Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spain’s first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecía. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion.In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition o...

Since the respiratory airways branch to all parts of the lungs and ready access is provided through the nose or mouth, exploration of these passages for direct visualization or tissue sampling has long been a clinical challenge. This would be particularly helpful in diagnosing those pulmonary diseases that involve the bronchial tree or affect the surrounding lung parenchyma which prove difficult to diagnose or define by indirect methods. The pioneering efforts of Chevalier Jackson in 1918,...

What is 'Hispanic Studies'? This companion gives a concise and accessible overview of the discipline as taught today and suggests new directions for future developments. 'Hispanic Studies' is broadly concerned with the languages and cultures of the vast 'Hispanic' world, extending chronologically from Roman Hispania to today, and geographically from Roman Hispania to today, and geographically from California in the North to Patagonia in the South, and from Majorca in the East to the Andes ...

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, t...

A central tenet of Catholic religious practice, confession relies upon the use of language between the penitent and his or her confessor. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Spain colonized the Quechua-speaking Andean world, the communication of religious beliefs and practices—especially the practice of confession—to the native population became a primary concern, and as a result, expansive bodies of Spanish ecclesiastic literature were translated into Quechua. In this fascinati...

Originally published in Mexico in 1970, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América is the first book by the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch (1922–79) to be translated into English. At its core is a binary created by colonization and the devaluation of indigenous practices and cosmologies: an opposition between the technologies and rationalities of European modernity and the popular mode of thinking, which is deeply tied to Indian ways of knowing and being. Arguing that this bi...

Why would a Latin Qur'an be addressed to readers who knew no Latin? What happens when translators work on paper rather than parchment? Why would a Jewish rabbi translate a bible for Christians? How can a theorist successfully criticize a version of Aristotle without knowing any Greek? Why were children used to bring down an Amerindian civilization? Why does the statue of Columbus in Barcelona point straight to Israel? Why should a Nicaraguan poet cite a French poem in order to explain a vo...

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) directed the composition of an encyclopaedic work on the world of the Nahuas, Universal History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1577-1579), for which he has received the title of pioneering ethnographer and anthropologist of colonial Mexico. Contextualizing Sahagún and his work in sixteenth-century Spain and America, this study presents him as a cultural translator who reconceptualized the Nahua world according to his own Euro-Christian categorization...

Quando a imprensa européia discute intensamente o prólogo escrito por Joseph Ratzinger ao último livro de Marcelo Pera; intelectual e político italiano; intitulado Perché dobbiamo dirci cristiani; recém publicado pela editorial Mondadori; resulta muito oportuno este trabalho que o leitor tem agora em suas mãos. Com efeito; no referido prólogo; Joseph Ratzinger; afirma que o diálogo inter-religioso é impossível a menos que o crente ponha entre parênteses a sua fé. Sem dúvida alguma; o pouco...

Gathering a group of internationally renowned scholars, this volume presents cutting-edge research on the complex processes of identity formation in the transatlantic world of the Hispanic Baroque. Identities in the Hispanic world are deeply intertwined with sociological concepts such as class and estate, with geography and religion (i.e. the mixing of Spanish Catholics with converted Jews, Muslims, Dutch and German Protestants), and with issues related to the ethnic diversity of the world...

"David Castillo takes us on a tour of some horrific materials that have rarely been considered together. He sheds a fantastical new light on the baroque."---Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California Berkeley"Baroque Horrors is a textual archeologist's dream, scavenged from obscure chronicles, manuals, minor histories, and lesser-known works of major artists. Castillo finds tales of mutilation, mutation, monstrosity, murder, and mayhem, and delivers them to us wi...

Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a personof mixed European and American Indianancestry.Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial gove...