BiblioVault - Books about Spanish & Portuguese

Emblemata Hispanica

An Annotated Bibliography of Spanish Emblem Literature to the Year 1700

Pedro F. Campa

Duke University Press, 1990

Emblem books—books containing pictorial representations whose symbolic meaning is expressed in words—were produced in great quantities and in numerous languages during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because literary critics and art historians increasingly recognize the importance of the emblem in Renaissance and Baroque studies, this book answers the need for a bibliography listing the locations of all known emblem books in Spanish, as well as those translated into Spanish, written by Spaniards in other languages, and polyglot editions that contain a Spanish text.
Covered in this bibliography are all emblem books published from the beginning to the end of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as a wide range of secondary sources on relevant subjects, among them mythography, paradoxography, numismatics, fetes, funerals, proverbs, apothegms, antiquarianism, collecting, and pertinent studies in art history and architecture. Providing call numbers for library locations, information on facsimile reprints, and microform editions, the work is extensively indexed—by date and place of publication, by printers and booksellers, by authors and artists, and by dedicatees, as well as by subject.

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Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion

María de Zayas y Sotomayor

University of Chicago Press, 2009

At the height of María de Zayas’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas’s signature topics—gender equality and domestic violence—written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas’s entire body of stories, and restores Zayas’s author’s note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love’s treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.

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Experience and Artistic Expression in Lope de Vega

The Making of La Dorotea

Alan S. Trueblood

Harvard University Press, 1974

This is a major book about one of the luminaries of the golden age of Spanish literature. In spite of his great reputation, Lope de Vega is to most of us merely a name, in part because of the prodigious quantity and variety of his plays and other writings in verse and prose. Alan Trueblood's book does not pretend to survey all of Lope's works or to touch on all the events of his colorful career; yet it probes the mind and heart, and art, of Lope as no other study in English has done.

Trueblood pursues the artistic consequences of a key experience in Lope's life, the four-year love affair with Elena Osorio that terminated violently in 1587. (The rejected Lope, age twenty-five, wrote slanderous verses about Elena's family and associates, was jailed on charges of libel, and was sentenced to ten years' exile.) Notwithstanding his subsequent marriages and liaisons, his mounting literary fame in Spain and abroad, and his eventual dedication to the Church as a priest, for forty-five years this experience reverberated intermittently in his writings, culminating in the great prose dialogue La Dorotea. Trueblood's demonstration of the increasing objectivity and sympathy with which Lope treats Elena/ Dorotea--in ballads, in sonnets, in plays, in La Dorotea--is psychologically as well as aesthetically revealing.

Trueblood provides by far the fullest analysis and elucidation of Lope's masterpiece, La Dorotea, that it has ever received--and in the process he probes the nature of literary creativity, the symbiosis between personal experience and artistic expression, in contexts going well beyond Lope and his age. Because the book will appeal to many readers who do not know Spanish, all quotations have been translated into English.

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