Both “illness and temptation of the enemy”: melancholy, the medieval patient and the writings of King Duarte of Portugal (r. 1433–38)

Recent historians have rehabilitated King Duarte of Portugal, previously maligned and neglected, as an astute ruler and philosopher. There is still a tendency, however, to view Duarte as a depressive or a hypochondriac, due to his own description of his melancholy in his advice book, the Loyal Counselor. This paper reassesses Duarte's writings, drawing on key approaches in the history of medicine, such as narrative medicine and the history of the patient. It is important to take Duarte's views on his condition seriously, placing them in the medical and theological contexts of his time and avoiding modern retrospective diagnosis. Duarte's writings can be used to explore the impact of plague, doubt and death on the life of a well-educated and conscientious late-medieval ruler

Post-Franco Theatre

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, or, at the very least, an end to drama as we know it

Dramas of Distinction: Plays by Golden Age Women

Renaissance Europe was the scene of flourishing and innovative dramatic art, and seventeenth-century Spain enjoyed its own Golden Age of the stage. According to traditional studies of this period, however, men seemed to be the only participants. Now in Dramas of Distinction, Teresa Scott Soufas offers the first book-length critical study of five important women playwrights: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor. By locating the plays within their period, Soufas avoids universalizing women without regard to history. Her approach transcends the simple measurement of women authors against male models. Confronting the issue of female silence demanded by seventeenth-century Spanish patriarchy, Soufas compares the drive to limit and contain theater space to Renaissance society\u27s efforts to limit and contain women. Yet these dramatists still found ways to question their own roles and male authority. Caro and Cueva investigate the difficult relationship between women and monarchy. Azevedo explores the ways Renaissance women become commodities in the marriage market. Cross-dressed women characters add carnivalesque implications to three plays in which gender identities are unstable. Finally, Enrfquez challenges the precepts of Lope de Vega\u27s comedia nueva as she attempts to adhere to classical formal principles and reject the public playhouse. As a companion to the recently published anthology Women\u27s Acts, also edited by Soufas, this study significantly contributes not only to Hispanic studies but also to women\u27s studies, Renaissance studies, and comparative literature. Teresa Scott Soufas is professor of Spanish and acting dean of the faculty of liberal arts and sciences at Tulane University. This fine book will influence the study of the comedia and Golden Age culture in this country. —Arizona Journal of Hispanic Culture Studies This unique critical study concentrates on a selection of plays by five female playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age. —British Bulletin of Publications on Latin America, The Caribbean, Portugal and S This is a text which teems with new lines of enquiry. —Bulletin of Hispanic Studies Soufas affords us a surprising new perspective on the literary life of Golden Age Spain. —Calliope Soufas provides a great deal of information and engaging textual readings, and she invites her audience to explore important neglected perspectives. —Choice Soufas has succeeded in providing a comprehensive theoretical approach to women writers of drama. Her exemplary study changes the critical landscape of Early Modern dramatic works by focusing on female discursive practice in its historical context. She has set the standard for a productive, innovative approach to drama that challenges the male canon and grants women the literary stature they have waited almost four hundred years to attain. —Revista de Estudios Hispanicos In this groundbreaking study, Soufas has written the first book-length examination of five of those women playwrights: Angela de Acevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor. —South Atlantic Reviewhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_spanish_literature/1034/thumbnail.jp

Women\u27s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age

Seventeenth-century Spain witnessed a rich flowering of dramatic activity that paralleled the Renaissance stage in other European countries. Yet this Golden Age traditionally has been represented in print almost entirely by male playwrights. With Women\u27s Acts, Teresa Scott Soufas makes available eight plays by five long-neglected women dramatists: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marla de Zayas y Sotomayor. In an age when moralists denounced women\u27s participation in the public arena, these women transgressed traditional gender ideology by creating works for the secular stage. Female characters in their plays portray the contradictions in their society\u27s expectations for women. Ranging from an empress whose unmarried state distresses her subjects, to a woman who adopts male behavior patterns in courtship, and another who must dress like a man in order to be heard in court, female characters show how difficult it was for women to find fulfillment during a time when their opportunities were limited. In her introduction, Soufas reviews the development of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Spanish drama while focusing on the position of women during this period, the significance of these plays, and the issues the playwrights address. Each dramatist\u27s section opens with an overview of the author\u27s life and professional activity, a synopsis of her work(s), and a selected bibliography. In a modernized edition that is consistent, readable, and suitable for use by both students and scholars, the plays in Women\u27s Acts will at last earn their rightful place in the canon of Renaissance drama. Teresa Scott Soufas is professor of Spanish and chair of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. Themes of love, arranged marriages and ill-fated love affairs—all written from the point of view of the woman involved—are explored, portraying how difficult it was for women to find fulfillment at a time when their opportunities were severely limited. —British Bulletin of Publications (Soufas) is a sure guide: her texts are authoritative, her glossary useful and her endnotes clear, pertinent and mostly consistent and her bibliographies are consistently excellent. The volume is thoroughly recommended. —Bulletin of Hispanic Studies A nuanced image of how talented women of Golden Age Spain might reshape the most popular cultural artifact of their era, the comedia, to make it communicate their personal views of gender and power relationships. —Caliope As Soufas has successfully demonstrated with Women\u27s Acts, our task in Golden Age studies is not only to excavate and examine these hidden treasures but to make them available to both students and scholars. —Revista de Estudios Hispanicoshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_dramatic_literature/1000/thumbnail.jp

Benito Pérez Galdós

In Galdós\u27 time, the tensions between such diverse phenomena as coins and credit, free trade and protectionist tariffs, factory work and domestic economy, masculine and feminine, and private and public exacerbated friction among peoples—those of pueblo and rural origins, whose voices rasped and whose bright colors raked the eye, and a nascent, insecure bourgeosie who, fearful of the masses, strove to imitate the aristocracy. Old and new converged also with the question of suffrage and citizenship to aggravate social malaise and political upheavals—Carlist wars, palace intrigues, the Revolution of 1868 and overthrow of Queen Isabel, the brief reign of Amadeo of Savoy, the aborted First Republic and the Bourbon Restoration (1875-1885), which reached Spain from England in the imported person of Alfonso XII. These turbulent events undergird the cultural, historical, and political events of the novels by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) to be discussed in this chapter. Galdós is the author of seventy-seven novels, twenty-six original plays, and numerous occasional pieces, written between 1867 and 1920. These divide into two main categories: the historical and the contemporary social novels, now more appropriately described as novels of modernity The forty-six historical novels, called Episodios nacionales, make up five series, each consisting of ten interconnected novels, except the fifth series, left unfinished. The thirty-one novels of modernity, published between 1870 and 1915, also divide into two groups: Novelas de la primera época ( Novels of the Early Period, 1870–1879) and Las novelas de la serie contemporánea ( The Contemporary Social Novels, 1881–1915). The novels of the early period comprise Galdós\u27 first attempts at novel writing, as well as four so-called thesis novels : Doña Perfecta (1876), the sequel Gloria (1876–1877), Marianela (1878), and La familia de León Roch ( The Family of León Roch, 1878–1879). The next group of novels represents what Galdós called his segunda manera —his second style, a different kind of writing ... a more sophisticated and varied mode of narrative presentation