Rhetoric and Reality in Early Modern Spain (Monografias A) (Monografías A)

"This collection of essays takes as its point of departure 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." "The 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 in the Spain of the period. 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. As these essays show, 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."--Jacket.