4 An Aesthetic of Instrumentality

University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2025-12-31

1 Ingenious Revolutions: Early Modern Science and a Hermeneutics of Technology

University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2025-12-31

Reviews of Books

Bulletin of Spanish Studies · 2019-07-03

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record

Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750. Edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press. 2018. 343 pp.

Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2019-01-01

MRN-Code/coinstac v4.2.2

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2019-04-10

Collaborative Informatics and Neuroimaging Suite Toolkit for Anonymous Computation

La musa refractada: literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco by Enrique García Santo-Tomás

Revista hispánica moderna/Revista hispanica moderna · 2018-01-01

Reviewed by: La musa refractada: literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco by Enrique García Santo-Tomás Cory A. Reed enrique garcía santo-tomás. La musa refractada: literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco. Iberoamericana, 2015, 365 pp. An ingenious and highly original blend of literary studies and history of science, La musa refractada is a fascinating exploration of the rise of optics in Europe and its significant influence on early modern Spanish culture, particularly its literary and artistic production. Enrique García Santo-Tomás thoroughly documents the Italian provenance of the "new sciences" of optics and astronomy [End Page 202] as well as their diffusion in Spain, seamlessly incorporating this intellectual history into an insightful interpretation of notable literary texts published during the seventeenth century. In doing so, he proposes what might be described as a critical lens, based on new ideas about distance and perspective, which characterizes satirical writing in the period. Deftly teasing out ambiguities and meanings in the terms antojo and anteojo in the scientific and literary contexts of the Spanish Golden Age, García Santo-Tomás establishes the centrality of the motif of the occhiali politici (or "anteojos políticos") as a rhetorical device or instrument for methodically examining political controversy in literary satire. The starting point of the study is a consideration of the work of the Italian satirist Traiano Boccalini, whose Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612) introduced the occhiali politici motif to an audience of Spanish readers and, presumably, satirical writers. Along with the 1615 Spanish translation of Tomaso Garzoni's La piazza universale di tutte le professione del mondo, Boccalini's work likened satire to a new way of seeing, inspired by the invention of the telescope and the theories of Kepler, Brahe, Copernicus, and Galileo, which were circulating contemporaneously throughout Europe. That these scientific theories also reached the Iberian Peninsula (sometimes openly and other times via clandestine translations) is evidenced by the temporary inclusion of Copernican cosmology in the curriculum at Salamanca and the publications of Spanish scholars such as Benito Daza de Valdés and Juan Cedillo Díaz, who developed an active discipline of optics, both theoretical and practical, in Habsburg Spain. From this double analysis of early modern optics and political satire emerges a picture of a complex network of social, scientific, and literary interconnectivity in Italy and Spain that challenges the traditional academic separation of scientific and literary discourse and disproves the obsolete notion that Spain was entirely closed to the new ideas and epistemologies emerging in Europe. Here, García Santo-Tomás joins a growing number of scholars in the field (such as Víctor Navarro Brotons, William Eamon, Nicolás García Tapia, and José María López Piñero) who have rightly questioned the idea of a "backward Spain" in light of substantial evidence of scientific activity and who localize this myth in the political context of the Black Legend and growing rivalries with emergent northern European powers. During the early modern period, Spain was a leading developer of new technologies that could be used in the administration of its imperial and colonial interests (such as advances in navigation and artillery), and it is precisely this tension between burgeoning scientific advancement and conservative, counter-reformation doctrine that creates a paradoxical scientific culture in Spain that is fascinating to study. Throughout his book, García Santo-Tomás references an impressive catalogue of Iberian scientists, including Rodrigo Zamorano, Vicente Mut, Juan Bautista Labaña, Andrés García de Céspedes, and countless others, to paint a vibrant portrait of active scientific engagement in early modern Spain. Indeed, an important contribution of this book is its careful documentation that challenges the assumption that Spain languished as a scientific backwater while the rest of Europe charged forward to embrace scientific discovery. The science of optics is a clear example of a highly practical discipline, derived from Galilean theory and the development of the telescope, which could be used [End Page 203] to improve navigational equipment and also to fabricate lenses to correct human vision. As García Santo-Tomás demonstrates, the field of optics...

Reviews of Books

Bulletin of Spanish Studies · 2017-11-26

Embodiment and Empathy in Early Modern Drama: The Case of Cervantes’ El trato de Argel

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2016-05-19 · 3 citations

Abstract Cognitive approaches to literature and culture hold promise for the analysis of theatrical performance in general, and early modern drama in particular. A cognitive approach to the complex dynamics of live performance sheds light on the ways an audience responds emotionally to, and engages with intellectually, the actions it perceives on stage. Assuming that human physiology and cognitive processes remain constant across time, cognitive approaches to live performance may allow us to approximate the emotional and intellectual dimensions of audience–performer interactions in the shared space of the theatrical corrales centuries ago. Cervantes’ early play, El trato de Argel [The Trade of Algiers], may have participated in a campaign to raise public awareness of the plight of enslaved Spaniards in Algerian prisons. Hence it lends itself to a cognitive analysis of the role of empathy in creating audience sympathy that might ultimately lead to an early modern form of proto-activism.

Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes by Michael Scham

Revista de estudios hispánicos · 2016-01-01

Reviewed by: Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes by Michael Scham Cory A. Reed Scham, Michael. Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. 384 pp. Cervantes’s address to his “desocupado lector” in Part One of the Quijote is the starting point for Michael Scham’s engaging study of game imagery in the author’s most important literary works. This intriguing book is a rigorous, detailed, and carefully documented analysis of the social and literary dimensions of leisure, recreation, pastimes, games, and play considered thoroughly in the philosophical, social, and political contexts of early modern Spain and, more specifically, through the lens of the Counter-Reformation’s interest in controlling recreation (5). Citing Cervantes’s invocation to the idle reader of the Quijote as well as his characterization of prose fiction as a “mesa de trucos” in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, Scham demonstrates a consistent Cervantine fascination with ludic spaces that evinces a humanistic interest in the role of recreation and play in the development of the early modern individual and the pursuit of self-knowledge (3). Analyzing not only the representation of games of chance in Cervantes’s works, but also the deployment of authorial deceit and the problematic role of the narrator in his interaction with readers, Scham’s study makes a persuasive argument for considering fiction books themselves as objects of entertainment that engage the reader in a critical process of self-education and preparation for social interaction. Fiction, according to Scham, is play, but it is an instructive kind of recreational activity that fosters moral and social development in the reader, as reflected in the early modern concepts of eutrapelia and serio ludere. One important contribution of this book is the extensive and diverse corpus of contemporary and historical critical sources and extra-canonical texts that provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for the analysis of games and play in Cervantes. Scham’s first chapter, “Leisure and Recreation in Early Modern Spain,” could stand alone as a concise monographic study on early modern cultural, moral, theological, legal, and even medical attitudes towards play, considered in the context of play theory as proposed by Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Eleni Papargyriou, Jacques Ehrmann, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and others. Both Schiller and Montaigne dismissed the idea of “mere play” to propose a symbiotic relationship of sorts between play and seriousness in contrast to prevailing Enlightenment thought that subordinated play to more useful or constructive activities (13). Complementing these modern theoretical approaches to games and leisure, Scham also analyzes topologies of play composed by Cervantes’s contemporaries, including Cristóbal Méndez’s Libro del ejercicio corporal y de sus provechos (1553), [End Page 548] Rodrigo Caro’s Días geniales o lúdricos (1626), Fray Alonso Remon’s Entretenimientos y juegos honestos, y recreaciones christianas (1623), and Pedro de Guzmán’s Bienes del honesto trabajo y daños de la ociosidad (1614), in order to develop an early modern concept of exemplary play that might train the player in virtue and redirect away from vice. This initial chapter, some 100 pages in length, is not so much an introduction to modern game theory as it is a careful consideration of various theoretical and cultural attitudes about games, leisure, entertainment, and jokes—framed historically—that manifest themselves in early modern literature, including the works of Cervantes. The two chapters that follow, also each about 100 pages long, specifically analyze the Quijote and the Novelas, respectively, with frequent comparative sallies among and between these works. Analyzing Don Quijote as a man of leisure, Scham identifies multiple levels of play in the novel, from overt references to cards, chess, Altisidora’s game of pelota, hunting, and even garden landscaping, to the broader idea of complicity between player and spectator, or between author/narrator and reader in the case of prose fiction. The importance of play as a critical or educational process that intrinsically informs self-actualization and social interaction is, in many ways, a primary unifying concept that permeates Cervantes’s text thematically and structurally. Through his revealing analysis of the Quijote, Scham persuasively argues that...

The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre by Delia Méndez Montesinos (review)

Comparative drama · 2015-03-01

Reviewed by: The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre by Delia Méndez Montesinos Cory A. Reed Delia Méndez Montesinos. The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014. Pp. xvi + 146. $29.99. In The Ingenious Simpleton, Delia Méndez Montesinos analyzes the subversive potential of brief comic theater and popular performance, and documents its persistent ability to resist submission to hierarchical, social stratification. Through comedy, lower and marginalized classes, who often are subjected to a negative self-concept imposed by hegemonic power interested in sustaining itself, find outlets to transgress socially prescribed norms. Méndez Montesinos’s valuable study concerns itself particularly with popular performances that feature a buffoon or comic simpleton, and develops case studies from three geographical [End Page 101] regions (Spain, Mexico, and California) across disparate chronological periods. Ultimately, this study reveals a heritage of subversive comedy in twentieth-century Hispanic popular performance that can be traced to the origins of the comic simpleton figure in sixteenth-century Spain. The author’s main contention is not that these kinds of politically subversive performances arise only under particular or special social circumstances, but that they can and do exist in a variety of historical, social, and political environments. The subversion of norms through comic performance is a common denominator that reveals a pervasive and enduring tradition across time. Proposing that “theatre can be a powerful tool to provide marginalized groups with a needed sense of solidarity and self-worth” (xi), the book’s brief introduction establishes its central argument by way of the specific historical examples of Lope de Rueda’s pasos as mass entertainment in sixteenth-century Spain, post-Revolutionary Mexican satirical public performance (a tradition the author sees dating to pre-Columbian times), and the Teatro Campesino among the grape-harvesters of California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s. The book’s first chapter outlines the theoretical parameters of the study, introducing definitions of laughter and comedy in both social and theatrical contexts. Here, Méndez Montesinos provides a brief historical overview of the comic figure of the fool, its relationship to laughter (particularly in the context of the carnivalesque), and its social and theatrical roles, beginning in the early modern period. The author cites Erasmus and Shakespeare as examples of early modern authors who developed the figure of the fool; she might also have discussed equally important Spanish writers, such as Cervantes, or the popular tradition of performed entremeses and teatro breve of early modern Spain in order to provide a firmer foundation for her otherwise sound historical analysis. Méndez Montesinos’s approach to laughter is largely Bakhtinian, although she also includes references to Henri Bergson, Jacques LeGoff, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, and others. This relatively schematic overview of the history of theories of laughter summarizes well-known scholarship on the topic and highlights an important connection between the fool’s marginalized perspective and the figure’s ability to express or reveal truths through comic illusion, in keeping with Aritsotle’s conception of eutrapelia. Throughout this chapter, Méndez Montesinos relies on a distinction between “artificial” and “natural” fools in an early modern context, claiming that the ruling classes allowed social transgression by fools because they considered their mockery to be unintentional, or because they accepted fools as mentally and/or physically “inferior” beings. While this discussion seems overly essentialist at times, it does serve to articulate the importance of the fool’s freedom to speak, and often to speak the truth, which characterizes this stock type from its earliest appearances on the comic stage. Méndez Montesinos then defines various types [End Page 102] of comedy, largely following the six points of Maurice Charney’s “metaphysics” of comedy: 1) the discontinuous, 2) the accidental, 3) the autonomous, 4) the self-conscious, 5) the histrionic, and 6) the ironic. The chapter ends with this list, where this reader would have appreciated a more extensive discussion relating this helpful scheme to the specific contexts to be discussed in the book. Chapter 2 focuses on Lope de Rueda as the source of the comic progression that ultimately culminates in Cantinflas and...