The Greatest Man Uncrowned
The Greatest Man Uncrowned

Author: Nicholas Grenville Round

Publisher: Tamesis Books

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780729302111

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Alvaro de Luna was for almost forty years Juan II of Castile's closest friend, and for the greater part of that time his chief minister. Working ceaselessly to consolidate Juan's position, achieved through his great-grandfather's murder of his half-brother king Pedro, he had initially to establish a power base and, in the years preceding his eventual downfall, to maintain it against the constant restlessness of the Spanish nobility. Only in the middle years can he be seen to have given Spain a fiscal regime, an enterprising recruitment policy for the public services, and a coherent ideology. This study of the violent and enigmatic circumstances in which his career came to an end makes a valuable contribution to understanding 15th-century Castilian history.

The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume 6, C.1300-c.1415
The New Cambridge Medieval History: Volume 6, C.1300-c.1415

Author: Rosamond McKitterick

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 1186

ISBN-13: 9780521362900

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The sixth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History covers the fourteenth century, a period dominated by plague, other natural disasters and war which brought to an end three centuries of economic growth and cultural expansion in Christian Europe, but one which also saw important developments in government, religious and intellectual life, and new cultural and artistic patterns. Part I sets the scene by discussion of general themes in the theory and practice of government, religion, social and economic history, and culture. Part II deals with the individual histories of the states of western Europe; Part III with that of the Church at the time of the Avignon papacy and the Great Schism; and Part IV with eastern and northern Europe, Byzantium and the early Ottomans, giving particular attention to the social and economic relations with westerners and those of other civilisations in the Mediterranean.

Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

Author: Thomas Foster Earle

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-05-26

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780521815826

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This highly original book opens up the almost entirely neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, reinforced by Renaissance ideas and conditions. Of enormous importance both for European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.

Seneca and Celestina
Seneca and Celestina

Author: Louise Fothergill-Payne

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988-08-26

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 052132212X

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This book examines the reason and intent behind the many Senecan and pseudo-Senecan quotations in Fernando de Rojas' masterpiece Celestina (1499), which enjoyed enormous popularity in sixteenth-century Europe. The author considers the importance attached to Senecan thought in the oral, scholarly and literary traditions of fifteenth-century Spain and demonstrates how readers' tastes and sensibilities were shaped by it. The main themes of Celestina, such as self-seeking friendship and love, pleasure and sorrow, gifts and riches, greed, suicide and death, are shown to be rooted in this intellectual background. The Senecan tradition, albeit treated in a satirical vein, is also seen as underlying the later additions and interpolations to the text, with a shift towards Seneca's tragedies in response to changes in fashion; Professor Fothergill-Payne reveals that even the Petrarchan quotations in Celestina have Senecan sources. Seneca and Celestina thus offers a fresh perspective on the literary and intellectual sources that shaped this famous book.

Transnational Portuguese Studies
Transnational Portuguese Studies

Author: Hilary Owen

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2020-06-17

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1789627303

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Transnational Portuguese Studies offers a radical rethinking of the role played by the concepts of ‘nationhood’ and ‘the nation’ in the epistemologies that underpin Portuguese Studies as an academic discipline. Portuguese Studies offers a particularly rich and enlightening challenge to methodological nationalism in Modern Languages, not least because the teaching of Portuguese has always extended beyond the study of the single western European country from which the language takes its name. However, this has rarely been analysed with explicit, or critical, reference to the ‘transnational turn’ in Arts and Humanities. This volume of essays from leading scholars in Portugal, Brazil, the USA and the UK, explores how the histories, cultures and ideas constituted in and through Portuguese language resist borders and produce encounters, from the manoeuvres of 15th century ‘globalization’ and cartography to present-day mega events such as the Rio Olympics. The result is a timely counter-narrative to the workings of linguistic and cultural nationalism, demonstrating how texts, paintings and photobooks, musical forms, political ideas, cinematic representations, gender identities, digital communications and lexical forms, may travel, translate and embody transcultural contact in ways which only become readable through the optics of transnationalism. Contributors: Ana Margarida Dias Martins, Anna M. Klobucka, Christopher Larkosh, Claire Williams, Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Edward King, Ellen W. Sapega, Fernando Arenas, Hilary Owen, José Lingna Nafafé, Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Maria Luísa Coelho, Paulo de Medeiros, Sara Ramos Pinto, Sheila Moura Hue, Simon Park, Susana Afonso, Tatiana Heise, Toby Green, Tori Holmes, Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Zoltán Biedermann.

Alfonso de la Torre's Visión Deleytable
Alfonso de la Torre's Visión Deleytable

Author: Luis Girón-Negrón

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-07-26

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9004475826

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The sources, content and fate of the 15th-century allegorical fable Visión Deleytable are examined from three angles: as a medieval compendium of religious philosophy, as a major influence in Spanish literature, and as an invaluable historical source on Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Spain. The volume is divided into three sections. The first part considers Visión's didacticism within the Jewish and Christian frames of education in 15th-century Spain. The second part includes a review of Visión's philosophical content as a comprehensive articulation of a rationalist Weltanschauung. The final section traces its intriguing editorial fate and literary influence through the 17th century in Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. It is Visión's first systematic study from the dual perspective of a Hispanist and a Hebraist.

Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age
Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age

Author: Isabel Torres

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1855662655

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Love poetry in the Spanish Golden Age redefines the lyric poetry that is located at the centre of Imperial Spanish culture's own self-image and self-definition. This work engages with a broader evaluation of early modern poetics that foregrounds the processes rather than the products of thinking. The locus of the study is the Imperial 'home' space, where love poetry meets early modern empire at the inception of a very conflicted national consciousness, and where the vernacular language, Castilian, emerges in the encounter as a strategic site of national and imperial identity. The political is, therefore, a pervasive presence, teased out where relevant in recognition of the poet's sensitivity to the ideologies within which writing comes into being. But the primary commitment of the book is to lyric poetry, and to poets, individually and intheir dynamic interconnectedness. Moving beyond a re-evaluation of critical responses to four major poets of the period (Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, Góngora and Quevedo), this study disengages respectfully with the substantialbody of biographical research that continues to impact upon our understanding of the genre, and renegotiates the Foucauldian concept of the 'epistemic break', often associated with the anti-mimetic impulses of the Baroque. This more flexible model accommodates the multiperspectivism that interrogated Imperial ideology even in the earliest sixteenth-century poetry, and allows for the exploration of new horizons in interpretation. Isabel Torres isProfessor of Spanish Golden Age Literature and Head of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University, Belfast.