Practising Places offers an original insight into the culture of early modern Spain in so far as the various fields explored here are seldom juxtaposed. Literary texts, urban views and paintings are analysed side by side in a hybrid cultural interpretation that is as cartographic as it is architectural, historical or literary.
This book presents a “thick” description which focuses on the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, the autobiographical writing of Teresa of Avila, and the urban views of Spanish towns drafted or painted by Joris Hoefnagel, Anton Van den Wyngaerde and El Greco. These works embody and challenge the sense of grandeur and subsequent notion of crisis, which inhere in the period. In this way, they simultaneously highlight and question the centralism and social control of the absolutist Habsburg rules, illustrating the claim that space is as much a social product as a social producer.