Programa del congreso

St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, inspired one of the most popular cults in early and early modern Europe. While upstaged in the Iberian Peninsula by St. James, adaptations of his vita frequently graced the religious and secular stages and combined into one of the most extensive extant corpora of hagiographical dramas, which spans the entire peninsula and Colonial Latin America over three hundred years. This paper examines the representations of power in three St. Christopher comedias: Vida y muerte de San Cristóbal (Juan de Benavides, c. 1600), El gigante cananeo (Cristóbal Monroy y Silva, c. 1632), and Comèdia de l’invicto mártir de Christo. E gloriós Cananeo S[an]t Christòfol (Anonymous, early 1700s) and considers how tension between the fictional milieu and the real world in which the plays were performed often results in an ambivalent, if not conflicting, message when considered the play from each perspective. More specifically, I contextualize the manifestation of agency as well as the characterization of the titular and secondary characters within post-Tridentine Spain.

Baroque political festivals of the Spanish empire were a potent form of social drama that both allowed and compelled many constituent communities to explore, imagine and fulfill their roles in a sprawling, global body politic. In this paper, I examine Alonso del Valle’s prose account of the fiestas organized in Manila in 1659, Prensados fastos descriptivos mapas de festivas acclamaciones, y ponposos jubilos. The occasion Valle relates was ostensibly meant to celebrate the recent birth of a much-awaited new heir to the Spanish throne, Felipe Próspero. But within the larger context of the festival, a careful reading of the text reveals that the performances of a wide variety of actors directed different messages to audiences other than the newborn prince. In particular, one supposedly impromptu bullfight provided the recently arrived governor of the remote and vulnerable Philippine colony a chance to represent his fitness to rule a diverse community that was threatened by fearsome enemies without and internal dissension within. This aspect of the fiestas underlines the way that public celebrations served to connect pluralistic, local communities like Manila to the larger Spanish world, and also provided a forum in which these communities could tell themselves stories about themselves.

Previous studies of Amazon characters in early modern Spanish theatre have categorized these warrior women as mujeres varoniles, or women who depart from the feminine norm. However, in this paper I plan to expand on the mujer varonil motif through the lens of trans* studies and performance studies. One aspect of trans* studies is the conceptualization of gender as diverse rather than universal, so I will first consider the ways in which the Amazons as historical figures are non-Western and therefore do not necessarily abide by Western sex/gender systems. However, these play texts were written to be performed by Spanish actresses in early modern Spain. Therefore, rather than impose a gender identity on the Amazons themselves, I will analyze the ways in which Spanish actresses were able to perform power in the form of exceptions to early modern Spanish gender norms. For this present study, I will be focusing on two of Lope de Vega’s comedias: Las justas de Tebas (before 1596) and Las grandezas de Alejandro (1604-1608). Both comedias feature Amazon royalty, but in Las justas de Tebas Queen Abderite dresses as a knight in order to rescue her brother in Thebes, and in Las grandezas de Alejandro Queen Thalestris approaches Alexander the Great seeking a worthy sexual partner.