Hispanism (sometimes referred to as Hispanic studies or Spanish studies) is the study of the literature and culture of the Spanish-speaking world, principally that of Spain and Hispanic America. It may also entail studying Spanish language and cultural history in the United States and in other presently or formerly Spanish-speaking countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, such as Equatorial Guinea and the former Spanish East Indies.
A hispanist is a scholar specializing in Hispanicism.J. H. Elliott, History in the Making, New Haven: Yale University Press 2012, p. 220 fn. 20. It was used in an article by Miguel de Unamuno in 1908Miguel de Unamuno, 'Sobre Don Juan Tenorio', La Nación (Buenos Aires), 24/02/1908. Reproduced in Miguel de Unamuno, Mi religión y otros ensayos breves, 4ª ed. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964, p. 99. referring to 'el hispanista italiano Farinelli', and was discussed at length for the U.S. by Hispanist Richard L. Kagan of Johns Hopkins University.Richard L. Kagan, ed. Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2002. The work carried out by Hispanists includes translations of literature and they may specialize in certain genres, authors or historical periods of the Iberian Peninsula and Hispanic America, etc.
Origins During the 16th century, Spain was a motor of innovation in Europe, given its links to new lands, subjects, literary sorts and personages, dances, and fashions. This hegemonic status, also advanced by commercial and economic interests, generated interest in learning the Spanish language, as Spain was the dominant political power and was the first to develop an overseas empire in post-Renaissance Europe. In order to respond to that interest, some Spanish writers developed a new focus on the Spanish language as subject matter. In 1492 Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática castellana, the first published grammar of a modern European language. Juan de Valdés composed his Diálogo de la lengua (1533) for his Italian friends, who were eager to learn Castilian. And the lawyer Cristóbal de Villalón wrote in his Gramática castellana (Antwerp, 1558) that Castilian was spoken by Flemish, Italian, English, and French persons.
For many years, especially between 1550 and 1670, European presses published a large number of Spanish grammars and dictionaries that linked Spanish to one or more other languages. Two of the oldest grammars were published anonymously in Louvain: Útil y breve institución para aprender los Principios y fundamentos de la lengua Hespañola (1555) and Gramática de la lengua vulgar de España (1559).
Among the more outstanding foreign authors of Spanish grammars were the Italians Giovanni Mario Alessandri (1560) and Giovanni Miranda (1566); the English Richard Percivale (1591), John Minsheu (1599) and Lewis Owen (1605); the French Jean Saulnier (1608) and Jean Doujat (1644); the German Heinrich Doergangk (1614); and the Dutch Carolus Mulerius (1630).
Dictionaries were composed by the Italian Girolamo Vittori (1602), the Englishman John Torius (1590) and the Frenchmen Jacques Ledel (1565), Diccionario muy copioso de la lengua española y francesa en el qual son declaradas todas las palabras castellanas y francesas con sus proprias y naturales significaciones sacadas de muchos y muy excelentes autores antiguos y modernos Jean Palet (1604) and Vocabulario para facilmente ... deprender á ler, escrebir y hablar la lengua castellana ... por D. Francisco Huillery ... Vocabulaire pour apprendre ... à lire, écrire et parler la langue espagnolle ... composé par Me François Huillery, sieur de la Porte dorée ... François Huillery (1661). The lexicographical contribution of the German Heinrich Hornkens (1599) and of the Franco-Spanish author Pere Lacavallería (1642) were also important to French Hispanism.
Others combined grammars and dictionaries. The works of the Englishman Richard Percivale (1591), Frenchman César Oudin (1597, 1607), Italians Lorenzo Franciosini (1620, 1624) and Arnaldo de la Porte (1659, 1669) and Austrian Nicholas Mez von Braidenbach (1666, 1670) were especially relevant. Franciosini and Oudin also translated Don Quixote. This list is far from complete and the grammars and dictionaries in general had a great number of versions, adaptations, reprintings and even translations (Oudin's Grammaire et observations de langue espagnolle, for example, was translated into Latin and English). This is why it is not possible to exaggerate the great impact that the Spanish language had in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the 19th century, coinciding with the loss of the Spanish colonial empire and the birth of new Spanish American republics, Europe and the United States showed a renewed interest in Hispanic history, literature and culture of the declining great power and its now independent former colonies. Inside Spain, after the country lost definitely its empire in the Spanish defeat in 1898, calls for cultural regeneration and a new conception of identity based in language and humanities began to emerge.
During the Romantic period, the image of a Moorish and exotic medieval Spain, a picturesque country with a mixed cultural heritage, captured the imagination of many writers. This led many to become interested in Spanish literature, legends, and traditions. Travel books written at that time maintained and intensified that interest, and led to a more serious and scientific approach to the study of Spanish and Spanish American culture. This field did not have a word coined to name it until the early 20th century, when it ended up being called Hispanism.
Hispanism has traditionally been defined as the study of the Spanish and Spanish-American cultures, and particularly of their language by foreigners or people generally not educated in Spain. The Instituto Cervantes has promoted the study of Spanish and Hispanic culture around the world, similar to the way in which institutions such as the British Council, the Alliance Française or the Goethe Institute have done for their own countries.
Criticism Hispanism as an organizing rubric has been criticized by scholars in Spain and in Spanish America. The term "attempts to appropriate Latin-American topics and subordinate them to a Spanish centre,” observes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. “The nomenclatures have a radial implication which both initiates and sanctions the flawed concept that all cultural materials under this heading emanate from a singular source: the Peninsula.” The rise of “Hispanism” as a term, notes Joan Ramon Resina, “in Spain as in Latin America, was accomplished for the purpose of political administration and obedience to Castilian rule through methods of domination that eventually led to independence and the birth (rather than fragmentation) of a constellation of republics.” He goes on to say that “it is incumbent on us to face up to the possibility that Hispanism no longer has a future in the university.” While Nicolas Shumway believes Hispanism “is an outmoded idea based on an essentialist, ideologically driven, and Spain-centric, notions,” Carlos Alonso maintains the field of Hispanism “must be rethought and exploded.”
In the Philippines In the Philippines, the Hispanists (or in Tagalog) are a term that has become associated with white washing, colonial mentality and cultural cringe for the past years. In particular, it has surfaced in social media as a bias on Philippine history that regards the colonizers and conquistadors as heroes and "civilizers", and the Philippine national heroes like Andres Bonifacio and Lapulapu as the "villains".
Issues and reactions had stirred on the so-called movement of Spanish restoration for their radicalism. Claims and historical narratives in the social media have included proposing to “replace” the current Filipino as the country's official language, alluding to the country's status as a former Spanish Empire colony. The anti-Tagalog bias and the demand to credit cultural achievements in the Filipino culture to the Spanish colonizers have resulted in backlash and a negative reputation for online supporters of these ideas in the Philippines.
World influence Hispanic America In the late 19th century Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó and Cuban José Martí were writers stressing the value of Spanish language and cultural heritage as part of the construction of an identity for the new Hispanic American independent nations.
Great Britain and Ireland The first Spanish book translated into English was the Celestina, as an adaptation in verse published in London between 1525 and 1530 by John Rastell. It includes only the first four acts and is based on the Italian version of Alfonso de Ordóñez; it is often referred to as an Interlude, and its original title is A New Comedy in English in Manner of an Interlude Right Elegant and Full of Craft of Rhetoric: Wherein is Shewed and Described as well the Beauty and Good Properties of Women, as Their Vices and Evil Conditions with a Moral Conclusion and Exhortation to Virtue.. The Scottish poet William Drummond (1585–1649) translated Garcilaso de la Vega and Juan Boscán. The English knew the masterpieces of Castilian literature, from early translations of Amadís de Gaula by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo and the Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro. Sir Philip Sidney had read Los siete libros de la Diana by the Hispano-Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor, whose poetry influenced him greatly. John Bourchier translated Libro de Marco Aurelio by Antonio de Guevara. David Rowland translated Lazarillo de Tormes in 1586, which may have inspired the first English picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), by Thomas Nashe. By the end of the 16th century, the Celestina had been translated fully (in London, J. Wolf, 1591; Adam Islip, 1596; William Apsley, 1598; and others). Some of the translators of that time traveled or lived for some time in Spain, such as Lord Berners, Bartholomew Yong, Thomas Shelton, Leonard Digges and James Mabbe. William Cecil (Lord Burghley; 1520–1598) owned the largest Spanish library in the United Kingdom.
Elizabethan theater also felt the powerful influence of the Spanish Golden Age. John Fletcher, a frequent collaborator of Shakespeare, borrowed from Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote for his Cardenio, possibly written in collaboration with Shakespeare, who is thought to have read Juan Luis Vives. Fletcher's frequent collaborator Francis Beaumont also imitated Don Quixote in the more well-known The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Fletcher also borrowed from other works by Cervantes, including Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda for his The Custom of the Country and La ilustre fregona for his beautiful young saleswoman. Cervantes also inspired Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, with his La gitanilla (one of the Novelas ejemplares) influencing their The Spanish Gipsy (1623).