Sceptres and Sciences argues convincingly that previous research on the Hispanic Late Baroque has underweighted the ideologies of ethnicity and empire embedded in Cartesianism and French neoclassicism. "... a masterful work of scholarship... should become essential reading in the field of Colonial and Spanish Enlightenment Studies."—Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) was the most significant literary figure of the colonial period in Spanish America.The autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays are some of her least studied, and most perplexing works. While one of them, El divino Narciso, has received substantial scholarly attention, the other two, El cetro de José and El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo, have been critically neglected in Sor Juana studies. This study presents a full-length analysis of all three plays, along with their loas, or the introductory pieces alongside which they were intended to be performed. Furthermore, the study seeks to place these works in their philosophical and cultural context by exploring their engagement both with orthodox Catholic sacramental theology, and the emergence of empiricism and the New Philosophy across the Hispanic world. The three sections of this book each present significant new readings of the three plays. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana's engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasise the importance of both the material and the transcendent to a holistic understanding of the Sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence on the play of the Christianised Stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used the work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to natural philosophy and the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.

In Science in the Vanished Miguel de Asúa provides the first modern comprehensive account of Jesuit science in the missions of Paraguay and the River Plate region during the 17th and 18th centuries. Focusing on individual Jesuits and underlining the relationships of their work to the religious goals of the Society of Jesus, the book covers the disciplines of natural history, cartography, medical botany, astronomy and the topics pursued by the former missionaries in their Italian exile. Based on many so far unexplored manuscripts and a vast corpus of primary sources, the book argues the existence of a tradition of research on nature consistent with universal Jesuit science and at the same time original in its articulation of Western learning and aboriginal lore on nature.

The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine. In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.

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.

Main headings: American studies from an international American studies perspective. - International, transnational, hemispheric America. - American social, ethical, and religious mentalisties. - Comparative perspectives, literary counterpoints. - American identities. - Space and place in American studies.

This book is about Enlightenment culture in Spanish America before Independence—in short, there where, according to Hegel, one would least expect to find it. It explores the Enlightenment in texts from five cultural fields: science, history, the periodical press, law, and literature. Texts include the journals of the geodesic expedition to Quito, philosophical histories of the Americas, a year’s work from the Mercurio Peruano, the writings of Mariano Moreno, and Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento. Each chapter takes one field, one body of writing, and one key question: Is modern science universal? Can one disavow the discourse of progress? What is a “Catholic” Enlightenment? Are Enlightenment reason and sovereignty monological? Must the individual be the normative subject of modernity? The book’s premise is that the above texts not only speak to the contradictions of a doubtless marginalised colonial American Ilustración but illuminate the constitutive aporias of the so-called modern project itself. Drawing on the work of Derrida, but also on both historical and philosophical accounts of the various Enlightenments, this incisive book will be of interest to students of Spanish America and scholars in the fields of postcolonialism and the Enlightenment.

Each of the book's five chapters evokes a colonial Mexican cultural and intellectual sphere: the library, anatomy and medicine, spirituality, classical learning, and publishing and printing. Using an array of literary texts and historical documents and alongside secondary historical and critical materials, the author Stephanie Kirk demonstrates how Sor Juana used her poetry and other works to inscribe herself within the discourses associated with these cultural institutions and discursive spheres and thus challenge the male exclusivity of their precepts and precincts. Kirk illustrates how Sor Juana subverted the masculine character of erudition, writing herself into an all-male community of scholars. From there, Sor Juana clearly questions the gender politics at play in her exclusion, and undermines what seems to be the inextricable link previously forged between masculinity and institutional knowledge. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico opens up new readings of her texts through the lens of cultural and intellectual history and material culture in order to shed light on the production of knowledge in the seventeenth-century colonial Mexican society of which she was both a product and an anomaly.

Provides an understanding of the events and cultural differences shaping these nations' texts, the lives of their writers, and the impact of Spanish and Latin American literature.

Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain’s fall from imperial power after 1640. This book culls genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose fiction, to restore the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court to the history of masculinity. Refuting the current conception that Spain’s political decline precipitated a ’crisis of masculinity’, Masculine Virtue maps changes in figurations of normative masculine conduct from 1500 to 1700. As Spain assumed the role of Europe’s first modern centralized empire, codes of masculine conduct changed to meet the demands of global rule. Viewed chronologically, Shifra Armon shows Spanish conduct literature to reveal three axes of transformation. The ideal subject (gendered male in both practice and law) became progressively more adaptable to changing circumstances, more intensely involved in currying his own public image, and more desirous of achieving renown. By bringing recent advances in gender theory to bear on normative rather than non-normative masculinities of early modern Spain, Armon is able to foreground the emergence of energizing new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.