What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.

The exhibition "Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst" that took place in Munich in 1910 marked a turning point in the approach to Islamic Art. The show attempted to break free of Orientalism and exotic fantasies and, in doing so, set a new standard for the reception of Islamic art in Europe. Moreover, naming the Islamic artefacts masterpieces, it layed claim to bestow upon Islamic art “a place equal to that of other cultural periods”. This book is the first comprehensive study on this path-breaking exhibition. It includes a wealth of unpublished material and numerous novel ideas on the subject and addresses the exhibition’s historical context, organization, realization and display as well as its reception in the West and its later influence on the study of Islamic art.

From the Golden Age to Goya. This is the first study wholly devoted to reception of Spanish art in Britain and Ireland. Examining the extent and sources of knowledge of Spanish art in the British Isles during an age of increasing contact, particularly in theaftermath of the Peninsular War, it contains contributions by leading scholars, including reprints of three essays by Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, to whose memory this book is dedicated. Focusing on Spanish art from the Golden Age to Goya, these studies chart the growth in understanding and appreciation of the Spanish School, and its punctuation by controversies and continuing distrust of religious images in Protestant Britain, as well as by the successive `discoveries' of individual artists - Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán, El Greco and Goya. The book publishes important new research on art importation, collecting and dealing, and discusses the increase in access to andscholarship on works of art, including their reproduction through both traditional prints and copies and the newly invented photographic methods. It also considers for the first time the role of women in reflecting taste for thearts of Spain. It is richly illustrated with 17 colour and 54 black and white illustrations. NIGEL GLENDINNING is Emeritus Professor of Spanish and Fellow of Queen Mary University of London. HILARY MACARTNEY isHonorary Research Fellow of the Institute for Art History, University of Glasgow. Contributors: NIGEL GLENDINNING, HILARY MACARTNEY, JEREMY ROE, SARAH SYMMONS, MARJORIE TRUSTED, ENRIQUETA HARRIS FRANKFORT