Chapter Three begins with a reading of Everyman, and deals with the persistent narrative use of disability as a kind of metaphorical death. This is not just the case in medieval or early modern drama, but persists in the present day where it is still evident in the dangerous (and deadly) ideological fantasy that insists that disabled people’s lives are less worth living than those of enabled people. As well as examining this trope in texts like Seneca’s Oedipus, and through characters such as Lamech in biblically-inspired drama, this chapter also begins to address some of the problems of the model of a classical tradition as a way of figuring reception. The chapter closes with some thoughts on the relationship between this eugenicist conflating of disability and closeness to death, and gender.

Chapter 2 argues for the pivotal role of humanist rhetoric and oratory in shaping and disseminating the political ideology of the global Hispanic Monarchy. Rather than taking a protonation state like Mexico or Peru as the unit of analysis, this chapter considers all the surviving funeral orations for Philip IV (1605–1665) in Spanish America, Iberian Asia, the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish North Africa, Spanish Italy and the Spanish Netherlands. These panegyrics are highly revealing of the political ideology espoused in each of these contexts. Grounded in epideictic rhetoric, which channeled a long-standing humanist commitment to a virtue-driven model of kingship, these orations offered absolute standards for imitation by the elite in the person of the king (“virtue politics”). This was a political ideology that left space for institutionalized resistance or “negotiation” in the face of unjust local officials who could be measured according to these standards, and held accountable by petitions to the king, the ultimate source of justice.