New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain by Elvira Vilches (review)

140 REVIEWS Juana’s rhetorical self-portrait with great clarity, but the book’s distinctive contribution to scholarship on this much discussed author is to demonstrate how Sor Juana’s life, the things she owned, and her conventual setting became a kind of mirror of Mexico City as the Spectacular City. Through her analysis of these and later Baroque writers of both New Spain and Peru, Stephanie Merrim catalogs and critiques the stultifying order that both Rama, and, especially, Leonard found in the seventeenth-century Spectacular City and, she argues, that they overstated and misunderstood. While I am not fully persuaded that creoles were as politically sophisticated as they are portrayed in this book, the author’s erudite, well-written, and at times quite witty text represents a literary history with much to offer the literary scholar and cultural historian alike. Susan Kellogg University of Houston Vilches, Elvira. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. HB. 368 pp. ISBN: 9780226856186. Elvira Vilches breaks new ground with this ambitious study of literature and economics in early modern Spain. Truly transatlantic in scope and transdisciplinary in approach, the argument examines the crisis of value and identity triggered by the economic upheavals stemming from Spain’s encounter with the Americas and the birth of the modern money economy. Vilches introduces the complex world of early modern economics to readers who may not be familiar with its history, explores the ways in which the influx of precious metals and the growth of the credit economy destabilized notions of value and identity, and then turns to literary texts. New World Gold draws upon a broad range of scholarship in developing its historical narrative and theoretical apparatus. The bibliography includes a gamut of economic historians, but perhaps more importantly it also features a series of thinkers, like Georg Simmel, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Marc Shell, who have explored the philosophical 141 RESEÑAS dimensions of money and the use of the language of economics to understand art, literature, and representation more broadly. Mary Poovey’s work on literature and economics in eighteenth-century Britain also serves as an important methodological precursor. Vilches draws upon this scholarship to demonstrate that the dramatic economic transformations experienced by Spain, and Europe more broadly, during the long sixteenth century were not a merely economic matter. The revolution in prices triggered by the influx of precious metals from the Americas, something that will be familiar to all Hispanists, as well as the development and popularization of sophisticated instruments of credit, something that may very well be new to readers of New World Gold, combined to erode confidence in the intrinsic value of precious metals, and with it, confidence in absolute value as such. The theoretical portions of the argument can be very tough going, particularly for a reader who does not feel confident with economics in general. The language is often quite dense and abstract, and this reviewer often wished for more concrete examples. But patience pays off. We come to understand that even as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all that was solid was already melting into air, to borrow from Karl Marx and Marshall Berman. The theoretical armature is brought to bear on an impressive range of literary and nonliterary texts, the first of which is the corpus of Columbian writings. Vilches argues that the discourse of the marvelous in Columbus functions on the gold standard, but the gold that guarantees value is prospective or imaginary. Columbus looks a lot like Charles V, underwriting the credit he receives with the promise of prospective American wealth. Oviedo and Díaz del Castillo follow. Their confused reflections on differences between prices in the New World and in the Old become symptoms of burgeoning cultural anxieties about money specifically and value more generally. The arbitristas come next, revealing how, in the absence of any real understanding of market forces, economic upheavals could only be understood as symptoms of moral decline. The discovery of the Indies became linked with a decline in traditional values. Most interesting are the pages dedicated to matters of gender. Since the Spanish valor stands both...