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Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture

By Alicia R Zuese

Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture
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  • Proposes the key role of visual language in baroque Spanish prose.

  • Expands notions of literacy, since the writers emphasize competencies in oral composition and comprehension, and visualization, alongside book culture.

  • Elucidates memory and visualization techniques (from Classical world and Counter-Reformation spirituality) embedded in popular literature.

  • Broadens the scope of visualization beyond spiritual meditation and memory technique into the public realm because audiences of the novella genre could read or listen to the texts.

  • Introduces developments in early modern embodied cognition and memory into baroque literary studies.

  • Grounds Spanish novella writers’ visual language in the genre’s features inherited from medieval exempla collections.

  • Uses methodologies from cognitive cultural studies to interrogate fictional representations of characters’ mental activity and inner textuality.

  • Brings together diverse manifestations of visual and material culture in relation to literature: medieval and baroque altarpieces, portraits, still lifes, paintings by Velázquez and El Greco, royal collections, fictional collectors, manuscript and book illustration, etc.

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