Faith S Harden

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Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Harden, F. S. (2020). Arms and Letters: Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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  Arms and Letters analyzes the unprecedented number of autobiographical accounts written by Spanish soldiers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These first-person, retrospective works recount a range of experiences throughout the sprawling domain of the Hispanic Monarchy. Reading a selection of autobiographies in contemporary historical context, including the coalescing of the first modern armies, which were partially populated by forced recruits and the urban poor, the book explains how soldiers adapted the concept of honor and contributed to the burgeoning autobiographical form. Arms and Letters argues that Spanish military life writing took two broad forms; the first as a petition, wherein the soldier's service was presented as a debt of honor, and second, as a series of misadventures, staging honor as a spectacle that captivated an audience. Honor was inevitably gendered and performative, and as such, it functioned as one of the overarching metrics of value that early modern men and women applied to themselves and others. In charting how non-elite subjects rendered their lives legitimate through autobiography, the book contributes both to a critical genealogy of honor and the history of life writing.

Chapters

• Harden, F. S. (2022). Estebanillo González. In A Companion to the Picaresque Novel(pp 135-146). Tamesis: Boydell & Brewer. doi:DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800106468.013
• Harden, F. S. (2018). Hacia una historia de la autobiografía militar del siglo XVII: el militar perfecto y las «vidas» de soldados. In Aspectos actuales del hispanismo mundial: Literatura — Cultura — Lengua(pp 317–324). Berlin: De Gruyter. doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110450828-023

Journals/Publications

• Harden, F. S. (2023). "Military Lives in the Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic World" (Special Issue/Volumen monográfico). eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies, 54.
• Harden, F. S. (2023). "Military Lives in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World" (Introduction). eHumanista: Journal of Iberian Studies, 54.
• Harden, F. S. (2017). Military Labour and Martial Honour in the Vida de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 94(2), 147-162. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2017.10

Presentations

• Harden, F. S. (2019, November). Notes Towards an English Translation and Critical Edition of Estebanillo González. American Literary Translators Association. Rochester, NY.
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  Linguistically complex and highly entertaining, Estebanillo González has been claimed as a remarkably detailed and accurate account of court life and military campaigns in the seventeenth century, as well as a sourcebook for the lexicon particular to Spanish Flanders. Likewise, it has been read as a sophisticated meditation on the senselessness of war, and even (more dubiously) proposed as a possible influence on Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Paradoxically, the same features that captured the interest of early modern Spanish readers, including the vivid sense of immediacy created by the novel’s wealth of historical referents, appear to have limited the novel’s translation into English. Despite its ample dissemination in the period, and the critical interest it has raised, the only English translations currently available are incomplete and over a century old. This presentation argues for the historical and literary value in translating the novel while exploring the particular difficulties that the project entails.
• Harden, F. S. (2018, February). "Masculine Virtue and Male Virginity in Diego Suárez Corvín's Discurso verdadero". Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Phoenix, AZ.
• Harden, F. S. (2017, October). "Male Virgins: Purity and Danger in Early Modern Military Life Writing". Sixteenth Century Society Conference. Milwaukee, WI.
• Harden, F. S. (2016, July). Hacia una historia de la autobiografía militar de los siglos XVI y XVII. XIX Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Muenster, Germany: Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas.
• Harden, F. S. (2015, July). Border Affects: Melancholy and the Margins of the Habsburg Empire in the Early Seventeenth Century. II Workshop Internacional Mudanças e Continuidades Espaços fronteiriços e mentalidades de fronteira. Lisbon, Portugal.
• Harden, F. S. (2015, October). The (Male) Body in Pain: Making Meaning out of Corporeal Experience. Sixteenth Century Society Conference. Vancouver, Canada.
• Harden, F. S. (2014, April). Gender, Ethics, and the Human/Animal in Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina. Exploring the Renaissance International Conference. Tucson, AZ.
• Harden, F. S. (2014, March). Autobiography as Commodity: Military and Mercantile Identities in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Soldiers’ Autobiographies. American Comparative Literature Association. New York, NY.
• Harden, F. S. (2014, May). Writing Against Death: Autohagiography and the Vida y trabajos de Jerónimo de Pasamonte. 11th International Symposium on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age: Death and the Culture of Death. Tucson, AZ.
• Harden, F. S. (2014, October). Writing Value and Valor: Textual Self-Commodification in Catalina de Erauso’s Vida y sucesos de la Monja Alférez. Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. New Orleans, LA.
• Harden, F. S. (2013, October). “Sex, Self, and the Nation: Figuring Female Captivity in the Early Modern Mediterranean”. Sixteenth Century Society Conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Sixteenth Century Society Conference.

Reviews

• Harden, F. S. (2022.

  Vidas en armas. Biografías militares en la España del Siglo de Oro, edited by Abigaíl Castellano López and Adrián J. Sáez. Etiópicas (Universidad de Huelva): Huelva, 2019. 220 pp.

  (pp Renaissance Quarterly Vol 75, Issue 3, pp. 1045-1047).
• Harden, F. S. (2021. "Espadas y plumas en la monarquía hispana: Alonso de Contreras y otras “vidas” de soldados (1600–1650) by Thomas Calvo"(pp 145-147). DOI: 10.1215/00182168-8796572.