Twelve Days of the Infanta Margarita
Twelve Days of the Infanta Margarita

Author: Eric Winter

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 85

ISBN-13: 1462032036

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Twelve days of the Infanta Margarita is a fiction but it is so well supported that it is hard to believe that it is not true. The evidence both amazes and delights, much of it is fact, some is legend, some fairy story, some children's games, but the most important are two portraits, "Las Meninas' and "The Rokeby Venus" by the Spanish painter Diego de Velasquez . The story begins in the princess's 15th year when she refuses to be a subject for another portrait in formal court dress and, to make a point, she insists she will be painted in the nude. The story then proceeds through the sequence of gifts that we know in the Carol "The Twelve days of Christmas" starting with the partridge and ending with the twelve lords a-leaping. The work is a performance-piece for a small vocal group. A narrator provides the continuing thread of the story which is supported by a number of musical arrangements most of which are based upon familiar Irish and Scottish airs. As few as three can perform the work and as many as twelve. It has been successfully presented in different venues from coffee shop to concert hall. The performance time is about ninety minutes.

Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman
Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman

Author: Silvia Z. Mitchell

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0271084103

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When Philip IV of Spain died in 1665, his heir, Carlos II, was three years old. In addition to this looming dynastic crisis, decades of enormous military commitments had left Spain a virtually bankrupt state with vulnerable frontiers and a depleted army. In Silvia Z. Mitchell’s revisionist account, Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman, Queen Regent Mariana of Austria emerges as a towering figure at court and on the international stage, while her key collaborators—the secretaries, ministers, and diplomats who have previously been ignored or undervalued—take their rightful place in history. Mitchell provides a nuanced account of Mariana of Austria’s ten-year regency (1665–75) of the global Spanish Empire and examines her subsequent role as queen mother. Drawing from previously unmined primary sources, including Council of State deliberations, diplomatic correspondence, Mariana’s and Carlos’s letters, royal household papers, manuscripts, and legal documents, Mitchell describes how, over the course of her regency, Mariana led the monarchy out of danger and helped redefine the military and diplomatic blocs of Europe in Spain’s favor. She follows Mariana’s exile from court and recounts how the dowager queen used her extensive connections and diplomatic experience to move the negotiations for her son’s marriage forward, effectively exploiting the process to regain her position. A new narrative of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy in the later seventeenth century, this volume advances our knowledge of women’s legitimate political entitlement in the early modern period. It will be welcomed by scholars and students of queenship, women’s studies, and early modern Spain.

From Al-Andalus to Monte Sacro
From Al-Andalus to Monte Sacro

Author: Dolores Luna Guinot

Publisher: Trafford Publishing

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 1490711562

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During the time he spent in the Portuguese islands of Porto Santo and Madeira, Cristopher Columbus, a navigator from Genoa, was in charge of a dying sailor, from Castile whose caravel had been carried by the current from the Gulf of Guinea to a remote sea, possibly the Caribean. On his deathbed, this man had told Columbus the secret of some lands where Siberians had arrived during the Pleistocene and some documents about some possible previous trips. This sailor assured that such lands he had achieved carried by the currents were the same ones he was referring to. When Columbus arrived in Spain, he tried to convince the Crown of Castile about his projects, which were precisely the same ones that Isaiah had prophesied as destined for getting the limits of the horizons. During his description, Columbus looked so sure that both the Queen Isabel and the King Fernando wondered whether he was trying to conceal a proved reality, a mistery he took to his grave. When Columbus asked them for a subsidy, Fernando el Catlico commented him that coffers were empty at that point as they had just subjugated the whole Al-Andalus after the seizure of Granada and therefore the defeat of the most unlucky Nasrid king, Boabdil, known as the little man. Due to the Spanish explorers of the 15th century, Spain became the biggest commercial power amongst the European countries. They built up settlements which would last until three centuries later in a colonizing expansive process; until the loss of Spanish power on such territories from the decade of 1810s on, when the Independence began. Since the late 18th century, until the early 19th Century, the West witnessed a series of chain revolutions which affected Western Europe and Spanish America at the same time. The invasin of Napoleon, Francisco de Miranda, Simon Bolivar, Masonic lodges, together with envies, betrayals or lovers make this book to be a thrilling adventure based on historic real.