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 of cultural objects described or alluded to in books from the Golden Age of Spanish literature, including clothing, paintings, tapestries, playing cards, monuments, materials of war, and even enchanted bronze heads. The contributors emphasize how literature preserved and transformed objects to endow them with new meaning for aesthetic, social, religious, and political purposes ­– whether to perpetuate certain habits of thought and belief, or to challenge accepted social and moral norms.

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, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as contingent and unstable, expose knowledge of the self as deceptive, and show how history intersects with the ideology of empire. Mary E. Barnard’s study argues persuasively that the material culture of early sixteenth-century Europe embedded within Garcilaso’s poems offers a key to understanding the interplay between objects and texts that make those works such vibrant inventions.

In terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature considers chocolate as an object of collective memory used to bridge the transatlantic gap through Spanish literary works of the early modern period, tracing the mention of chocolate from indigenous legends and early chronicles of the conquistadors to the theatre and literature of Spain. The book considers a variety of perspectives and material cultures, such as the pre-Colombian conception of chocolate, the commercial enterprise surrounding chocolate, and the darker side of chocolate’s connections to witchcraft and sex. Encapsulating both historical and literary interests, Chocolate will appeal to anyone interested in the global history of chocolate.

Poetry and Crisis argues that the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid marked a critical turning point in Spanish society, with poetry taking a unique role in reflecting new political and cultural realities.

Costume design is a crucial, but frequently overlooked, aspect of film that fosters an appreciation of the diverse ways in which film and fashion enrich each other. These influential industries offer representations of ideas, values, and beliefs that shape and construct cultural identities. In Fashioning Spanish Cinema, Jorge Pérez analyses the use of clothing and fashion as costumes within Spanish cinema, paying particular attention to the significance of those costumes in relation to the visual styles and the narratives of the films. The author examines the links between costume analysis and other fields and theoretical frameworks such as fashion studies, the history of dress, celebrity studies, and gender and feminist studies. Fashioning Spanish Cinema looks at instances in which costumes are essential to shaping the public image of stars, such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, Victoria Abril, and Penélope Cruz. Focusing on examples in which costumes have discursive autonomy, it explores how costumes engage with broader issues of identity and, relatedly, how costumes impact everyday practices and fashion trends beyond cinema. Drawing on case studies from multiple periods, films by contemporary directors and genres, and red-carpet events such as the Oscars and Goya Awards, Fashioning Spanish Cinema contributes a pivotal Spanish perspective to expanding interdisciplinary work on the intersections between film and fashion.

This highly original biography of Infante Manuel offers an intriguing and alternative perspective on one of the most turbulent eras of medieval Spain.

This interdisciplinary collection takes a deep dive into early modern Hispanic health and demonstrates the multiples ways medical practices and experiences are tied to gender.

Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janés, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions. Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal "father of the nation" and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.

Christine Arkinstall’s historical and literary study of female freethinking intellectuals in fin-de-siècle Spain examines the contributions of three intellectuals, Amalia Domingo Soler, Angeles López de Ayala, and Belén Sárraga, to the development of feminist consciousness and democracy. These women wrote for, edited, and published radical and feminist periodicals that, until now, have been left unstudied. This significant gap in the scholarship has left us without an accurate sense of Spanish women’s involvement in the public realm. Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879–1926 recovers the lost history and literary contributions these women made to the so-called Generation of 1898. Using their extensive published works, Arkinstall not only illuminates the lives of Domingo Soler, López de Ayala, and Sárraga, but traces the connections between feminism, freethinking, republicanism, freemasonry, anarchism, and socialism. By placing these women’s work in the broader literary, social, and political context of the period, Arkinstall’s study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the central role of women in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century democracy in Spain.

In Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura, Leslie J. Harkema analyzes the literature of the modernist period in Spain in light of the emergence of youth culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Harkema argues for the prominent role played by Miguel de Unamuno—as a poet, essayist, and public figure—in Spanish writers’ response to this phenomenon. She demonstrates how early twentieth-century Spanish literature participated in the glorification of adolescence and questioning of Bildung seen elsewhere in European modernism, in ways that were not only aesthetic but also political. Harkema critically re-examines the relationship between Unamuno and several Spanish writers associated with the so-called Generation of 1927 (known as at the time as “la joven literatura” or “the young literature”). By situating this period within the wider framework of European modernism, Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth brings to light the central role that the early twentieth century’s re-imagining of adolescence and youth played in the development of literary modernism in Spain.