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

This article deals with the study of a noble’s library, through the inventory carried out upon the death of the Italian aristocrat Eleonora Gonzaga in  1710. An analysis of the titles, compiled by the notary, shows the baroque character of the collection, a small library which represents the reading tastes of the Marquises of Beniel. This library, shared by the couple, within a very specific domestic space, wasnot simply a property of its owners, but was read by them, as is demonstrated by a second inventory drawn up in 1727. The abundance of historical texts, complemented by tomes on political-moral didacticism and, to a lesser extent, religious books, comprise a bibliographic collection that seems to have been rare among the moderate-level Murcian nobility. Such reading trends may be indicative of the intellectual, moral, and political interests that would have governed the vital trajectory of its owners in the public and private domain. The books printed in Italian also bring us closer to the personality of the aristocrat whose mother tongue would remain linked to her daily devotions. The ordinary appearance of most of the copies may be indicative of the utilitarian nature of the collection in the formation and leisure of the aristocrat and her family; these were books that served for religious practice, poetic delight and the historical, moral and political formation of the reader.

Review of the book: Álvarez Domínguez, Pablo (coord.) Los Museos Pedagógicos en España. Entre la memoria y la creatividad (Gijón-Sevilla; Ediciones Trea-Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2016).

Review of the book: Meda, Juri, Mezzi di educazione di massa. Saggi di storia della cultura materiale della scuola tra XIX e XX secolo (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2016).

Review of the book:Yanes-Cabrera, Cristina; Meda, Juri and Viñao, Antonio (eds.), School Memories. New Trends in the History of Education (Cham: Springer, 2017)

Review of the book: D'Ascenzo, Mirella and  Ventura, Gabriele (ed.), Dalla parte delle maestre. La stagione pedagogica di virginia predieri (1931-2009). (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia Editore, 2016)

Review of the bookl: Prats, Joaquín; Valls, Rafael and Miralles, Pedro (eds.), Iberoamérica en las aulas. Qué estudia y qué sabe el alumnado de educación secundaria. (Lleida: Milenio, 2015).

In the first decades of the nineteenth century the monitorial system of education generated widespread pedagogical discussion in several countries (as well as unprecedented transcontinental diffusion ). Despite having passed quickly through the educational landscape, this model exerted a decisive influence in defining a specific educational organization for public primary schools, one that would prevail (irreversibly) over individual instruction and the legitimization of simultaneous teaching. First of all, in light of research already carried out on the subject, we aim to contextualize the way in which the method was received in Portugal, emphasizing the pluralization of interpretations of this educational technology in the course of its diffusion worldwide. Secondly, using printed materials —in this case, two guides of the method written in Portugal (1835 and 1844)— and the data in them concerning the materiality of schools (taking note, between the given dates, of the changes as well as the continuities), we defend a central idea: that the pedagogical-didactic practices, i.e., the interaction of teacher / students in the teaching and learning situation has a decisive influence on the evolution and configuration of school spaces

Social science textbooks are the most widely read historical narrative, and for much of the population constitute the only reading they will ever have done on the subject . Hence the need to analyze in detail what types of content and activities these books contain. The pre-eminence of textbook as the main educational resource in Spain remains overwhelming, both in primary and secondary education. This derives from the conceptual model assigned to humanistic subjects like history. Along with the lecture and rote examination, the manual gives us a picture of the advances and setbacks in the teaching of history in Spain. While studies on issues regarding national identity and narrative are abundant, there is a conspicuous lack of coverage in the manuals of the different autonomous communities since educational power was transferred to them. In both quantitative and qualitative terms, the relevance given to the regions is far inferior to that given to state and universal contents (Eurocentric), and the latest laws have only led to more of a setback. Our examination of the case of the Region of Murcia seeks to reveal the continuity of clichés that simplify and distort the history of this territory, preventing students from acquiring a minimum background knowledge of the region’s diversity of landscapes, cultures and lifestyles. To this end we have analyzed nine history textbooks of the 1st, 2nd and 4th years of Secondary Education, covering the last two decades and three most recent education laws (LOGSE, LOE and LOMCE).

This paper examines the survival of a master narrative about the history of Spain, a national narrative as it is reflected in history textbooks in secondary education between 1976 and 2016 and in current historical accounts of students and teachers-in-training. The aim is to analyze three subjects of this master narrative (the Reconquest, the Catholic Monarchs and the Spanish Empire) that continue to have their place in history textbooks. We analyze the contents and forms of discourse with this aim: to demonstrate to what extent the political, educational and historiographical changes have transformed the national historical representation of such contents as a national discourse. This is an empirical, exploratory and descriptive study based on discourse analysis using a probability sample from history textbooks. This analysis is then compared with studies on historical accounts of Spain given by students and teachers-in-training. The results show a duality between textbooks and historical accounts of adolescents and youth. On the one hand, we see significant changes in academic texts from school textbooks without an essentialist national dimension; but we also see continuity in the discursive thread of the master narrative (reconquest-unit-empire), and with maps of «Spain» from the 16th century and with images of national historical painting from the nineteenth century. On the other hand, we can see the continuity of essentialist and traditional representations of such contents in historical accounts of students and teachers-in-training. This is due principally to poor historical literacy in secondary education and the survival of a national master narrative in non-school social uses of the national historical past.