Modernity and Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Fringe Discourses

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The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.

Reviews

This is a useful collection of essays that moves interestingly between pseudo-science, respectable science and literary culture, and which should make us reconsider what was central and what was marginal in nineteenth-century Spain. After reading the book, the borderline appears, if not blurred, at the very least rather more porous than one had thought. * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *
Salvaged from historys dustbin, the fringe discourses in this study present nineteenth-century Spain in a fresh and thought-provoking way. The essays in this volume explore a series of fascinating but often overlooked topics, such as pseudoscience, couvade, pogonology, hypnotism, spiritualism, and more. By shedding light on how science and religion understood human nature during this period, Ryan A. Davis and Alicia Cerezo Paredes show us that the Spanish nineteenth century still has much to offer to the modern scholar. -- Margot Versteeg, University of Kansas
Ryan A. Davis and Alicia Cerezo Paredess ingenious collection of essays redefines science by recuperating the broad range of discourses originally found under sciences expansive umbrella. In this important new scholarly monograph, experts from the field focus on the fringefrom non-men to travelogues and beards to ideaphonesin order to offer an extensive and provocative interrogation of nineteenth-century constructions of human identity, gender, evolution, and faith. -- Denise DuPont, Southern Methodist University
This volume challenges the predominant conception of the antagonism between science and spirituality in nineteenth-century Spain, and shows how these two supposed enemies cohabited with greater ease than most scholars have ever realized. While focused on the nineteenth century, the essays ultimately urge us to question the validity of this dichotomy in contemporary times as well. The volume is a superb resource for all scholars of the nineteenth century and for all those interested in the history of science. -- Joyce Tolliver, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign
In this collection, Ryan A. Davis and Alicia Cerezo Paredes aim to correct a sort of scholarly amnesia that has largely ignored what they refer to as fringe discoursessuch as phrenology, hypnotism, spiritualism, mysticism. Following a rising tide of recent scholarship on similar topics from critics such as Iarocci and Gulln, this volume offers a plethora of insights on these discourses and in the process proposes a more nuanced understanding of the cultural milieu in Spains nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by undoing the dichotomous view of human nature proposed by the monoliths of Science and Religion. -- Susan Walter, University of Denver

Author Bio

Ryan A. Davis is associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University. Alicia Cerezo Paredes is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.