Books by Steven Hutchinson
Manchester University Press, 2020
Against a background of slavery in general, this chapter examines the kinds of slavery and captiv... more Against a background of slavery in general, this chapter examines the kinds of slavery and captivity practiced in the early modern Mediterranean world, and focuses primarily on the mode of "Mediterranean frontier slavery" on both the Muslim and Christian sides of the Mediterranean. Special emphasis is given to the experience of becoming a slave, as well to the very different plight of women who were enslaved.
Manchester University Press, 2020
This highly original study explores how Muslims, Christians and Jews interacted in the frontier z... more This highly original study explores how Muslims, Christians and Jews interacted in the frontier zones of the early modern Mediterranean (primarily 1530-1670) and how they developed a frontier consciousness that took into account the thoughts and actions of their inrerlocurors.
Economía ética en Cervantes (Ethical economy in Cervantes) – written in Spanish because its read... more Economía ética en Cervantes (Ethical economy in Cervantes) – written in Spanish because its readership was most likely to know Spanish – involved an examination of ethics not in the abstract (e.g. what is good or right?) but in unfolding human relations where people are enmeshed in a wide variety of affects and interactions that, for better or for worse, oblige them toward certain attitudes and behaviors. I call this ethical economy, because the concepts and language continually used in relation to it tend to be economic, revolving around debts and payments as well as the more fundamental question of how people value each other, or more generally, what is a person worth in the estimation of others? Once again, while ethical economy is universal but infinitely varied, it can thus be found wherever one looks for it, and Cervantes’ oeuvre provides an extraordinarily wide scope of examples and awareness of how it works.
Cervantine Journeys took as its starting point reflections on the fact that narrative literature... more Cervantine Journeys took as its starting point reflections on the fact that narrative literature in all cultures and epochs tends to focus either on journeys or on stories centered on the development of place-oriented relationships, i.e. the models we find in the Odyssey and the Iliad, respectively. Motivated in part by autobiographical undercurrents, I wanted to think this through with the idea of sketching out a philosophy of travel. As nearly all narrative literature of the early modern period in Europe (15th-18th centuries) tended toward travel, often inspired by the kinds of travel prevalent in those times, and virtually all of Cervantes’ long and short novels narrate very diverse sorts of travel, often with universal significance, these works would provide the means to meditate on travel without excluding a wealth of other sources and insights. The book delves into the complex relations between movement and language, into the varied experience of travel, into distinct chronotopes and worlds in which travel takes place, and into the question of how travel is transformed into narrative.
Articles by Steven Hutchinson
Selected publications (excluding, inter alia, work in progress) "'Nada humano me es ajeno': el co... more Selected publications (excluding, inter alia, work in progress) "'Nada humano me es ajeno': el cosmopolitismo de León el Africano en su representación del África de la Temprana Edad Moderna". Sharq al-Andalus: Estudios mudéjares y moriscos 23 (Homenaje a Bernard Vincent) (2023): 345-61. "Rhythmic counterpoints". In special double volume of Bulletin of Spanish Studies entitled Aural Culture and Poetics in the Early Modern Hispanic World:
Sharq Al-Andalus, 2023
“Nothing human is alien to me”: the cosmopolitanism of Leo Africanus in his representation of Afr... more “Nothing human is alien to me”: the cosmopolitanism of Leo Africanus in his representation of Africa in the Early Modern Age.
In 1550 the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio published the first edition
of his great anthology Navigationi et viaggi, proudly placing at the beginning an unpublished text by Leo Africanus which he titled Descrittione dell’Africa, and declaring that as editor he did no more than correct the faulty prose of the manuscript. While the collection was being republished, translations of the work on Africa appeared in French and Latin, then in English, Dutch, German, and more recently in Arabic and Spanish. As a synthesis of ethnography’, geography, local chronicles and autobiographical narratives of multiple journeys through North and sub-Saharan Africa, the text changed European knowledge and perception of the ‘third part of the world’ for centuries. But beyond its value as a rich source of information, the work became a ‘classic’ for other qualities. However, the appearance in 1931 of a manuscript of the work – titled Cosmographia de L’Affrica (1526) – has revealed that the editor Ramusio rewrote it from beginning to end, often with very significant changes that altered the very character of the author and his text. With the exception of a few recent scholars, the world has never come to know either the writer or his work. This essay explores the previously obfuscated cosmopolitanism of both the author and his world.
Keywords: Leo Africanus, manuscript, translation, early modern Africa,
cosmopolitanism.
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2023
This essay challenges many of the assumptions generally held about poetic rhythm in poetry, prima... more This essay challenges many of the assumptions generally held about poetic rhythm in poetry, primarily in Spanish but also in other Romance languages and English. Long before sophisticated technology confirmed centuries-long intuitions about the nature of reading, both Francisco de Quevedo and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz understood that we hear/listen with our eyes when we read, exploring the modalities of this fundamental synaesthesia, and they were by no means alone in defying what are still habitually held to be the rules about rhythm and meter. Present-day theorists of poetic rhythm very often do their utmost to deny any essential relationship or affinity between poetry and its 'sister art', music, and their conceptualization of the relations between rhythm and meter in poetry tend to be highly problematic. Speculations about supposed meaning of the etymon of rhythm, ruthmós, seem especially predisposed to obfuscate the workings of rhythm in any particular context. This study delves into all of these issues in an endeavor to clarify them and offer possible ways of resolving them.
This "Introduction", co-written with Mary B. Quinn, to the double volume we co-edited, explores t... more This "Introduction", co-written with Mary B. Quinn, to the double volume we co-edited, explores the notion of aurality within a context of "Intersensoriality". While theoretical approaches have largely tended to separate the senses and show how they vie for dominance, emphasis here is on their interdependence and synaesthetic interplay. Aurality figured very little in the majority of twentieth-century literary theory and criticism, which almost invariably homed in on how to decipher meaning. As of the 1990s, an aural turn matched the visual turn as sound studies, soundscapes, aurality, acoustics and similar terms of interest burgeoned into a promising and productive field that is still very much in development as it reorients attention to hearing in any context, from silence to noise. Major monographs and exceptional edited volumes appeared. All of this provides some context for the current double volume, whose aim has been for all 11 contributors including ourselves to probe the boundaries and examine the basis of aural studies particularly in literature and music - and often combinations of these - in the early modern Hispanic world.
eHumanista Cervantes, 2022
Resumen: Este artículo explora el funcionamiento de la dinámica de grupo en El retablo de las mar... more Resumen: Este artículo explora el funcionamiento de la dinámica de grupo en El retablo de las maravillas, especialmente en relación con la ideología de la “pureza de sangre”. Los personajes están claramente individualizados, pero a medida que avanza la obra, sus pensamientos y comportamientos se vuelven colectivizados y fanatizados. La versión metateatral de Cervantes cambia casi todos los aspectos de la historia original en El conde Lucanor, señalando comportamientos grupales instigados por formas de locura ideológica más reconocibles desde nuestro propio punto de vista histórico y lleva la obra más allá.
Abstract: This paper explores the workings of group dynamics in El retablo de las maravillas, particularly with regard to the ideology of ‘blood purity’. Characters are clearly individualized, but as the play progresses their thought and behavior become collectivized and fanaticized. Cervantes’ metatheatrical version changes nearly every aspect of the source story in El conde Lucanor, pointing to group behaviors instigated by forms of ideological madness more recognizable from our own historical vantage point, and takes the play beyond meaning.
Palabras clave: Retablo de las maravillas, dinámica de grupo, colectividades, pureza de sangre, locura, significado.
Keywords: Retablo de las maravillas, group dynamics, collectivities, blood purity,
madness, meaning.
Lepanto and Beyond: Images of Religious Alterity from Genoa and the Christian Mediterranean., 2021
Scholars refer to “the Muslim Other” as though such a type actually existed. On the contrary, and... more Scholars refer to “the Muslim Other” as though such a type actually existed. On the contrary, and particularly with regard to the early modern period, I would remove the capital letter in Other and refer not to a singularized (and by default masculinized) “other” but to a plurality of Muslim alterities in addition to other alterities such as those of religion, ethnicity, and sometimes gender and race. I argue that the idea of alterity, of “the other”, needs to be rethought, taking into account the peculiarities of the phenomenological tradition (Hegel, Husserl, Derrida, Levinas, among others) where the relation between “self” and “other” is often reduced conceptually to a face-to-face confrontation between two people, normally men, be they master and slave or two people who in effect come to understand each other because they belong to the same social and religious categories. Scholars of post-colonial studies, racial and ethnic studies, gender studies, and the like (e.g., Fabian, Taussig, Said, Spivak) frame alterity as a function of a power differential. Such conceptions of alterity are indeed pertinent to a study of the early modern Mediterranean, although with certain reservations owing to the historical specificities of that region and epoch. This essay looks into ways in which people of the same socio-religious category exhibit profound internal differences while those of the different categories often show important similarities. Examples are drawn from a variety of lesser-known early modern texts, and focus not only on Christian-Muslim relations but also the complexities inherent within the catetories of so-called “renegades”, Jews and Moriscos.
El septrentrión marítimo del Persiles y sus posibilidades artísticas, 2019
Este estudio reflexiona sobre el espacio del Septentrión de los primeros dos libros del Persiles,... more Este estudio reflexiona sobre el espacio del Septentrión de los primeros dos libros del Persiles, preguntando qué espacio necesitaría Cervantes para su última novela y qué le ofrece el Septentrión (a diferencia de otras regiones del mundo). Entre otras cosas, lo que parece necesitar el novelista es un espacio enorme con abundantes islas poco conocidas donde pueda poblarlas a su antojo. Tanto la Carta Magna de Olao Magno (1539) como su magnum opus Historia de las gentes septentrionales (1555) obviamente le sirvieron a Cervantes para la poética del Persiles, aunque traslada buen número de detalles de Noruega y Suecia a islas más distantes, entre ellas islas imaginarias. Una comparación entre una imagen de satélite del Septentrión y los mapas existentes demuestra cómo le sirvió a Cervantes la cartografía precisamente porque se parece tan poco a lo que se ve actualmente.
En estas páginas me propongo explorar los caminos del islam en el Mediterráneo a través de los ci... more En estas páginas me propongo explorar los caminos del islam en el Mediterráneo a través de los cinco tratados de la Topografía e historia general de Argel, es decir, la Topografía misma que describe la ciudad, sus habitantes y modus vivendi, el igualmente magnífico Epítome de los reyes de Argel que narra la historia de los llamados "reyes" desde Aruch Barbarroja en 1516 y su hermano Jeredín hasta casi finales del XVI, y los tres diálogos, sobre la Captividad, los Mártires y los Morabutos. Son textos conocidos, desde luego, y ha habido buen número de estudios basados en distintos temas de los textos, pero creo que ofrecen detalles y perspectivas únicos no sólo sobre Argel sino sobre el Mediterráneo de su tiempo. Desde luego, en semejante mapa mediterráneo se podrían trazar otros muchos caminos desde otros textos de la época y estudios modernos, pero me parece que la Topografía como texto clave ya puede establecer varias rutas y sus coordenadas. No voy a entrar en cuestiones de autoría, ya que se sabe desde hace bastantes décadas -en estudios de Astrana Marín (1949: v. 2: 468), George Camamis (1977: 95-107), Emilio Sola y José María Parreño (1990: 11-12), entre otros- que el presunto autor, fray Diego de Haedo, con motivos todavía un poco oscuros, ejerció más o menos de editor de la obra que por fin se publicó en 1612, unos 30 años después de que Antonio de Sosa escribiera los textos durante su cautiverio de 1577 a 1581. Los tratados mismos incluyen muchas referencias de unos a otros y al propio autor Sosa, quien es interlocutor en los tres diálogos, y nos sitúan constantemente en Argel mismo y en un presente de estos años, como por ejemplo cuando se habla del virrey Jafer Baxá: "Hasta hoy los ocho de marzo de 1581, que son ocho meses que reina y gobierna cuando esto se escribe, no se ha notado en él vicio o maldad alguna" (Epítome, cap. 22.1, 87r) 1. Las recientes investigaciones de María Antonia Garcés han revelado muchos datos sorprendentes sobre Sosa (2011: 41-78).
Resumen: A partir de textos novelísticos del XVII, tanto breves como extensos, me propongo reexam... more Resumen: A partir de textos novelísticos del XVII, tanto breves como extensos, me propongo reexaminar la literatura de ficción que narra historias sobre el Mediterráneo, con el fin de esbozar sus propiedades genéricas mediante un análisis de sus modalidades cronotópicas. Semejante corpus consiste mayoritariamente en episodios importantes dentro de obras extensas y en determinados relatos o novelas dentro de colecciones de obras más breves. El propio Cervantes contribuye decisivamente a este corpus tanto en sus novelas largas como en las Novelas ejemplares. No se trata de un tema literario sino de un género –interdependiente con otros géneros– que explora los parámetros y posibilidades narrativas de la ficción en un Mediterráneo fronterizo donde el ser humano actúa en situaciones límite que oscilan entre vida y muerte, poder y esclavitud, crueldad y compasión, amor y odio.
Abstract: Focusing on long and short novels of the seventeenth century, I seek to reexamine literary fiction that narrates stories about the Mediterranean, with the aim of sketching out its generic properties by identifying its chronotopic modalities. Such a corpus is not comprised of long works in their entirety nor of whole collections of short fiction but rather of key episodes within longer works and of particular tales or novels within collections of shorter works. Cervantes himself contributed decisively to this corpus both in his long novels and in his Novelas ejemplares. It is not a question here of a literary theme but of a genre – interdependent with other genres – that explores the parameters and possibilities of narrative set within Mediterranean frontier space where human beings act in extreme situations of life and death, power and slavery, cruelty and compassion, love and hate.
Resumen: En la editio princeps del 'Quijote' de 1615, la muerte de Alonso Quijano figura entre pa... more Resumen: En la editio princeps del 'Quijote' de 1615, la muerte de Alonso Quijano figura entre paréntesis en una larga frase que se refiere a diversos asuntos, lo que tenía que quitarle énfasis a esta muerte tan escandalosamente banal. El último capítulo desarrolla un estilo lleno de ironías, toques ligeros, saltos abruptos, luces y sombras. Este ensayo cuestiona la facilidad con la que personajes, narradores y lectores asumen una identidad entre los avatares tan distintos de don Quijote (“Quixana” y otros variantes, don Quixote, Alonso Quixano), e indaga en el virtuosismo cervantino al acabar su libro con un lúcido anticlímax.
Abstract: In the princeps edition of 'Don Quixote' part II, the death of Alonso Quixano figures in parentheses within a long sentence that touches on various topics, thus playing down the importance of this scandalously banal death. The final chapter develops a style full of irony, light touches, abrupt changes, light and shadow. This essay questions the ease with which characters, narrators and readers assume an identity between the very distinct avatars of Don Quixote (“Quixana” and other variants, Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano), and inquires into Cervantes’ masterly techniques in bringing his great novel to an end with a lucid anticlimax.
Impresión: ulzama digital.
Renegadas in early modern Spanish literature
"In time she came to love her master well and married him, abandoning her true religion for her h... more "In time she came to love her master well and married him, abandoning her true religion for her husband's, in which she lived with great pleasure for six or seven years, being served, regaled and bedecked with jewels and pearls, oblivious to having been a Christian." (Vicente Espinel, Marcos de Obregón II, 13)
A discussion of literary renegade women (renegadas) in the early modem Mediterranean calls for at least a double comparison: with historical renegadas on the one hand, and on the other with their male counterparts, literary renegados. Since most of my examples will be drawn from texts in Spanish referring to the western Mediterranean, and particularly the Maghreb, it might also be worth noting that Ottoman-Venetian relations as well as idiosyncratic practices within the Ottoman court created rather different conditions for historical renegadas from those prevailing in the western Mediterranean: the three case studies that Eric Dursteler compellingly presents in his Renegade Women, for example, largely depend on circumstances peculiar to Istanbul itself and its interactions with Venice. Whereas the western Mediterranean gave rise to somewhat different narratives in this regard, the entire Muslim Mediterranean shared practices very distinct from how the Christian Mediterranean treated the women from Muslim countries who sooner or later converted to Christianity. The major differences here were that the numbers of women converts to Christianity were far smaller than those of women who converted to Islam, and more important, that Islamic societies by and large , This essay is a companion piece to three other articles of mine listed in the bibliography, as well as a chapter in a book manuscript in progress. In all of these, there are passages about renegade women different from those discussed here. Only in this essay is the focus on renegade women as such, with emphasis on literature. 528 T i incorporated converts by offering them marriage-or pressuring them into marriage-whereas Christian societies rarely did so.3 This is not the place to rehearse the concepts and terms associated with conversion from one religion to another, or to justify the use of the biased term renegade (which coexists with other terms such as Saracens, Moors, Moriscos, non-Turkish "Turks", etc.). My intention here is to go somewhat against the grain and use the word quite neutrally to refer to converts in either direction, and to retain the aura of. scandal attached to it by those who saw the abandonment of their own religion as apostasy. Standard practice in all western ·European countries that were involved in the Mediterranean was to call converts to Islam renegades (renegados, rinnegati, renegats, etc.), with pejorative connotations of course, though one often finds the term used more descriptively than disparagingly. All too little is known about renegade women in the early modem Mediterranean. As Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar point out in their impressive study, Les Chrétiens d'Allah, renegade women most often surface fleetingly in documents as mothers or wives of others. A number of these "others," I might add, figure among the protagonists of the 16"'-and 17'h-century Mediterranean, and some of the women were protagonists in their own right. The statistics provided by the Bennassars are quite revealing. Of the 1,550 cases of renegades in their study, all of them from inquisitional records produced after the voluntary or forced return of renegades to Christian lands, only 59 are women, as the authors readily observe. This amounts to under 4% of the cases studied. While most men were captured as soldiers or sailors, women (and children) were captured mainly in coastal raids and on voyages, and hence there were always fewer women captives than men. Conversion was a very frequent sequel to captivity, especially for women, children and adolescents, whose slave-masters rarely put them up for ransom. Women would have made up some 10-20% of the total number of renegades, depending on where they were and in what time period. Pierre Dan, for example, in his Histoire de Barbarie (1637), puts the figure of renégats in Algiers at 8,000, and of femmes at 1,000-1,200 - here and elsewhere it's not clear whether the renégates are included in the figure for renégats - and for Tunis he estimates there being 3,000 or 4,000 renegats, with 600 or 700 women. Much more than women did, renegade men obviously disposed of a variety of means to return to their homelands...
This essay reorients "Morisco Studies" from an exclusively Spanish national context to a Mediterr... more This essay reorients "Morisco Studies" from an exclusively Spanish national context to a Mediterranean and Pan-Islamic context (the Ummah), which enables interpreting the 'Morisco' episode in Persiles y Segismunda (III,11) in ways diametrically contrary to how Cervantes scholars have understood it. There are also an abundance of clues indicating that this episode is not at all what it appears to be. As we know, the anti-Morisco diatribe is delivered by the only Morisco Christian man in the village, and the content of his speech parrots the clichés of the books published by apologists of the expulsion. What's more, the actions of the Morisco villagers would be judged negatively by the criteria of 'assimilation', which is how scholarship of the episode has also reacted. What has not been considered sufficiently is that this village has asked to be taken by corsairs into exile, and that their motivation is highly justifiable for these internally colonialized people despite the deep loss that exile involves for them. Historiography has recorded but largely downplayed the significant 'illegal' emigration of Moriscos throughout the 16th century, and this is precisely what we see happening in this episode. What readers nearly always fail to grasp is the manipulation of their sensibility by a narrator (who is *not* Cervantes' spokesman by any means) who would have us believe that the protagonists of the novel are in mortal danger with these Moriscos, that the only two good Moriscos are the Christians Rafala and her uncle, that the Turks commit sacrilege at the church and sack the village, that the villagers have fallen into a trap laid by the Turks to be taken away, and much more, all of which turns out to be false when we examine the details and the historical context. A reconsideration of this episode enables us to recontextualize Cervantes' varied handling of the so-called 'Morisco problem' geopolitically, socially, ethnically, ethically...
Este estudio indaga en la extraña lógica del personaje Zoraida que se escapa de Argel a España co... more Este estudio indaga en la extraña lógica del personaje Zoraida que se escapa de Argel a España con el cautivo y futuro marido Ruy Pérez de Viedma. Como sabemos, es modelo histórico de Zoraida la hija de Hajj Murad (Agi Morato), de nombre desconocido, quien se casó con el príncipe 'Abd al-Malik, futuro rey de Marruecos quien murió en la gran batalla 'de los Tres Reyes' (o de Wadi al-Majazin). La crítica ha solido ver o el amor o a religión para explicar por qué se exilia a España. Aunque la literatura siempre puede permitirse el absurdo en sus narraciones, ninguna de estas motivaciones parece adecuada para explicar las acciones y el comportamiento de Zoraida en 'la historia del cautivo'. Este ensayo examina el contexto y momento socio-histórico de este relato y propone otra manera enteramente diferente de comprender a Zoraida y su historia.
Este estudio empieza citando y comentando -dentro de sus parámetros legales- casos históricos de ... more Este estudio empieza citando y comentando -dentro de sus parámetros legales- casos históricos de adulterio, postulando que el adulterio femenino no solo era un tópico literario sino también un importante tema social. Dentro de la producción literaria, la obra cervantina se distingue por aprobar o disculpar el adulterio femenino (como observa Américo Castro). De hecho, en toda la obra cervantina la palabra 'adulterio' y sus derivados solo aparece una docena de veces, y no siempre en sentido propio. Solo aparece una vez en el 'Quijote', en boca de Lotario ('la mujer adúltera'), y la única mujer cervantina que se reconoce como 'adúltera' es Luisa la Talaverana en el 'Persiles'. Un análisis de la primera versión de 'El celoso extremeño' y sobre todo de la definitiva de 1613 demuestra que la única persona *no* culpable en toda la casa es Leonora misma.
Mucho más complicado es el caso de Camila en 'El curioso impertinente', que casi siempre se ha leído desde el código de la honra y la ética de la amistad sin tener en cuenta la perspectiva y el admirable carácter de Leonora. Aquí también el narrador de la novela -de ninguna manera portavoz de Cervantes sino todo lo contrario- ha influido en la lectura de la novela como un personaje más, uno incapaz de comprender a Camila.
Ehumanista Journal of Iberian Studies, 2010
Las esclavas en el mundo Mediterráneo durante la Temprana Modernidad experimentaban la esclavitud... more Las esclavas en el mundo Mediterráneo durante la Temprana Modernidad experimentaban la esclavitud de manera intrínsicamente diferente que los esclavos maculinos, tanto en tierras musulmanas como en cristianas, lo cual se observa en documentos y testimonios históricos y se refleja en obras literarias. Las escenas de regalos, compras y posesión de esclavas desde la literatura antigua atestiguan una erotización del cuerpo femenino esclavizado. Hay que tener en cuenta de que los términos esclava/esclavo y cautiva/cautivo figuran en el lenguaje erótico-amoroso de la Edad Moderna. Por otro lado, en el imaginario cristiano-europeo las cautivas/esclavas abren un espacio y sexualidad distinto al del matrimonio, la prostitución y el adulterio, entre otros. En este ensayo se examinan casos de esclavitud femenina de la *Vida* de Miguel de Castro (en Durazzo [Durrës, Albania], Italia y España, de *El amante liberal* de Cervantes, *Premiado el amor constante* de Francisco de Lugo y Dávila, y *Marcos de Obregón* de Vicente Espinel, y se reflexiona sobre el tratamiento de esclavas en tierras cristianas en marcado contraste con su tratamiento muy diferente en tierras musulmanas donde podían integrarse socialmente.
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Books by Steven Hutchinson
Articles by Steven Hutchinson
In 1550 the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio published the first edition
of his great anthology Navigationi et viaggi, proudly placing at the beginning an unpublished text by Leo Africanus which he titled Descrittione dell’Africa, and declaring that as editor he did no more than correct the faulty prose of the manuscript. While the collection was being republished, translations of the work on Africa appeared in French and Latin, then in English, Dutch, German, and more recently in Arabic and Spanish. As a synthesis of ethnography’, geography, local chronicles and autobiographical narratives of multiple journeys through North and sub-Saharan Africa, the text changed European knowledge and perception of the ‘third part of the world’ for centuries. But beyond its value as a rich source of information, the work became a ‘classic’ for other qualities. However, the appearance in 1931 of a manuscript of the work – titled Cosmographia de L’Affrica (1526) – has revealed that the editor Ramusio rewrote it from beginning to end, often with very significant changes that altered the very character of the author and his text. With the exception of a few recent scholars, the world has never come to know either the writer or his work. This essay explores the previously obfuscated cosmopolitanism of both the author and his world.
Keywords: Leo Africanus, manuscript, translation, early modern Africa,
cosmopolitanism.
Abstract: This paper explores the workings of group dynamics in El retablo de las maravillas, particularly with regard to the ideology of ‘blood purity’. Characters are clearly individualized, but as the play progresses their thought and behavior become collectivized and fanaticized. Cervantes’ metatheatrical version changes nearly every aspect of the source story in El conde Lucanor, pointing to group behaviors instigated by forms of ideological madness more recognizable from our own historical vantage point, and takes the play beyond meaning.
Palabras clave: Retablo de las maravillas, dinámica de grupo, colectividades, pureza de sangre, locura, significado.
Keywords: Retablo de las maravillas, group dynamics, collectivities, blood purity,
madness, meaning.
Abstract: Focusing on long and short novels of the seventeenth century, I seek to reexamine literary fiction that narrates stories about the Mediterranean, with the aim of sketching out its generic properties by identifying its chronotopic modalities. Such a corpus is not comprised of long works in their entirety nor of whole collections of short fiction but rather of key episodes within longer works and of particular tales or novels within collections of shorter works. Cervantes himself contributed decisively to this corpus both in his long novels and in his Novelas ejemplares. It is not a question here of a literary theme but of a genre – interdependent with other genres – that explores the parameters and possibilities of narrative set within Mediterranean frontier space where human beings act in extreme situations of life and death, power and slavery, cruelty and compassion, love and hate.
Abstract: In the princeps edition of 'Don Quixote' part II, the death of Alonso Quixano figures in parentheses within a long sentence that touches on various topics, thus playing down the importance of this scandalously banal death. The final chapter develops a style full of irony, light touches, abrupt changes, light and shadow. This essay questions the ease with which characters, narrators and readers assume an identity between the very distinct avatars of Don Quixote (“Quixana” and other variants, Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano), and inquires into Cervantes’ masterly techniques in bringing his great novel to an end with a lucid anticlimax.
A discussion of literary renegade women (renegadas) in the early modem Mediterranean calls for at least a double comparison: with historical renegadas on the one hand, and on the other with their male counterparts, literary renegados. Since most of my examples will be drawn from texts in Spanish referring to the western Mediterranean, and particularly the Maghreb, it might also be worth noting that Ottoman-Venetian relations as well as idiosyncratic practices within the Ottoman court created rather different conditions for historical renegadas from those prevailing in the western Mediterranean: the three case studies that Eric Dursteler compellingly presents in his Renegade Women, for example, largely depend on circumstances peculiar to Istanbul itself and its interactions with Venice. Whereas the western Mediterranean gave rise to somewhat different narratives in this regard, the entire Muslim Mediterranean shared practices very distinct from how the Christian Mediterranean treated the women from Muslim countries who sooner or later converted to Christianity. The major differences here were that the numbers of women converts to Christianity were far smaller than those of women who converted to Islam, and more important, that Islamic societies by and large , This essay is a companion piece to three other articles of mine listed in the bibliography, as well as a chapter in a book manuscript in progress. In all of these, there are passages about renegade women different from those discussed here. Only in this essay is the focus on renegade women as such, with emphasis on literature. 528 T i incorporated converts by offering them marriage-or pressuring them into marriage-whereas Christian societies rarely did so.3 This is not the place to rehearse the concepts and terms associated with conversion from one religion to another, or to justify the use of the biased term renegade (which coexists with other terms such as Saracens, Moors, Moriscos, non-Turkish "Turks", etc.). My intention here is to go somewhat against the grain and use the word quite neutrally to refer to converts in either direction, and to retain the aura of. scandal attached to it by those who saw the abandonment of their own religion as apostasy. Standard practice in all western ·European countries that were involved in the Mediterranean was to call converts to Islam renegades (renegados, rinnegati, renegats, etc.), with pejorative connotations of course, though one often finds the term used more descriptively than disparagingly. All too little is known about renegade women in the early modem Mediterranean. As Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar point out in their impressive study, Les Chrétiens d'Allah, renegade women most often surface fleetingly in documents as mothers or wives of others. A number of these "others," I might add, figure among the protagonists of the 16"'-and 17'h-century Mediterranean, and some of the women were protagonists in their own right. The statistics provided by the Bennassars are quite revealing. Of the 1,550 cases of renegades in their study, all of them from inquisitional records produced after the voluntary or forced return of renegades to Christian lands, only 59 are women, as the authors readily observe. This amounts to under 4% of the cases studied. While most men were captured as soldiers or sailors, women (and children) were captured mainly in coastal raids and on voyages, and hence there were always fewer women captives than men. Conversion was a very frequent sequel to captivity, especially for women, children and adolescents, whose slave-masters rarely put them up for ransom. Women would have made up some 10-20% of the total number of renegades, depending on where they were and in what time period. Pierre Dan, for example, in his Histoire de Barbarie (1637), puts the figure of renégats in Algiers at 8,000, and of femmes at 1,000-1,200 - here and elsewhere it's not clear whether the renégates are included in the figure for renégats - and for Tunis he estimates there being 3,000 or 4,000 renegats, with 600 or 700 women. Much more than women did, renegade men obviously disposed of a variety of means to return to their homelands...
Mucho más complicado es el caso de Camila en 'El curioso impertinente', que casi siempre se ha leído desde el código de la honra y la ética de la amistad sin tener en cuenta la perspectiva y el admirable carácter de Leonora. Aquí también el narrador de la novela -de ninguna manera portavoz de Cervantes sino todo lo contrario- ha influido en la lectura de la novela como un personaje más, uno incapaz de comprender a Camila.
In 1550 the Venetian Giovanni Battista Ramusio published the first edition
of his great anthology Navigationi et viaggi, proudly placing at the beginning an unpublished text by Leo Africanus which he titled Descrittione dell’Africa, and declaring that as editor he did no more than correct the faulty prose of the manuscript. While the collection was being republished, translations of the work on Africa appeared in French and Latin, then in English, Dutch, German, and more recently in Arabic and Spanish. As a synthesis of ethnography’, geography, local chronicles and autobiographical narratives of multiple journeys through North and sub-Saharan Africa, the text changed European knowledge and perception of the ‘third part of the world’ for centuries. But beyond its value as a rich source of information, the work became a ‘classic’ for other qualities. However, the appearance in 1931 of a manuscript of the work – titled Cosmographia de L’Affrica (1526) – has revealed that the editor Ramusio rewrote it from beginning to end, often with very significant changes that altered the very character of the author and his text. With the exception of a few recent scholars, the world has never come to know either the writer or his work. This essay explores the previously obfuscated cosmopolitanism of both the author and his world.
Keywords: Leo Africanus, manuscript, translation, early modern Africa,
cosmopolitanism.
Abstract: This paper explores the workings of group dynamics in El retablo de las maravillas, particularly with regard to the ideology of ‘blood purity’. Characters are clearly individualized, but as the play progresses their thought and behavior become collectivized and fanaticized. Cervantes’ metatheatrical version changes nearly every aspect of the source story in El conde Lucanor, pointing to group behaviors instigated by forms of ideological madness more recognizable from our own historical vantage point, and takes the play beyond meaning.
Palabras clave: Retablo de las maravillas, dinámica de grupo, colectividades, pureza de sangre, locura, significado.
Keywords: Retablo de las maravillas, group dynamics, collectivities, blood purity,
madness, meaning.
Abstract: Focusing on long and short novels of the seventeenth century, I seek to reexamine literary fiction that narrates stories about the Mediterranean, with the aim of sketching out its generic properties by identifying its chronotopic modalities. Such a corpus is not comprised of long works in their entirety nor of whole collections of short fiction but rather of key episodes within longer works and of particular tales or novels within collections of shorter works. Cervantes himself contributed decisively to this corpus both in his long novels and in his Novelas ejemplares. It is not a question here of a literary theme but of a genre – interdependent with other genres – that explores the parameters and possibilities of narrative set within Mediterranean frontier space where human beings act in extreme situations of life and death, power and slavery, cruelty and compassion, love and hate.
Abstract: In the princeps edition of 'Don Quixote' part II, the death of Alonso Quixano figures in parentheses within a long sentence that touches on various topics, thus playing down the importance of this scandalously banal death. The final chapter develops a style full of irony, light touches, abrupt changes, light and shadow. This essay questions the ease with which characters, narrators and readers assume an identity between the very distinct avatars of Don Quixote (“Quixana” and other variants, Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano), and inquires into Cervantes’ masterly techniques in bringing his great novel to an end with a lucid anticlimax.
A discussion of literary renegade women (renegadas) in the early modem Mediterranean calls for at least a double comparison: with historical renegadas on the one hand, and on the other with their male counterparts, literary renegados. Since most of my examples will be drawn from texts in Spanish referring to the western Mediterranean, and particularly the Maghreb, it might also be worth noting that Ottoman-Venetian relations as well as idiosyncratic practices within the Ottoman court created rather different conditions for historical renegadas from those prevailing in the western Mediterranean: the three case studies that Eric Dursteler compellingly presents in his Renegade Women, for example, largely depend on circumstances peculiar to Istanbul itself and its interactions with Venice. Whereas the western Mediterranean gave rise to somewhat different narratives in this regard, the entire Muslim Mediterranean shared practices very distinct from how the Christian Mediterranean treated the women from Muslim countries who sooner or later converted to Christianity. The major differences here were that the numbers of women converts to Christianity were far smaller than those of women who converted to Islam, and more important, that Islamic societies by and large , This essay is a companion piece to three other articles of mine listed in the bibliography, as well as a chapter in a book manuscript in progress. In all of these, there are passages about renegade women different from those discussed here. Only in this essay is the focus on renegade women as such, with emphasis on literature. 528 T i incorporated converts by offering them marriage-or pressuring them into marriage-whereas Christian societies rarely did so.3 This is not the place to rehearse the concepts and terms associated with conversion from one religion to another, or to justify the use of the biased term renegade (which coexists with other terms such as Saracens, Moors, Moriscos, non-Turkish "Turks", etc.). My intention here is to go somewhat against the grain and use the word quite neutrally to refer to converts in either direction, and to retain the aura of. scandal attached to it by those who saw the abandonment of their own religion as apostasy. Standard practice in all western ·European countries that were involved in the Mediterranean was to call converts to Islam renegades (renegados, rinnegati, renegats, etc.), with pejorative connotations of course, though one often finds the term used more descriptively than disparagingly. All too little is known about renegade women in the early modem Mediterranean. As Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar point out in their impressive study, Les Chrétiens d'Allah, renegade women most often surface fleetingly in documents as mothers or wives of others. A number of these "others," I might add, figure among the protagonists of the 16"'-and 17'h-century Mediterranean, and some of the women were protagonists in their own right. The statistics provided by the Bennassars are quite revealing. Of the 1,550 cases of renegades in their study, all of them from inquisitional records produced after the voluntary or forced return of renegades to Christian lands, only 59 are women, as the authors readily observe. This amounts to under 4% of the cases studied. While most men were captured as soldiers or sailors, women (and children) were captured mainly in coastal raids and on voyages, and hence there were always fewer women captives than men. Conversion was a very frequent sequel to captivity, especially for women, children and adolescents, whose slave-masters rarely put them up for ransom. Women would have made up some 10-20% of the total number of renegades, depending on where they were and in what time period. Pierre Dan, for example, in his Histoire de Barbarie (1637), puts the figure of renégats in Algiers at 8,000, and of femmes at 1,000-1,200 - here and elsewhere it's not clear whether the renégates are included in the figure for renégats - and for Tunis he estimates there being 3,000 or 4,000 renegats, with 600 or 700 women. Much more than women did, renegade men obviously disposed of a variety of means to return to their homelands...
Mucho más complicado es el caso de Camila en 'El curioso impertinente', que casi siempre se ha leído desde el código de la honra y la ética de la amistad sin tener en cuenta la perspectiva y el admirable carácter de Leonora. Aquí también el narrador de la novela -de ninguna manera portavoz de Cervantes sino todo lo contrario- ha influido en la lectura de la novela como un personaje más, uno incapaz de comprender a Camila.
se expresan sus desvaríos psíquicos en forma de alucinaciones, paranoia, ansiedades,
resentimiento y otros patrones de su pensamiento y conducta, y cómo se concretan
en su peculiar experiencia social y religiosa. Su locura tiene una lógica, una peculiar economía ética que pretendo trazar en sus líneas maestras.
From its ambiguous stance towards verisimilitude, the "Quixote" is full of voids, impossibilities, paradoxes and metalepses that play a profoundly creative role in the novel. This essay explores how Cervantes, drawing upon traditions of paradoxical thinking, presents ontological and epistemological voids as a plenitude of being and knowing. He thus exposes and develops the equivocal workings of fiction.