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  • Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity
  • Sara T. Nalle
Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity. By Henry Kamen. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 240. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index. $38.00 cloth.

Unlike his previous works, Kamen’s present book was first published in Spain as Del imperio a la decadencia. Los mitos que forjaron a la España moderna (2006). Originally meant for the Spanish public, Kamen’s goal is to show how deeply attached Spaniards (and some historians) are to certain national myths, or as Kamen calls them, historical fictions. Myths serve to perpetuate closely held convictions, and it would seem that Spaniards are loathe to [End Page 269] give up any number of their favorite prejudices about their own country. The myths, mostly about what did or did not happen in the sixteenth century, were cooked up in the polarized nineteenth and twentieth centuries by both liberals and conservatives to bolster their own vision of the future of all or some part of Spain, and/or to tear down their opponents’ position. In Kamen’s retelling of them, some of the myths can be amusing, as in how in the late nineteenth century the Catalans fabricated out of whole cloth their national anthem, dance, and holiday. On a serious note, however, so much harm has been carried out in the name of misguided notions of Spain’s past that Kamen believes it is necessary, in the interest of political good health, to lance them like a festering sore in the national consciousness.

There are seven myths in all (readers of this journal will be reminded of Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest [2003], but there ends any similarity). Some of the myths are jingoistic, propping up national greatness, and tend to be used by conservatives, in the past especially by the Franco regime (1939–1975). These are as follows: the myth that the country we know as “Spain” was always a historical nation; that the Spaniards were gifted as empire builders who were exceptionally devoted to Christianity; and that the Spanish language was universal. Since the early nineteenth century, for their part, liberals have tended to focus on the negative myths that explain the country’s backwardness: that the Inquisition was a hegemonic, racist institution that doomed Spain; that the country has always been in decline; and that its monarchy was a failure.

Kamen is at his best and most interesting while explaining the historiographical origins of some of these ideas and how, despite all we know today about Spanish history, they persist among well-educated Spaniards. However, the author has a propensity to cherry-pick some of his facts, and he cannot resist trying to score points against colleagues he believes are ensnared by the bad old thinking. He enjoys taking on the “professional historians” for perpetuating the myth of Spain’s decline “because they can entertain themselves with its concepts, [which are] a nightmare to students, who continue to struggle with its tortuous ingenuity, and a solace to ideologists, who believe that it explains what happened to their country” (p. 97).

Since Imagining Spain is an interpretive essay originally meant for a popular Spanish audience, one which Kamen finds complacent and badly informed about the nation’s history, I can understand the author’s temptation to paint his points with broad strokes. Nonetheless, at times I found that Kamen’s arguments failed to stand up in the light of the evidence. For example, my particular area of expertise is the Inquisition and the social history of religion in Spain. I was surprised to learn that “the Inquisition played little part in the process of racial discrimination” (p. 147), and that “there was certainly no evidence of exceptional devotion to the faith, or of a Spain that had renewed itself spiritually and was about to dedicate itself to converting Europe and America” (p. 81).

The book’s value to an American audience is twofold. For the casual reader, Imagining Spain provides some context for the arguments that are employed in justifying different nationalist agendas one might find in the country. Historians will find useful Kamen’s historiographical...

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