Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Queen Margaret of Austria (1584–1611) was married to King Felipe III for twelve years, of which she spent precisely half of the time pregnant. This case illustrates the relevance of a question which couples were repeatedly confronted with in Early Modern Spain: is lovemaking advantageous or harmful to the child’s prenatal development? They might have been at a loss, given the hodgepodge of contradictory opinions from philosophical, moral, and medical authorities, in addition to common beliefs and lived experiences. The powerful Catholic Church declared sex as a marital duty, yet at the same time, she preached the virtue of chastity and that intercourse was only tolerable for social reproduction. Physicians were often indecisive, as any assessment would depend on the stage of pregnancy (not always easy to determine) and other factors. After delivery, puerperium constituted another transitory state which invited certain fears, but also a redefinition of the new mother’s status and authority.

This article seeks to study the breakdown of the closure that occurred in different female monasteries in the Viceroyalty of Peru at the beginning of the 17th century. During those years, the post-Tridentine bishops had to dealt with an uncomfortable reality: episodes of active sexuality in many women’s monasteries and, consequently, the existence of pregnant nuns. Analysing the case of three monasteries located in the cities of Quito and Popayán, we will try to show in these lines which were the limits of the Council of Trent and, at the same time, to underscore the strategies that a great number of nuns developed to hide all trace of their monastic infractions.

This article presents the history of the words parir, dar a luz and alumbrar as synonyms for the meaning ‘parir’ and abortar, malparir or mal parir and mover as terms to designate the action ‘malparir’. The lexicographic history is revised in each of the cases taking into account both bilingual and monolingual dictionaries. Furthermore, the use of these words is analyzed in the texts, considering the chronology and the discursive tradition. The result of this study reveals the uniqueness of Spanish in comparison to other geographically close languages since Spanish employs the same lexia for people and animals. This is the main reason for the progressive rejection of the words parir and abortar which will be respectively replaced by dar a luz, alumbrar, malparir and mover. In addition to this, it is observed in the latter case —that of ‘malparir’— a circular process that the term abortar —initially rejected— has nowadays recovered as a clear reflection of the social change experienced in this respect.

Review of: López Zapico, Misael Arturo; Rodríguez Campesino, Aida y Vitón, Gonzálo (eds.), Nuevas miradas sobre el antiimperialismo y/o el antiamericanismo desde la historia, la literatura y el arte. Instituto de Estudios Internacionales Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, 2019, 180 pp.

Review of: Faraldo Jarillo, José María, Las redes del terror. Las policías secretas comunistas y su legado, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018, 327 pp. 

Review of: Reseña de: Giuliani, Gaia y Lombardi-Diop, Cristina: Bianco e Nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani, Firenze, Le Monnier Università, 2013, 224 pp. 

Review of Prieto Borrego, Lucía, Mujer, moral y franquismo. Del velo al bikini, Málaga, Universidad de Málaga, 2018, 351 pp.

Revrie of Carlos Varona, María Cruz de, Nacer en palacio. El ritual del nacimiento en la corte de los Austrias, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2018.

This article consists of a historical-critical analysis about the early development of contemporary Nepalese art at the beginning of the 20th century and throughout the autarchy of the maharajas Rana of Nepal. As initial hypothesis, it is established that contemporary Nepalese art emerges as a result of the round-trip myth, or “orientalism” versus “westernism,” which converge in the origin of a new form of visual art used as a means of international communication. It is analyzed how through contemporary painting and photography techniques, inherited from Western art, Nepalese elite used visual art as a tool to create their own “Eastern myth”. Especially, the idea of the “picturesque Himalaya” is relevant for this purpose. By hybridizing these new techniques with the idea of traditional art, it is concluded that it was thanks to these magnificent “self-divine” portraits, through the contemporary artist’s creative skill, how the Ranas stated their exotic power in the Himalayan nation with the ultimate aim of protecting the country’s independence. 

Since its origins, Mexico City is presented as a complicated and juxtaposed city: a European city built on the pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan. Thus, it was always concentrating on its western dimension, the general trend of urban research on the very first Mexico City has been, until now, to investigate the urban paradigms of the Renaissance or Classical antiquity in search of an explanation for its trace. On the one hand, after an exhaustive analysis of the urban fabric of Mexico City, the present work intendsto break stereotypes and unravel ancient urban structures, proving that these were direct reflections of the reality of the conquerors who planned the city (with a cultural horizon imbued with the medieval Islamic world that permeated so deeply in the Iberian Peninsula).On the other hand, through a practical example of the establishment of the northern limit of the first Mexico City, to set the usefulness of an interdisciplinary methodology based on the integration of various disciplines such as history, urban planning and archeology, to approach urban phenomena and their historical and cultural substrates in a more globally and precisely way.