Scala’s The Fake Husband offers readers and performers an accessible English script which captures the comic brilliance of the commedia dell’arte. Expanded from an earlier scenario, Il marito (The Husband), the play presents characters originally created by members of the Gelosi troupe, in particular the stars Isabella Andreini and Sylvia Roncagli. Scala’s ability to capture the individual artistry of these women makes this script especially exciting and shows his appreciation of the towering contribution made by the female performers who joined the troupes in the 1560s. Also included is a comprehensive study of Scala’s place in the theatrical world and beyond.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 75

The Fame of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz traces the meteoric trajectory of the Mexican Tenth Muse’s renown and studies how her worldly celebrity was altered posthumously by elegists in her Fama y obras póstumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] of 1700. In this study of a polyphonic, transatlantic volume, the didactic framework of early modern fame is pushed to its limits as panegyrists inscribe the nun into an evolving world-view that could trade in the fictions of the saintly exemplar, the Tenth Muse or a New World treasure, but could not preserve a woman’s renown on the grounds of authorship. Only by making her legible could she vie for the promise of posthumous fame. In flushing out the machinations of Sor Juana’s role as agent of her own celebrity as well as the negotiations of her contemporaries, this book opens new lines of inquiry in the study of early modern fame and print culture and the role of writers, panegyrists and editors as cultural agents in the transatlantic literary relationship between Mexico and Spain.

During the Manchu conquest of China (1640s–1680s), the Qing government mandated that male subjects shave their hair following the Manchu style. It was a directive that brought the physical body front and center as the locus of authority and control. Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China highlights the central role played by the body in writers’ memories of lived experiences during the Ming-Qing cataclysm. For traditional Chinese men of letters, the body was an anchor of sensory perceptions and emotions. Sight, sound, taste, and touch configured ordinary experiences next to traumatic events, unveiling how writers participated in an actual and imagined community of like-minded literary men.

In literature from this period, the body symbolizes the process by which individual memories transform into historical knowledge that can be transmitted across generations. The ailing body interprets the Manchu presence as an epidemic to which Chinese civilization is not immune. The bleeding body, cast as an aesthetic figure, helps succeeding generations internalize knowledge inherited from survivors of dynastic conquest as a way of locating themselves in collective remembrance. This embodied experience of the past reveals literature’s mission of remembrance as, first and foremost, a moral endeavor in which literary men serve as architects of cultural continuity.

The Female Baroque is a contribution to the revival since the 1980s of early modern women's writings and cultural production in English. Its originality is twofold: it links women's writing in English with the wider context of Baroque culture, and it introduces the issue of gender into discussion of the Baroque. The title comes from Julia Kristeva's study of Teresa of Avila, that 'the secrets of Baroque civilization are female'. The book is built on a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics - narrativity, hyperbole, melancholia, kitsch, and plateauing, pointing less to surface manifestations and more to underlying ideological tensions. The crucial concept of the Female Baroque is developed in detail. Attention is then given particularly to Gertrude More, Mary Ward, Aemilia Lanyer, The Ferrar/Collet women, Mary Wroth, the Cavendish sisters, Hester Pulter, Anne Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn, the latter two whose lives and writings point to the developing cultural transition to the Enlightenment.

The definitive account of transpacific Asian movement through the Spanish empire—from Manila to Acapulco and beyond—and its implications for the history of race and colonization in the Americas.

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system.

Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the early Americas. Uncovering how and why Asian peoples crossed the Pacific, he sheds new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, the term “chino” officially racialized diverse ethnolinguistic populations into a single caste, vulnerable to New Spanish policies of colonial control. Yet Asians resisted these strictures, often by forging new connections across ethnic groups. Social adaptation and cultural convergence, Luis argues, defined Asian experiences in the Spanish Americas from the colonial invasions of the sixteenth century to the first cries for Mexican independence in the nineteenth.

The First Asians in the Americas speaks to an important era in the construction of race, vividly unfolding what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire. In so doing, it demonstrates the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history and reveals the fundamental role of transpacific connections to the development of colonial societies in the Americas.