Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture

By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audiences aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Mara de Zayas and Luis Vlez de Guevara as well as Alonso de Castillo Solrzano, Gonzalo de Cspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Crdoba.