̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Spain

Astrolabe reveals Islamic–Jewish scientific exchange

ta385 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 06:30:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��identification of an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions makes it one of the oldest examples ever discovered and one of only a handful known in the world. ̽��ֱ��astronomical instrument was adapted, translated and corrected for centuries by Muslim, Jewish and Christian users in Spain, North Africa and Italy.

Spanish butterflies better at regulating their body temperature than their British cousins

sc604 — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 04:32:22 +0000

Butterfly populations in northern Spain are better than their UK counterparts at regulating their body temperature, but rising global temperatures may put Spanish butterflies at greater risk of extinction.

Economic activity has halved during Spain’s coronavirus lockdown, study suggests

fpjl2 — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:57:10 +0000

A new analysis of 1.4 billion anonymised credit and debit card transactions during the first three months of 2020 shows that spending in Spain post-lockdown was an average of 49% lower than the same period the previous year.

Economists from the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Imperial College in the UK worked with the Spanish bank BBVA, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, to study the 'real-time evolution' of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is an unprecedented dataset of millions of everyday transactions, revealing the underlying costs of the coronavirus crisis,” said study co-author Vasco Carvalho, Professor of Macroeconomics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and director of its INET Institute.

“We can see in high resolution the impact of extreme mobility restrictions on a major western economy. We find an abrupt and persistent decline in spending during lockdown, amounting to about half of what we might normally expect.”

̽��ֱ��researchers found evidence of a major spending increase in the few days just before Spain’s lockdown began on the 14 March 2020, when daily expenditure growth shot up by 20 percentage points above average for the year.

Once lockdown began, daily spending halved on average. ̽��ֱ��researchers say that, while bank transaction data is 'substantially more volatile' than overall consumption by households in Spain, they are closely linked.

As such, a 'back-of-the-envelope calculation' for consumption movement during the pandemic suggests growth of just over 4% prior to lockdown dropped sharply to a -13% decline in average household consumption – a key indicator of GDP – once lockdown restrictions were in place.

“While considerable uncertainty surrounds these calculations, is seems hard to construct a scenario where average consumption of Spanish households is not declining somewhere between minus 10% and minus 15% during the period of lockdown,” said Carvalho.

̽��ֱ��dataset charts the dramatic shift to online purchasing once lockdown was enforced. While both offline and online spending fell overall, the decline at physical points of sale was massive. As such, online shopping increased its market share by about 50%.

̽��ֱ��detail in the anonymised transaction data allowed the researchers to analyse the best and worst performing types of goods and outlets as people adapted to their new lockdown lives.

While outlets unable to conduct business were obviously the worst hit – from bars to fashion retailers – the study shows that small local food shops and convenience stores benefited the most, increasing their market share more than even the 'Hipermercados', or superstores.

Other categories of spending that have seen market share grow during Spanish lockdown include mobile phone credit, as telecommunications become even more vital to social lives, as well as pharmacies and insurance.

“Spending on commodities related to basic necessities, such as foodstuffs and the pharmacy, more than doubled during the lockdown period, while trade in fashion or personal services declined heavily,” said Carvalho. “Restrictions to movement mean proximity to the customer is now of key importance.”

̽��ֱ��study found that – all together – the top 10 best performing spending categories during lockdown went from an average of 10% market share in the first two months of 2020 to 50% by late March.

̽��ֱ��economists also used anonymised geo-tagging of the transactions to study the economic effects of coronavirus on the different regions of Spain, as well as among the neighborhoods of one of its major cities.

Unlike the country’s autonomous regions, which all followed a similar pattern, economic activity evolved very differently within Madrid’s postcodes during the crisis. “Those neighborhoods where there were more sick and infected people saw substantial declines in spending,” said Carvalho.

“Within a big city, inequality in disease burden appears to be linked to inequality in economic burden.”

Study co-author Professor Sevi Rodriguez Mora, of the ̽��ֱ�� of Edinburgh’s School of Economics, said: “Over the coming weeks governments will grapple with how to relax social distancing measures, but have few means of understanding the impact of diﬀerent policies on economic activity.

“Transaction data can provide immediate feedback on how spending patterns across space and sectors react to restriction measures, but also their relaxation.”

“Given that this seems to be happening in Spain before the rest of Europe and America, whatever happens in Spain will show us what we should expect everywhere else."

Álvaro Ortiz, Head of Big Data at BBVA Research, added: “Tracking these kind of events in real time and high definition provides an important strategic advantage for policy makers, as they can react more quickly to limit the economic damage.”

̽��ֱ��new research is published as a Cambridge-INET working paper on the Institute’s dedicated COVID-19 research page.

How you can support Cambridge's COVID-19 research effort

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Almost one and a half billion spending transactions reveal 'real-time' reactions of consumers in a major western economy during the nation’s peak pandemic period.

Within a big city, inequality in disease burden appears to be linked to inequality in economic burden

Vasco Carvalho

Nemo

A deserted Grand Via, in the heart of Madrid, a week after the lockdown started.

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Music and the battle for Granada's past

ta385 — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 17:32:15 +0000

Concerns over immigration and the rise of the far-right in Spain are fuelling tensions at one of its most important festivals, the Día de la Toma in Granada. And as a new Cambridge study reveals, music has become a key battleground.

̽��ֱ��man who tried to read all the books in the world

lw355 — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 12:49:19 +0000

129,864,880. That’s the number of books in the world, according to an estimate by Google Books, which since its launch in 2005 has been trying to scan them all, convert them to searchable text using optical character recognition and then make them publicly available online. Although Google Books’ hopes have been slowed by wrangles over copyright and fair use, if it succeeds it could become the largest online body of human knowledge ever available.

Half a millennium earlier in Seville, Spain, Hernando Colón (1488–1539) had the same ambitious aim: to create a library that would be universal in a way never before imagined because it would contain everything. And Colón really did try to collect everything: from precious manuscripts to books by unknown authors, from flimsy pamphlets to tavern posters, from weighty tomes to throwaway ephemera.

Colón’s bibliomania took him back and forth across Europe for three decades. According to Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, from Cambridge's Sidney Sussex College and the Faculty of English, he bought 700 books in Nuremburg over Christmas in 1521, before passing on to Mainz where he bought a thousand more in the course of a month. In a single year in 1530, he visited Rome, Bologna, Modena, Parma, Turin, Milan, Venice, Padua, Innsbruck, Augsburg, Constance, Basle, Fribourg, Cologne, Maastricht, Antwerp, Paris, Poitiers and Burgos, voraciously buying all he could lay his hands on.

Wilson-Lee has been working with Dr José María Pérez Fernández from the Universidad de Granada to research the life of Colón, the natural son of the great Italian navigator Christopher Columbus. In addition to creating his library, Colón accompanied his father on explorations of the new world and wrote the first biography of Columbus; he was also a ground-breaking mapmaker and gathered unparalleled collections of music, images and plants.

“Colón had an extraordinary memory and an obsession with lists,” says Wilson-Lee, whose research on Colón was funded by the British Academy. “Each time he bought a book, he would meticulously record where and when he bought it, how much it cost and the rate of currency exchange that day. Sometimes he noted where he was when he read it, what he thought of the book and if he’d met the author. As pieces of material culture, each is a fascinating account of how one man related to, used and was changed by books.”

This almost obsessive activity makes what now remains of his library – the Biblioteca Colombina, housed in a wing of Seville Cathedral – an incredibly important material resource to explore book history, travel and intellectual networks. “When pieced together,” he adds, “they give an account of one of the most extraordinary lives in a period filled with entrancing characters.”

Wilson-Lee describes Colón as having lived at the time of an “event horizon” of exponential change, in the same way that the advent of the internet has been for us today; only in Colón’s case it was the move from written manuscript to printed book.

“It simply became impossible for one man to read everything,” says Wilson-Lee. “Maybe in his youth, it would have been possible – there would have been few enough printed books. But as his library grew, he realised he needed to employ readers to work through each book and provide him with a summary – in effect the forerunner of the Reader’s Digest.”

As Colón’s vision of amassing all knowledge grew, so did something else: the need to add structure to the information he gathered. “It was one of the first ‘big data’ challenges,” says Wilson-Lee. “You might have the information but how do you make sense of it all?

“One of the fascinating aspects about the library is that it shows that sometimes the way in which knowledge becomes divided up is not in response to some kind of grand abstract reasoning, some kind of Eureka moment, it’s sometimes in response to a practical problem. In this case, ‘I’ve got 15,000 books, where do I put them?’” On a shelf seems reasonable, but even in this respect Colón was pioneering, says Wilson-Lee.

“In essence, he invents the modern bookshelf: row upon row of books standing upright on their spines, stacked in specially designed wooden cases.”

And a material problem of how to store things very quickly turns into an intellectual problem of which things belong together. It forces certain decisions. “As anyone who has walked through a library will know, order is everything,” explains Wilson-Lee. “ ̽��ֱ��ways in which books can be ordered multiplies rapidly as the collection grows, and each of these orders shows the universe in a slightly different light – do you order alphabetically, by size or by subject?

“Hernando was acutely aware of this. He referred to unordered, or ‘unmapped’, collections as ‘dead’.”

He wanted his library not only to have everything but also to “provide a set of propositions about how the universe fits together,” he adds. “He viewed the Universal Library as the intellectual counterpart – the brain – to the world empire that Spain was aiming for in the 16th century. It was a fitting extension to his father’s grand ambitions to explore the globe.”

One of Colón’s innovations to make sense of his library was a vast compendium of book summaries, called the Libro de Epitomes. To create this, he set a team of sumistas – digesters of the thousands of books in the library – to work distilling each volume, leading towards his ultimate vision that all the knowledge in the world could be boiled down into just a few volumes: one for medicine, one for grammar, and so on.

Another was a blueprint for the Library using ten thousand scraps of paper bearing hieroglyphic symbols. “Each of the myriad ways they could be put together suggested a different path through the library, just as a different set of search terms on the internet will bring up different information. In some respects, the Biblioteca Hernandina, as it was then called, was the world’s first search engine.”

How these systems worked will be uncovered in books that Wilson-Lee and Pérez Fernández are writing about the man and his library, and also about how his accomplishments resonate with our own fast-changing networked world.

“For all that he died nearly five centuries ago, Hernando’s discovery of the world around him bears striking, sometimes uncanny, resemblance to the world that we are discovering today,” says Wilson-Lee. “ ̽��ֱ��digital revolution has increased the amount of information available but how do you discern what’s useful from what’s useless? We are wholly reliant on search algorithms to order the internet for us. Hernando was just as aware that how you choose to categorise and rank information has immense consequences. It’s easy for us to forget this sometimes – to sleepwalk our way into knowledge collection and distribution.”

Today, just over 3,000 books of Colón’s library remain. Until now, the life of this extraordinary man has largely escaped notice; it’s taken another revolution to grasp how visionary he was in recognising the power of tools to order the world of information.

Edward Wilson-Lee’s biography of Hernando Colón, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books’ will be published by HarperCollins in 2018, and the study of the library, co-authored with José María Pérez Fernández, will be published later by Yale ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset image: Hernando Colón. Credit: Wikipedia.

One man’s quest to create a library of everything, 500 years before Google Books was conceived, foreshadowed the challenges of ‘big data’ and our reliance on search algorithms to make sense of it all.

In some respects, the Biblioteca Hernandina, as it was then called, was the world’s first search engine.

Edward Wilson-Lee

Montilal Books

Old book wall

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̽��ֱ��last Muslim King in Spain

sjr81 — Thu, 18 May 2017 08:21:48 +0000

Based on original research, and drawing attention to the connections between the medieval Moorish king Boabdil, and current social and political concerns in Europe today, Drayson presents the first full account in any language of the Moorish sultan of Granada, and head of the Nasrid dynasty.

̽��ֱ��academic’s research has also uncovered a potential mystery regarding the final resting place of the last Muslim king in Spain. Long thought to have died in Algeria in 1494, experts are now hoping to exhume and DNA test what they believe to be the remains of the sultan beneath a derelict mausoleum in Fez, Morocco.

In the ten years before Boabdil’s fall in 1492, his kingdom of Granada was the theatre of one of the most significant wars in European history. ̽��ֱ��sultan’s territory was the last Spanish stronghold of a Muslim empire that had once stretched to the Pyrenees and beyond – including the cities of Barcelona, Pamplona and Cordoba, which had been home to paved roads, street lighting and more than 70 libraries at a time when London and other European cities were backwaters of disease, violence and illiteracy.

“How did Boabdil change the course of Spanish history? Does he now represent what he stood for in the past? And how significant is he as a figure of resistance to the forces of western Christendom?” asked Drayson, who spent three years working on her new book – ̽��ֱ��Moor’s Last Stand: ̽��ֱ��life of Boabdil, Muslim King of Granada.

“That Boabdil was a key figure at a crucial moment in world history cannot be doubted: the current tensions between Islam and the West have their roots in his reign and in the kingdom he lost. Christian posterity has treated him with scorn and pity – viewed from the perspective of the victors. But my account presents the other side of the coin, revealing that issues of violence, tension and compromise between Muslims and Christians were as pressing then as they are now.”

Betrayed by his family and undermined by faction and internal conflict, Boabdil’s defeat at the hands of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (the parents of Catherine of Aragon) symbolised the epoch-changing transition of Granada from Islamic state to Christian territory – a moment which set Spain on course to becoming the greatest power in early modern Europe.

̽��ֱ��Christian victory marked the completion of the long Christian reconquest of Spain and ended seven centuries in which Christians, Jews and Muslims had for the most part lived peacefully and profitably together.

“Five centuries after his death, it’s timely to consider the impact of his defeat then and now,” added Drayson. “Boabdil was a man of culture and war: a schemer, rebel, father, husband and brother. He was a king, yet also the pawn of the Catholic monarchs. I wanted to show why his life matters – and the meanings it now has at this time of extreme tension between the west and the Islamic states.”

̽��ֱ��end of Muslim rule at the heart of Spain came to an end on January 2, 1492 when Boabdil relinquished the keys to the Moorish capital to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. “These are the keys to paradise,” he said before leaving the city with his mother Aixa.

Legend has it that as Boabdil retreated into exile, he turned around for one final, distant look at Granada – sighed, and burst into tears. His mother, betraying little sympathy for her vanquished son, is said to have told him: “You do well, my son, to cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend like a man.”

̽��ֱ��‘last sigh’ has long been used by historians to belittle and diminish Boabdil’s legacy, ignoring – according to Drayson – the immense sacrifice he demonstrated in saving his people from certain slaughter at the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella’s irrepressible armies which encircled Granada.

“ ̽��ֱ��fall of Granada was of such magnitude that a mythical story was needed to explain, accept or legitimise the immense upheavals the conquest brought about,” said Drayson.

According to her, Boabdil’s heroism, long repudiated by most historical commentators, is evident in his ability to recognise the futility of further resistance, and the choice he made in rejecting the further suffering, starvation and slaughter of his people. Instead, he bargained for the best terms of surrender possible, rejecting martyrdom and willingly sacrificing his reputation for the greater good.

“ ̽��ֱ��loss of Granada is viewed by modern writers as a prelude to the repression of the Muslim world,” added Drayson. “At a time when Europe is seeking a way of addressing issues of racial and religious intolerance, equality and freedom, we might look closely at the Spanish Muslim society of which Boabdil was the final heir, which successfully tackled some of these problems.

“Today, Boabdil represents a last stand against religious intolerance, fanatical power, and cultural ignorance; his surrender of the city and kingdom of Granada symbolised the loss of the fertile cross-cultural creativity, renewal and coexistence born out of the Muslim conquest of Spain.”

Elizabeth Drayson appears at the Hay Festival as part of the Cambridge Series on Sunday, May 28 at 2.30pm on the Good Energy Stage.

̽��ֱ��history, myths and legends surrounding the last Muslim ruler in Spain – whose surrender ended seven centuries of Islam at the heart of Western Europe – is the subject of a new book and Hay Festival appearance by Cambridge academic Elizabeth Drayson.

I wanted to show why his life matters – and the meanings it now has at this time of extreme tension between the west and the Islamic states.

Elizabeth Drayson

̽��ֱ��Capitulation of Granada by Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz 1882: Boabdil surrenders to Ferdinand and Isabella

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Flamenco: what happens when a grassroots musical genre becomes a marker of culture

amb206 — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 09:03:16 +0000

For audiences around the world, flamenco symbolises the colour and romance of southern Spain. An energetic blend of song, guitar and dance, it is most strongly associated with Andalusia, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions. With historic connections to Islamic North Africa, Andalusia stands at a geographical crossroads and its culture is rich with influences from far beyond its shores.

̽��ֱ��government of Andalusia has long supported flamenco as an important element of regional identity and a magnet for tourism. In 2010 flamenco was recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH), a designation that signals its contribution to culture worldwide. It was a seminal moment in the history of flamenco which has progressed from a tradition embedded in gypsy and working class communities to a genre taught in conservatoires alongside more classical styles.

̽��ֱ��listing of flamenco as an ICH raises important questions about culture and identity: how best to keep regional art forms alive and flourishing in an increasingly globalised world and, most specifically, how musical forms intersect with politics. Dr Matthew Machin-Autenrieth (Faculty of Music) addresses these topics and more in his book Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain, a detailed study of the ways in which an iconic performative tradition contributes to the formation of identity at local, regional, national and international levels.

Machin-Autenrieth comes to his subject matter as an ethnomusicologist and classical guitar player interested in the shifting politics of a ‘grassroots’ art form that has been packaged both as a global commodity and as a symbol of regional identity. His understanding of the guitar and grasp of colloquial Spanish, together with his deep interest in the relationship between music and politics, qualify him for the task of unravelling the ways in which music is grounded not just in place but in notions of place which contribute to powerful ‘landscapes’ of belonging.

Much has been written, and contested, about the origins of flamenco which emerged as a genre only in the mid-19th century when it was ‘discovered’ by middle class audiences searching for the exoticism and romanticism of folk traditions. Its deeper roots are entwined with the music of gypsies and other marginalised groups. Its themes play on the highs and lows of human experience – love and loss, death and sorrow – reflecting the suffering of a population living in a region scarred by centuries of feudalism.

Flamenco is not universally popular in its country of origin where some see it as a relic of a more ‘backward’ Spain and ‘not really European’. Machin-Autenrieth writes in his introduction: “Many Spaniards I have met (from outside Andalusia) disregard and even detest the conflation of flamenco with Spanish-ness, viewing it as nothing more than an Andalusian-Gypsy tradition. Arguably, a similar process of appropriation is occurring within Andalusia, the tradition being developed by institutions and in the popular media as a definitive symbol of regional identity.”

In setting the context for his discussion, Machin-Autenrieth traces the recent history of flamenco which was repressed and then appropriated by the Franco regime. When the regime ended in the mid-1970s, Spain underwent a process of democratisation and decentralisation in which flamenco was a political tool, becoming a potent marker of the culture of Andalusia. Its popularity may not be universal across the region but, by virtue of educational initiatives and a programme of festivals, all Andalusians are familiar with its distinctive style.

Music has a powerful cohesive effect on communities, and orally-based traditions in particular offer a voice to groups who might remain unheard. But when music is appropriated by institutions, its authenticity and relevance for local communities may be under threat. Concerns about the alleged commercialisation of flamenco are nothing new. Early in the 20th century, the poet Federico García Lorca and composer Manuel de Falla, both Andalusians themselves, emerged as champions for an art form which had gained negative stereotypes, and was under attack by antiflamenquistas intent on depicting flamenco as an outdated cultural phenomenon out of step with Spain’s European ambitions.

In recent years, however, flamenco has seen an increase in institutional support in a country where regional identity is high on the agenda. But institutional involvement in the arts can be counter-reproductive. Making a point that could apply equally to other art forms, Machin-Autenrieth quotes the Spanish sociologist, Aix Gracia, who argues that “the affability with which the administrations treat flamenco in Andalusia, through ‘festivalisation’ and its preservation as a representation of identity, is also its biggest threat… I cannot resist the question: could this art die of success? Or more specifically, could it lose its autonomy?”

In exploring the question of artistic freedom, Machin-Autenrieth attended dozens of flamenco performances and interviewed many of those involved as artists and promoters. He describes the tensions that exist between the styles of flamenco approved by the heritage industry and forms out of favour with the dominant institutions. Strength of feeling against the institutional development of flamenco led to the emergence of Flamenco es un derecho (Flamenco is a right), a protest movement that claims flamenco is a gift to humanity – but one over which Andalusians have a right.

Much scholarly research on flamenco in Andalusia has focused on the role of three cities (Seville, Cadiz and Jerez) as the defining ‘golden triangle’ for its performance. As well as exploring the regional politics behind flamenco, Machin-Autenrieth looks beyond the ‘golden triangle’ to focus on flamenco in Granada, a city famous for its stunning Moorish architecture. Focusing on specific case studies, he explores the relevance of flamenco for local identity in Granada beyond its regional associations. ̽��ֱ��book provides an insight into the range of distinct contexts and styles in Granada that speak to a vibrant and historically-significant flamenco community.

Spanish identity, by virtue of the country’s history, is strongly local. To be Andalusian is to feel a strong sense of regional belonging, to be granadino or granadina (from Granada) is to have even stronger allegiance to a city with its own sense of history and tradition. With flamenco, a sense of locality splits even further into the competing styles performed in different clubs and venues. It is this richness of diversity, rather than adherence to proscribed authenticity, that will keep the genre moving forward.

Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain is published by Routledge.

Inset images: Flamenco (Paolo Signorini); Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain front cover (Routledge).

What happens when a musical genre becomes an identifier for a region? In his book Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain, Matthew Machin-Autenrieth unravels the cultural complexity and contested politics of an iconic art form.

In 2010 flamenco was recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH). It was a seminal moment in the history of flamenco which has progressed from a tradition embedded in gypsy and working class communities to a genre taught in conservatoires.

Flickr Creative Commons (Veyis Polat)

Flamenco by Veyis Polat (cropped)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Read all about it!

lw355 — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 10:44:19 +0000

̽��ֱ��flip side of contemporary fear of crime is our fascination with it. Repelled we might be, but the popularity of watching CCTV footage of real crimes or reading the latest salacious scandals in tabloids is testament to modern society’s appetite for stories that shock.

But this fascination with crime is not new; nor is the popularity of the materials that purvey it. Cambridge researcher Professor Alison Sinclair has set out to discover what Spain thought about wrongdoing between 1800 and 1936 by examining a wide range of sources, and in particular the equivalent of the mini-tabloids of the time – so-called chapbooks or pliegos sueltos – of which an extensive archive exists in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Sold on street corners by hawkers and luridly illustrated, the sueltos carried vivid tales of the unlawful, the improper and the morally corrupt.

‘Spain in the 19th century was chaotic and troubled. It has no literary work that is the equivalent of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and yet the figures for violent crime in the 19th century in Europe place Spain as one of the countries highest on the list,’ explains Professor Sinclair, whose three-year research project has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

‘With their mix of fact and fantasy, the sueltos provide a window not only into wrongdoing at the time but also into its representation and the way people perceived it, thus complementing in a completely original way other literary and cultural representations of wrongdoing.’

̽��ֱ��sueltos spoke to an audience entranced by the exploits of such characters as Francisquillo the Tailor, a boastful chap whose scissors turn out to be his major weapon in a series of dramatic standoffs about honour. A recurring (and real) character is Diego Corrientes, a Spanish Robin Hood figure who took from the rich and gave to the poor, and who died by hanging aged 24 years.

A key feature of the project will be to catalogue and digitise 4,470 sueltos held in the ̽��ֱ�� Library and the British Library. Many are in an exceptionally fragile state and a goal of the project is to create a world-class and accessible collection, which will be held in the ̽��ֱ��’s central repository DSpace@Cambridge (www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/).

Clearly related to a specific time and place, the project raises questions relevant for modern society. As Professor Sinclair, from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, comments: ‘ ̽��ֱ��research will help us to question, as cultural consumers, our excited and emotional responses to this sort of material, including processes of identification and voyeurism.’

For more information, please contact Professor Alison Sinclair (as49@cam.ac.uk).

A new study of wrongdoing and its cultures in Spain from 1800 to 1936 will explore the fascination of popular versions of crime and other misdemeanours.

With their mix of fact and fantasy, the sueltos provide a window not only into wrongdoing at the time but also into its representation and the way people perceived it..

Professor Alison Sinclair

Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Pliegos sueltos Diego Corrientes (S743.1.c.8.2)

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