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“A King, not foreign”: The Creation of a Spanish Heritage for the Bourbon Kings
- The Eighteenth Century
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2018
- pp. 167-182
- 10.1353/ecy.2018.0009
- Article
- Additional Information
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ABSTRACT:
This study explores how two eighteenth-century epics—Hernandia. Triunfos de la fe y gloria de las armas españolas, by Francisco Ruiz de León and El Pelayo, by Alonso Solís Folch de Cardona Rodríguez de las Varillas—created a distinguished Castilian and Visigothic past for Spain’s Bourbon kings. It identifies parallel attempts at legitimization in other eighteenth-century artistic and cultural media and contends that the epics were a part of a large-scale redefinition of the Monarquía that aimed to ensure the Bourbon king’s future by giving them possession of Spain’s history.