive and disruptive nature of female criminality. In addition to an introduction to this fascinating subgenre of Early Modern Spanish literature, Parker Aronson analyzes the representations of women as bandits and highway robbers; as murderers; as prostitutes, libertines, and actors; as Christian renegades; as enlaved people; as witches; as miscegenationists; and as the recipients of punishment.

A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Martí’s posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Martí studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Martí as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Martí as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Martí’s literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Martí has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.

Forging Communities explores the importance of the cultivation, provision, trade, and exchange of foods and beverages to mankind’s technological advancement, violent conquest, and maritime exploration. The thirteen essays here show how the sharing of food and drink forged social, religious, and community bonds, and how ceremonial feasts as well as domestic daily meals strengthened ties and solidified ethnoreligious identity through the sharing of food customs. The very act of eating and the pleasure derived from it are metaphorically linked to two other sublime activities of the human experience: sexuality and the search for the divine. This interdisciplinary study of food in medieval and early modern communities connects threads of history conventionally examined separately or in isolation. The intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics, and culture enhances our understanding of historical developments and cultural continuities through the centuries, giving insight that today, as much as in the past, we are what we eat and what we eat is never devoid of meaning.

What can stories of magical engraved rings or prophetic inscriptions on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed the world? Writing beyond Pen and Parchment introduces readers to a Middle Ages where writing is not confined to manuscripts but is inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. Drawing on the work done at the Collaborative Research Centre “Material Text Cultures,” (SFB 933) this volume presents a comparative overview of how and where text-bearing artefacts appear in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literary traditions, and also traces the paths inscribed objects chart across multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. The volume’s focus on the raw materials and practices that shaped artefacts both mundane or fantastical in medieval narratives offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture often overlooked.