The author explains key aspects of Spain’s polemical Age of Reason, particularly the uncertain shifts in scientific ideas, the developing confusion of philosophical attitudes, the controversial movements in literary theories, the popular reactions to artistic practices and the disturbed variations in traditional beliefs and social attitudes. Ideological Hesitancy in Spain 1700–1750 should significantly advance scholarly understanding of a critical epoch of transition and upheaval within the history of Europe – a period of productive ferment in science, ideology and society which proved necessarily conducive to the development of our own modern age of civilization.

Published in memory of Ivy L. McClelland, a pioneer-scholar of Spain’s eighteenth century, this volume of original essays contains, besides an Introduction to her career and internationally influential writings, three previously unpublished essays by McClelland and nine studies by other scholars, all of which are focused on elucidating the Enlightenment and its characteristic manifestations in the Hispanic world. Among the Enlightenment writers and artists, works and genres, themes and issues discussed, are: Nicolás Moratín and epic poetry, Lillo’s The London Merchant and English and French influences on eighteenth-century Spanish drama, José Marchena and literary historiography, oppositions and misunderstandings within Spanish society as reflected in El sí de las niñas, Goya and the visual arts, Quintana’s Pelayo and historical tragedy, Enlightenment discourse, the Periodical Press, theatre as propaganda, the ideology and politics of Empire, the roots of revolt in late viceregal Quito, women’s experience of Enlightenment in Spain, social and cultural difference in colonial Peru, ideological debate and uncertainty during the Age of Reason, eighteenth-century Spain on the nineteenth-century stage, and public opinion in Spain on the eve of the French, and European, Revolution. First published as a Special Issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies (LXXXVI [November–December 2009], Nos 7–8), this book will be of value and stimulus to all scholars concerned to investigate and interpret the culture, theatre, ideology, society and politics of the Enlightenment in Spain, Europe and Spanish America.

Previously published as a special issue of The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, The Eighteenth-Century Theatre in Spain is the second in a series of research bibliographies on the Theatre in Spain. Representing ten years of searches and compilation by its specialist authors, this volume draws together data on more than 1,500 books, articles and documents concerned with Spanish eighteenth-century theatre. Studies of plays and playwrights are included as well as material dealing with theatres, actors and stagecraft. Wherever possible, items listed have been personally examined, and their library location in Britain, Spain or USA is provided. Scholars with interests in drama will find in this single-volume work of reference a wealth of reliable information concerning this specialist field.

Arts of Perception offers a new account of a key period in Spanish history and culture and a fundamental reassessment of its major writers and intellectuals, including Gracián, Quevedo, Calderón, Saavedra Fajardo, López de Vega, and Sor Juana. Reading these figures in the context of European thought and the new science, and philosophy, the study considers how they developed various ‘arts of perception’ - complex perceptual strategies designed to overcome and exploit epistemic problems to enable an individual to act effectively in the moral, political, social or religious sphere. The study takes as its subject the distinctive epistemological mentality behind such ‘arts of perception’. This mentality was fostered by the creative interaction of scepticism and Stoicism, and found expression in the key concepts ser/parecer and engaño/desengaño. The work traces the emergence, development, and impact of these concepts on Spanish thought and culture. As well as offering new interpretations of specific major figures, Arts of Perception offers an interpretation of the mentality of an entire culture as it made the fraught transition to intellectual modernity. As such it ranges over numerous discourses and formative contexts and provides a wealth of new material which will be of use to all those seeking to understand and interpret the literature, culture and thought of Golden Age Spain. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

This is a history of the Enlightenment--the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. But rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, its principal protagonists are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, the region is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how Spanish imperial subjects created legal documents, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies--far more often than peninsular Spaniards--sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined new ideas in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

The beginning of the eighteenth century opened Spain to an influx of people, books and ideas and gave the country its own brief age of Enlightenment. At this time of momentous change, the three authors represented in this volume contributed to the Europe-wide debate over the nature of women and their position in society. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo was an admired scholar and a prolific author. One of his most controversial essays was Defence of Women, which argued that women were men's intellectual equals. This sparked a pamphlet war that continued for twenty-five years. Josefa Amar y Borbón was a writer and translator who submitted her own spirited argument, the Defence of the Talents of Women, to a debate on whether women should be admitted to the new Economic Societies. She also demanded in her Discourse on the Education of Women that women should be given the opportunity to study and learn. At the very end of the century, Inés Joyes y Blake published an Apology for Women, arguing that women should develop self-respect, support each other and refuse to be manipulated by insincere lovers and domineering husbands. All three writers wrote with verve and imagination about one of the most important social questions of their day

Essays on key aspects of cultural, religious, and intellectual life in early modern Spain.