Pablo García Piñar, University of Chicago

Description

Beginning with the Council of the Indies’ 1625 rejection of playwright and jurist Juan Ruiz de Alarcón for judicial office, this article traces how bodily appearance became a criterion of fitness for royal service in Habsburg Spain. I argue that this logic emerged from a political and juridical culture that imagined royal officials as visible embodiments of monarchical power, making conformity to ideals of dignity, proportion, and decorum a measure of suitability for office and rendering bodily divergence a potential ground for exclusion. Crucially, the Council reached its decision despite knowing that Ruiz de Alarcón had already exercised judicial authority successfully in New Spain. His case thus exposes a bifurcated conception of fitness for office, in which demonstrated capacity to exercise authority could coexist with disqualification from embodying it when a candidate’s physical presence was deemed incompatible with the representational demands of royal office.

About the Presenter

Pablo García is an Instructional Professor of Spanish at the University of Chicago and a scholar of early modern Spanish literature and premodern critical disability studies. His current book project, Unfit for Office: Divergent Bodies and the Embodiment of Authority in Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture, examines how bodily norms shaped access to public office and the representation of political authority in Habsburg Spain. His research on disability, embodiment, and performance has appeared in the Bulletin of the Comediantes, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Symposium, and Comedia Performance, and his work on disability and early modern law is forthcoming in an Oxford Handbook. His article “The Ethics of Staging Crip Comedia” received the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater’s 2025 Matthew Stroud Comedia Article Prize. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Renaissance Society of America, as well as the Huntington Library.

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About the Premodern Studies Seminar

Presented by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, the Premodern Studies Seminar provides a forum for new approaches to classical, medieval, and early modern studies, allowing scholars from a range of disciplines to share work-in-progress with the broader community. The seminar’s 2026-2027 theme is “Premodern Ethics.” This year’s papers aim to explore both foundations and reconfigurations of ethics before 1800 in a global context.

The seminar is organized by Lydia Barnett (Northwestern University), Timothy Crowley (Northern Illinois University), Megan Heffernan (DePaul University), Christopher Fletcher (Newberry Library), and Caterina Mongiat-Farina (DePaul University).