Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain

Early modern Spain's insistent rhetorics of nation and kingship of a monolithic body of shared values and beliefs especially in respect of racial and gender stereotypes and of a centralized and ostensibly absolutist legislative apparatus did not map unproblematically onto the complex topography of everyday life. This volume explores the extent to which these rhetorics and the ideology they helped to construct or underpin reflected or failed to reflect the realities of social economic and cultural life. It sets against their typically exorbitant claims the lived messy and sometimes contradictory experience of Spaniards across a broad social spectrum both at the centre and at the margins not just of peninsular society but of the Hispanic world overseas. Confronting ideology were questions of economic pragmatism executive feasibility jurisdictional competence and above all the social and political complexity of the Spain of the period.RICHARD J. PYM is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway University of London.Contributors: TREVOR J. DADSON MARGARET RICH GREER BARRY IFE ALISTAIR MALCOLM MELVEENA MCKENDRICK RICHARD J. PYM HELEN RAWLINGS ALEXANDER SAMSON JULES WHICKER