La oda en la poesía española del siglo XVI por Soledad Pérez-Abadín Barro (review)

88 «S Reviews praise of the nun's work by leading Spanish clerics, recruited by the vicereine to combat the ire of the Mexicans. Whereas many scholars, myself included, routinely skip over these panegyrics, Glantz engaged in rewarding literary archaeology. By careful readings of these highlycoded texts she demonstrates how certain turns of phrase or repetitions of key words are veiled rebuttals of accusations against Sor Juana, and that many of the panegyrics shared a combative mindset, "enfatizada por la presencia constante de palabras guerreras: lid, debate , campana, combate, herofsmo" (196). Sor Juana's champions engaged in the typical Baroque rhetoric of comparison and hyperbole — hence the title of the collection —staggering their praises of her to such a degree that hyperbole itself became exhausted, its meaning ultimately lost, the final product silence (206). In the last two studies of this final section Glantz examines some of the important finds about Sor Juana's life which surfaced around the celebrations of 1995: Elfas Trabulse's discovery of the Carta de Serafina de Cristo and of the convent account books which revealed the nun's clandestine investments; Teresa Castelld'6 revelation of the inventory of Sor Juana's cell; Ricardo Camarena's work on the sermon by the Jesuit Francisco Xavier Palavicino, who had the temerity to praise Sor Juana's theology and was subsequently severely punished by the Inquisition. Some of Trabulse's theories have since been questioned , most notably by Antonio Alatorre and Marta Lilia Tenorio in their book Serafina y Sor Juana (El Colegio de Mdxico, 1998) but other finds have held up and certainly shed new light on the many mysteries surrounding the nun's final years. Margo Glantz is to be congratulated for the quality and passion of her research, the clarity of her prose, her attention to detail, and the absolute sureness with which she moves in Sor Juana's world. One word of advice to the reader: don't ever skip one of her footnotes. Nina M. Scott University of Massachusetts/Amherst Perez-Abadm Barro, Soledad. La oda en la poesia espafiola del siglo XVI. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade, 1995. 302 pp. ISBN 848121 -368-3. For early modern European poetry, the Renaissance meant the rediscovery and imitation of Greek and Latin genres: tragedy and comedy , the epic, the eclogue and the georgic, the epistle and the elegy, verse satire, epigrams, and the primary lyric genre known as the ode. Reviews t» 89 The first imitations of Classical models were written in Latin and later in the various vernaculars. To trace the development of each genre in each national language is fundamental for the literary historian of the Classical tradition. In 1960 Carol Maddison wrote a general history of the ode in modern Europe, but limited it to the neo-Latin, Italian, French, and English traditions. Soledad Perez-Abadin (SPA) has now filled an important gap by defining the genre for Spain and by carefully reconstructing and analyzing its early history in that country. In a brief introduction, SPA gives us an idea of the complexity of her undertaking; in the first place, it is not easy to establish a canon. In Spanish poetry Horace's odes were the privileged models, associated with the five-line stanza known as the lira, first used by Garcilaso, following Bernardo Tasso, in his famous Ode ad florem Gnidi. The Petrarchan tradition of love poetry and the Biblical tradition 6f psalms and other genres provided non-Horatian themes for different poems in the same stanzaic form. She explains that las aportaciones de los diferentes autores son calibradas como eslabones de un proceso que en su mismo devenir determina y define los rasgos del genero. . . . El panorama asi delineado pone de manifiesto la versatilidad de un genero de extraction clasica que, al implantarse en la poesia espafiola, se diversifica en su desarrollo. Al lado de las netas manifestaciones, surgen ejemplos hibridos que dan cabida a elementos de otras categorias poeticas. Estos experimentos amplfan las potencialidades expresivas de la oda arquetfpica, a la que remiten a travel de diversas "alusiones genericas" que con frecuencia se deslizan en los textos. Otros poemas, que no obedecen a una consciente filiacidn generica, testimonian...