Culture and Society in Habsburg Spain by ed. Nigel Griffin, et al. (review)

Reseñas D 113 Griffin, Nigel, and Clive Griffin, Eric Southworth, Colin Thompson, eds. Culture and Society in Habsburg Spain. London: Tamesis, 2001. HB. viii + 248 pp. ISBN 1-85566-080-6. Despite the title, there is no consistently sociological or anthropological approach to Habsburg Spain in this book, which might disappoint scholars of contemporary “cultural studies.” In the essays of this book, “culture and society” refer principally to high culture and intellectual history, while the term “Habsburg Spain” only loosely describes the chronological and geographical scope of the book. Nevertheless, this heterogeneous collection of studies presented to Ronald W. Truman (“on the occasion of his retirement,” as the editors announce in their preface and on the title page) makes important contributions to literary and historical scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberia. Truman is a scholar deeply invested in the intellectual history of Spain, who has published most recently on the political treatises of Philip II’s reign, and his influence is felt explicitly and implicitly throughout the book. Bruce Taylor’s study on the Mercedarian Order opens the collection (1-16). This highly visible arm of the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could boast of mystics and theologians among its number, along with the dramatist Tirso de Molina, yet, as Taylor points out, the Mercedarian’s “active vocation” and “interaction with secular society” were frequently a source of criticism from without and tension within the Order. By charting trends in recruitment—which was “not particularly discriminating” (9) —and the often ineffective reform efforts that followed, Taylor provides an excellent picture of the changes and contradictions of the order especially in the latter half of the sixteenth century (though his chronological parameters are much broader). This study could offer scholars an alternative context for understanding Tirso. Likewise, it might be an interesting starting point for further research on that famously brief, yet provocative fourth tratado of the Lazarillo, which describes a Mercedarian friar, as “perdido por andar fuera, amicísimo de negocios seglares y visitar.” David G. Pattison’s “The Language of Lazarillo de Tormes and the Date of the Work” (45-48) also contributes to the understanding of that problematic work. Pattison reopens the debate about Lazarillo’s date of composition by exploring “a number of minor [linguistic] details—principally in the field of verbal morpho-syntax,” concluding that “the work could well have been composed at a date much earlier than later in the second quarter of the sixteenth century” (48). 114 Reviews D Similarly detail-oriented are the bibliographical and textual studies by Thomas F. Earle (35-44), John Rutherford (49-56), and Ian Michael (95-120). These studies exemplify the type of scholarly detective-work that is so often overlooked or taken for granted by theory-minded critics. Noted medeivalist Ian Michael sharpens his bibliographical acuity in “How Don Quixote came to Oxford: The Two Bodleian Copies of Don Quixote, Part I (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1605)” by tracing Sir Thomas Bodley’s acquisition in 1605 of an editio princeps of the Cervantine masterpiece. He concludes, after careful reexamination of the documentary evidence, that the genuine editio princeps owned by the Bodleian library (the library has a second copy from Juan de la Cuesta, 1605, that turns out to be an undeclared second edition printed in the spring of that year) would have come in a shipment of books commissioned in Seville by John Bill in November of 1604, and not, as previously believed, as the result of a diplomatic mission to Spain in late spring, in the early summer of 1605. Michael also takes the opportunity as a “relative newcomer” to Quixote scholarship to express his lack of satisfaction with the “standard of bibliographical scholarship hitherto bestowed on the early editions of such a key text as Don Quixote” (96), pointing to the rigor of Don Cruikshank’s work on Calderón as a positive model for studying the “first printing of Don Quixote” which he claims is “a bibliographer’s dream” (97). John Rutherford uses a wealth of documentation and textual analysis to explore another perennial mainstay of textual criticism: authorial attribution. The object of his study is the manuscript...