Leggere nella Spagna moderna. Erudizione, religiosità e svago by Antonio Castillo Gómez (review)

This anthology masterfully synthesizes previously published work to provide a coherent and nuanced account of reading practices in Golden Age Spain. Castillo Gómez approaches reading, writing, and the history of texts in the traditions of Roger Chartier and histoire du livre, Armando Petrucci’s paleographic and documentary approach, and reception theory, making excellent use of an array of non-literary and non-canonical texts, both manuscript and print, their materiality and layout, and examples of early modern visual culture. He also marshals an astounding array of Inquisitorial processes to fill out this full social portrait of reading. Nor does Castillo Gómez hesitate to mine the canon for representations of non-literary reading, using Cervantes’ representations of his own and Don Quixote’s readings to frame his study, and Lope’s representations of and protestations about reading by the barely literate—indeed, Castillo Gómez shows that Cervantes had a kind of reception theory avant la lettre. While one chapter is dedicated to erudite reading, the majority are dedicated to the textual experiences of everyday people, the total horizon of texts and reading in this historical time and place.

In the first chapter, “‘Dell’ampio e brillante esame.’ La lettura tra norma e trasgressione,” he makes use of early modern discourses about reading to show what “reading” meant, for both men and women, as authors and subjects of such discourses. He uses the escrutinio of Don Quixote’s library as a launching point for tracing the taxonomies and ethics of books and reading, using many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century primary texts, including treatises, popular and devotional works, correspondence, memoirs, and Inquisitorial archives, to lay out a quasi official canon, both what and how to read. This canon was aimed at preventing uncontrolled practices though there are abundant testimonies of transgressive readings; readings were divided into “good” and “bad,” and the bad were almost ritualistically characterized as “profane, dishonest, and chivalric books,” for being “lies” (fictional) and “poisonous” to the soul and to good habits, and thus harmful to vulnerable readers like women, children, and the uneducated (“gente semplice”). Readings were also prescribed according to status, so that genres generally deprecated for the vulnerable, like poetry, might be useful for powerful elites; thus “proper readings” were those texts that properly formed one’s person in virtue and social propriety according to class.

Much of the focus for guiding reading is on children and women, because of the weakness of their intellects, and texts for primary education were supervised by parish priests; throughout the period, catechisms shifted the proportions of pedagogical versus moral and religious formation in favor of the later, particularly after Trent progressively eliminating profane texts from children’s reading. Finally, he details early modern anxiety about what seemed even then to be massive production of reading matter, which increased possibilities of reading among different audiences, and thus the possibility of ideas that escaped official control; hence the imposition of various layers of control, licencias to regulate production and Inquisitorial surveillance to monitor circulation.

The second chapter, “Leggere e annotare. La lettura erudita,” discusses learned reading. Erudite readers are habitual readers, but look for useful teachings rather than entertainment, and in few rather than many books. Castillo Gómez examines this form of private, silent intense reading evidenced in notes, both in margins and in common-place books, using several surviving manuscript commonplace books. In preaching, too, the explicit doctrine was to read a few books well, rather than many badly. For these readers, reading was tightly connected to writing, also explicit in sixteenth-century instruction for “los que son novicios en leer libros” (Castillo Gómez 44; citing Alejo Venegas, Tractado de ortographía en tres lenguas principales, 1531, c1v). Long characterized by intensive rather than extensive reading, appropriating the substance of “essential titles” by deep and repetitive interaction could also consist of underlining or otherwise marking in books themselves—hence the utility of Agostino Ramelli’s book wheel (reproduced...