This book accounts for the outpouring of celebrations in the Habsburg Empire upon the 1657 birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain. These celebrations allow us to interrogate the shifting uses of performance in the empires center and periphery. Such spectacles could work to contain and manipulate public sentiment, but at other moments they questioned sanctioned power structures. A study of zarzuela texts, opera libretti, notated music, paintings, poems, and historical documents shows that an array of people took advantage of this festive moment to question the empires policies in surprising ways. Sensorial experience played a crucial role during these celebrations. For its part, the Crown engaged a variety of senses, especially sight, sound, and smell, in order to augment the impact of royal spectacles. But simultaneously, those who questioned the Crown also did so through an engagement of the sensorial world.
Arvustused
"By dissecting cultural artefacts into layers of meaning, Mary B. Quinns book convincingly shows how writers and artists used the performative sense to obtain new forms of communication."
Ascension Mazuela-Anguita, Universidad de Granada, in Music and Letters, gcaf145
Dedication and Acknowledgements, List of Figures, Introduction Prince
Felipe Próspero, Festival Culture, and the Performative Sense,
Chapter 1:
Calderón de la Barca, Rubens, and Apollo's Desire,
Chapter 2: Antonio de
Solís, Velázquez, and Minerva's Competition,
Chapter 3: Naples, Opera, and
Parthenope's Song,
Chapter 4: Florence, Cavalli, and Ipermestra's Choice,
Chapter 5: Parades, Poetry, and Plus Ultra in Lima and Manila, Epilogue
Making Sense of Spectacle, Index, Works Cited.
Mary B. Quinn (University of New Mexico) is the author of The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain and co-editor of Aural Culture and Poetics in the Early Modern Hispanic World: Sound, Rhythm, and Music.
