Introduction: The Female and Male Modern Spanish Subject

Abstract

The relationship between the Spanish subject and the concept of modernity has consistently been fraught with conflict, ambivalence, and marginalization. Between the late fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, Spanish imperialism and the Counterreformation threatened Northern Europeans, who defended themselves not only militarily but also by perpetuating stereotypes about sadistic and barbaric Spaniards who acted out their inimitable cruelty in the Inquisition and the conquest of America. This defamation of Spanish character and customs continued throughout the entire early modern period, and the Spanish Inquisition stereotype was replaced by the indolent Spaniard stereotype of the eighteenth century. As a third stage of this stereotyping process, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Northern Europeans began to look to idealized Spain as the site of the lost ideals of romanticism in the age of materialistic and disillusioning modernity. All these stereotypes contributed greatly to the general impression in Northern Europe that Spain had not fully modernized.