From Aragon, Galicia, and the Basque regions in the north to the central cities of Madrid and Toledo, from the fabled Andalusian cities of Seville and Granada in the south to the Catalan capital, Barcelona, more than thirty enchanting and historically significant properties are visited in this landmark volume. The lavish illustrations depict the wide range of design styles embraced by Spaniards over the centuries, reflecting the fascinating motifs of the numerous cultures that have contributed to the Spanish aesthetic. Imposing medieval castillos, fabulously detailed Moorish-influenced country casas, and beautifully furnished, art-filled city palacios are included in this tour of the country's grand and historic private residences and buildings
Constancia de la Mora was the granddaughter of Antonio Maura, who had served under Alfonso XIII as Prime Minister of Spain. She was one of the first women to obtain a divorce under the new laws passed by the fledgling Spanish Republic, and quickly remarried. Her new husband was appointed commander of the Republican air force when the fascist rebellion broke out in 1936, while Constancia became a key figure in the Republic's International Press Office. This is her autobiography, first published in 1940.
In early modern times, the city of Seville was the most important entrept̥ between the Old and the New World, attracting numerous merchants from all of Europe. They provided the American market with European merchandise, especially with textiles and metalware from Flanders and France. This book investigates the networks of Flemish and French merchants in Seville, displaying overall structures of trade as well as collective strategies of both merchant colonies.
The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the "Black Legend," which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt--California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida--there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain's political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.
Since 1987 we have defended in articles that the Spanish queen Isabella I of Castile (Isabel la Catolica) was the new chess queen (dama) on the chessboard. Other publications were in 1990, 1994, 1997, and 2004. And of course, Marilyn Yalom studied our book during her visit to the National Library in The Hague (Holland) before she wrote Birth of the Chess Queen in 2004. In her book one cannot see that in 1987, 1990, and 1994 we already published material about Isabel la Catolica (Isabel I of Castile) being the new powerful dama or chess queen on the chessboard. In other words we can state here that we have been studying Spanish history and its chess literature for over 30 years. Since 2003 we have also known the development of the new bishop in chess."
Separated only by a narrow body of water, Spain and England have had a long history of material and cultural interactions; but this intertwined history is rarely perceived by scholars of one country with a view toward the other. Through their analyses of the various modes of exchange of material goods and the circulation of symbolic systems of meaning, the contributors to the anthology-historians and literary critics-investigate, for the first time, the two nations' express points of contact and conflict during these historically crucial fifty years. Focusing on the half-century period that began with the marriage of Mary Tudor to Prince Philip of Spain, and spanned the reigns of Philip II and Elizabeth I of England, the essays in this anthology demonstrate and problematize, from the perspective of Spanish cultural history, the significant material, cultural, and symbolic contacts between the two countries. The volume shows how the two countries' alliances and clashes, which led to the debacle of the 'Invincible Armada' of 1588 and continued for decades afterwards, held enormous historical significance by shaping the religious, political, and cultural developments of the modern world.
The Spanish Golden Age, a cultural narrative that has developed and over four centuries, remains a key element of how Spaniards articulate cultural identities, both within Spain and to the outside world. The Currency of Cultural Patrimony examines the development of this narrative by artists, intellectuals, historians, academics, and institutions. By defining the Spanish Golden Age as a diachronic problem, it examines several of Spain’s most canonical golden-age literary narratives (including Don Quixote, Fuenteovejuna, and Las mocedades del Cid) as texts whose institutionalization, mediation, and commercialization over the course of four hundred years inform their meaning both for contemporary Spaniards and for the field of Hispanic Studies around the world. Spain’s persistent deployment of this cultural patrimony as the canonical epicentre of a national literary tradition has stimulated diverse and often contradictory interpretations, the cumulative effect of which informs their reception by each new generation of Spaniards. This book’s analysis of how this patrimony is interpreted according to both tradition and current circumstances illuminates new angles from which scholars can approach some of Hispanism’s most persistent and vexing questions, including the growing divide between popular and academic understandings of the Spanish nation’s “classics.”
