Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554-1604: Transculturalisms, 1400-1700 (review)

England and Spain in the early modern period provide a rich diet of transculturalism. Throughout the period, relations between the two countries oscillated between close alliance and being on a war footing, with all possible variations in between. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the recently united Crowns of Castile and Aragon were seeking marital alliance with England, itself still recovering from the civil disruptions of the Wars of the Roses and settling under the new Tudor dynasty; at the end of the century, the descendants of the Catholic Monarchs and Henry Tudor were slogging through the end game of a debilitating war that had lasted for a generation and which neither side could claim to have won. The accession of a new dynasty in England, when James Stuart succeeded Elizabeth, made possible the cessation of hostilities with the negotiation of the Treaty of London in 1604.

Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554-1604 considers the second half of this turbulent period, an epoch which opens with a Hapsburg prince of Spain, Philip, installed as King Consort of England through his marriage to Mary Tudor. The marriage of Philip and Mary marked the apogee of Anglo-Hispanic relations but the decline in the alliance was rapid: after Mary's death in 1558, Philip flirted briefly with the prospect of marrying her sister Elizabeth, the new queen (a proposal which Elizabeth politely declined), but the interests of the two kingdoms drifted apart and the papal Bull of 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth as a heretic Protestant made outright hostility almost inevitable. The 1588 Spanish Armada, to use the English terminology, became the stuff of legend - if not Black Legend. Early essays in this volume review this historical context, from both anglophone and Hispanic traditions, and the juxtaposition of essays by William D. Phillips Jr and Magdalena de Pazzis Pi Corrales is in itself an exercise in transculturation. The final word rests with Spain, with Bernardo J. García García examining why the Treaty of London was as necessary for Spain as for England.

Elizabeth R. Wright, in an essay demonstrating how Francis Drake's reputation owes at least as much to contemporary Spanish reporting as to English, quotes from an account of Drake's circumnavigation and comments on it thus: 'A scribe employed by the Mexican Inquisition writes in the voice of a Portuguese witness, who recalls how an English mariner relies on an African slave to communicate [...] The best known version [in English] [...] was based on a Dutch rendition, which itself had been translated from a copy obtained from the Portuguese viceroy of India'. This multilingual ventriloquism typifies this volume, in which nationality and language slip backwards and forwards: Felipe II and Philip appear in the same sentence, Cádiz and Aragón rub shoulders with Cadiz and Aragon, the text abounds with Isabels, Isabelas and Elizabeths: constantly changing viewpoints show us Elizabeth I's relations with the troublesome Earl of Essex transformed into a love story in Antonio Coello's play El conde de Sex (prefiguring Hollywood's Elizabeth and Essex, although the link is not made). A statue of the Virgin, damaged in the Earl of Essex's raid on Cadiz, was translated to the English College at Valladolid, one of whose students, Titus Oates, would have a pernicious influence on English attitudes to Catholicism in 1679, as Anne J. Cruz points out; while another refugee from the Sack of Cadiz, one of the Isabelas who people the volume, is considered by Frederick A. de Armas in his analysis of Cervantes' La española inglesa in an essay nestling among others examining England's attitudes to, and historiography of, the Spanish world.

The strength of Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England lies in this dialogue across the cultures. We learn from what the essays say to each other, as well as from what...