Materia crítica: Formas de ocio y de consumo en la cultura áurea ed. by Enrique García Santo-Tomás (review)

242 REVIEWS hidalgo pobre Quijano y el ocioso hidalgo rico Miranda) y la mujer (el ama y la sobrina como figuras no maternales cómplices de formas represivas de control del Estado y de la Inquisición). Este monográfico es el primero que intenta conceptualizar de manera sistemática la domesticidad masculina en el ámbito de las literaturas hispánicas de la temprana modernidad, alejándose con ello de una tradición que se ha enfocado en la mujer, y que incluye aproximaciones tan diversas como La mujer, la casa y la moda (en la España del rey poeta) de José Deleito y Piñuela (Espasa-Calpe, 1946), la primera parte de El ángel del hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain de Bridget Aldaraca (U of North Carolina P, 1991) y Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain de Georgina Dopico Black (Duke UP, 2001). La virtud principal del volumen es su convicción de que la domesticidad no es una subdisciplina esclava de la historia de la vida privada y que, consecuentemente, merece un estudio independiente que rescate sus múltiples dimensiones discursivas e ideológicas. Por eso, el libro busca interpretar la domesticidad como una noción tanto material como discursiva, tanto individual como colectiva, tanto identitaria como económica. La variedad genérica que incorpora es igualmente elogiable porque permite palpar la distancia entre la idealización del ámbito interior ejercida por la ideología estamental, manifiesta especialmente en los manuales, y las diversas apropiaciones culturales de ese ideal en otras expresiones textuales de la España del Renacimiento. Noelia Cirnigliaro Dartmouth College García Santo-Tomás, Enrique, ed. Materia crítica: Formas de ocio y de consumo en la cultura áurea. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009. HB. 432 pp. ISBN: 978-84-848-94506 . Materia crítica is a collection of sixteen essays that explores different aspects of the material culture of Golden Age Spain with an emphasis on luxury consumer goods, some of them familiar (clothing, coaches, fine art) and others less so and all the more fascinating for their RESEÑAS 243 unfamiliarity (baubles and trinkets, snow, and candle-wax). The editor, Enrique García Santo-Tomás, sets an ambitious agenda for the book in his introduction, “Barroco material/ material barroco.” Thoroughly engaged with recent Anglophone scholarship on the history of consumption and material culture, García Santo-Tomás proposes to bring an interdisciplinary, dynamic engagement with consumer objects to Spanish literary criticism, where, he argues, this kind of approach is still in its infancy. The resulting volume reveals a still-developing field of inquiry with essays that range from the purely descriptive to the entirely theoretical, with the most innovative and successful among them gracefully combining the two and coordinating literature with other kinds of evidence. The collection tilts heavily towards the field of Spanish language and literature, with only four contributions from other disciplines (three from history and one from art history). The articles are grouped into thematic sections with enticing titles, although readers are mostly left to determine for themselves precisely how the essays relate to the stated themes and to one other. The section entitled “Visiones del ocio urbano” includes four essays on popular and courtly entertainments and the cross-over between them. There was no shortage of leisure activities in Golden Age Spain, where diversions ranged from bloody bullfights to gentler courtly games that were popularized by printed books. Such entertainments were the subject of constant criticism by Spanish writers (including the women Luisa de Padilla and María de Guevara, studied here by Nieves RomeroD íaz) and by foreign observers (such as the oft-cited Madame d’Aulnoy), whose voices dominate these essays. Spaniards like the seventeenth-century critic Juan de Zabaleta, cited by Pedro Ruiz Pérez, tended to criticize leisure activities as having a negative impact on the soul. In amusing contrast, the French authors from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, who are cited by Jesús Pérez-Magallón, criticized the court of Charles II for not being entertaining and frivolous enough. Pérez-Magallón argues that...