Devoción y fiesta en la pluma barroca de Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea: Estudio de la 'Vigilia y octavario de San Juan Bautista' (review)

In her retirement after 44 years as a teacher of Spanish language and literature and of language pedagogy, María de los Angeles Campo Guiral completed her graduate study in 1990, defending her thesis on the Cistercian author Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea. The dissertation consisted of a critical edition and study of Abarca de Bolea's Vigilia (1679). Campo Guiral's critical edition appeared in 1994. It is gratifying to observe that even as Abarca published her Vigilia at the age of 77, Campo Guiral was likewise in her late seventies when in 2003 the analytical part of her dissertation was ready for the press. However, Devoción y fiesta was only published in 2007, some six months after the author's death.

Vigilia y octavario is many things: a late pastoral romance, an anthology of Abarca de Bolea's poetry, a Baroque miscellany. Campo Guiral's study of some 450 pages is in many senses exhaustive, as it considers the Vigilia's pastoral frame, interpolated short stories, flores historiales (consisting of 700 instances of the importance of the number seven – a sort of exercise in Baroque trivial pursuit), poetry, and interpolated playlet (Baile pastoril al Nacimiento). The principal chapters are subdivided. For example, the discussion of the pastoral frame includes questions such as narrative time and space, the themes of love and pilgrimage, the characters, the description of sacred and profane festivities, etc. Devoción is meticulously documented and detail-oriented in the extreme. Thus, the reader learns that the Vigilia mentions one more musical instrument than Cervantes' Galatea, the only other pastoral romance in which rustic instruments are named in detail (104). Castro Guiral writes very clearly, and each chapter or subsection ends with a careful summary of her conclusions. It is therefore possible for the reader to quickly get the gist of Campo Guiral's ideas by perusing the final paragraph of each section of her volume.

While Campo Guiral uses tried and true literary approaches and her study's very mechanical structure makes for a certain predictability, there are moments when her ideas take flight, as, for example, her analysis of the stylistic effects of the use of esdrújulos in passages involving gushing blood or spurting water (331–32). I likewise found interesting the analysis of the differences between two versions of the same poem, one published previously, the other inserted into the Vigilia (397–99). There is a bibliography, but no index. As if Campo Guiral's erudition were not sufficient reason to recommend this study, let me commend its high production values – the Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses has produced a particularly handsome volume. Devoción y fiesta will be the necessary point of departure for future studies of Abarca de Bolea.