Browsing by Author "Vilches, Elvira"
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Item Open Access Accounting for Finance and Affect in Early Modern Spain(European Journal of Economic History, (2023),, 2023) Vilches, ElviraItem Open Access Business Tools and Outlooks: The Culture of Calculation in the Iberian Atlantic(Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2019) Vilches, ElviraItem Open Access Columbus’s Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth and the Enterprise of the Indies(Modern Languages Notes, 2004) Vilches, ElviraItem Open Access Doing Things with Money in Early Modern Spain(2019) Vilches, ElviraEarly Modern Spanish society lived in a world saturated with all kinds of business and concerns about money. Everyone adopted habits of thought associated trade. Profit and loss became the language for assessing material, social, private, and spiritual matters. Mercantile culture merged business and cultural registers to the extent than adopting and reshaping the discourse of commerce became the concern of literature.Item Open Access Figures of Arithmetic: Numeracy, Calculation, and Accounting in the Comedia(2019-03-04) Vilches, ElviraPaying critical attention to reckoning, accounting, and managing gives us the opportunity to examine how numeracy and the logic of calculation operates on and off the stage. The stage exists as a matrix of figures where numbers imbue the dramatic form, mediate the interactions among characters, quantify emotions, and displays in the unlimited capacity to transform social relations into abstract numerical equivalents. Studied Playwrights include Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and Tirso de MolinaItem Open Access La República de las Letras: De escribanos y letrados a escribientes y lectores(2017-05-05) Brissette, BenjaminHistorians generally accept that after the introduction of the movable type printing press, literacy expanded broadly, but rarely do researchers stop to ask why. The simple fact of easier access to the written word does not explain why more people all of a sudden began learning to read and write, long before the advent of any government-run programs of elementary education. In Spain during this period (from the late 15th through the 18th centuries) literacy was already fairly well-documented among the clergy and aristocracy, with significant increases in literacy occurring in the developing merchant class, artisans and skilled workers, and urban and rural laborers, all groups in society for which there is classically little documentation. In fact, most urban and rural laborers only learned to read and not to write, meaning that they couldn’t leave behind documents explaining their motivations, and though self-referential works do exist for merchants, artisans, and skilled workers, they rarely address the individual’s desire to learn. Given the dearth of primary sources that can offer qualitative information, a number of investigators have turned to a wide variety of secondary sources, including analyses of period literature that offer representations of these groups and their engagements with literacy, but a genre of sources that has been underutilized is that of instructional books printed at this time that taught people how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, alongside myriad more advanced skills. The texts that this research investigated included tracts on grammar, spelling, calligraphy, common dialogue and vocabulary, and the history and etymology of the Spanish language. Their publication dates ranged from 1492 to 1692, and most of them have not been reprinted in modern editions. Due to this fact, the original versions of these texts were consulted in the National Library of Spain, in Madrid. Through a careful analysis of stated authorial intent, diction, and the level of content presented, as well as situating each work firmly within the context of Spain during the Early Modern Period, this research investigates the role of literacy in the creation of identity. Focus is directed towards the construction of national, individual, and authorial identities, and how the skills involved in literacy, specifically reading and writing, relate to each of these groups. My argument proceeds through an analysis of the importance of literacy to each of the above groups. Chapter 1 focuses on aprobaciones and licencias, documents written by government officials, as well as the letters dedicated to government officials written by the authors, to explore how literacy was believed to impact national identity. Chapter 2 transitions to focus primarily on the prologues to the reader in order to discover the perceived benefits of literacy to individuals. Chapter 3 explores how the authors of these works constructed their own identity and authority. In sum, these instructional books indicate that the skills of reading and writing are tools necessary for the construction of an identity, but that they are not integral aspects of identity for any of the three groups. Without literacy, a full identity, as defined by the standards set out in these texts, cannot be realized. With literacy, though, an identity that fully participates in society is possible, but it is defined according to the uses of literacy, and not the fact of literacy in itself.Item Open Access The Character and Cultures of Credit in Early Modern Spanish Texts: Matters of Belief, Trust, and Uncertainty(2022) Vilches, ElviraThe rise of finance casts a long shadow in Iberian print culture. Mathematicians and businessmen understood credit as a matrix of equations that could establish either the fluid functioning of genuine exchange or open a threshold into the realm of the senseless. Thinkers and authors perceived that the power of the imagination penetrates even the skillful techniques of commercial arithmetic. Credit means to believe and give credence. It relies on calculation and abstraction, as well as mechanisms of trust and make believe particular to fiction. Mateo Alemán, Duarte Gomes Solis, and José Penso de la Vega intersect tropes of hope and fear with visions of modernity that speak to myths of restlessness, boldness, and imprudence, together with a rich imagery of intricacy and impermanence. This set of writings examines the puzzling logic of fictitious capital as a means of production and representation. Technical, intellectual, and creative pursuits shaped the extensive debate about credit explicitly or implicitly. For the vexing questions explored are not exhausted by vocabulary, genre, or ideology.Item Open Access Trade, Silver, and Print Culture in the Colonial Americas(Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2015-07-03) Vilches, Elvira