Kamen, Spain, 1469-1714 - A Society Of Conflict

Abstract

The difficulty in teaching renaissance and early modem Spanish history is not so much the long rise of Iberia to its time of greatness covered by Professor Kamen's work, and certainly not the post mortem of its social and institutional collapse from the early eighteenth until the late twentieth century, but in intelligently analyzing the period in between. All major societies have these richly detailed moments, and they sometimes recur after lulls of exhaustion. Spain, unfortunately, thus far has only this 200-year period of true national greatness: world discovery, empire, the Siglo de Oro, and great power status all in one.