Espana y America en una perspectiva humanista: Homenaje a Marcel Bataillon (review)

Every serious student of Latin America will sooner or later learn of the seminal importance of the Hispanist Marcel Bataillon (1895-1977). Grateful acknowledgments to Bataillon, starting with Robert Ricard in 1933, stud many of the enduring works on colonial Latin America. Indeed, Bataillon's works have shaped understandings of the Iberian colonization of the New World for the past 70 years. Initially interested in mentalities of the sixteenth-century Iberian Peninsula, Bataillon became increasingly drawn to the New World as demonstrated in his later works. This collection of essays, organized to celebrate the centenary of Bataillon's birth, is grouped around three basic areas of his work: his close historical readings of la literatura aurisecular, his studies on the influence of northern Humanism (most particularly the works of Erasmus) upon sixteenth-century Spain, and his critical readings of the contemporary chronicles, histories, and polemics of the conquest and colonization of the New World. The contributors, all disciples of Bataillon, have written their essays to trace out some of the paths that Bataillon opened. While Latin Americanists will find most interesting the essays directed towards the subject of the New World, all of the essays are helpful in understanding the pivotal sixteenth century and the growing interplay between the Old World and the New.

The first essay, by Aurora Egido, is a closely reasoned piece on the Humanist "search for a perfect language." It explores the manner in which Erasmus's meditations on grammar and spirituality were translated and received in Charles V's Spain. A particularly interesting aspect of this essay explores how Erasmus's translator, Pérez de Chinchón, expanded upon Nebrija's ideas about language and empire. The second essay, by Jean Canavaggio, examines how Bataillon's skeptical analysis of possible precursors to Lope de Vega withstood a series of attacks by later historians. This historiographical study demonstrates Bataillon's exemplary commitment to close textual analysis of historical and literary texts. The third essay, by Antonio Vilanova, is a rather pedantic essay employing Bataillon's textual methodology to assert that Cervantes's portrait of Don Quixote's delusions de origen libresco was based on both classical and contemporary accounts of madness.

The next two essays, by Ricardo García Cárcel and José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, treat the expanse of the Erasmian influence in sixteenth-century Spain. García Cárcel cautiously calls into question Bataillon's periodization of Erasmian thought in Spain and then calls for more attention to the Erasmian influence in Valencia and Catalonia. In short, this is a call to expand Bataillon's study beyond the immediate sphere of Castille. Tellechea Idígoras, using as his point of departure the simultaneous prohibition on study abroad for Spanish students, and the autos-da-fé of 1558 and 1559, casts a wider net and argues convincingly that the prohibitive spirit of the age embraced all of Europe and not just Spain. Within this essay is also a provocative argument that there was more continuity than discontinuity between the reigns of Carlos V and Felipe II.

The final set of essays explores the ramifications of the Iberian Peninsula's imperial, spiritual, and intellectual trajectories in the New World. Two of these essays, by Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso and André Saint-Lu, revisit a subject near to Bataillon's heart: the thoughts and actions of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Pérez, in a rather philosophical piece, notes happily that Lascasian studies have now transcended the national and the polemical. He then focuses on Las Casas's great contribution to the developing corpus of the philosophy of law. He argues that the greatest contribution made by the Defender of the Indies was neither religious nor anthropological, nor even moral—but...