Early Modern Literature

En este trabajo doy a conocer documentación relativa a la actividad profesional del célebre barroco actor y autor Antonio García de Prado y Peri hacia 1640-1643, que además nos ofrece detalles inéditos sobre su familia y su condición de hidalgo. En la parte final del trabajo ofrezco un breve acercamiento a la presencia de estos miembros de la baja nobleza en el mundo del teatro profesional barroco.

March 10, 4pm
Graduate & Faculty Seminar
“Christina Sharpe’s Theory of Black Subjectivity in the Premodern Context”

A Zoom link will be sent to registrants prior to the event. Excerpted readings from Sharpe’s In the Wake available here.

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (Duke UP, 2016) offers a stark re-theorization of black subjectivity in the 21st century. This seminar will explore if/how Sharpe’s theories can be applied to premodern history, culture, and texts.

This article presents the first edition and translation of a short text (in 2 versions) which circulated in Iceland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was based on a section of Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum. The tale tells of how the seemingly unpromising son of a ruler in Denmark rises to the occasions when belligerent Saxons threaten his father's kingdom. The sources of Vermundar þáttur og Upsa are considered in an attempt to better understand the ways in which material from the Gesta Danorum was available to Icelandic audiences in the post-medieval period.

En La española inglesa de Cervantes se han identificado una variedad de subtextos y componentes genéricos: desde tropos provenientes de novelas bizantinas e historias de cautivos, a elementos específicos de una novela italiana de Bandello. Menos obvia, pero no menos presente, es la alusión en esta 'novela ejemplar' de Cervantes a textos religiosos como la historia bíblica del patriarca José y la traducción española de la Historia eclesiástica del cisma de Inglaterra de Pedro de Ribadeneira. Ejemplo por excelencia de la paciencia exílica en las tradiciones judía, musulmana y cristiana, la historia de José apoya la lección explícita que la providencia recompensa la virtud, en concordancia con la creencia de cristianos viejos y nuevos. Por su parte, la historia de Ribadeneira, ampliamente difundida por la península ibérica, parecería ser la fuente principal de la perspectiva española sobre la reforma inglesa. ¿Qué propósito podrían cumplir estos intertextos mediterráneos religiosos en la novela ejemplar de Cervantes?  Esta presentación sugerirá razones estéticas, sociales y religiosas.

MILITARY LIVES IN THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN IBERIAN WORLD
This volume considers the multifaceted textual corpus of military vidas from across the medieval and early modern Iberian world. The military vida is here defined capaciously as a retrospective account of a life marked by military service. It may take any form, including memoir, biography, history, fiction, poetry, or the bureaucratic narratives that were required for career advancement. By bringing a diverse set of disciplinary practices to the study of military lives and their textual manifestations, spanning the global empires of Spain and Portugal, this volume aims to explore these works as aesthetic laboratories, engines of knowledge production, and sites of ideological articulation. We welcome a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to the study of military vidas from the medieval period through the eighteenth century, including but not limited to the following:

• Affect theory and the history of emotions
• Archival studies and the constitution of a military-autobiographical "canon"
• Comparative studies
• Material history and the history of the book
• Military ethics and theories of warfare
• Narrative theory and narratology
• Queer theory and theories of gender and sexuality
• Theories of subjectivity and self-fashioning
• The soldier as laborer
• The soldier as social problem
• Soldiers and the production of knowledge
• Rebellious soldiers and the representation of mutiny
• Contemporary appropriations of the military vida, including intersections with imperiofilia and imperiofobia

Please send abstracts (250-500 words) and a 2-page C.V. to Faith S. Harden (fharden@arizona.edu) by March 15, 2021. Decisions will be communicated within 2 weeks of receipt. Contributions may be in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

This article contributes to the development of the sociology of lying by exploring some of the earliest comments on the topic, which are to be found amongst Georg Simmel's writings about secrecy. We outline Simmel's broader approach to interaction, as an experience that is conditioned upon non-knowledge, and work towards the attribution to him of the discovery of an aesthetic of concealment and revelation. This, we argue, can be used as a founding block in the sociology of lying. We then examine what Simmel has to say about lying specifically and find he falls into contradiction as he tries to link lying to other social forms, such as love, and to the shifting patterns of life which he understood to define modernity. To refine his approach, we look back to the period of early modernity during which questions of self-revelation and concealment are being explored in literature and lived uncertainly. Specifically, we take a detailed look at William Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, for it clearly articulates the complex, relational dynamics of lying and love and allows us to read this back into Simmel's account and explain why he falls into confusion. We then conclude by posing a series of questions and taking the position that sociologists should study lying as a relational phenomenon.

This paper focuses on the figure of the graduate Francisco de Rojas, a minor playwright from the first half of the seventeenth century who is better known for copying several theatrical manuscripts and, above all, for the presence of his handwriting in dozens of other manuscripts. The objectives of this paper are to contextualize his activity as a copyist, to systematize the nature of his interventions in the dialogues of the plays, and to point out the—often silence—influence that Rojas’ amendments have had in several editions of early modern Spanish plays for over a century.

En el artículo se da cuenta del hallazgo de una nueva edición de la obra de Lope de Vega El castigo sin venganza, una suelta sin datos de impresión. Tras una presentación del contexto de creación y de la historia de la transmisión del texto, se examina la nueva suelta: se demuestra que su origen está en una imprenta sevillana y que puede datarse en el período 1632-1638, según sus rasgos bibliográficos; se valora y filia el nuevo testimonio dentro de la tradición conocida; se plantean hipótesis sobre cómo pudo llegar el texto a la imprenta a partir del estudio de las compañías de teatro que lo pusieron en escena; y se alcanzan las conclusiones, incluida la posibilidad de que esta nueva suelta sea la editio princeps y hubiera movido a Lope de Vega a publicar en 1634 la que hasta ahora se ha tenido por tal.