Programa del congreso

At the same time that he was becoming the playwright Tirso de Molina, Fray Gabriel Téllez was an active and devoted priest, moral theologian, and religious teacher and leader. Tirso’s divided life is part and parcel of his theatrical legacy: his plays charm spectators by making use of conventions like role-play and creating psychologically-complex women characters, and also enlighten and challenge the audience by imparting Catholic religio-moral reasoning and philosophical arguments based in ethics and natural law theory.

Tirso wrote five Biblical plays that are a tour de force of his ability to simultaneously fascinate and inform an audience. As a number of scholars including Glaser and Metford have pointed out, in the early 1620s one source Tirso drew from to craft three of these works, La mejor espigadera, La venganza de Tamar and La vida y muerte de Herodes, was the Romanized Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who set out both to critically interpret and to defend Jewish belief and history for his Roman patrons and for diasporic Jews. Although it is known that Tirso went to Josephus, specifically Jewish Antiquities and Jewish Wars, to dramatize familiar Biblical stories, what exactly did Josephus’s accounts add to the Biblical narratives that was so important to Tirso’s retellings for seventeenth-century theater audiences? Furthermore, what was Tirso’s relationship with Josephus? In the playwright’s imagination, where did the value lie in the Jewish historian’s writings? Close examination of the three Biblical plays in which Tirso drew upon Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities and Jewish Wars allows us to address the question of what Tirso found in Josephus and also speculate about the nature of his perspective on the historian at this particular point in his career, the early 1620s.

Part I of Cervantes’s Don Quixote landed on English soil in August 1605, only eight months after its publication in Madrid. Thomas Shelton’s translation, published in 1612, was the earliest rendering of Cervantes’s masterpiece in Europe. On 5 December 1615, Edward Blount obtained the license to publish a translation of the second part that had been printed in Spain that same year. Translations of parts I and II were published together in London in 1620. They were reprinted with some variations in 1652. One hundred and eighty-two references to Don Quixote in texts printed in England between 1605 and 1649 have been identified by Dale and Boswell, who also include records from the years before Shelton’s translation was first published. The number of references increased notably in the 1650s, when one hundred and twenty-seven records have been identified, among them, Edmund Gayton’s Pleasant Notes (1654), the first piece of literary criticism on Cervantes’s work ever published in Europe.

Gayton follows Cervantes and organises his work in four parts, in which, chapter by chapter, he introduces direct quotes from the 1652 English edition and large and detailed comments on them. Cervantes’s piece almost disappears behind those notes in which he basically turns the Spanish hero into an object of laughter and ridicule. The Cervantean characters become just an excuse to include detailed notes on contemporary English political life and culture thus appropriating Don Quixote for ideological, cultural, and, mostly, commercial reasons in an age of increasing tension between both countries. This paper approaches this process by focusing on two introductory sections (the paratext and chapter 1) and on the popular episode of the expurgation of books in Don Quixote’s library (chapters 5 and 6). These parts in Gayton’s work will be also collated with those in Shelton’s translation and Cervantes’s original.

In early modern iconography, a huge date palm burdened with heavy fruit is often the staff of Saint Christopher, a holy giant. The date palm and its fruit have been potent natural resources and multifaceted symbols in Mediterranean cultures at least since biblical times. As well as offering food, medicine, and building materials, they represent victory, martyrdom, justice, a woman’s breasts, the sun, conjugal love, and the paradisal landscapes of both the Christian and Islamic traditions. But by 1600 the New World coconut palm was supplanting the date palm as the biblical Tree of Life, and the coconut sprouted comically dark imagery as well.

Throughout the early modern empires of Spain and Portugal, new observations regarding a variety of palms and their uses expanded this tree as a symbol and as an object of contemplation in the Ignatian tradition. At the same time, efforts were being made to correct the traditional taxonomies that had committed such errors as confusing a palm nut with a cactus fruit. The cultural significance of the date, coconut, and other palm trees can be discovered by examining the specificity with which artists and writers described the exotic flora that appeared on their maps and in their prayers, paintings, and plays.

The rediscovery of the palm tree influenced the illustrations for Arquitectura civil recta y oblicua and can be found inside texts as varied as Discvrsos de las cosas aromaticas, arboles y frutales, Lope’s El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, and Calderón's El médico de su honra.