ABSTRACT
Born in Rio de Janeiro, the controversial critic and historian Américo Castro taught at Princeton and Harvard universities for years. His scholarship dealt with literature and history as a means to decipher the Spanish temperament. Castro's books include España en su historia: Cristianos, moras y judíos (Spain in Its History: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1948), The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History (1971), and the anthology of his work, An Idea of History (1977). The latter includes essays on Cervantes and Pirandello, and an examination of Don Quixote, lo barroco (the baroque) as a literary style, and Sultan Saladin in literature. Castro's thesis is that Spanish culture is to a large extent the result of religious coexistence of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The following brief entry belongs to Chapter XIII of the influential volume, The Structure of Spanish History (1954). It is an example of the sort of psychohistorical meditation Castro undertook throughout his life.
