The Early Modern Hispanic World

Abstract

years. At the reception, I served as the foreigner, who arrived speaking a strange language. Who was this Fernand Braudel, whose long book on the Mediterranean (the 1949 edition) I had just read with such excitement? What was the École des Annales, whose journal I pawed through most mornings in the library's tombs to peruse book reviews? But one of the older students, an ordained Lutheran minister I later learned, asked bluntly the real question on everyone's mind, "Why Spain?" The era of Charles V constituted a fine choice, but, "Wouldn't it be better to study something important?" he inquired in a tone of genuine pastoral concern. Even in a huge graduate program in November 1966, Spanish history counted for nothing. My attempt to offer the justification from J. H. Elliott's Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (1964), around which I had organized part of my special undergraduate reading course before departing for Wisconsin, fell flat with this audience. I still lived in a bubble of naïveté, unable to see that these students were unconsciously prepping me for later job