Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain (review)

This book is a refreshing contribution to Spanish cultural history in the early modern period. In a field long dominated by the themes of monarchs, political institutions, economics, and religion, Bouza's work comes as a welcome and suggestive surprise.

A translation of the original Spanish version of 1999, this text includes a laudatory forward by Roger Chartier that reveals the international company the writer keeps. Indeed, Bouza's writing is a relatively rare example of an early modern Spanish cultural historian who has incorporated the theoretical insights and developments of the broader European and American scholarship. This book is clearly informed by the rich literature on the history of the book, reading, the reception of texts and images, and a variety of other themes related to print culture, visual culture, and performance. Here we finally see Habsburg Spain connected to this important body of work.

A short book of just over 100 pages including notes and bibliography, this text is best approached as a series of four essays that represent an opening or blueprint for other scholars interested in the field. One of the great strengths of the work is that it is based largely upon little-known primary sources that the author has dug out of Spanish libraries and manuscript collections. For these references alone, it is worth a careful read, and there is much more to be said about the sources that he generously digs up and presents to us. But Bouza also asks big questions of his sources and offers novel answers that are well worth pondering.

In chapter 1, "Hearing, Seeing, Reading and Writing," for example, the author tackles the complex problem of the relationship between reading, printing, oral culture, and memory. Drawing on a wide-ranging collection of texts such as biblical commentaries, pedagogical treatises, and plays, this chapter outlines some of the major developments that occurred in what can broadly be called communication theory between roughly 1500 and 1700. This is obviously an enormous task, but Bouza's familiarity with the primary sources allows him to handle it with an economy of words that is impressive.

Particularly central to this chapter is the text by Blas Antonio de Ceballos, Historical and Moral Book Regarding the Origin and Excellences of the Most Noble Art of Reading, Writing and Narrating and Its Teaching. Written in 1692, it is one of the first texts published on the subject in Europe, and Bouza finds it especially useful for the long historical perspective it offers coming as it does at the end of the Habsburg period. More specifically, for Bouza the text reveals that in Habsburg Spain written and printed texts were "understood as a faithful copy of that which is oral or visual" (8). Moreover, the author goes on to point out that in contrast to much earlier work on printed culture, the Spanish example reveals that oral culture and presentation was not seen as inferior to the printed text. Rather, "writing sought to imitate speech and images," and authors like Lope de Vega could go even further to poke fun at the printing press as an instrument that spread confusion instead of wisdom or clarity (9).

Chapter 2 pursues a similar line of inquiry concerning the relationship between the spoken word, texts, and images. Again, the author draws on a rich variety of works such as the Informative Brief for Painters of 1633 to explore the close relationship between texts and images as political and religious tools of both teaching and propaganda. The author handles the use of both texts and religious imagery after Trent with a balance that gives neither too much nor too little attention to the Council's impact.

In the remaining two chapters of the book, Bouza analyzes the pervasive impact of writing and the printing press on Spanish society, as well as the more formal institutional developments related...