1st Edition

Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds

Edited By Víctor Sierra Matute Copyright 2025
    312 Pages 23 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book is an interdisciplinary edited collection that seeks to recognize the radical importance of sound, and centre it in discussions in the field of early modern studies.

     

    Bringing together a collection of case studies related spatially and temporally to specific places or events, the volume explores a gallery of soundscapes mapping the early modern Iberian empires. This transnational and comparative style takes a twofold approach: on the one hand, each study works as a snapshot of the soundscape of a given place and time; on the other, the different entries offer a series of paradigms to systematically approach the tensions and developments related to sound in the early modern period. Ultimately, this volume collects soundscapes from multiple territories and geographies: from the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and their expansion throughout the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.

     

    Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds will be of great value to students and scholars interested in the history of senses, emotions and theatre, social and cultural history and early modern history.

    Part 1: Creole Aurality

    1.      “Hearing and Seeing Indigenous Presence in a Colonial Mexican Church (Tecamachalco, 1562)”

    Savannah Esquivel

    2.      “Resounding Failures in Colonial Lima: Bellaquería in the Travails of María Pizarro (1568) and Francisco de la Cruz (1578)”

    Nicole D. Legnani

    3.      “Religious Soundscapes: Jesuit Missionary Encounters with the Tupi in Sixteenth-Century Brazil”

    Jessica Rutherford

    4.      “Harmonizing the Four Corners of the World: The Soundscape of Late Early Modern Manila”

    Pedro Luengo

     

    Part 2: Hearing the Cityscape

     

    5.      “Sound and Power in Early Modern Alcalá de Henares”

    Carlos Roberto Ramírez

    6.      “Towards the Soundscape of a Developing Azorean Port-town in the Late Sixteenth Century: Angra (Terceira Island) in the 1590s”

    Luís Henriques

    7.      “A la usanza romana: Spanish Poetry and alla spagnola Music in Early Modern Rome (1624)”

    Sebastián León

    8.      “The Sound of Arcadia: The Aural Regime of Lope de Vega’s Pastoral”

    Lorena Uribe Bracho

     

    Part 3: Spectacular Sonic Environments

     

    9.      “‘Vuelva el aire / los repetidos acentos’: Seville’s Sonic Reverberations and the Ontology of Silence in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El médico de su honra

    Alani Hicks-Bartlett

    10.  “The Siren’s Song: Sounds of Resistance in a Neapolitan dramma musicale

    Mary B. Quinn

    11.  “Towards a Proper Way of Being: Embedded Sounds and Civilized Words in Puebla’s Festivals (1730, 1753, 1768)”

    Amelia R. Mañas

    12.  “Sounds of Modernity in Cervantes’s Barcelona”

    Esther Fernández

     

    Part 4: Vibrant Beings

     

    13.  “Soundscapes of the Self (Salamanca, 1554)”

    Simone Pinet

    14.  “Between the Wall and the Pulpit: Soundscapes of Baroque Preaching in Palma de Mallorca (1647)”

    Juan Vitulli

    15.  “Captive Listeners: Antonio de Sosa’s Topographia as Acoustic Ethnography of Early Modern Algiers”

    Paul Michael Johnson

    16.  “Hearing Alcuzcuz: Word Play and the Production of Uncertainty in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Amar después de la muerte

    Erica Feild-Marchello

     

    Part Five: Transoceanic Sound

     

    17.  “Global Soundscapes from the First Voyage of Circumnavigation, 1519-1522”

    David R. M. Irving

     

    Biography

    Víctor Sierra Matute is Assistant Professor at Baruch College (CUNY). His research interests include material culture, affect theory, transoceanic studies, and the history of the senses and emotions. His research has appeared in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Romanic Review, and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies.