Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the “new poetry” of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, u...

The most comprehensive collection of writing by award-winning US poet, renowned translator of Sappho, and trailblazing archivist Mary Barnard.Born in the Pacific Northwest, Mary Barnard (1909–2001) struck up correspondence with Ezra Pound in 1933, won Poetry magazine's prestigious Levinson Award in 1935, and moved to New York City the following year. There she met Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, who proclaimed her writing emblematic of "what we have bee...

Drawing on years of midwifery experience of waterbirth, this collection of stories, based on real-life events, illuminates a rewarding way of birth and emphasises the theoretical knowledge, skills, understanding, and resilience needed to practice well.Waterbirth Stories includes chapters on the criteria for use of water in labour and birth, on the different stages of labour, and on some more serious or unusual situations such as shoulder dystocia, postpartum haemorrhage, b...

A Poetry of Things examines the works of four poets whose use of visual and material culture contributed to the remarkable artistic and literary production during the reign of Philip III (1598–1621). Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Juan de Arguijo, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza cast cultural objects – ranging from books and tombstones to urban ruins, sculptures, and portraits – as participants in lively interactions with their readers and viewers across time and space.

The Spatial Turn in the Literature and Art of Early Modern Spain investigates novel and transformative ways in which writers and artists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain conceived of space through the lens of what recent studies have called the spatial turn.With an emphasis on the production of space, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Yi-Fu Tuan, the essays in this volume explore space as a cultural construct, produced within a dynamic sphere ...

Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was a mark of character among the royals and aristocrats in Early Modern Spain: it ranked with extravagant hospitality as a sign of nobility and with virtue as a token of princely power. Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain explores how the writers of the period shared the same impulse to collect, arrange, and display objects, though in imagined settings, as literary artefacts.These essays examine a variety...

Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular ...

Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a deep consideration of the intellectual environment that gave rise to Cervantes’ seminal work. Susan Byrne demonstrates how Cervantes synthesized the debates surrounding the two most authoritative discourses of his era – those of law and history – into a new aesthetic product, the modern novel.Byrne uncovers the empirical underpinnings of Don Quixote through a close philological study of Cervantes’ sly questioning of a...

In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in hum...

A vivid account of the literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the time of Columbus to Latin American Independence, this Very Short Introduction explores the origins of Latin American literature in Spanish and tells the story of how Spanish literary language developed and flourished in the New World. A leading scholar of colonial Latin American literature, Rolena Adorno examines the writings that debated the justice of the Spanish conquests, described the novelties ...

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...

The modern world began with the clash of civilisations between Spaniards and native Americans. Their interplay and struggles ever since are mirrored in the fates of the very languages they spoke. The conquistadors wrought theirs into a new 'world language'; yet the Andes still host the New World's greatest linguistic survivor, Quechua. Historians and linguists see this through different - but complementary - perspectives. This book is a meeting of minds, long overdue, to weave them togethe...