No. 06 (2017)

The first French-language treatises on emblems appeared in the seventeenth century, but prior to their appearance, many authors of emblem texts and vernacular translations offered glimpses in their paratextual material—prefaces and dedicatory letters, for the most part—of their concept of the emblem. As a rapidly emerging genre, the emblem itself underwent a series of transformations, and and attempt at developing a true theory of the emblem was rendered impossible not only by those but by the commercial pressures associated with attempting to take advantage of the new market for illustrated books of all kinds. This essay examines the progress of thinking about the emblem in France from the earliest times to the period immediately prior to the publication of Claude-François Ménestrier’s Art des emblemes in 1662, and explores some of the reasons why the birth of emblem theory in French was so long delayed.

This paper investigates the autographed library inventory of Sevillian canon Ambrosio José de la Cuesta y Saavedra (1653-1707), who was a careful collector of Spanish poetic compilations of the Golden Age and the author of the earliest additions to Nicolás Antonio’s Bibliotheca Hispana Nova. It offers a biographical sketch of Cuesta, a complete description of New York, Library of The Hispanic Society of America, MS. B2681, and a structural analysis of the works mentioned in the inventory contained in this manuscript. This essay also locates some of the 1287 works recorded in the same miscellaneous compilations, which are now preserved in the Colombina Library, the University Library of Seville and the Hispanic Society of America. Moreover, this article identifies several printed books by seventeenth-century authors from Seville which were owned by this bibliographer, offering a complete transcription and numbering of all the works contained in Cuesta’s inventory.

In the extensive editorial trajectory of Cárcel de Amor from Diego de San Pedro in the XVI century, the text remains as in its origins, although in the following editions changes in format, letters and illustrations arise. In 1551, in the printing house from Esteban de Nájera in Saragossa, a refurbished edition is published showing a totally renewed iconographic program. This article studies the origin of its iconographies and its adaptation to the text. Part of the woodcuts that illustrate this late edition are copies of the drawings from the German painter Hans Holbein el viejo (1497-1543), in particular of the series designed to illustrate Historiarum Veteris Instumenti Icones and Danza de la Muerte. The sources of the copies the engraver might have used are Retratos o tablas del Testamento Viejo (Lyon, 1543) and Les Images de la Mort (Lyon, 1547).

In between Quevedo’s sculptorical poetry, the sonnets dedicated to the statues of Philip III and Charles V (núms. 211-212 and 214) forms a very significant triptych of art and politics which opens El Parnaso español: this work examines the construction of the poems, the managed artistic ideas and some intertextual relations with one Statius’ silva (for the first couple of poems) and the Tratado de las estatuas antiguas by Villalta (for the third one), among other winks to Quevedo’s works.

By depicting three historical characters from ancient history (Alexander the Great, Aristotle and King Philip II of Macedonia) and effectively using anti-Machiavellian theories from the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, this comedy calls into question the “fallacious raison d’état”, namely that politics must not be subordinate to morality.

In this paper we have done a new critical edition of the Letter of defiance that the 9th Duke of Medina-Sidonia, Gaspar Alonso Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, wrote in order to clean his honour against the charges of traitor that linked him to the Portuguese Revolt of 1640 leaded by the duke of Bragance. In addition to carrying out a brief historical contextualization, we have taken into account both the handwritten tradition of the text and the printed. As far as the last one concerns, we have focused our attention on two new editions, one unknown from Valladolid and another one rescued from the oblivion from Écija.

In this note, reference is made to the paintings of the Dutch artist Frans Francken II, or the Young, on the themes of Fortune and Occasio-Opportunity, and a summary is given of the present state of the discussion on the interpretation of the motifs of the pictures on the latter subject, and notice is given of a new work in that series, not considered until now by those who have dealt with this matter.   

Review on the book: Antonio Rey Hazas, Mariano de la Campa Gutiérrez y Esther Jiménez Pablo (Coords.), La Corte del Barroco. Textos literarios, avisos, manuales de corte, etiqueta y oratoria, which include different studies related to the hispanic court in the seventeenth century prepared by experts from different universities.

Review on the book: Teresa Zapata Fernández de la Hoz, La Corte de Felipe IV se viste de fiesta. La entrada de Mariana de Austria (1649), which analyzes the royal wedding between Mariana de Austria and Felipe IV, specially the triumphal entry of the queen in Madrid.

Review on the book: Ricard Expósito i Amagat, Nivells d'alfabetització i pràctiques culturals en la Catalunya moderna, in which we underline the methodological originality and the focus on the research topic by the author, who makes an exhaustive research study on reading practices and reception of  the several kind of printed stuff in Early Modern Catalonia (Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries).

This article recompiles for the first time the dispersed causes of the Spanish classical authors’ stage abandonment during the decade of the ’70s, their gradual recovery throughout the ’80s and the ’90s, and their artistic and social consolidation since the turn of the millennium. This paper discusses the reasons that influenced this process of recovery and takes stock of the theatre listings, from 1975 to the present, in order to highlight the current boom of Baroque theatre in Spain.