Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain

MARGARET R. GREER is Emeritus Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University.

• Preface - Richard J. PymOfficial rhetoric versus local reality: propaganda and the expulsion of the moriscos - Trevor J. DadsonArbitrismo and the early seventeenth-century Spanish Church: the theory and practice of anti-clericalist philosophy - Helen RawlingsLaw and disorder: anti-gypsy legislation and its failures in seventeenth-century Spain - Richard J. PymDiego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Jewess of Venice: tolerance, interfaith sexuality and converso culture - Representing their sex: actresses in seventeenth-century Spain - Melveena McKendrickPublic morality and the closure of the theatres in the mid-seventeenth century: Philip IV, the Council of Castile and the arrival of Mariana of Austria - Alistair MalcolmThe politics of memory in El tuzaní de la Alpujarra - Margaret R. Greer'Seguid la guerra y renovad los daños.': implicit pacifism in Cervantes's La Numancia - Jules WhickerHere and there, acá and allá: the origins of authority in Oviedo's Historia natural y general de las Indias - B. W. Ife

A superb collection of essays that share, among other features, an interest in challenging certain conceptions, or accepted views, of history and of literary history. Individually and collectively, the essays are enlightening and inspiring, full of ideas that whet the critical appetite.