New Books in Iberian Studies New Books Network

All can agree that the achievement of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) set the standard for subsequent works of "Jewish philosophy". But just what were the contours of philosophical-scientific inquiry that Maimonides replaced? A fairly large array of diverse texts have been studied, but no comprehensive picture has yet emerged. The newly discovered Hebrew dialogue published here, Before Maimonides: A New Philosophical Dialogue in Hebrew (Brill, 2023), has points of contact of various depth with most of the major works of pre-Maimonidean thought. It shares as well influences from without, especially from the Islamic kalam. The dialogue thus presents, in an engaging literary form, a clear and detailed snapshot of pre-Maimonidean philosophy and science.
Y. Tzvi Langermann teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.
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The Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the Atlantic, and while humans have been traversing its current-driven maritime highways for thousands of years, its sheer scale proved an obstacle to early European imperial powers. Enter Lope Martin, a forgotten Afro-Portuguese ship pilot heretofore unheralded by historians. 
In Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery (Mariner Books, 2021), UC-Davis history professor and Bancroft Prize winner Andrés Reséndez tells the story of Martin and the broader history of trans-Pacific travel in the 16th century. Part environmental history, part imperial expeditionary tale, and part swashbuckling adventure, Reséndez recounts thousands of years of Pacific history, tracking the long story of connection between the western coast of the Americas and the eastern coast of Asia. In doing so, he reveals just how dynamic and metropolitan early imperial Spanish maritime culture was, and broadens our horizons beyond the usual stories of well known explorers such as Columbus and Magellan. By unearthing the long-ignored story of Martin, Conquering the Pacific reveals a rich history of excitement, danger, and of human resilience under remarkable circumstances.
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Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Tabea Alexa Linhard chronicles the refugee journeys of six writers whose lives were upended by fascism in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II: Cuban-born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral, German-born Spanish writer Max Aub, German writer Anna Seghers, German author Ruth Rewald, Swiss-born political activist, photographer, and ethnographer Gertrude Duby, and Czech writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. While these six writers came from different backgrounds, wrote in different languages, and enjoyed very different levels of recognition in their lifetimes and posthumously, they all made sense of their forced displacement in works that reveal their conflicted relationships with the people and places they encountered in transit as well as in Mexico, the country in which they all eventually found asylum.
The literary output of these six brilliant, prolific, but also flawed individuals reflects the most salient contradictions of what it meant to escape from fascist occupied Europe. In a study that bridges history, literary studies, and refugee studies, Dr. Linhard draws connections between colonialism, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II and the Holocaust to shed light on the histories and literatures of exile and migration, drawing connections to today's refugee crisis and asking larger questions around the notions of belonging, longing, and the lived experience of exile.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period.
In The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia's Pacific Lowlands (U Texas Press, 2024), Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.
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Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Amanda Wunder is the first archival study of dress at the court of Philip IV, as told through the life and work of royal tailor Mateo Aguado. Tailor to the queens of Spain from 1630 to 1672, Aguado designed the striking dresses that gave the Spanish court its distinctive look in the Baroque era. The most influential dress designer in the seventeenth-century Spanish world, Aguado was responsible for creating the iconic dresses that appear in some of Diego Velázquez’s most famous court portraits.
Based on new research, this book brings to life the world of Aguado and his colleagues at court. The long-lost garments and accessories that the court artisans made for their royal employers are reconstructed here for the first time. Aguado’s creations played a crucial role in domestic and international politics by shaping the royal image, and his dresses took center-stage in major political events during Philip IV’s reign. Richly illustrated with well-known masterpieces along with surviving textiles and garments, the book explores how Aguado’s dress designs shaped a new vision of Spanish style, and Spanishness, that defined Golden-Age Spain.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Debby Koren's book Responsa in a Historical Context: A View of Post-Expulsion Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Communities Through 16th- And 17th-Century Responsa (Academic Studies Press, 2023) contains a collection of eight annotated translations of responsa, alongside the original Hebrew texts, focusing on the post-expulsion Spanish-Portuguese communities of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Topics include excommunication in Amsterdam, ʻagunot, inheritance rights of a converso son, obligatory contracts and breach of agreement, heresy and humanist scholarship, informing on someone to the Venetian Inquisition, and more.
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