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  • Warnings to the Kings and Advice on Restoring Spain: A Bilingual Edition
  • Ronald E. Surtz
Maria De Guevara , Warnings to the Kings and Advice on Restoring Spain: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Nieves Romero-Díaz. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2007. xxix + 165 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-14081-0. [End Page 710]

This volume contains four texts: Treatise and Warnings by a Woman, Concerned for the Good of Her King and Affronted by Part of Spain (1663); Disenchantments at the Court and Valorous Women (1664); Memorial of the House of Escalante (1654); and Report on the Day's Journey That the Countess of Escalante Made to the City of Vitoria to Kiss Her Majesty's Hand (1660). At first glance Guevara seems to be all over the place, but, as the translator points out, two issues stand out among the author's preoccupations: the importance of assigning government positions to well-qualified candidates; and the ongoing war with Portugal. There may have been a personal dimension to Guevara's choice of issues, since, for example, the war had devastated the estates she owned along the Portuguese border, and the Portuguese had captured and imprisoned her husband. In the opening of her Treatise she complains about seized estates and declares that the sovereign must learn to duly appreciate the services rendered in the past by noble families (51). The translator also points to Guevara's conservative stand on social issues. She is zealous of the privileges of the nobility, resents the presence of nouveaux riches Portuguese bankers and merchants in Spain (many of whom – Guevara claims – the king had rewarded with properties taken from Spaniards), and is fiercely anti-Semitic (many said bankers were descendants of converted Jews). Since a number of the same grievances are voiced in Guevara's genealogical Memorial of 1654, I suspect that a certain self-interest lies behind much of her ostensibly altruistic advice.

At the end of Treatise, Guevara wishes not only that she herself but that everyone in Spain were an Amazon, in order to defend her country's honour (63). In Disenchantments she mentions the Amazons again in the context of declaring that women are capable of surpassing men in the field of letters (73). While the translator's introduction exaggerates the importance of these two mentions of the Amazons, it is nonetheless certain that Guevara makes a number of explicit feminist statements. Women should be allowed to sit on royal administrative councils, where they would give as good advice as the 'keenest councilors' (75). Guevara recommends sending troops of women to fight in the Portuguese war (57), and states that 'a government of women is at times better than that of many men' (71). Nonetheless, given the wide range of issues that Guevara discusses, such an insistence on her feminism in a sense misrepresents the text. One could, for example, make a cogent – although considerably less interesting – case for Guevara's championing of Christian virtue.

Inasmuch as this bilingual volume is directed at both Spanish- and English-speaking readers, the latter are not always given the immediate help they require. For example, in order to understand the significance of Guevara tracing her origins back to Don Pelayo (4), the reader needs to be told who Don Pelayo was. The term 'New Christian' first appears on p. 12, but it is only defined – sort of – in a note on p. 125. The quotation on p. 29 refers to 'a second Spanish Cava', but the reader has to wait for a footnote on p. 126 to learn who La Cava was.

A number of questions beg discussion. For example, I miss some commentary on the fact that only one of the treatises was published – and anonymously at that. Indeed, the prime reason for attributing Disenchantments to Guevara is a manuscript annotation on one of the copies of the printed text. While the attribution to Guevara is verisimilar, there is no awareness on the editor's part that her authorship is a potentially problematic issue. It likewise seems worth further comment that Guevara dedicated Disenchantments to Prince Joseph Charles (the future Charles II), who at the...

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