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The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation
Mark Kurlansky Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0140298517 |
Amazon.com
The buzz about the Guggenheim Bilbão aside, the Basques seldom get good press--from the 12th-century Codex of Calixtus ("A Basque or Navarrese would do in a French man for a copper coin") to current news items about ETA, the Basque nationalist group. Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, sets out to change all that in The Basque History of the World."The singular remarkable fact about the Basques is that they still exist," Kurlansky asserts. Without a defined country (other than Euskadi, otherwise known as "Basqueland"), with no known related ethnic groups, the Basques are an anomaly in Europe. What unites the Basques, above all, is their language--Euskera. According to ETA, "Euskera is the quintessence of Euskadi. So long as Euskera is alive, Euskadi will live." To help provide a complete picture of the Basques, Kurlansky looks at their political, economic, social, and even culinary history, from the valiant Basque underground in World War II to medieval whalers to modern makers of the gâteau Basque. The most affecting chapter focuses on Guernica, a small market town bombed by German planes for over three hours on April 26, 1937, and uses interviews with survivors to illustrate the horror of the attack.
Kurlansky is clearly enamored of the Basques, which leads him to see them in a uniformly positive light. That rosy outlook aside, The Basque History of the World is an excellent introduction to these romantic people. Are they the original Europeans? Kurlansky doesn't weigh in on the issue, preferring instead to honor the Basque request Garean gareana legez--let us be what we are. --Sunny Delaney
Book Description
Straddling a small corner of Spain and France in a land that is marked on no maps except their own, the Basques are a puzzling contradiction-they are Europe's oldest nation without ever having been a country. No one has ever been able to determine their origins, and even the Basques' language, Euskera-the most ancient in Europe-is related to none other on earth. For centuries, their influence has been felt in nearly every realm, from religion to sports to commerce. Even today, the Basques are enjoying what may be the most important cultural renaissance in their long existence.Customer Reviews:
Reading in situ at the Guggenheim, Bilbao.......2007-05-25
fascinating subject, but only a so-so book.......2007-05-22
A Useful Introduction into the Basque Culture.......2007-05-08
An Amazing History of an Inspiring People.......2007-03-14
Recommended.......2006-07-26
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Unfit for Marriage: Impotent Spouses on Trial in the Basque Region of Spain, 1650-1750 (The Basque Series)
Edward J. Behrend-martinez Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items: ASIN: 0874176999 |
Book Description
In early modern Europe the sacrament of matrimony represented a life-long commitment, and the Catholic Church accepted few grounds for the dissolution of an unhappy marriage. One of these was an unconsummated marriage owing to the sexual impotency of one of the partners. Even then, an annulment was granted only after a Church court had conducted a lengthy investigation of the case, soliciting testimony from numerous witnesses as well as from the aggrieved couple, and had subjected the allegedly impotent spouse (and sometimes both spouses) to an intimate physical examination.Historian Edward J. Behrend-MartÃnez studied the transcripts of eighty-three impotency trials conducted by the ecclesiastical court of the Spanish diocese of Calahorra in La Rioja--an area incorporating both Basque and Castilian populations and including urban and rural parishes. From these records, he produced a detailed account of private life and public sexuality in these early years of the modern era.
The transcripts provide insights into the dynamics of daily marital life and the role that property, gender, and personal preference played in marriage. They also reveal information about medical knowledge at the time and about contemporary understanding of the physiology and psychology of sex. Unfit for Marriage is the first study in English to address the proceedings of a Spanish ecclesiastical court and is a vivid portrait of marriage and marital sex in early modern Europe. It is essential reading to anyone interested in social history, gender studies, canon law, legal history, sexuality, and the history of divorce in Western Europe.
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Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World
Catalina De Erauso Manufacturer: Beacon Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0807070726 |
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Marjorie Garber (Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety), provides a lively introduction to this picaresque autobiography of a 17th-century nun turned cross-dressing soldier. De Erauso's story itself is a swashbuckler's catalogue of sword fights, daring escapes, damsels in distress, and witty repartee. Even if only half of what de Erauso claims about herself is true, it's a life well worth remembering and an utterly wonderful read.Book Description
One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic lives of any woman in history. A soldier in the Spanish army, she traveled to Peru and Chile, became a gambler, and even mistakenly killed her own brother in a duel. During her lifetime she emerged as the adored folkloric hero of the Spanish-speaking world. This delightful translation of Catalina's own work introduces a new audience to her audacious escapades.Customer Reviews:
Life's more fun as a man than a nun.......2004-06-25
Despite her previously sheltered existence, de Erauso plunged into her new, wordly life as a man with unusual gusto, as described in her memoir, Lieutenant Nun.
Written some 20 years after her flight, when she correctly deemed confession of her ruse and her still virginal state might save her from the rope or an even more ignominious fate, the memoir describes at breathtaking pace a life of soldiering, banditry and dueling in the wilds of Peru and Chile.
While this slim volume is packed with action, there is little self-reflection or explanation. Transforming her convent undergarments to boy's clothing, she quickly obtains a position with a scholar, runs off when he apparently exhibits too much attention in the boy, and becomes a page at the king's Court.
But when her father (who does not recognize her) appears at court, distraught over his daughter's disappearance, she slips away again. After two comfortable years as a page elsewhere, she quits, "for no more reason than it suited me," returns to her hometown, sees her mother in church (who also fails to recognize her) and leaves, drifting until she finds work as a cabin boy on her uncle's galleon.
While convent education may have fitted her for work as a page, nothing had prepared her for shipboard life. "The work was new to me and I had a hard time at first," is all she has to say about that.
Finding favor with her uncle, who knows her only as another Basque, she jumps ship in the New World, stealing 500 of his pesos and makes her way aboard merchant ships, beginning a pattern of prospering until some slight to her pride causes her to retaliate with knife or sword, necessitating flight or, if captured, jail time, church sanctuaries and scantily described negotiations among law officers, churchmen and the aggrieved parties.
Needing money she signs on as a soldier, serves with an older brother she had never met, and endures "three years of misery" fighting Indians "with everything but discomfort in short supply" .
Following a disastrous duel in which she kills her brother, de Erauso's career takes a downswing into banditry and the life of a gambler with brawling and knife fights involving several brushes with the gallows.
Although wounded in battle and once "stripped" for the rack, de Erauso never explains how she conceals her gender. Her attitude seems entirely that of the colonial male. One murderous knife fight, for instance, is justified when "my companion, with plenty of people around to hear it, told me I lied like a cuckold."
Her well-timed confession to a sympathetic bishop not only saved her from prosecution, but made her a celebrity. She was later granted dispensation by the Pope to live as a man and she finished her life as a merchant in Mexico.
De Erauso's delivery is deadpan and devoid of introspection. There is no purple prose, quite the opposite. While the pace is headlong, it raises more questions than it answers. But Michelle Stepto's useful introduction fills in much of the essential historical and social background, yielding a fascinating portrait of a very peculiar adventurer's life in colonial Chile.
A Different Conquistador.......2000-07-31
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A Time We Knew: Images of Yesterday in the Basque Homeland (Basque Series)
Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items: ASIN: 0874171571 |
Customer Reviews:
A snapshot of the oldest continuous civilization in Europe.......2006-07-28
"The time between dogs and wolves".......2001-05-12
In the fall of 1967, Allard spent two months in the Basque country of northeastern Spain and southwestern France, capturing with his camera the everyday life of the people who lived there. Although Allard spoke no Basque and was linked to the Basque country only through his Basque wife, his stunning photos evoke the tremendous power of the Basque landscape and people: the haunting flanks of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques at evening; the gloomy mountains of the northern coast of Spain just at the approach of a storm; a rough-hewn woman with a scythe at Behorleguy, on the frontier between youth and age, in whose face is reflected the painful past of the ancient Basque people. From a technical point-of-view, these incredible photographs are so good that they could truly be "images of yesterday": the color is brilliant. Alas, though, "yesterday" in the Basque country is no more. The years since 1967 have seen the heavy industrialization of both the French and Spanish sectors of the Basque homeland and the gradual passing of the ancient ways Allard captures here.
Laxalt's contribution to this book is his prose vignettes, some of the best of his characteristically exquisite prose-poetry. A second-generation Basque-American whose father grew up in the French Basque country, Laxalt knows the region as well as probably anyone in the United States. While one cannot miss the heavy dose of romanticism in his prose ("Girls slender as reeds walking hand in hand down the lane, singing an ode to spring in soprano voices pure and light as air") and even pastoralism (exacerbated by the fact that the Basques are some of the world's greatest shepherds), it is obvious that Laxalt is a remarkable writer.
A poetic look at "yesterday" in the Basque country. Get it on your shelf.
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Basques In The Philippines (Basque Series)
Marciano R. De Borja Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0874175909 |
Book Description
The Basques, one of Spain's most distinct ethnic minorities, played a remarkably influential role in the creation and maintenance of Spain's vast colonial empire, including the Philippines. Basques were members of the Magellan expedition that discovered the Philippines in 1521, and a Basque-led expedition subsequently laid the foundation for Spain's conquest and pacification of the archipelago. Despite the small population of their native provinces, the Basques' unique skills as shipbuilders, navigators, businessmen, and scribes, their evangelical zeal, and their ethnic cohesion and work-oriented culture made them well suited to serve as explorers, colonial administrators, missionaries, settlers, merchants, and shippers in the trans-Pacific galleon trade between China, Manila, and Acapulco, Mexico. After the Wars of Independence deprived Spain of most of its American empire, many Basques settled in the Philippines, fleeing political persecution and increasingly limited opportunities in their homeland. Basque emigration from Spain to the Philippines continued through the first half of the twentieth century.Basques played prominent roles in the governance, defense, and cultivation of the Philippines until the end of Spanish sovereignty in 1898, and an active role in Filipino resistance to the Japanese occupation during World War II. They were leaders in the economic development of the hinterlands, as well as the advancement of industry, transportation, inter-island trade and shipping, and the establishment of Catholicism as a dominant national religion. Filipinos of Basque descent continue to contribute in significant ways to the culture and economy of the contemporary Philippines.
This work breaks new ground with its study of the Basque diaspora in the Far East. It also addresses the long-unappreciated history of the Philippines as a vital part of the Spanish Empire, closely connected through trade and personal ties to the American colonies, and crucial to the European penetration of East Asia. Basques distinguished themselves in many areas of Filipino life, and their story, as told by Marciano de Borja, is rich in vivid characters and fascinating detail, while at the same time filling an important void in the scholarly literature about the Basque diaspora.
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The Land of My Fathers: A Son's Return to the Basque Country
Robert Laxalt , and Joyce Laxalt Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0874173388 |
Book Description
In 1960, renowned Nevada writer Robert Laxalt moved himself and his family to a small Basque village in the French Pyrenees. The son of Basque emigrants, Laxalt wanted to learn as much as he could about the ancient and mysterious people from which he was descended and about the country from which his parents came. Thanks to his Basque surname and a wide network of family connections, Laxalt was able to penetrate the traditional reserve of the Basques in a way that outsiders rarely can. In the process, he gained insight into the nature of the Basques and the isolated, beautiful mountain world where they have lived for uncounted centuries. Based on Laxalt's personal journals of this and a later sojourn in 1965, The Land of My Fathers is a moving record of a people and their homeland. Through Laxalt's perceptive eyes, and his wife Joyce's photographs, we observe the Basques' market days and festivals, join their dove hunts and harvests, share their humor and history, their deep sense of nationalism, their abiding pride in their culture and their homes, and discover the profound sources of the Basques' strength and their endurance as a people.Customer Reviews:
"The language of the eyes".......2001-06-03
The book is not a straightforward narrative and Laxalt writes about much more than his own experiences. A collection of vignettes, histories, and folk-sayings, it is an exploration of the Basque character. We read about everything from "Basque troubadours" to the humanization of German soldiers stationed in the Basque lands during the occupation of the Pyrenees. Trying to capture the essence of this ancient people, Laxalt gives us glimpses of the "poetic truth" of the Basque land and Basque history, the emotional truth gleaned from "the language of the eyes." Of course the approach is not without its drawbacks, but for a book like this, "The Land of My Fathers" is remarkably free of immigrant-son's-come-home romanticism.
In addition to Laxalt's vivid prose poetry, many of his vignettes are interesting as anthropological descriptions of life in the "Pays Basque". Here, we encounter aspects of Basque folklife such as pigeon-hunting, contraband, dancing, the unique brand of "shepherd justice", and the "bohèmes" (literally "Bohemians", they are a poorly-known group of shunned outsiders -- not unlike the Gypsies -- who have lived in the Basque country for years). A couple of these "ethnological vignettes", in fact, appeared in the August 1968 issue of "National Geographic".
Although throughout one is struck by the Basques' indomitable ability to overcome adversity, unfortunately the beautiful culture described by Laxalt is rapidly slipping away -- if it has not, for the most part, slipped away already. The Spanish sector of the Basque lands has long been one of the most heavily industrialized in Europe and the French sector, although still largely rural, has seen the same kinds of cultural changes places all over the world have seen with the onslaught of globalization. Many things have changed for the better, and Laxalt certainly doesn't claim the past was perfect, yet it is difficult not to agree with him that "something of the romantic past has been lost." For all that, his many books are even more important, small safeguards against a rapidly deteriorating humanity.
If there were ten stars, "The Land of My Fathers" deserves them.
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Portraits of Basques in the New World (Basque Series)
Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0874173329 |
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Modern Basque History (Basque Textbooks Series)
Center for Basque Studies Manufacturer: Center For Basque Studies ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1877802166 |
Book Description
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On the Inconstancy of Witches: Pierre De Lancre's Tableau De L'inconstance Des Mauvais Anges Et Daaemons 1612 (Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance)
Manufacturer: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance S ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 086698352X |
Product Description
The demonology Tableau de linconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612) is an important text in the history of the early modern European witch persecutions (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). It is a report of the authors four-month stay in the Labourd (Basque) region of France, which is situated in the extreme southwest corner bordering Spain and Navarre. De Lancre was there as a member of a royal commission empowered to cleanse the region of witches. This narrative is based on his own experiences and trial records now lost. This text contains one of the most detailed accounts of the witches Sabbath that survives. An ethnologist before his time, de Lancre gives an expert and meticulous account of the Basque people, their lives, their culture, and their alleged easy commerce with Satan and bad angels. The text was translated into German in a truncated version in 1630, but has never until now been rendered into English.
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A Book of the Basques (Basque Series)
Rodney Gallop , and Marjorie Gallop Manufacturer: University of Nevada Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0874173167 |
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant as a history.......2003-12-26
A classic destined to remain one.......2001-07-01
First of all, the reason why it doesn't go much beyond 1930 is because that's when it was published. British folklorist Rodney Gallop was a pioneer in the field of Basque anthropology and "A Book of the Basques" was one of the earliest (and remains one of the most readable) attempts to explain Basque culture to the English-speaking world.
Gallop inclined heavily toward the French side of the Pyrénées for two reasons. First, that's where he did most of his research. Second, as he points out in the book, the French Basque Country -- at least up to the time he wrote -- had always been much less heavily industrialized than its Spanish counterpart, making it much more ideal for an anthropologist's study. The ancient traditions of the Basques survived more intact in France and, additionally, the French Basques were more culturally "introspective" than their Spanish cousins; that is, they never played as prominent a part in the national life of France as did the Spanish Basques in Spain and its empire. Consequently, they remained much closer to their "roots", so to speak.
Unlike the reviewer below, I thought the book was extremely well written and a fantastic source of information on traditional Basque folklife. Gallop does quote a lot from French, but he wrote in a time when you weren't considered educated until you knew a little French, and a little Latin, too. (In other words, don't blame Gallop -- blame yourself!). The book is divided into chapters on such aspects of Basque folklife as language and literature, folksongs, folkdance, proverbs, Basque houses, superstition and witchcraft, fishermen and corsairs (!), decoration, and that great game, "pelote". Additionally, the author discusses some of the many theories regarding the mysterious origins of the Basques, which, admittedly, is of less interest today than it was in 1930 (the Golden Age of bogus racial theories!).
Unfortunately, much of the book has to be shifted into the past tense today, since the traditional Basque folkways Gallop describes have grown more and more obsolete since he wrote. But as work of history, it's still a classic and is destined to remain one. A+
Overated.......2000-06-27
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