re clearly charts the evolution of her personality, intellect, and goals in interaction with events. Some revision and rearrangement of certain chapters, for example, builds on what was initially presented as background information in discussing how importantly history and tradition figured in her thinking and self-representation.
Reflection has confirmed that Isabel was highly intelligent, courageous, and politically astute. Developed and underscored in this edition is her demonstration of several outstanding traits: she was possessed of great moral conviction, she was ambitious, and she was literal-minded. She had a strong sense of reality, and her own reality included a huge legacy of myth -myth interwoven with and construed as history, and that history as divinely inspired and as sacrosanct tradition. Upon gaining the crown, she committed herself wholeheartedly to fulfilling the traditional aspirations of her nation and its greatest rulers as she understood them. Isabel believed fervently that Spain's ruler was preeminent on earth and divinely charged with leading an ongoing Spanish mission that in time was to culminate universal history, and that central to that mission was Christian advance against infidel and heretic. She was now that ruler. Moreover, she recognized that to reign successfully required the monarch be seen as imbued with virtues considered royal, the foremost of them being prudence, and she strove both to cultivate and personify those virtues.
This book tells how Isabel, displaying moral conviction and unflinching moral certitude, turning ideology into Spanish destiny, gained immense popularity. It looks at how she and her adherents widely disseminated her stance -through histories, architecture and iconography, drama, poems, and ballads, and songs and sermons. And it traces how what she stood for struck responsive chords in popular belief. Clearly, however disparate her policies, in carrying them out she translated aspirations commonly understood as Spanish ideals into anticipated reality; and her policies gained cohesion through each being presented as furthering the national mission. It shows how Isabel, both behaving as an absolute monarch and firmly believing in the propaganda she engendered, successfully presented centralizing innovation as continuity and reform as renovation. In the doing, she seamlessly linked religion and politics. So, for example, she rationalized the Inquisition and the expulsions of Jews and Muslims as eradicating impurities or stains from the social fabric.
A principal criticism of the original edition was that it relied too strongly on the writings of Isabel's chroniclers and courtiers. Since then, work in various fields of history has confirmed that such accounts, beyond being many and rich and pleasurable, can be read to provide invaluable insights into the context and narrative of a royal life and into ideologies speaking to systems of cultural belief as well. To a generation wise in the art of the spin, it is far easier to accept that Isabelline chroniclers both attest to the gap between historical reality and operative myth and to their symbiosis. The decade or so since that first edition appeared has reconfirmed that how Isabel and her publicists presented her can yield crucial evidence to her character, convictions, and purposes, as well to the ideational, religious, and political contexts of her times. Those chronicling contemporaries of hers -along with the rhetoric she and they employed and other conduits of her symbolic imagery- reveal just how Isabel appealed to, and stimulated, an ingrained militant religious faith and a belief in national mission. Moreover, she did so with telling effect on Spanish, Western, and indeed world history. The historian, José Manuel Nieto Soria, who has done much in the past dozen years to trace the two-way flow of political theology in Isabel's Spain, has put it this way: "at the end of the fifteenth century, the ideological foundations and the practice of propaganda that were consubstantial were not secondary aspects of rulin