Sceptres and Sciences argues convincingly that previous research on the Hispanic Late Baroque has underweighted the ideologies of ethnicity and empire embedded in Cartesianism and French neoclassicism.

Sceptres and Sciences argues convincingly that previous research on the Hispanic Late Baroque has underweighted the ideologies of ethnicity and empire embedded in Cartesianism and French neoclassicism. "... a masterful work of scholarship... should become essential reading in the field of Colonial and Spanish Enlightenment Studies."—Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

This study centres on science, aesthetics and ideology in Spain and Spanish America in the years 1680-1740. It argues that previous research on the Hispanic Late Baroque has underweighted the ideologies of ethnicity and empire embedded in Cartesianism and French neoclassicism.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) was the most significant literary figure of the colonial period in Spanish America.The autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays are some of her least studied, and most perplexing works. While one of them, El divino Narciso, has received substantial scholarly attention, the other two, El cetro de José and El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo, have been critically neglected in Sor Juana studies. This study presents a full-length analysis of all three plays, along with their loas, or the introductory pieces alongside which they were intended to be performed. Furthermore, the study seeks to place these works in their philosophical and cultural context by exploring their engagement both with orthodox Catholic sacramental theology, and the emergence of empiricism and the New Philosophy across the Hispanic world. The three sections of this book each present significant new readings of the three plays. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana's engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasise the importance of both the material and the transcendent to a holistic understanding of the Sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence on the play of the Christianised Stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used the work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to natural philosophy and the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.

In Science in the Vanished Miguel de Asúa provides the first modern comprehensive account of Jesuit science in the missions of Paraguay and the River Plate region during the 17th and 18th centuries. Focusing on individual Jesuits and underlining the relationships of their work to the religious goals of the Society of Jesus, the book covers the disciplines of natural history, cartography, medical botany, astronomy and the topics pursued by the former missionaries in their Italian exile. Based on many so far unexplored manuscripts and a vast corpus of primary sources, the book argues the existence of a tradition of research on nature consistent with universal Jesuit science and at the same time original in its articulation of Western learning and aboriginal lore on nature.

The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine. In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.

A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of community, philosophy and law, science, colonial empire, and historiography, it offers breath-taking scope without sacrificing attention to detail. Destined to become the standard go-to resource for non-specialists, this book also contains an extensive bibliography aimed at the serious researcher. Contributors are: Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Edward Behrend-Martínez, Cristian Berco, Harald E. Braun, Susan Byrne, Bernardo Canteñs, Frederick A. de Armas, William Eamon, Stephanie Fink, Enrique García Santo-Tomás, J.A. Garrido Ardila, Marya T. Green-Mercado, Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Hilaire Kallendorf, Henry Kamen, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Michael J. Levin, Ruth MacKay, Fabien Montcher, Ignacio Navarrete, Jeffrey Schrader, Lía Schwartz, Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry, and Elvira Vilches.