Doctrina y diversión en la cultura española y novohispana (review)

For almost two decades Ignacio Arellano has been at the helm of the Grupo de Investigación Siglo de Oro (GRISO) based at the University of Navarra. More recently, as founder and director of the Centro de Estudios Indianos (CEI), an offshoot of GRISO, he has been behind the organization of numerous conferences, the publication of critical editions of otherwise little-known literary works, and several collections of articles on colonial literature and culture by scholars affiliated with the center. In the present volume the editors have brought together a selection of papers first delivered at the conference that under the same name took place in Puebla, México, in October 2007.

As has been the case for early-modern Europe, renewed interest in the civic and religious rituals, festivals, and ceremonies that made up a significant portion of public life in the Spanish colonies has resulted in the publication of a considerable number of monographs and articles by historians, art historians, and literary scholars. Indebted one way or another to José Antonio Maravall’s work on Baroque culture, these recent contributions explore the connections among public spectacle, artistic production, and colonial power. The essays at hand appear unburdened by any such concerns or any detectable urgency to offer fresh perspectives or insights.

The volume opens without an introduction, an absence that probably has less to do with the seemingly self-explanatory nature of the title than to the potentially daunting task of discerning methodological, theoretical, or thematic affinities among widely diverse contributions. This latter difficulty is compounded by the inclusion of essays with only a tenuous connection to the theme of the book. The theme does come into sharp focus in Arellano’s essay on the public celebrations that accompanied the beatification and canonization of the Jesuit saints San Ignacio and San Francisco Javier. Drawing from a substantial number of relaciones written to record in all their rich details the religious festivities organized for the occasions in places such as Goa, Madrid, Mexico, and France, Arellano analyzes the doctrinal teachings privileged by the Jesuits and the media employed for their transmission: plays, ephemeral art, poetic contests, religious prints, and so forth.

By comparing Sahagún’s description of the festival of Toxcatl in preconquest Mexico and Las Casas’s treatment of the same festival in his account of the massacre at the Templo Mayor in 1520, Beatríz Barrera highlights the efforts by the Dominican friar to represent the Nahua celebration as a strictly civic affair devoid of any religious meaning. On his part, Octavio Rivera addresses in a cursory manner—and relying almost entirely on a secondary bibliography—the survival of several genres of indigenous dances and performances in sixteenth-century religious celebrations such as Corpus Christi and missionary theater. Notwithstanding the title (“El más allá cristiano en la iconografía novohispana”), García Ponce’s piece amounts to a scene-by-scene retelling of an auto about the Final Judgment attributed to the Franciscan Andrés de Olmos.

Arnulfo Herrera’s annotated edition of an eschatological poem penned by the seventeenth-century Dominican friar and poet Pedro Muñoz de Castro on the occasion of Mardi Gras merits special mention. Rigorous, to the point, but also amusing, Herrera’s comments place Muñoz de Castro’s jovial invective against his peers in its social context and reveals literary practices in which the boundaries between the public and the private blur. Muñoz de Castro has a cameo role in Poot Herrera’s somewhat puzzling but playful musings on the responses elicited by the publication of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Carta atenagórica. Sor Juana is also represented in two other contributions, one on the influence of Petrarch on her poetry—although it quickly devolves into an enumeration of themes—and another by Roc...