Cultural Capital, Language and National Identity in Imperial Spain

This innovative study examines the cultural mechanisms in early modern Spain that led to the translation, imitation and selective adoption of the values embodied by the Italian Renaissance. These mechanisms served to delineate a national tradition that addressed the needs of a changing society and gave a "Spanish" physiognomy to the Italian experience, which ultimately led to the Golden Age. By examining such important texts as the sentimental fictions of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores, the Spanish translation of Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, and the Polifemo, Binotti first describes the conditions imposed on book production by both the expectations of an elite audience and the limitations of the printing market while outlining the process of the creation of an expressive poetic language and the quest for literary models. She then looks at Ambrosio de Morales' chronicles and Bernardo de Aldrete's Del Origen, showing how a cultural discourse founded on foreign scholarship paved the way for the establishment of innovative-and autochtonous-methods of historical and scientific analysis in the early seventeenth-century. LUCIA BINOTTI is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.