Alexander Samson

Outdoor pursuits: Spanish gardens, the huerto and Lope de Vega's Novelas a Marcia Leonarda

The imprecision of the early modern lexis for Spanish gardens reflects their liminality and the distinctness of outdoor pursuits shaped by the climate and geography of the Iberian penninsula. Literary evocations of gardens from Lazarillo to Lope de Vegas Novelas a Marcia Leonarda underline this extra-mural nature, the public pleasures and hidden dangers that awaited beyond the city in shady, watery retreats. In his own garden, Lope cultivated flowers, including the fashionable tulip, an activity that served in his poetry as metaphor and synecdoche for the moral ambivalence of his shaping activities as a writer of fiction, in stories that were an explicit part of his own seductions.

The adelantamiento of Cazorla, converso culture and Toledo Cathedral chapter's 1547 estatuto de limpieza de sangre

Estatutos de limpieza de sangre in early modern Spain have too readily, although not unsurprisingly, been conceptualized as symptoms of endemic racism and intolerance; divisive exclusions, arising from an obsession with purity of blood. More recently, the limited extent of their imposition and even more patchy implementation has been commented on and there has been a growing recognition of their implication in highly specific factional struggles. In numerous cases far from being about racism they were essentially anti-aristocratic exclusions, useful in order to bypass and undermine the networks of patronage and privilege associated with the hereditary nobility. The case studied here, perhaps the most infamous and representative of the statutes, demonstrates that although anti-Semitic prejudice played a role, it was predominantly about Toledan politics, opposed visions of the church and contested notions of religious identity as either a genealogical category, something inhering in blood lines or something associated with virtue and personal piety. As Stafford Poole has suggested purity of blood could in particular circumstances function as the letrados ’ answer to the hereditary nobility. However, his evidence shows that numerous letrados were themselves conversos and in specific cases with the right friends, even in the context of sustained investigation, their murky pasts did not prevent their advancement even to the very highest eschelons of Philip II’s government. This article explores converso culture in relation to the factional politics of Toledo’s cathedral chapter in 1547 in the context of its infamous estatuto de limpieza de sangre . The argument proposes three distinct but related historical interpretations of the estatuto . The first understands Juan

Culture under Mary I and Philip

The literary culture of England and its court under Philip and Mary I labour under the weight of two major fault lines in our understanding of the Tudor period. Firstly, it suffers from the persistent sense of Marian England as a ‘barren interlude’, to use the Froudian phrase, twinning Mary’s reproductive problems with the political history of her reign; a kingdom dominated by foreign interlopers, a Habsburg satellite or papal fife alienated from its true indigenous roots as an ‘ancient empire’. This is compounded by the notion that humanism was the preserve of evangelicals, a counterpart of the anti-Catholic bias implicit in the historiography. Viewing English Catholicism in this period as a sterile anachronism rather than a creative and vibrant source of new thinking has been thoroughly contested by revisionist perspectives on the Reformation.1 Secondly, it lies at the heart of what C.S.Lewis dubbed the ‘drab age’; a literary wasteland lacking the political interest of the Henrician period and the sophisticated vernacular forms that had emerged by the middle of Elizabeth’s reign.2 The notion that ‘between 1547 and 1580… English literature “retreated” or “lapsed” into a pre-Henrician or premodern medieval state’ has rightly been contested.3 What is notable, however, is that despite this shift in paradigm, the reign of Philip and Mary has not been ‘polished’. This chapter seeks to offer a more balanced assessment of the cultural achievements of the period and counter the difficulties presented by the Anglo-Spanish moment, foregrounding developments in translation and Neo-Latin studies, transnational and religious histories, and vernacular print culture. Moving away from parochial, insular, national constructions of English culture, it suggests some of the ways in which the literary history of the period needs to be seen as part of broader developments in European vernacular culture. Closer contact, brought about by the marriage with a metropolitan, multilingual intellectual culture stretching across the high prestige, dynamic cultures of Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries, was a key driver of new forms of writing and cultural achievement in England.

Outdoor pursuits: Spanish gardens, the huerto and Lope de Vega's Novelas a Marcia Leonarda: Lope de Vega's Novelas a Marcia Leonarda

The imprecision of the early modern lexis for Spanish gardens reflects their liminality and the distinctness of outdoor pursuits shaped by the climate and geography of the Iberian penninsula. Literary evocations of gardens from Lazarillo to Lope de Vegas Novelas a Marcia Leonarda underline this extra-mural nature, the public pleasures and hidden dangers that awaited beyond the city in shady, watery retreats. In his own garden, Lope cultivated flowers, including the fashionable tulip, an activity that served in his poetry as metaphor and synecdoche for the moral ambivalence of his shaping activities as a writer of fiction, in stories that were an explicit part of his own seductions.