Medieval and Renaissance Spain and Portugal: Studies in Honor of Arthur L-F. Askins (review)

This book is a collection of twenty-one articles published in honor of Arthur Lee-Francis Askins, for many years a renowned professor and scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Professors Schaffer and Cortijo Ocaña have done an excellent job as editors of the volume. Charles Faulhaber's introduction gives a detailed account of Prof. Askins's achievements as an important editor of sixteenth-century poetry manuscripts and pliegos sueltos from both Spain and Portugal, and his overall professional career. The volume also provides a bibliography of Professor Askins's scholarly production. All essays are written by recognized scholars in the fields of Spanish and Portuguese literatures and cultures. Even though the number of essays included is quite large, it is a collection that is unified by similar interests and, more importantly, by a common philological, historical approach.

For the purposes of clarity, we can identify four major areas of study in the volume. Three articles are devoted to topics related to the book as artifact and to important holdings in library collections. Gemma Avenoza explores the library of Lope García Salazar and tries to identify the reasons for his love of books, and when and where he made his purchases. The article, like many of the pieces in the collection, is well-documented and provides ample information on the topic. Fernández Vega provides bibliographical information on the twenty-seven Catalan incunabula purchased and recorded by Fernando Colón, brother of Christopher Columbus, who owned one of the most significant collections of books in Spain. Each bibliographical entry is fully documented by extended historical commentary. A very interesting contribution to the volume is the article written by Hook and Lewis-Smith, in which both scholars explore annotations made by a group of different readers to the two-volume edition of Bibliotheca Hispana. The written comments found add, expand, and correct the existing bibliographical information included in a text once owned by the famous Hispanist James O. Crosby. The annotations have important repercussions for the understanding of early sixteenth-century drama and, possibly, the history of early printing in Alcalá de Henares.

A second group of articles explores topics related to biography and authorship. After an exhaustive investigation, Vicenç Beltrán identifies provisionally the true historical identity of the poet Fernan Velho. Prof. Angel Gómez Moreno proposes that Juan del Encina is the author of the Tratado del menosprecio del mundo (ca. 1500). The article also includes a transcription of the poem in its entirety. Ana Hatherly compares the lives of Luis Vaz de Camões and Fernão Mendes Pinto, in particular their experiences in Asia. The renowned scholar Dorothy Severin discusses the problems of authorship in Sepultura to Macías. The article also includes a transcription of the poem with commentary.

A third grouping of articles deal primarily with lyric poetry, ballads, and pliegos sueltos. The well-known scholar Alberto Blecua describes the historical transformations of a particular sonnet ("Perdido ando, señora, entra la gente"). Pedro Cátedra studies the existence as literatura de cordel of two works entitled Reglas de bien vivir and Desprecio del mundo, both written by Antonio de Espinosa. Da Costa Fontes studies how modern ballads in Portugal perpetuate parallelism, using as an example the ballad "A Condessa Traidora." Thomas Hart explores the issue of monotony in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amor by comparing them to the troubadour canso. Víctor Infantes writes a bibliographical supplement on pliegos sueltos published after the seminal edition of the Nuevo diccionario by Rodríguez-Moñino (1970). Beatriz Mariscal Hay studies the survival of a medieval Spanish ballad in the oral tradition, first transcribed in 1917.

The majority of the essays can be included in the fourth and more general category of historical — and, to a lesser extent...