Anne J. Cruz is Professor of Spanish at the University of Miami, USA. She is series editor of Hispanisms, University of Illinois Press, and President of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry.

Separated only by a narrow body of water, Spain and England have had a long history of material and cultural interactions; but this intertwined history is rarely perceived by scholars of one country with a view toward the other. Through their analyses of the various modes of exchange of material goods and the circulation of symbolic systems of meaning, the contributors to the anthology-historians and literary critics-investigate, for the first time, the two nations' express points of contact and conflict during these historically crucial fifty years. Focusing on the half-century period that began with the marriage of Mary Tudor to Prince Philip of Spain, and spanned the reigns of Philip II and Elizabeth I of England, the essays in this anthology demonstrate and problematize, from the perspective of Spanish cultural history, the significant material, cultural, and symbolic contacts between the two countries. The volume shows how the two countries' alliances and clashes, which led to the debacle of the 'Invincible Armada' of 1588 and continued for decades afterwards, held enormous historical significance by shaping the religious, political, and cultural developments of the modern world.