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Publications
Publications (134)
James Amelang in this essay considers two autobiographies published in England in the 1620s by two Spanish friars: Juan Nicolás y Sacharles and Fernando Tejeda. Both rejected their Catholic upbringing to embrace Protestantism, publishing The Reformed Spaniard (1621) and Texeda Retextus (1623), respectively. These autobiographical texts he notes rai...
Criteria to understand failure in historical perspective are usually narrow and tend to be modelled upon the particular period or biography under study. The term “failure” is now and then used to title research on global phenomena and the Iberian Atlantic in the 16-19th centuries but it is often treated in self-explanatory fashion, and has been the...
This article deals with diverse aspects of what may be called a "second autobiographical revolution" -the rise of autobiography to the status of most favored source among historians. This new situation of privilege is due in large measure to the tendency to attribute to these sources the all too little discussed condition of "witness". Following so...
Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World. Miguel Martínez. Material Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. vii + 310 pp. $59.95. - Volume 70 Issue 4 - James Amelang
Iberia stands at the center of key trends in Atlantic and world histories, largely because Portugal and Spain were the first European kingdoms to 'go global'. The Early Modern Hispanic World engages with new ways of thinking about the early modern Hispanic past, as a field of study that has grown exponentially in recent years. It focuses predominan...
En un tiempo en que la ficción televisiva de carácter histórico goza de creciente popularidad, al tiempo que la disciplina histórica, metodológicamente renovada, se interroga sobre sus formas de producción de conocimiento y escritura, este volumen plantea un diálogo inusual entre historiadores y profesionales del cine y la televisión para superar l...
This article explores three different dimensions of the relations between autobiography and the historical writing of Natalie Z. Davis. First, it reviews Davis' own efforts at first-person writing, most of which have consisted of interviews or speeches in which she has been invited to reflect upon her life and career. it then examines the way her h...
On January 17, 1897, a young and as yet unknown Viennese physician wrote a colleague about a potentially disturbing fact: that the psychiatric problem on which they were working had been thoroughly researched and even published long before their efforts. Those responsible for the scoop were medieval Inquisitors. By developing the doctrine of demoni...
Huguet-TermesTeresa, ArrizabalagaJon and CookHarold J. (eds), Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations, Medical History Supplement No. 29 (London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009), pp. vi + 158, £35.00/€40.00/$60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-85484-128-8. - Volume 55 Issue 2 - James S....
If ever there was a first book that took your breath away, it was Stefania Pastore's Il vangelo e la spada, published in 2003. In that book Pastore rewrote the early history of the Spanish Inquisition, and of much else besides, by rereading the classic texts of Spanish religious history from the mid-fifteenth-century Espina-Oropesa controversy over...
In September 1570 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici, gave the slightly more than 700 Jews living under his rule a choice: go into exile or take up residence in Florence in a quarter specifically designated as theirs. Such “ghettoization” did not lack for precedents. The city of Venice had famously subjected its Jews to a similar reside...
Despite widespread interest in the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban planning and architecture as of late, little is known about the city's historical development. This article suggests as a remedy more concerted efforts in comparative history. Comparison with other cities reveals three anomalies: the condition of ex-capitality; a distinctive focus on civ...
In 1980 the Danish folklorist Gustav Henningsen published The Witches’ Advocate, a lengthy study of the famous 1610 trial and execution by the Spanish Inquisition of a handful of witches from the mountain village of Zugarramurdi in northern Navarre. This book had a major impact and soon became the best-known work on witchcraft in early modern Iberi...
José Pardo Tomás, El médico en la palestra: Diego Mateo Zapata (1664–1745) y la ciencia moderna en España, Estudios de historia de la ciencia y de la técnica, no. 25, Valladolid, Junta de Castilla y León, 2004, pp. 456, €25.00 (hardback 84-9718-252-9). - Volume 50 Issue 4 - James S Amelang
Why Phaeton? According to one version, Helios's miscreant offspring wrecked the family vehicle by crashing into the Po River near Ferrara. This provided local humanists and artists with an offer they could not refuse. From their pens and palettes poured one panegyric after another linking the city and its enlightened rulers with the sun, swans, mou...
This article offers some summary reflections on the present state of the cultural history of early modern Spain. Cultural history now flourishes, and while the signs of this are to be found far and wide, certain areas have distinguished themselves as fields of study: the history of political thought; of printing, books, and the cultural practices o...
José Miguel López García (ed.), El impacto de la Corte en Castilla: Madrid y su territorio en la época moderna. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1998. xxiv + 535pp. 12 figures. 23 tables. 7 maps. Bibliography. No price stated. - - Volume 27 Issue 1 - James S. Amelang
Mark Traugott (édité et traduit par), The French Worker. Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1993, 382 p. - Volume 49 Issue 3 - James S. Amelang
This article reviews research on autobiographical texts written by artisans and other members of the urban popular classes during the early modern era. After reviewing some of the ways in which urban history has incorporated personal literature by authors from diverse social backgrounds, it explores the meaning of the term ‘popular autobiography’....
In the sixteenth century Spain was at the height of its glory, enjoying a period of exceptional power, wealth, and artistic splendor. In 1561 Philip II commissioned Europe's leading topographical artist, Anton van den Wyngaerde, to prepare cities and towns of his Golden Age empire. Van den Wyngaerde spent most of his time traveling in Spain from 15...
