Séance organisée par : Université Paris Nanterre

Lieu : Sorbonne Université, rue de la Sorbonne (75005), salle F671 (free – if you are planning to attend please send a message to our secretary, Mathilde Alazraki, by 8 February: mathilde.alazraki@hotmail.fr)

+ Zoom (free – to receive the link, please fill in the registration form by 8 February: https://forms.gle/CKrifuHPk3S5NXvG8)

My work on Anglo-Spanish cultural and political relations began with doctoral research and eventually a monograph on the marriage of Mary I and Philip II, followed by a fellowship studying cultural and intellectual exchanges.  That it comes as a surprise to many people that England had a Spanish king in the mid-Tudor period and was ruled by the same monarch who thirty years later would attempt an invasion of the country with his Gran Armada is a telling reflection of how marginal and peripheral Spain and its culture have been in accounts of both the literary history and historiography of early modern England. Habsburg Spain’s hegemony in Europe in this period was not without fruit in the realms of art, literature, and culture. Multidirectional, many-layered, multi-dimensional contacts, encounters, and exchanges, through translation, peace and war, sharing and appropriating technology and material practices, produced a complex web of dynamic, shaping and determining influences. Transnational, connected, and global history approaches have complicated and undermined literary histories rooted in communities that had yet to come into being and languages whose identification with culture was merely emergent. In this presentation, I propose to present some early results from my work producing a new synthesis about England and Spain in the early modern period, which recognises that while often disavowed Hispanic worlds were nevertheless key to the emergence of many aspects of English Renaissance Culture.

Alexander Samson is Professor of Early Modern Studies in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. His research interests encompass the early colonial history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and early modern English and Spanish drama. He has edited volumes on The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Ashgate, 2006),  A Companion to Lope de Vega (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008) with Jonathan Thacker, Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance, a monographic Special Issue of Renaisance Studies (2012), and Philip IV and the World of Spain’s Rey Planeta (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming) with Stephen Hart. He has published articles and book chapters on everything from historiography and royal chroniclers in 16^th century Spain to English travel writers, firearms, maps, John Fletcher, Cervantes, female Golden Age dramatists and historical fiction. His book Mary and Philip: the Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Hispanic Worlds in English Renaissance Culture, as well as editions of Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero and James Mabbe’s Exemplary Novels. He runs the Golden Age and Renaissance Research Seminar and directs UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.

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