Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in Persiles [Review]

Michael Armstrong-Roche quite correctly points out that most critics view The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda as a “turning away from modernity” (3), an example of Cervantes’ late-life embrace of the Counter-Reformation. Some even consider the byzantine novel a misstep by the author of Don Quixote while, ironically, Cervantes himself saw his last book as his crowning achievement. In this percep¬tive monograph, Armstrong-Roche makes the case that Persiles can best be appreciated if, instead of looking forward toward the novel, we look back to the epic

Ovid in the Age of Cervantes [Review]

This book is the first comprehensive study of Ovid’s influence during early modern Spain since Rudolph Schevill’s Ovid and the Renascence in Spain (1913). This time, fifteen specialists have contributed to a volume with a great variety of perspectives and surprising cohesiveness

Dignidad real y acción mayestática en La farsa de las galeras de Luis Milá

La farsa de las galeras es uno de los muchos textos escritos por Luis Milán hacia 1535 que vieron finalmente la luz dentro del Libro intitulado el Cortesano publicado en 1561, una vez que la corte de los duques de Calabria ha sido disuelta y sus señores –los propios duques y virreyes valencianos Fernando de Aragón y Germana de Foix– han fallecido. Mi intención aquí es demostrar cómo mediante este fasto dramático Luis Milán pretendía no únicamente halagar o entretener a su mecenas, sino poner de manifiesto la verdadera condición natural de éste como ‘rey’ y, por tanto, no sujeta a la contingencia política que lo apartaría del trono de Nápoles que había jurado en su infancia. Con este propósito, el músico y escritor valenciano desarrolla una trama dramática en la cual se pueden observar algunas de las cualidades que se atribuyen típicamente a los monarcas, fundamentalmente la de ser rey por específica elección de Dios

Ut pictura non poesis: Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and the Construction of Memory

Painting and literature in Early Modern Spain were powerful tools used to educate the population in a theocratic and absolutist ideology. Although the resolutions of the Council of Trent did not create a new style, they did provide a corpus of rules that shaped the artistic and literary production of the Catholic nations. Among the most important consequences of these resolutions may have been the necessity of controlling the different expressions of human creativity in order to maintain the country's dominant ideology. The next logical step for art and literature was to break with the intellectual elitism of the Renaissance and Mannerism in order to become more appealing to the senses of the population (Portús 21). Spain, the champion of the Catholic Reformation, developed a theory of the art of painting based on its "usefulness" in narrating stories to the faithful using strategies such as compositio loci or in illustrating complicated concepts with the rhetorical help of the demonstratio ad oculos. The seductive power of images was considered key to teaching the appropriate behaviors. (1) Francisco Pacheco established this importance in his Arte de la pintura (1649), in which he considers the aim of the Christian painter to "persuadir al pueblo, y llevarlo, por medio de la pintura, a abrazar alguna cosa conveniente a la religión" (I, 11; 252)

Courting Don Quixote. An Aulic Frame of Reading

Despite the current success of aulic studies in early modern history, the court did not exist as a research topic on its own until well into the 1980s. Before then, historians tried to compile all the information they could with the hope of being able to reconstruct a "perfect" narration of their national history. In the twentieth century, it was argued that a collection of data reflects not only objective information, but also the personality, interests, goals, and beliefs of the collector and his or her society. The ideal of "Total History"--the aspiration to write an indisputable and objective narration of cultures and nations has disintegrated. Historical studies have since diversified into multiple circumstantial, inapprehensible and sub-theoretical pieces. It is in this context that the subfield of "court history" has been able to grow in recent decades. In many instances, court history studies what happens behind the scenes of major historical events, and therefore its findings and achievements were often neglected of diminished by the traditional notion of history. In court history, secrets and rumors, games, friendships, and personal preferences are more important than facts, battles, and offices

Supersymmetric contributions to muon g-2 and the electroweak precision measurements

In view of the recent measurement of the muon g-2 and finalization of the LEP electroweak data, we re-examine all the new particle contributions to those observables in the MSSM. The SM fits the latest electroweak data excellently with the observed top-quark mass and the Higgs-boson mass of around 100 GeV, and so does the MSSM in the decoupling limit. The MSSM gives a slightly better fit to the data than the SM (\Delta \chi^2_{min} \sim -2) when relatively light left-handed sleptons of mass \sim 200 GeV and a light chargino of mixed higgsino-wino character (\mu/M_2 \sim 1) with mass \sim 100 GeV co-exist. The improvement in the fit diminishes quickly for wino- or higgsino- dominant charginos, for heavier charginos, and for lighter sleptons. We find that the MSSM contributions to the muon g-2 is most efficient when the light chargino has a mixed character. If \tan\beta < 10, the set of a light mixed chargino and light sleptons that is favored by the electroweak data is also favored by the g-2 data for \mu >0. Models with light gauginos (\mu/M_2 > 10) or light higgsinos (\mu/M_2 < 0.1) give significant contributions to muon g-2 only for large \tan\beta (\simgt 15).Comment: 12 pages, latex, 4 figures. reference added. version to appear in Phys.Lett.

Qualitative and quantitative characterization of the in vitro dehydration process of hydrogel contact lenses

PURPOSE: To investigate the in vitro dehydration process of conventional hydrogel and silicone-hydrogel contact lens materials. METHODS: Eight conventional hydrogel and five silicone-hydrogel contact lenses were dehydrated under controlled environmental conditions on an analytical balance. Data were taken at 1-min intervals and dehydration curves of cumulative dehydration (CD), valid dehydration (VD), and dehydration rate (DR) were obtained. Several quantitative descriptors of the dehydration process were obtained by further processing of the information. RESULTS: Duration of phase I (r(2) = 0.921), CD at end of phase I (r(2) = 0.971), time to achieve a DR of -1%/min (r(2) = 0.946) were strongly correlated with equilibrium water content (EWC) of the materials. For each individual sample, the VD at different time intervals can be accurately determined using a 2nd order regression equation (r(2) > 0.99 for all samples). The first 5 min of the dehydration process show a relatively uniform average CD of about -1.5%/min. After that, there was a trend towards higher average CD for the following 15 min as the EWC of the material increases (r(2) = 0.701). As a consequence, average VD for the first 5 min displayed a negative correlation with EWC (r(2) = 0.835), and a trend towards uniformization among CL materials for the following periods (r(2) = 0.014). Overall, silicone-hydrogel materials display a lower dehydration, but this seems to be primarily due to their lower EWC. CONCLUSIONS: DR curves under the conditions of the present study can be described as a three-phase process. Phase I consists of a relatively uniform DR with a duration that ranges from 10 to almost 60 min and is strongly correlated with the EWC of the polymer as it is the CD during this phase. Overall, HEMA-based hydrogels dehydrate to a greater extent and faster than silicone-hydrogel materials. There are differences in water retention between lenses of similar water content and thickness that should be further investigated

«En música italiana / y castellana en la letra». El camino hacia la ópera italianizante en el teatro palaciego de Felipe V

Los historiadores del drama musical español han encontrado durante generaciones una abundante fuente de conocimientos en La historia de la Zárpela, o sea, del Drama lírico en España, desde su origen a fines del siglo XIX de Emilio Gotarelo Mori. Desde la aparición de este libro y hasta no hace mucho tiempo, los diversos estudios llevados a cabo no han hecho sino sumar datos, corregir algunas inexactitudes y, en definitiva, acudir con el cántaro una y otra vez al libro de Gotarelo Mori. Pot este motivo, advierte Juan José Gorreras (49-50), una revisión crítica del drama musical español requiere de una reevaluación de los documentos conocidos hasta ahora y una relectura crítica de los mismos. Entre los autores que más han trabajado en los últimos años para lograr esta renovación habría que destacar a William M. Bussey, Daniele Becker y Louise K. Stein, y la sistemática publicación de documentos de la serie Fuentes para la historia del teatro en España a cargo de N. D. Shergold, J. E. Varey y Charles Davis. Sin embargo, aunque cada vez sabemos más de la música dramática en el teatro español de la época de los Austrias, todavía queda demasiado por esclarecer en cuanto a lo que supuso la llegada de la música italiana a las tablas del Coliseo del Buen Redro durante el reinado de Felipe V y el impacto que ello tuviera en las relaciones entre la música y el texto dramático en las celebraciones palaciegas

Juegos caballerescos en el origen del teatro áulico

Tradicionalmente se pensó que el teatro de nuestro Siglo de Oro era hijo de una 'laicización' de un primitivo teatro religioso, el cual—según se explicaba—a causa de un progresivo alejamiento de lo sacro hubo de sacarse primero a los portales de las iglesias, y después a las plazas (Chambers 182; Crawford 137-59). Sin embargo, cuando hace ya algunos años empezó a ponerse en una mejor perspectiva la importancia de la secularización de las formas dramáticas religiosas en el origen del teatro español y se distinguió entre el teatro religioso dentro de la Iglesia y aquel que—si bien con temas más o menos religiosos—se desarrollaba dentro del palacio cortesano, se descubrió el importante papel que desempeñó el inmenso número de prácticas de tipo escénico y espectacular iniciadas en los palacios cortesanos1 de la Edad Media y desarrolladas durante el siglo XVI en el camino hacia la comedia barroca (Wardropper, Varey, Shergold, Arróniz, Froldi, Surtz, Rozas, Oleza, Ferrer Vails, Álvarez Pellitero, et al.)

“Nuevos casos, nuevas artes.” Intertextualidad, autorrepresentación e ideología en la obra de Juan Boscán

Este libro pone en evidencia a la crítica literaria que mantiene a Juan Boscán como autor medieval y cancioneril cuyo mayor logro poético consistiría en ser el precursor de Garcilaso. A lo largo de sus páginas se analizan algunos de los distintos motivos por los que el catalán ocupa una posición marginal dentro del canon literarioe spañol a pesar de la importancia de su traducción del Libro del Cortegiano de Castiglione, su notable contribución a la poesía renacentistae spañola y su labor como editor,e ntrel a que destaca la publicación postuma de los poemas de Garcilaso de la Vega