When King Philp IV of Spain died on September 17, 1665, he had ruled the Spanish empire for more than 44 years. In keeping with Habsburg tradition, following the entombment the Court undertook royal exequies, or funerary honours, intended to commemorate the deceased and to reassure his subjects that the monarchy would continue in an orderly fashion. These observances took place in a church adorned with a majestic ensemble of temporary decorations that had been designed especially for the occasion.
Providing a novel research methodology for students and scholars with an interest in dynasties, at all levels, this book explores the Spanish Habsburg dynasty that ruled the Spanish monarchy between c. 1515 and 1700. Instead of focusing on the reigns of successive kings, the book focuses on the Habsburgs as a family group that was constructed in various ways: as a community of heirs, a genealogical narrative, a community of the dead and a ruling family group. These constructions reflect the fact that dynasties do not only exist in the present, as kings, queens or governors, but also in the past, in genealogies, and in the future, as a group of hypothetical heirs. This book analyses how dynasties were ‘made’ by the people belonging to them. It uses a social institutionalist framework to analyse how family dynamics gave rise to practices and roles. The kings of Spain only had limited power to control the construction of their dynasty, since births and deaths, processes of dynastic centralisation, pressure from subjects, relatives’ individual agency, rivalry among relatives and the institutionalisation of roles limited their power. Including several genealogical tables to support students new to the Spanish Habsburgs, this book is essential reading for all students of early modern Europe and the history of monarchy. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
In recent years, the rituals and beliefs associated with the end of life and the commemoration of the dead have increasingly been identified as of critical importance in understanding the social and cultural impact of the Reformation. The associated processes of dying, death and burial inevitably generated heightened emotion and a strong concern for religious propriety: the ways in which funerary customs were accepted, rejected, modified and contested can therefore grant us a powerful insight into the religious and social mindset of individuals, communities, Churches and even nation states in the post-reformation period. This collection provides an historiographical overview of recent work on dying, death and burial in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe and draws together ten essays from historians, literary scholars, musicologists and others working at the cutting edge of research in this area. As well as an interdisciplinary perspective, it also offers a broad geographical and confessional context, ranging across Catholic and Protestant Europe, from Scotland, England and the Holy Roman Empire to France, Spain and Ireland. The essays update and augment the body of literature on dying, death and disposal with recent case studies, pointing to future directions in the field. The volume is organised so that its contents move dynamically across the rites of passage, from dying to death, burial and the afterlife. The importance of spiritual care and preparation of the dying is one theme that emerges from this work, extending our knowledge of Catholic ars moriendi into Protestant Britain. Mourning and commemoration; the fate of the soul and its post-mortem management; the political uses of the dead and their resting places, emerge as further prominent themes in this new research. Providing contrasts and comparisons across different European regions and across Catholic and Protestant regions, the collection contributes to and extends the existing literature on this important historiographical theme.
This book presents, from the point of view of the early modern historian, the legacy of Baroque thought in modern and contemporary literature, a highly under-researched subject that spans two disciplines and several centuries. Its purpose is not to discover the direct links and references of one culture in the other, but, rather, to present the patterns of thought that our time owes to the age of Baroque, namely both temporal and spatial plurality. The books explored here (Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald, and The Investigator, by Dragan Velikić) are not novels that are consciously or purposefully Baroque in their structure, or use the age of the Baroque as the setting of their narratives. However, the Baroque is still present in them all, primarily as the aesthetic principle, as that invisible heritage that shapes the worldviews of their characters. They are Baroque in the sense of space they inhabit, and in the way reality and imagination are interwoven.
The Renaissance era was launched in Italy and gradually spread to the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, and other parts of Europe and the New World, with figures like Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht DYrer, and Albrecht Altdorfer. It was the era that produced some of the icons of civilization, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Last Supper and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Piet^, and David. Marked as one of the greatest moments in history, the outburst of creativity of the era resulted in the most influential artistic revolution ever to have taken place. The period produced a substantial number of notable masters, among them Caravaggio, Donato Bramante, Donatello, El Greco, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. The result was an outstanding number of exceptional works of art and architecture that pushed human potential to new heights. The A to Z of Renaissance Art covers the years 1250 to 1648, the period most disciplines place as the Renaissance Era. A complete portrait of this remarkable period is depicted in this book through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on major Renaissance painters, sculptors, architects, and patrons, as well as relevant historical figures and events, the foremost artistic centers, schools and periods, major themes and subjects, noteworthy commissions, technical processes, theoretical material, literary and philosophic sources for art, and art historical terminology.
The only volume on the work of Vicente Carducho in English Analysis of the Dialogues on Painting by international experts Contributors are art historians or hispanists, offering a multi-disciplinary approach
Melissa Calaresu is the McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, UK. Filippo de Vivo is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Joan-Pau Rubies is Reader in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of community, philosophy and law, science, colonial empire, and historiography, it offers breath-taking scope without sacrificing attention to detail. Destined to become the standard go-to resource for non-specialists, this book also contains an extensive bibliography aimed at the serious researcher. Contributors are: Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Edward Behrend-Martínez, Cristian Berco, Harald E. Braun, Susan Byrne, Bernardo Canteñs, Frederick A. de Armas, William Eamon, Stephanie Fink, Enrique García Santo-Tomás, J.A. Garrido Ardila, Marya T. Green-Mercado, Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Hilaire Kallendorf, Henry Kamen, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Michael J. Levin, Ruth MacKay, Fabien Montcher, Ignacio Navarrete, Jeffrey Schrader, Lía Schwartz, Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry, and Elvira Vilches.
