Mary Quinn’s forthcoming Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV: Performing Empire in Word, Music, and Image (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) is not only one of the most recent scholarly monographs to be indexed by Southwest Humanities, it is also one of the rare Peninsular Studies books that I’ve had the pleasure to work on. Quinn’s book provides a careful study of the celebrations of the birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain, across the Habsburg Empire. “Such spectacles could work to contain and manipulate public sentiment, but at other moments they questioned sanctioned power structures.” Quinn’s “study of zarzuela texts, opera libretti, notated music, paintings, poems, and historical documents shows that an array of people took advantage of this festive moment to question the empire’s policies in surprising ways.” Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV thereby provides an in-depth examination of the role of sensorial experience during these celebrations. This excellent title will be published by Amsterdam University Press on 25 October 2024. Please visit the publisher’s website here for more information.
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