Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680–1740) by Ruth Hill (review)

Reseñas 107 D Comedy of Errors and Calderón’s La dama duende and demonstrating the affinities between how these texts present ego through farce and thus evoke an uncanny strangeness in the search for self. Although I think the volume would have merited a longer introduction explaining the rationale for its chosen four part division, it presents a valuable, open invitation to discussions of vital interest to the field. It depicts trajectories of early modern textual echoes in contemporary contexts as well as underscores lines of fruitful study for a reconsideration of Renaissance and Baroque literatures: for example the presence of counterdiscourses to that of European Imperialism seen in Spanish models, as well as the use of imitatio as a vehicle for parody and satire. Dana Bultman University of Georgia Hill, Ruth. Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680-1740). Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000. viii + 296pp. PB. ISBN 0-8532-3596-1. The study under review examines certain aspects of the intellectual history of Peninsular Spain and its New World empire during the years indicated in the title. Ruth Hill’s approach to the issue of the sciences includes a consideration of the political and ideological issues of the time. In effect, Prof. Hill describes the intellectual currents and their political and cultural implications during the period in which late Baroque culture in Spain and its New World possessions was evolving into the eighteenth-century Enlightenment mentality. Prof. Hill’s own opening statement best describes her project: “This study represents a reconceptualization of the literature and the culture of a period (16801740 ) that falls within the Hispanic Late Baroque. It aims to discover what is modern in the aesthetic, natural philosophy and ideology of authors traditionally characterized as Gongorist and baroquist. I call them humanists, and I argue that they charted a middle course between scholastics and moderns in Spain and Spanish America” (1). In situating the intellectual history of Spain, the book also deals with the broader European context and the influential figures from other countries whose contributions to the development of modern science are well known. Hill mentions thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi, René Descartes, Sir Francis Bacon, and Giambattista Vico, among others. The importance of Gassendi, as well as the greater appropriateness of his theories as opposed to those of Descartes, is stressed at the beginning of Hill’s “Introduction”; as she notes, “his 108 Reviews D emphasis on ethics and his privileging of the senses within the process of cognition made Gassendi the perfect bridge between the Baroque and Enlightenment in the Spains, where there persisted an epistemology with ties to late medieval nominalism” (2). Hill then asserts Gassendi’s debt to Juan Luis Vives (2) and the trend in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain to rehabilitate the Stoics as “Christians ahead of their times” (2). The author underscores Gassendi’s critique of Aristotelianism, echoing Bacon’s attitude (3), and she points out the influence of Quevedo’s championing of neo-Stoicism in general and Epicurus in particular (4). Hill’s presentation of the historical figures and philosophical concepts that inform the Spanish version of the Enlightenment is clear, compact in exposition, and extensively documented. Sceptres and Sciences frames issues that for many readers may be more accessible than questions of scientific theory but, in terms of intellectual history, no less important. The first of these themes is what Hill calls “literary absolutism” (4-5), the relationship between a concept of heroism (and/ or conquest) and the epistemological activity of the philosopher (4-5); this in turn is connected with the ideological implications of the philosopher’s or scientist’s mission, on the one hand, and the influence and institution of the (absolutist) monarch, on the other (5). The complex reciprocal relationship noted here reminds us not only that there exists a mutually compromised linkage between the scientific or philosophical thinker and the political authority that supports the former and whom the former serves, but also that the ideological systems and metaphorical “models” that orient one sphere of endeavor tend to shape and influence the other. The second issue is the question of “Gothicism” (11-21). The...