In this introduction I establish the main parameters of the interpretation of early modern Spanish cultural history that will serve as the basis for this book. The paradigm developed below centres on the application to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Castile of the concept of internal colonialism. The chapter is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses primarily on the formation of religious identities during the second half of the sixteenth century, when the Counter-Reformation was fully underway. As I will argue, these changes were fundamental to the reconfiguration of Spanish society during Cervantes’ lifetime. The second section looks at examples...

The juxtaposition above highlights the similarities between early modern Spanish and postcolonial Latin American efforts to bring the marvellous into contact with the everyday. This chapter is about the Baroque taste foradmiratioand Cervantes’ persistent exploration of its relation to the world he and his readers shared. This topic necessitates returning to such familiar issues as the role of neo-Aristotelian precepts in Cervantes’ poetics, especially the ‘legitimacy’ of certain departures from verisimilitude, and the place of the romance genre in his fiction. I doubt that it is possible to provide a more nuanced account of these questions than Alban...

Nearly four hundred years after Cervantes’ death, his posthumous masterpiece,Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a complex, innovative work exploring cultural identity and social organization, is still widely read as a conventional expression of Counter-Reformation orthodoxy. Beginning with Diana de Armas Wilson’sAllegories of Love, however, a number of recent studies have demonstrated that Cervantes’ text ironically undercuts such an ideologically closed reading.¹ Nonetheless, irony alone does not explain the pervasiveness of religion in the work, in particular the importance of the pilgrimage theme, one of its structuring elements. The theme, ubiquitous inPersiles y Sigismunda, serves as the...

In this chapter I interpretLos trabajos de Persiles y Sigismundaas a transnational romance, whose decentring of the nation effectively ‘turns Spain inside out.’ Its meandering plot joins people and places in a complex geographical network, connecting much of the European continent and some of what lies beyond in a loose unity.Persiles y Sigismundaistransnational – not simply international or cosmopolitan – in that it situates Spain in the broader context of early modern Europe, demonstrating the permeability of the borders defining the territory of the Hapsburg monarchy, as well as the imagined community to which all ‘Spaniards’ belong....

On Thursday, 11 March 2004, the municipal archivist in Baeza interrupted my research on the War of the Alpujarras to let me know that she would close early that day. She had to attend the silent gathering outside city hall for the victims of the terrorist attack. ‘What terrorist attack?’ I asked. Hadn’t I heard? No, I had spent the morning in the archive and had not spoken to anyone. Thus I learned of the shocking and brutal bombings on rush hour commuter trains in Madrid that morning, bombings that claimed nearly two hundred lives. Like most people in Spain,...

In this poem by Alurista, as in a number of works of Chicano literature, Don Quixote is evoked as a symbol of cultural resistance to Anglo-American hegemony. Of course, anyone who struggles against virtually insurmountable odds may be compared to the mad knight. But why would Chicano writers identify with a cultural monument of Spain, the European power that first colonized the New World? Perhaps Don Quixote and Sancho have simply been adopted by the culture of Spanish America to such a degree that they are no longer associated in the popular imagination with the Spanish Empire per se.¹ In...