Disciplining History

Censorship, Theory and Historical Discourse in Early Modern Spain

The overall purpose of the studies collected together in this volume is to explain the shaping of Hispanic historiography in the Early Modern period by examining the continuities and discursive complicities between the writing, criticism, theory and censorship of history. This book sheds light on the so-far neglected circulation of ideas and practices between these four areas, and highlights the constitutive nature of a wide spectrum of forms of censorship from repression to criticism in shaping the interests, principles, methods and problems of Early Modern Hispanic historiography. Examining the various fronts that converge in this disciplining discourse of history helps expand and improve our understanding of the relations between historiography and civil and ecclesiastic literary censorship, and the implications of the ideological control of historical writing and theory. In many respects their hypotheses, results and conclusions can be extrapolated to Western historiography in the Early Modern period. This book will be of interest to historians of both historiography and Hispanic censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in general to scholars of historical, literary and political culture in the Early Modern age.