Reproduction of the original: Spanish Passions: Expelled from Spain by Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

Spanish Passions - Expelled from Spain

Beinart's detailed magnum opus focuses on the practicalities of the expulsion and its consequences, both for those expelled and those remaining behind. Analysis of hundreds of archival documents enables him to take history out of the realm of abstraction and give it concrete reality, and in so doing he also sheds much light on Jewish life in Spain before the expulsion.

Reproduction of the original: Spanish Passions: Spain by Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico explores the Passion plays performed in Nahuatl (Aztec) by Indigenous Mexicans living under Spanish colonial occupation. Though sourced from European writings and devotional practices that emphasized the suffering of Christ and his mother, this Nahuatl theatrical tradition grounded the Passion story in the Indigenous corporate community. Passion plays had courted controversy in Europe since their twelfth-century origin, but in New Spain they faced Catholic authorities who questioned the spiritual and intellectual capacity of Indigenous people and, in the eighteenth century, sought to suppress these performances. Six surviving eighteenth-century scripts, variants of an original play possibly composed early in the seventeenth century, reveal how Nahuas passed along this model text while modifying it with new dialogue, characters, and stage techniques. Louise M. Burkhart explores the way Nahuas merged the Passion story with their language, cultural constructs, social norms, and religious practices while also responding to surveillance by Catholic churchmen. Analytical chapters trace significant themes through the six plays and key these to a composite play in English included in the volume. A cast with over fifty distinct roles acted out events extending from Palm Sunday to Christ’s death on the cross. One actor became a localized embodiment of Jesus through a process of investiture and mimesis that carried aspects of pre-Columbian materialized divinity into the later colonial period. The play told afar richer version of the Passion story than what later colonial Nahuas typically learned from their priests or catechists. And by assimilating Jesus to an Indigenous, or macehualli, identity, the players enacted a protest against colonial rule. The situation in eighteenth-century New Spain presents both a unique confrontation between Indigenous communities and Enlightenment era religious reformers and a new chapter in an age-old power game between popular practice and religious orthodoxy. By focusing on how Nahuas localized the universalizing narrative of Christ’s Passion, Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico offers an unusually in-depth view of religious life under colonial rule. Burkhart’s accompanying website also makes available transcriptions and translations of the six Nahuatl-language plays, four Spanish-language plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material. Comments restricted to single page plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material

A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the wildest of romances, written down with the exactitude of a business diary; a view of men and cities from Naples to Berlin, from Madrid and London to Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the 'vie intime' of the eighteenth century depicted by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals and saluted crowned heads, and tomorrow lurked in dens of profligacy and crime; a book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a record of forty years of "occult" charlatanism; a collection of tales of successful imposture, of 'bonnes fortunes', of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate wit of Voltaire. Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the life of the past, who would not cry, "Where can such a book as this be found?" Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meager summary, of the book known as "THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA"; a work absolutely unique in literature. He who opens these wonderful pages is as one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. He often signed his works Jacques Casanova de Seingalt after he began writing in French following his second exile from Venice. He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with "womanizer". He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart.