DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
"Hag(e)ografía. Propaganda ideológica y política geográfica en los discursos hagiográficos peninsulares. La construcción de la
nación española (siglos XIII a XVII)". Defended on June 2012, University of Kansas.
My dissertation explored Iberian vernacular hagiographies written between the 13th and 17th centuries as strategic cultural artifacts designed for and by the hegemonic powers to support their geo-political agendas. I argued that these hagiographies were inserted in a wider socio-political and ideological cultural project, whose goal was the creation and the expansion of a Christian, Catholic Spanish nation. They were hag(e)ographies, a term that I proposed to highlight the geo-political agenda lying underneath its religiosity. The work was organized in four chapters: an introduction that provided a diachronic evolution of the genre, the current limitations and problems, and a proposal of reading the genre in hag(e)ographical terms; two chapters, pre-1516 and post-1516 respectively, that provided an analytical study of various hagiographic cultural artifacts (literary texts from Berceo and Lope de Vega, archival documentation, sculptures, paintings and architectonic constructions) from a hag(e)ographical point of view; and a final chapter proposing the study of literary hagiographies as cultural productions inserted within their wider cultural context.
"Hag(e)ografía. Propaganda ideológica y política geográfica en los discursos hagiográficos peninsulares. La construcción de la
nación española (siglos XIII a XVII)". Defended on June 2012, University of Kansas.
My dissertation explored Iberian vernacular hagiographies written between the 13th and 17th centuries as strategic cultural artifacts designed for and by the hegemonic powers to support their geo-political agendas. I argued that these hagiographies were inserted in a wider socio-political and ideological cultural project, whose goal was the creation and the expansion of a Christian, Catholic Spanish nation. They were hag(e)ographies, a term that I proposed to highlight the geo-political agenda lying underneath its religiosity. The work was organized in four chapters: an introduction that provided a diachronic evolution of the genre, the current limitations and problems, and a proposal of reading the genre in hag(e)ographical terms; two chapters, pre-1516 and post-1516 respectively, that provided an analytical study of various hagiographic cultural artifacts (literary texts from Berceo and Lope de Vega, archival documentation, sculptures, paintings and architectonic constructions) from a hag(e)ographical point of view; and a final chapter proposing the study of literary hagiographies as cultural productions inserted within their wider cultural context.