Reason and Its Others Italy, Spain, and the New World

Ed. David R. Castillo and Massimo Lollini

By exploring manifestations of normative and non-normative thinking in the geopolitical and cultural contexts of Early Modern Italy, Spain, and the American colonies, this volume hopes to encourage interdisciplinary discussions on the Early Modern notions of reason and unreason, good and evil, justice and injustice, center and periphery, freedom and containment, self and other.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Reason and Its Others in Early Modernity (A View from the South)
David Castillo and Massimo Lollini

Part I. Of Walls and Windows: Containment Machines and the Drive Towards the Unknown

Chapter 1

The Telescope in the Baroque Imagination
Andrea Battistini

Chapter 2

Descartes in Naples: The Reception of Passions de l’âme
Silvia Contarini

Chapter 3

Fernando de Herrera Invented the Internet: Technologies of Self-Containment in the Early Modern Sonnet
Leah Middlebrook

Chapter 4

A Ritual Practice for Modernity: Baltasar Gracián’s Organized Body of Taste
Bradley Nelson

Chapter 5

An Unreasonable Journey? The Place of Europe and Italy in Francesco Negri’s Viaggio settentrionale
Nathalie Hester

Chapter 6

Baroque Sapphic Poetry: A Feminist Road Not Taken
Dianne Dugaw and Amanda Powell

Part II. Of Houses and Cities: Early Modern Spaces and the Aporias of Baroque Reason

Chapter 7

The Foreigner and the Citizen: A Dialogue on Good Government in Spanish Naples
John A. Marino

Chapter 8

The Baroque Public Sphere
William Childers

Chapter 9

Reason’s Baroque House (Cervantes, Master Architect)
William Egginton

Chapter 10

Spanish Mannerist Detours in the Mapping of Reason: Around Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares
Julio Baena

Chapter 11

The Genealogy of the Sublime in the Aesthetics of the Spanish Baroque
Anthony J. Cascardi

Part III. The West Wing: America and the Frontiers of Reason

Chapter 12

Sacrificial Politics in the Spanish Colonies
Fernando R. de la Flor

Chapter 13

Bartolomé de las Casas on Imperial Ethics and the Use of Force
George Mariscal

Chapter 14

Imperialism and Anthropophagy in Early Modern Spanish Tragedy: The Unthought Known
Margaret Greer

Chapter 15

Reason and Utopia at the Imperial Borders: Modernity/Coloniality in the Jesuits’ Reducciones in Paraguay
Fernando Ordoñez

Chapter 16

Universal History: Vico’s New Science between Antiquarians and Ethnographers
Giuseppe Mazzotta

Afterword

Reasoning the Other
Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini