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324ReviewsLa colonica 34.2, 2006 da Costa Fontes, Manuel. The .Ait of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado. West Lafayette. Indiana: Purdue I P. 2005. 346 pages. ISBNU55753-348-2. In his comprehensive study. The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado, Manuel da Costa Fontes demonstrates how converso writers, both before and after the establishment ofthe Spanish Inquisition in 1481, questioned and challenged the basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy through an art that may well be qualified as subversive. In the shadow ofthe Inquisition, under which manv conversos faced persecution and the constant threat of imprisonment, torture or even death, the onlv viable form of jirolesl was through literature, a miiltifaceted art form that afforded them the means to voice their dissent without being discovered and proseciiled bv an inquisitorial society, one that would be onlv too eager to see them jiav for their jierceived Transgression. While drawing from a wide array of literan rexts that range frolli Galician-Portuguese cantigas de am/go and Castilian villancicos to fifteenth and sixteenth-ceiitun- jirose genres such as the sentimental, picaresque and Moorish novels, da Costa Fontes centers bis study on two works that would be highly influential in the forging of die modern novel in Spain: Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina and Francisco Delicado's La Druma andaluza. Da Costa Fontes examines how Rojas and Delicado encode a counterdiscourse in their works through the use of irony, jiarodv and allegon in order to challenge the dominant, mainstream discourse of Christian society. In lexis such as La Celestina and La Lozana andaluza, both deejilv riddled with ambiguity, it comes as no surprise that many scholars have oftentimes negated the possibility that their writers were conversos. Denying these writers both their status and invaluable contributions as conversos is not onlv tantamount to a silencing of their voices, but it is also a clear lack of critical appreciation of literan texts thai, far from being devalued bv their converso component, are instead enriched bv their socio-historical, religious and political perspectives. In Chapter One, "The Converso Problem", da Costa Fontes examines how anti-Semitic sentiments against Jews and conversos often reached culminating jioints during the long centuries of what has been termed as convivencia, a concept that may onlv he jiartiallv true, since the violent pogroms of 1391 and the ensuing mass conversions of Jews may point to the fallacy of idealizing convivencia as a Utopian construct. In the face of the anti-Semitic laws sanctioned bv a Sjianish pojie in Avignon, Benedict XIII, many Jews "?.2 (Spring. 2006): 32-1-28 Reviews325 were forbidden to live alongside Christians and conversos, often having to abandon their professions. Da Costa Fontes details the anti-Semitic statutes on "purity of blood", which culminated in the anti-//i«rra??o disturbances in Toledo in 1449 and the "Sentencia-Estatuto" ("Judgment and Statute"), in which conversos were to be excluded from any public or Church office. The politics of exclusion, however, are best exemplified by the tragic expulsion of the Jews in 1492, which is both a political and a religious measure undertaken by the Catholic monarchs in order to eradicate what they perceived to be pervasive "Judaizing" among conversos, which led in turn to the putatively voluntary exile of those Jews who chose not to convert to Christianity. Emphasizing the importance of understanding the significance behind the converso background of Fernando de Rojas and Francisco Delicado, in Chapter Two, "Repression and Artistic Expression", da Costa Fontes points to the converso background of writers such as Rojas and Delicado, a background inextricably bound to their works. In the case of Delicado, it is the author's personal circumstances of being a converso forced to go into exile twice -first from Spain, and then from Rome after the sack in 1527that ostensibly prompted the creation of La Lozana andaluza, whose female protagonist da Costa Fontes views as Delicado's literary alter ego, a partner of sorts in exile. Da Costa Fontes focuses on the polemical works by the Jewish and converso poets ofthe Cancionero de Baena (1445), a multifaceted compilation of 600 poems by fiftv-six authors from the royal court, spanning various generations...

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