This collection of essays takes as its point of departure early modern Spain's insistent rhetorics of nation and kingship, of a monolithic body of shared values and beliefs, especially in respect of racial and gender stereotypes and hierarchies, and of a centralized and ostensibly absolutist state legislative apparatus. These rhetorics, typically clothed (or disguised) in an authority borrowed from biblical and classical sources, furnished the ‘official’ ideological landscape of Habsburg Spain. As such, they inevitably found their way into the very fabric of most ‘authoritative’ texts of the period, whether legal, historical, economically, or morally focused, or, indeed, fictional. But this is not to suggest that they mapped unproblematically onto the complex topography of everyday life, or the immediate experience of Spaniards; nor did it preclude them from being subjected by contemporaries to sceptical or even subversive commentary, especially in fiction. The drama of the period, whose powerful ironies are only now coming fully to be recognized, provides an obvious case in point. This volume explores the extent to which these rhetorics and the ideology they helped to construct or underpin reflected or, just as commonly, failed to reflect, the realities of social, economic and cultural practice in early modern Spain. It sets against their typically exorbitant claims the lived, messy and sometimes contradictory experience of Spaniards across a broad social spectrum, both at the centre and at the margins, not just of peninsular society, but of the Hispanic world as a whole. Several chapters draw on contributors’ recent archival work in Spain to examine how confronting the claims of ideology were thorny questions of economic pragmatism, executive feasibility, jurisdictional conflict, and, most important of all, social and political complexity, especially as glimpsed in specific regional or local inflections. Meanwhile, as one contributor argues, the experience of the New World challenged even the adaptive resources of what passed for ‘authoritative’ language itself. The volume explores how the familiar rhetorics of the day, whether related to Spain's much-vaunted martial prowess, the role of women, or the construction of ethnic, religious or cultural difference, could find themselves at odds, or simply incommensurate with lived experience, just as they might be subtly contested or subverted in the relatively protected space of the theatre.