Fray Hernando de Talavera y Granada by Vega García-Ferrer, María Julieta, and: El poder de la palabra en el siglo XV: fray Hernando de Talavera by Isabella Iannuzzi (review)

Almost fifty years ago, Tarsicio de Azcona noted in his critical biography Isabel la Católica that modern scholarship “no ha dedicado todavía la atención que merece” (226) to the queen’s influential confessor and advisor, the Hieronymite friar Hernando de Talavera (1430?–1507). Despite Azcona’s admonition, knowledge of Talavera’s career has advanced only piecemeal since the work of Márquez Villanueva in 1960–61. In 1985 Suberbiola provided the first carefully documented account of Talavera’s archiepiscopal administration. The 1992 quincentenary of Granada’s surrender to Castile inspired several publications and republications of (almost hagiographical) works about Talavera (Fernández de Madrid, Resines Llorente), but these contributed virtually no new information. Four decades after Márquez Villanueva’s work, the best brief critical treatment of Talavera’s career remains the introduction to Aldea’s 1976 essay on the archbishop’s library and will. Two new book-length studies by María Julieta Vega García-Ferrer and Isabella Iannuzzi now seek to remedy the neglect of Talavera in modern historical scholarship.

In Fray Hernando de Talavera y Granada, the distinguished musicologist brings her formidable specialized expertise to the study of Talavera’s major liturgical composition, the mass In festo deditionis nominatissimae urbis Granatae. She frames her analysis (93–128) between a summary, but careful analysis of Talavera’s life (19–92) and extensive appendices of iconographic and documentary evidence (129–314).

Her first chapter, “En torno a las Vidas y la biografía de Fray Hernando (c. 1430–1507)” (20–63) begins with a welcome attempt to sort the relative merits and provenance of the various contemporary and sixteenth-century biographies of Talavera (20–25), and then recounts the full trajectory of his life, from his birth around 1430 into a humble converso family to the miracles reported soon after his death in 1507. A second chapter, “La obra religiosa, benéfica y cultural de fray Hernando de Talavera” (65–92), focuses specifically on his achievements as the first Archbishop of Granada. Some readers may find excessive her praise of Talavera’s tolerance toward heterodoxy (40) and non-violent methods for evangelizing Granada’s Muslims (86–92), or her claim that his proposals for improving clerical morals could have helped avoid the Protestant Reformation (30). Nonetheless, Vega García-Ferrer’s third chapter, “Fray Hernando, compositor: la Misa y el Oficio de la Toma de Granada” (93–128), offers the most incisive analysis to date of this important work of musical propaganda, whose contribution to promoting the political and religious ideology of the Catholic Monarchs she explicates very exactly. Scholars of this era will especially appreciate Vega García-Ferrer’s painstaking identification of the biblical figures and allusions that Talavera assembles to express the political and religious ideals of Isabel and Ferdinand, since these scriptural references undoubtedly deserve notice in other non-liturgical texts as well.

The extensive appendices, which constitute over half of Vega García-Ferrer’s work, offer a cornucopia of iconographic and textual material regarding Talavera’s career:

eight full-color plates of paintings, monuments, manuscripts, and incunabula

(129–36)

a new critical transcription of the anonymous Sumario de la vida del primer arçobispo de Granada, don frey Hernando de Talavera (Evora: Andrés de Burgos, 1557)

(138–221)

an edition of a previously unknown manuscript copy (made in 1527) of Talavera’s will

(226–55)

an edition and Spanish translation of the In festo deditionis nominatissimae urbis Granatae

(256–97)

various documents regarding the last years of Talavera’s career and his posthumous veneration

(298–312).

Of this material, the edition of...