Material and Symbolic Circulation Between Spain and England, 1554-1604 (review)

Material and Symbolic Circulation Between Spain and England, 1554-1604 constitutes a valuable addition to an emerging field of scholarship on Anglo-Spanish cultural contact. Anne J. Cruz, editor of the present volume, observes in her introduction that neglect of this field has arisen from the failure of historians and literary critics to engage in dialogue across disciplinary, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. This wide-ranging collection of essays seeks to address this lacuna by studying what Cruz describes as the "various modes of exchange of material goods and the circulation of symbolic systems of meaning both within and between England and Spain" (xix). The contributors to this volume-an internationally recognized team of Hispanists from both sides of the Atlantic-examine, in a more nuanced manner and from a variety of methodological perspectives, the many material and symbolic crossings of the Channel, some invited and others clearly unwelcome. What emerges from these essays, then, is a deeper, more complex understanding of the shifting alliances that inform the cultural interactions between Spain and England.

"Material and Symbolic Exchanges," the first of three subsections, addresses "the physical and representative connections across the channel" (xix). The opening chapters, by historians William D. Phillips, Jr. and Magdalena de Pazzis Pi Corrales, provide a comprehensive introduction to Anglo-Spanish relations in the second half of the sixteenth century. Phillips discusses Anglo-Spanish commercial contact and related dynastic alliances since the thirteenth century, addressed in terms of the two countries' relation to "Atlantic Europe." He concludes with the salutary reminder that although England's break with the Catholic Church prompts a series of disruptions that fragments the tenuous unity of the Atlantic, other repercussions, particularly the exodus of English Catholics into Spain, result in unlikely and unexpected contact. Such symbolic exchanges anticipate the later clandestine entries into England made by the Jesuits during the reign of Elizabeth. Pi Corrales then turns to the widening rift between England and Spain during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Philip II. Her chapter takes a close look at the reasons why England and Spain did not immediately go to war: factors such as the traditional Tudor-Hapsburg alliance against their perennial enemy, France, the safeguarding of sea routes to northern Europe, and the preservation of economic links between England and the Netherlands, militate against a direct confrontation.

Elizabeth Wright next examines the construction of Sir Francis Drake's fearsome image in Spain and the Americas in a piece entitled "From Drake to Draque: A Spanish Hero with an English Accent." Reports from released captives and diplomats alike culminate in Drake's apotheosis in Lope de Vega's 1598 epic, La Dragontea, a deeply ambivalent poem that walks an uneasy tightrope between frank admiration and politically correct loathing. Wright quite correctly sees Lope's work as a dire warning to Philip III and to a Spain increasingly anxious about the security of its New World possessions. Cruz's chapter, "Vindicating the Vulnerata: Cádiz and the Circulation of Religious Imagery as Weapons of War," considers the process of "symbolic warfare" in response to acts of iconoclastic violence committed during Drake's devastating raid on Cádiz in 1587. Cruz focuses on how a desecrated statue of the Virgin Mary, later afforded sanctuary at the English Jesuit College in Valladolid, is deployed as propaganda to incite feelings of outrage and resentment in the international Catholic community.

The second section of essays, organized under the title "Circulating Fictions of the Other," investigates configurations of otherness in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Barbara Fuchs's chapter, "Sketches of Spain: Early Modern England's 'Orientalizing' of Iberia," examines the conflation of Catholic Spain and the Islamic East in English plays such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Fuchs argues that this discursive strategy constitutes a powerful early manifestation of orientalism, one that willfully disregards national and confessional borders in order to "emphasize the alterity...