This article aims to reopen discussion of the Renaissance ars historica, a genre that has garnered little attention in modern scholarship. It does so by using a set of computational tools to measure the quantitative occurrence of terms related to artistry and cognition in Johann Wolff's collection of historical-method texts entitled “Artis Historicae Penus” (1579). Like the period's historical writing, which amalgamated aesthetics and historiography, the Renaissance artes historicae belonged to a historiographical paradigm in which the skillful construction of discourse went hand in hand with the search for historical truth. The title of Wolff's anthology accordingly draws an overt connection between the concepts of “ars” and “historia,” yet what did sixteenth-century theorists mean by “art”?

Reviewed by: A Companion to Calderón de la Barca ed. by Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker Sofie Kluge Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker, editors. A Companion to Calderón de la Barca. TAMESIS, 2021. 414 PP. THERE ARE ANTHOLOGIES of scholarly essays on Calderón in various languages; there are biographies of his life and monographs on specific aspects of his work; there are introductions to individual plays and myriad scholarly articles on every Calderonian topic imaginable. Yet following brilliant books published in the 1980s by the likes of Frederick de Armas, Alexander Parker, and Robert ter Horst, and notwithstanding the ongoing curricular presence of early modern Spanish studies in British and American universities, we were lacking a comprehensive, English-language study of the most important playwright of the Spanish baroque. Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker's Companion to Calderón de la Barca is the first "general guide to the interested reader" (xv), which I take to mean not only students and scholars of early modern Spanish literature and early modernists in other fields but also comparatists and people interested in theater history and the theater more broadly. Appealing to this wide range of readers, this comprehensive volume sends two unmistakable signals: first, that Calderón is as fresh and relevant as ever, and not just to specialists; and second, that Tamesis Books is an essential player in the academic book market, serving the Hispanist community as well as the educated public. The Companion to Calderón de la Barca is comprised of the editors' introduction; fourteen original and substantial essays (each of about 20–25 pages, three of them translated from Spanish); two useful appendices, one listing key digital and print sources and the works by Calderón mentioned in each contribution (appendix I), the other providing an introduction to Calderonian versification (appendix II); a full bibliography of all of the works referenced by the contributors; and an index. The volume is meticulously edited—the only minor inconsistency I noted was the subheading format in chapter 8, which is really quite impressive for a volume of over 400 pages—and the contributions are overall both magisterially written and pedagogically oriented. For the most part, individual chapters take off from one, or in most cases several, plays, as case studies for establishing broader syntheses (regarding, for instance, Calderón's worldview and his religious comedias) and creating subclassifications (biblical comedias, saints' plays, [End Page 449] and Marian dramas). Envisioning readers both inside and outside Hispanic Studies departments, all Spanish titles, quotations, and concepts are followed by an English translation in square brackets, and individual chapters cross-reference each other in footnotes and in the body. Some contributors suggest interesting parallels to the modern world; Jeremy Lawrance, for instance, discusses La vida es sueño with reference to science fiction (chapter 4), and Colin Thompson points to the resonance of Calderón's wife-murder dramas with contemporary domestic violence (chapter 5). The volume is enhanced by black-and-white illustrations, among which the contemporaneous drawings of the lavish performances of mythological court dramas reproduced in chapter 7, by Margaret Greer, are bound to be particularly illuminating for the targeted readership of educated but not (necessarily) expert readers. Equally enlightening are the depictions of the public playhouses, stage machinery, and carts from the representations of autos sacramentales in chapters 3 and 12. Subjects treated range from the man and his time (chapters 1 and 2) to specific genres, covering honor plays, comedies, mythological spectacle plays, religious comedias, autos sacramentales (chapters 5–9, respectively). Continuing, the volume provides thematic orientations on cross-generic features, illuminating the figure of the gracioso; the links between Calderón's dramatic poetry and visual art (chapter 10); aspects of theater history, the Spanish entertainment industry, and staging (chapters 3 and 12); and the reception of Calderón within and outside of Spain (chapters 13 and 14). Lawrance's chapter on La vida es sueño is the only one to focus on a single play, but the importance of the work itself merits this special attention. Norton and Thacker have assembled an impressive group of revered specialists—mainly British, plus a few Spaniards and...

Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period's own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction in ways modern historians would consider counterfactual: a culture where imaginative historical prose, poetry and drama self-consciously rivalled the accounts of royal chroniclers and the dispatches of diplomatic envoys; a culture dominated by a notion of truth in which skilful construction of the argument and exemplarity took precedence over factual accuracy. Literature and Historiography in the Spanish Golden Age: The Poetics of History investigates this grey area backdrop of modern ideas about history, delving into a variety of Golden Age aesthetic-historical works which cannot be satisfactorily described as either works of literature or works of historiography but which belong in between these later strictly separate categories. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Performed in city streets during the Corpus Christi, the autos sacramentales were closely related to the sacrament of the Eucharist. As dramatic reimaginings of the abstract theological ideas about Fall and Redemption, death and transformation to new life informing this major Catholic feast, the autos were an artistic expression of the Golden Age idea of the historical world as a great allegorical drama comprising literal-historical and figurative-spiritual meanings in one boundless mystical unity. Though other Golden Age dramatists, including Lope de Vega, also wrote autos sacramentales, the genre remains intimately connected with the name of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and one of his most famous engagements with this densely symbolic type of drama is no doubt El gran teatro del mundo [The Great Theater of the World] (c. 1635), which is discussed here in depth.

El volumen estudia las formas en las que se constituye y desfigura el poder político en la literatura y la cultura del Siglo de Oro. Las contribuciones parten de la premisa de que la ficción literaria desempeña un papel fundamental en las construcciones del poder, como lo demuestran los ejemplos de varios géneros literarios de los siglos XVI y XVII. Esta interacción puede rastrearse en casi todas las esferas de la vida del imperio español: desde las élites cortesanas y religiosas hasta el creciente aparato administrativo, pasando por los mundos cotidianos picarescos y los territorios coloniales. Las posiciones abarcan referencias miméticas y afirmativas, así como construcciones de contramundos utópicos y satíricos.

Resumen El artículo presenta el teatro áureo como un experimentarium de pensamiento político donde se reflexionan y trabajan, creativamente, temas políticos actuales controvertidos. A partir de la obra maestra calderoniana se arguye que los ingenios del teatro áureo presentaban temas políticos de manera esencialmente dialéctica, ya que los articulaban necesariamente por boca de sus diversos personajes dramáticos con sus divergentes puntos de vista, dejándolos confrontarse y relativizarse entre sí.

Whereas modern critics have considered Juan de la Cueva's Tragedia de los siete infantes de Lara (1579) unappealing compared to Lope's 1612 version of the story and discussed the Sevillian playwright's misguided use of classical tragic genre conventions, the present essay proposes a framework for understanding the play that is neither Lopean nor classicist. Arguing that the heart of Infantes is a pervading sense of metaphysical absence, it suggests that the play can be meaningfully construed as an early example of the "mourning play," or that mixture of history play and tragedy which the German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin presented as the central late-Renaissance aesthetic form of historical contemplation in his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1925; The Origin of German Tragic Drama). Cueva's history of the House of Lara can be construed, that is, as a play which is concerned not so much with this or that historical person or event as with-unideal, broken, amputated-history itself.

Taking off from El prodigio de Alemania [The Wonder in Germany, 1634], a recently discovered collaborative play by Calderón and Coello about general Albrecht von Wallenstein, this article discusses the conception of factuality informing Golden Age dramatic representations of contemporaneous history. Vis-à-vis the recurrent critical disparagement of this type of drama as artistically inferior propaganda, I will demonstrate the dramatists’ delicate handling of the breaking news about Wallenstein’s death and their use of advanced aesthetic and performative devices to stimulate audience thinking about Wallenstein’s destiny: Why did he become a traitor? Highlighting the subtle doublespeak informing especially the epilogue and the protagonist’s great monologue, I will argue that the play is at once loyal and critical toward Habsburg policy: it follows the official explanation of the general’s murder — that he was planning high treason — yet at the same time demonstrates an essentially interrogatory conception of factuality that invites reflection on what is historical “truth”.