Hilaire Kallendorf – författare

Sins of the Fathers considers sins as nodes of cultural anxiety and explores the tensions between competing organizational categories for moral thought and behaviours, namely the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments. Hilaire Kallendorf explores the decline and rise of these organizational categories against critical transformations of the early modern period, such as the accession of Spain to a position of world dominance and the arrival of a new courtly culture to replace an old warrior ethos.This ground-breaking study is the first to consider Spanish Golden Age comedias as an archive of moral knowledge. Kallendorf has examined over 800 of these plays to illustrate how they provide insight into aspects of early modern experience such as food, sex, work, and money. Finally, Kallendorf engages the theoretical terminology of Marxist literary criticism to demonstrate the inherent ambiguity of cultural change.

Chastity and lust, charity and greed, humility and pride, are but some of the virtues and vices that have been in tension since Prudentius’ Psychomachia, written in the fifth century. While there has been widespread agreement within a given culture about what exactly constitutes a virtue or a vice, are these categories so consistent after all?In Ambiguous Antidotes, Hilaire Kallendorf explores the receptions of Virtues in the realm of moral philosophy and the artistic production it influenced during the Spanish Golden Age.  Using the Derridian notion of pharmakon, a powerful substance that can serve as poison and cure, Kallendorf’s  original and pioneering insight into five key Virtues (justice, fortitude, chastity, charity, and prudence) reveals an intriguing but messy relationship. Rather than being seen as unambiguously good antidotes, the Virtues are instead contested spaces where competing sets of values jostled for primacy and hegemony. Employing an arsenal of tools drawn from literary theory and cultural studies, Ambiguous Antidotes confirms that you can in fact have too much of a good thing.

Can feelings be wrong? Scientists agree that emotions contain both a cognitive and a physiological component. The cognitive part can be modified, while the physiological response is largely involuntary. In religious terms, the answer is clear in its legislation of heart motives: love your enemies, lust is equivalent to adultery, hate is the same thing as murder.In Perilous Passions, Hilaire Kallendorf draws on early modern Spanish theatre to reveal how emotions have always been understood as central to ethics. Starting with a treatise on emotion, On the Passions of the Soul by Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), Kallendorf uses pairs of opposing emotions – love/hatred, desire/aversion, joy/sorrow, hope/despair, and courage/fear – to explore how they are depicted in Golden Age plays.The book pinpoints and probes intersections of feelings with morality. It asks: Do emotions bear positive or negative ethical overtones? Which emotions are more conducive to virtue? Are passions perceived as perilous in early modern Spain, in agreement with Neostoic principles? Or does the Catholic liturgy’s emphasis on involving the corporeal senses in worship mean that bodily sensations, including feelings, are accorded pride of place – especially in drama? In asking these questions, Perilous Passions argues for the significance of theatre in emotional education.

Exorcism and demonic possession appear as recurrent motifs in early modern Spanish and English literatures. In Exorcism and Its Texts, Hilaire Kallendorf demonstrates how this 'infection' was represented in some thirty works of literature by fifteen different authors, ranging from canonical classics like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, and Lope de Vega, to obscure works by anonymous writers. From comic and tragic drama to picaresque narrative and eight other genres, possession worked as a paradigm through which authors could convey extraordinary experience, including not only demonic possession but also madness or even murder. The devil was thought to be able to enter the bodily organs and infect memory, imagination, and reason. Some came to believe that possession was tied to enthusiasm, poetic frenzy, prophecy, and genius. Authors often drew upon sensational details of actual exorcisms. In some cases, such as in Shakespeare, curing the body (and the body politic) meant affirming cultural authority; in others, as with Zamora, it clearly meant subverting it. Drawing on the disciplines of literary theory and history, Exorcism and its Texts is the first comprehensive study of this compelling topic.

A panoramic, state-of-the-art handbook destined to chart a course for future work in the field of early modern Hispanic theater studies. It begins in the closet with an essay on Celestina as closet drama and moves out into the court to explore intersections with courtly love. An essay on the comedia and the classics demonstrates this genre’s firm grounding in the classical tradition, despite Lope de Vega’s famous protestations to the contrary. Distinct but related genres such as the autos sacramentales and the entremeses also make an appearance. The traditional themes of honor and wife-murder share the stage with less familiar topics like the incorporation of animals into performance. This volume covers the urban space of the city in Spain and Portugal as well as uncharted territories in the New World and Japan. Essays on emblems and the picaresque round out this anthology, along with studies of theatrical representations of early modern innovations in science and technology. The book concludes with two different psychoanalytical approaches, focused on melancholy and Lacanian tragedy, respectively. This collection incorporates the work of younger scholars along with established names in the field to synthesize the most exciting recent work on the comedia and related forms of early modern Hispanic theatrical production.Contributors include: Ignacio Arellano, Frederick de Armas, Henry Sullivan, Edward Friedman, A. Robert Lauer, Manuel Delgado, Adrienne Martín, Enrique García Santo Tomás, Matthew Stroud, Teresa Scott Soufas, Enrique Fernández, María Mercedes Carrión, Robert Bayliss, Ted Bergman, Cory Reed, Maryrica Lottman, Christina Lee, and Enrique Duarte.

The queenship of the first European Renaissance queen regnant never ceases to fascinate. Was she a saint or a bigoted zealot? A pious wife or the one wearing the pants? Was she ultimately responsible for genocide? A case has been made to canonize her. Does she deserve to be called Saint Isabel? As different groups from fascists to feminists continue to fight over Isabel as cultural capital, we ask which (if any) of these recyclings are legitimate or appropriate. Or has this figure taken on a life of her own?Contributors to this volume: Roger Boase, David A. Boruchoff, John Edwards, Emily Francomano, Edward Friedman, Cristina Guardiola-Griffiths, Michelle Hamilton, Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Hilaire Kallendorf, William D. Phillips, Jr., Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, Caroline Travalia, and Jessica Weiss.