Voicing Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Inquisition, Social Criticism and Theology in the Case of El Criticón (review)

Scholars of early-modern Spain have labored long and hard to dispel the notion of a monolithic, all-powerful Inquisition. Patricia Manning's Voicing Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Spain is a valuable contribution to that project. The book focuses on the Spanish Inquisition's censorship of texts and describes how such efforts were hampered by various procedural loopholes, scarcity of personnel, porous borders, and resistance by intellectual elites. Contrary to José Antonio Maravall's notion of baroque Spain as a "guided culture" that successfully enforced ideological conformity, Manning argues that slack in the inquisitional system allowed certain Spanish authors to critique the status quo. Baltasar Gracián's El Criticón (1651-57) serves as a case in point and as the book's central case study. Manning has combined a nuanced reading of this text with solid archival research to produce an impressive piece of scholarship.

Before turning to El Criticón Manning devotes several chapters to the factors that made dissent possible in seventeenth-century Spain. She cites, for example, the divided jurisdiction between state and Inquisition, which created institutional inefficiencies and bureaucratic redundancies without providing sufficient manpower to effectively police ports or monitor booksellers. She also notes that the Inquisition's approval process for printed works was remarkably slipshod. In some cases authors (especially well-connected clergy such as the Jesuit Gracián) could count on friends and allies to review their books. In other cases, books sailed through the process without even being read, based on the reputation of the author. Authors who did not enjoy such preferential treatment were by no means passive in the face of inquisitional authority; Manning presents numerous episodes in which authors mounted spirited defenses of their works. Even if a book ended up being banned there were ways to circumvent the Inquisition's edict: special licenses were issued to theologians who needed access to prohibited works so as to combat the ideas contained therein; licenses also were granted to monastic orders for their libraries and to well-connected aristocrats for their private collections. If the books covered by these licenses were sold or transferred, the Inquisition found it almost impossible to track them down.

Against this background of a surprisingly fractious Spanish republic of letters, Manning interprets Gracián's El Criticón as a book that refuses to fit neatly into the didactic canon to which it has traditionally been assigned. In her analysis, Gracián, instead of writing an advice manual for the edification of the Counter-Reformation faithful, used the literary devices of El Criticón as tools for social critique. Rather than proffering straightforward moral guidance, Gracián presented a world so out of joint that it could only result in a disillusionment (desengaño) that did not even hold out the possibility of turning readers' attention to the hereafter. Gracian's portrayal of the afterlife (the "Island of Immortality," p. 18) neither conformed to orthodox visions of heaven nor offered a secular version of moral redemption, and thus in the end readers were left with nothing more than "a continuous string of deceptions" (p. 185).

In this disenchanted fictional world Gracián juxtaposed standard tropes lauding the glories of Spanish culture with veiled criticisms of contemporary Spanish society, criticisms that extended even to King Philip IV and his most trusted ministers. Manning argues that this structure offered readers a choice of interpretations, thereby implicating them in any subversive reading of the text and leaving the author "without blame" (p. 250). The degree to which such literary subtleties would have confounded the Holy Office is unclear, but the fact remains that El Criticón never appeared on the Inquisition's Index of Prohibited Books, and when Gracián eventually ran afoul of the...