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This book explores the power and peril of interpretive reading. It traces the legacy of Hispano-Roman philosopher and playwright, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, as constructed by and through readers. Despite his Iberian birth, Seneca is not generally thought of as a Spanish writer. In imperial Spain, however, he was popularly known as “the Spaniard.” The Spanish Crown used Seneca to paint the national character as ancestrally Roman. Polemicists claimed Seneca had prophesied Spain’s global conquests; they quoted his writings to defend the colonial caste system. Rival England, meanwhile, used Seneca to challenge Spanish Humanist thought based in the classics. Writing in the heat of Anglo-Spanish conflict, English writers and polemicists not only denied Spain’s claims to Seneca, but also they argued that Spaniards had misinterpreted Seneca’s Stoic teachings. Playwrights mimicked Seneca’s dramatic style in Hispanized tragedies that challenged Spanish imperialism. Yet these writers also defended England’s imperial aims. Hence, this book argues, the Spanish Seneca conjured by later readers was a posthumous double-agent, used by both Spain and England to defend global conquest.

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An article preview of this project has been published in the Sixteenth Century Journal.