Sins of the Fathers: Moral Economies in Early Modern Spain by Hilaire Kallendorf (review)

Book Reviews Hilaire Kallendorf. Sins of the Fathers: Moral Economies in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 446. ISBN 978-14426 -4458-8. $90.00. Sins of the Fathers is not the first book Hilaire Kallendorf, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University, has written examining early modern religious thought as it manifests itself in English and Spanish literature. Exorcism and Its Texts (2003) and Conscience on Stage (2007) reveal her concern with Christian doctrine and theology and with the question of subjectivity in written documents from the 17th century. In her latest book, Kallendorf writes an in-depth analysis of how Spanish Baroque drama references the competing catalogs of sin found in the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments. Using confessors’ manuals and referencing scholars examining both the Capital Vices and the Decalogue in the early modern period, she explains that the list of Vices demonstrates a more communal approach to sin while the Ten Commandments move toward an individualistic application of obedience and sin. The transversal nature of her study, crossing the corpus of 17th-century Spanish comedias (plays) and autos sacramentales (religious dramas similar to English Morality plays), has been facilitated by the Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro (TESO) searchable database containing over 800 works by 16 playwrights from 16th- and 17th-century Spain. With the breadth of her analysis Kallendorf models the type of ‘‘synthesis, contextualization and interpretation’’ (213) she encourages her fellow scholars to engage in: an examination of Baroque dramatic production and performance ‘‘as repositories or archives of moral wisdom.’’ This collective archive is not equal to the historical records, but does, however, reflect the ‘‘ethical dilemmas’’ and ‘‘early modern moral attitudes’’ (10) that for Kallendorf are indications of individualizing subjects. Kallendorf considers the emphasis on the individual in the comedias as a necessary corrective to the concept of the Spanish Baroque as a ‘‘directed culture’’ popularized by José Antonio Maravall in the 1970s (8) and which she suggests reflects the hegemonic perspective of critics emerging from the long shadow of the Franco regime (210). Analyzing the representation of sin throughout the secular and religious plays leads Kallendorf to affirm ‘‘that fundamentally , notions of sin shape our notions of self’’ (4). Playwrights display ideas of the self through descriptions of sin, through dialogues and monologues examining actions and motivations in relation to definitions of sin, and even in allegorical representations of Vice and Virtue. Kallendorf acknowledges that the term ‘‘sin’’ Christianity & Literature 2014, Vol. 64(1) 111–139 ! The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0148333114556596 cal.sagepub.com may appear anachronistic in the twenty-first century, but with her wide-lens methodology , a re-examination of vice, virtue, and commandments can confirm for ‘‘[e]ven atheistic scholars or readers . . . sins as nodes of cultural anxiety’’ (xi). The cultural anxiety that Kallendorf refers to forms around the interpretation of what sin is. The structure of the Capital Vices and the structure of the Ten Commandments compete as taxonomies guiding interpretation through traffic in terms and concepts ‘‘that were traded, substituted, reversed, and exchanged in a complex ethical calculus which acted figuratively as an economy of sins and souls’’ (6). Kallendorf uses Marxist critic Raymond Williams’ terms, residual and emergent , to organize her comparison of these competing taxonomies. She employs ‘‘transformation’’ to mark a transition from the residual vocabulary treating the ‘‘Seven Deadlies’’ to the emergent presence of the taxonomy of the Decalogue. We can easily note that the Seven Deadly Sins will not exactly correspond to Ten Commandments, and in answer to this Kallendorf follows the structure of several confessors’ manuals organizing her book around the Vices and then mentioning the Commandments that relate to each. After the introduction, the first part of the book focuses three chapters on Pride, Avarice, and Lust as categories maintaining ‘‘easy equivalents in the list of Ten Commandments’’ (8). Kallendorf calls Sloth, Gluttony, and Anger, discussed in chapters 4, 5, and 6, ‘‘liminal cases’’ that experience transformation to fit the rising influence of the Decalogue. The third part of the book, ‘‘Emergence,’’ including chapters 7...