The essays in this collection focus on early modern women’s contributions to theatrical production in Spain and England, as inspirations for characters, as dramatic performers and as playwrights. While the possibilities for Spanish and English women’s active engagement with either public or private theatricals were different in many respects, the themes covered by these women dramatists as well as the roles performed by women from the two nations reveal interesting similarities.
In spite of decrees that intended to forbid woman’s public performance, women conquered the stage in Spain from the late sixteenth century onwards. The unconventional, assertive female, the "mujer varonil", became a favourite character in Spanish Golden Age drama. Moreover, women hit the Spanish stage as actresses, in the public theatres as well as in the enclosed ambience of the convent, as leaders of theatre companies and as playwrights. While plays by English writers equally questioned ideas about traditional femininity, staging strong and assertive women who reject submission as well as silent domesticity, women’s active role in the English public theatre could only begin after the Restoration in 1660. However, English women found alternative ways of manifesting themselves as actresses or dramatists through household theatricals and through the genre of closet drama. As a comparative study this volume shows how on both Golden Age stages theatrical activity was bound up with gender subversion.
The volume contains contributions by María del Carmen Alarcón Román, Marguérite Corporaal, Alison Findlay, José Manuel González Fernández, María J. Pando Canteli, Maite Pascual Bonis, Barbara Ravelhofer, Rina Walthaus, Helen Wilcox, Amy R. Williamsen and Marion Wynne-Davies.

Serie: Calderón: Autos sacramentales completos 60.
Editor: Luis Galván y Rocío Arana Caballero.

El campo semántico del término afecto fue en su día mucho más amplio de lo que es actualmente. En la misma medida en que hemos aprendido a analizar y expresar nuestras emociones de acuerdo con las perspectivas psicoanalíticas y postestructuralistas, hemos olvidado la existencia de un código muy sofisticado, heredado de las tradiciones aristotélica y galénica e impregnado además de las visiones cosmológicas platónicas y herméticas, que era la base de la expresión de las emociones en la Europa anterior al Romanticismo. La retórica y la poética clásicas, así como cualquier forma de espiritualidad cristiana, se basan en la distinción entre dos polos entre los que todavía hoy oscila la idea del equilibrio psíquico: lo ético y lo patético o pasional. El significado que pueda serle atribuido a lo que es afecto y lo que es pasión ha demostrado ser contingente, dependiendo de cómo se configuren las fronteras que separan el territorio de lo ético de la atractiva pero peligrosa inmensidad que se extiende más allá de ellas. La retórica de los afectos analiza algunos aspectos de esta distinción y de esta contingencia a partir de testimonios literarios, musicales y visuales procedentes especialmente de la tradición hispánica, aunque relacionados con otros tomados de las tradiciones italiana, francesa, inglesa y alemana, en función de conceptos críticos como poder o performatividad.

**

The term affect used to refer to a much broader semantic field than the one it refers to today. As we learnt to analyse and express our emotions according to the psychoanalytic and post-structural viewpoints, we started forgetting the sophisticated code inherited from Aristotelian and Galenic literature, also impregnated of Platonic and Hermetic cosmology, which used to support the European early-modern psychological culture. Classical rhetoric and poetics, as well as every form of Christian spirituality emanate from the distinction between the two poles which still delimit the spectre of the psychic and physiological equilibrium: ethos and pathos. The meaning we attribute to the terms affect and passion has shown to be contingent depending on where we place the boundaries separating the territory of the ethical from the attractive but perilous darkness which falls beyond. Bearing into account Spanish, Italian, English, French and German literary, musical and visual materials, as well as critical concepts such as power or performativity, La retórica de los afectos analyses some aspects of this distinction and contingency.

**

Lucía Díaz Marroquín obtuvo un Master of Arts en la State University de Nueva York y un Doctorado cum laude en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Actualmente trabaja en el prestigioso Warburg Institute de la Universidad de Londres, centro dedicado al estudio interdisciplinar de las tradiciones clásicas y modernas. Su proyecto postdoctoral –Performing the Temperaments– tiene como objetivo el análisis de la retórica de los afectos, así como la puesta en escena actual de diversas manifestaciones de los temperamentos humanos según la teoría galénica. Este proyecto es el resultado de una colaboración del mismo Warburg Institute, el Institute of Musical Research (Universidad de Londres) y el proyecto Lieder Theatre London. Actualmente, Lucía Díaz Marroquín conjuga dos facetas que se enriquecen mutuamente: la investigación académica y la práctica musical.

**

Lucía Díaz Marroquín. Having earned a Master of Arts at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a Doctorado cum laude at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Lucía Díaz Marroquín currently develops a post-doctoral project at the Warburg Institute (School of Advanced Study; University of London). This project –Performing the Temperaments–, based on her doctoral dissertation, consists of an analysis on the performative and affective implications of the Galenic theory. It is being developed in collaboration with the Institute of Musical Research (School of Advanced Study; University of London) and with the Lieder Theatre London Project, thanks to the generous help awarded by the John Coffin Memorial Trust.

Serie: Cervantes y su mundo 5.
Editor: José Ángel Ascunce / Alberto Rodríguez.

Serie: Catálogo descriptivo de pliegos de villancicos 2.

Editor: Fausta Antonucci.

Editor: Maria Grazia Profeti.

Serie: Calderón: Autos sacramentales completos 52.
Editor: Juan Manuel Escudero.