The Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the Eighteenth Century

Catherine M. Jaffe is professor of Spanish Literature at Texas State University. She co-authored María Lorenza de los Ríos, marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar: vida y obra de una escritora del Siglo de las Luces and is co-editor of several books on women and the Hispanic Enlightenment. Karen Stolley is professor of Spanish American literary and cultural studies at Emory University. She is the author of Domesticating Empire: Enlightenment in Spanish America and co-editor of a special issue of Colonial Latin American Review on “Latin American Enlightenments.” Recent publications include chapters on eighteenth-century Spanish American studies.

CATHERINE M. JAFFE and KAREN STOLLEY, Introduction

I. Debating and negotiating the Black Legend in the Hispanic World



ANTONIO CALVO MATURANA, Nobody expects the Spanish Enlightenment: victimhood and sense of European belonging in late eighteenth-century Spain


NURIA SORIANO MUÑOZ, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Black Legend as a political problem in the Spanish Enlightenment: patriotism and victimhood


KAREN STOLLEY, Rewriting the Black Legend in eighteenth-century New Spain: Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia de la California


ANA MARÍA DÍAZ BURGOS, Inquisitorial mission or colonial protocol: rethinking the Spanish Black Legend in the long-eighteenth-century Cartagena de Indias



II. Translating the Black Legend



CAROLE MARTIN, Instrumentalizing the Black Legend, or: how Don Quixote’s dis/enchantment set the French Enlightenment in motion


MARIA SOLEDAD BARBÓN, Competing fictions in Italian exile: Spanish Jesuit literati and the Black Legend


CLORINDA DONATO, Writing and translating the Black Legend: French and Italian literary constructions of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century


CATHERINE M. JAFFE, “We are now members of the same flock”: gender, nation, and conversion in María Rosario Romero’s 1792 translation of Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne



III. Deploying the Black Legend beyond the Hispanic World



MICHAEL VINCENT, “He knew no music other than his own”: Spain and isolation in biographies of Luigi Boccherini


DAVID FREEMAN, The Black Legend in travel accounts: perceptions of Spain in eighteenth-century Dutch travel writing


JONATHAN CRIMMINS, The Black Legend: liberalism, natural right, and British abolitionism


REVA WOLF, The victim as martyr: the Black Legend and eighteenth-century representations of Inquisition punishments



CATHERINE M. JAFFE AND KAREN STOLLEY, Epilogue