Antonio Enríquez Gómez: Un Écrivain Marrane (v. 1600-1663) (review)

Reviews221 to a specifically feminine universe, which Calderón in turn associates with the supernatural. The fourteen-page works-cited list that closes the book serves as a concise , contemporary bibliography in Spanish on Calderón, and will, as will the book, be a useful tool for future studies of Calderón's theater. William Egginton University at Buffalo Révah, LS. Antonio Enriquez Gómez: Un Ecrivain Marrane (v. 16001663 ). Ed. Carsten L. Wilke. Paris: Chandeigne, 2003. 686 pp. Israel Salvator Révah (1917-1973) devoted much of his scholarly career to researching the life of the seventeenth-century Spanish poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist Antonio Enriquez Gómez. He first became interested in Enriquez Gómez during a stay in Lisbon in 1939, when he found records ofattempts by the Portuguese Embassy in Paris to prosecute Enriquez for having published a pamphlet entitled La política angélica (1647), which the Portuguese considered a dangerous attack on the Inquisition. Révah was intrigued, especially because, when he read the Política angélica, he found it disappointingly tame; its moderate criticisms ofthe Inquisition were based entirely on Christian doctrine. It was not until 1945 that he learned from Marcel Bataillon that the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris contained a unique copy ofa second part ofthe Política angélica. This second part included a much harsher critique of the Inquisition's practices as well as demands for drastic reform. While doing research in Madrid's Archivo Histórico Nacional in the summer of 1955, Révah found considerable Inquisitional documentation that Enriquez Gómez had judaized while living in exile in Rouen in the late 1640s. He also made the much more sensational discovery that Enriquez had not died in Amsterdam, as earlier historians had thought, but had in fact returned clandestinely to Spain in 1649, where he lived under the pseudonym Fernando de Zarate and wrote many fervently Catholic plays before being arrested by the Inquisition in 1661. He died in the Inquisition's prison in Seville, after being reconciled to the Church and receiving the last sacraments, on March 19, 1663. In 1 962 Révah published a critical edition of the second part of the 222BCom, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2005) Política angélica in the Revue des Études Juives. He introduced the edition by pointing out that almost everything previously published concerning Enriquez's biography was false. Then, in a succinct but surprisingly detailed six-page biographical sketch, he presented the facts he had discovered in his archival research. That summary has served as the starting point for all subsequent studies ofEnriquez's life. However, the work of later scholars was seriously hampered by the fact that Révah's article cited the archival documents only in French translation and that he refused to document any ofhis sources. In a footnote he explained that he would soon be publishing a study ofAntonio Enriquez Gómez and his family, and that study would include the many unpublished documents that had enabled him to reconstruct Enriquez's biography. Unfortunately, he died in 1973 without having written that study. Shortly after his death, his widow turned his papers over to his student Charles Amiel. In the prologue to his critical edition ofEnriquez's Elsiglopitagórico, published in 1977, Amiel promised to publish a biography that would document Révah's findings, as well as other discoveries that he himself had made. That book never appeared, and, during the more than twenty years that the documents were in his hands, Amiel stubbornly refused to allow other researchers access to them. At last the Révah family asked Carsten L. Wilke, who had published a biography of Enriquez in German in 1994, to edit Révah's papers on Enriquez for publication, and this book was published in Paris last year. It is gratifying that these materials are finally being made available to scholars, over forty years after Révah first announced their existence and promised to publish them. Wilke prefaces the book with an interesting account ofthe vicissitudes of Révah's own career, then discusses the scholarship that has appeared on Enriquez since Révah's...