Rhetoric And Reality In Early Modern Spain

Early Modern Spains Insistent Rhetorics Of Nation And Kingship, Of A Monolithic Body Of Shared Values And Beliefs, Especially In Respect Of Racial And Gender Stereotypes, And Of A Centralized And Ostensibly Absolutist Legislative Apparatus Did Not Map Unproblematically Onto The Complex Topography Of Everyday Life. This Volume Explores The Extent To Which These Rhetorics And The Ideology They Helped To Construct Or Underpin Reflected Or Failed To Reflect The Realities Of Social, Economic, And Cultural Life. It Sets Against Their Typically Exorbitant Claims The Lived, Messy, And Sometimes Contradictory Experience Of Spaniards Across A Broad Social Spectrum, Both At The Centre And At The Margins, Not Just Of Peninsular Society, But Of The Hispanic World Overseas.