Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV
Regular price
€56.99
A01=Mary Quinn
Author_Mary Quinn
baroque opera analysis
Category=DSB
Category=NHTB
early modern performance
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
festival
festival politics
Habsburg cultural history
habsburg empire
multisensory royal celebrations research
performance
philip prosper
senses
sensory studies
visual culture Spain
Product details
- ISBN 9781041185925
- Weight: 390g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This book accounts for the outpouring of celebrations in the Habsburg Empire upon the 1657 birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain. These celebrations allow us to interrogate the shifting uses of performance in the empire’s center and periphery. Such spectacles could work to contain and manipulate public sentiment, but at other moments they questioned sanctioned power structures. A study of zarzuela texts, opera libretti, notated music, paintings, poems, and historical documents shows that an array of people took advantage of this festive moment to question the empire’s policies in surprising ways. Sensorial experience played a crucial role during these celebrations. For its part, the Crown engaged a variety of senses, especially sight, sound, and smell, in order to augment the impact of royal spectacles. But simultaneously, those who questioned the Crown also did so through an engagement of the sensorial world.
Mary B. Quinn (University of New Mexico) is the author of The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain and co-editor of Aural Culture and Poetics in the Early Modern Hispanic World: Sound, Rhythm, and Music.
