An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (review)

In recent years, Adrienne Laskier Martín has become a leading member of a group of scholars who are redressing a glaring omission in early modern studies. As the author herself puts it, 'in hispanism, critical inquiry into sexuality in literature [...] has traditionally been considered a somewhat distasteful and unworthy endeavor' (xiii). In her earlier Cervantes and the Burlesque and the two volumes of Venus Venerada (co-edited with José Ignacio Díaz Fernández), Martín has engaged with what Paula Finley once called 'the other Renaissance' - i.e. the significant body of early modern texts that deal with 'forbidden' topics. Her latest book, the culmination of extensive research into this area, is lucidly written and informed by a variety of critical approaches - from the sociology of deviance to Foucaultian theories of discourse, power and sexuality to the Marxist feminist notion of alienation as a paradigm for women's oppression. Martín's goal is to study the symbolic universe and historical referents that determine how marginal characters - prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, transvestite female warriors and sexual tricksters - are represented in poetry, prose, and drama.

The first chapter offers a fascinating overview of the status and practices of prostitution in early modern Spain through the prism of Cervantes' exemplary novel, La tía fingida. In Martín's view, this text offers one of the most original presentations of the literary prostitute through the characterization of Esperanza and her phony aunt, Claudia. Although the attribution of this work to the author of the Quijote has been questioned, Martín asserts that this text is essentially 'Cervantine' in its interrogation of truth, social legitimacy and power relationships. In addition to the novela ejemplar, Martín also considers the character of Maritornes in the Quijote, claiming that she functions not only as a verisimilar literary figure but also as a 'historical document'. That is, a consideration of this secondary but unforgettable character in Cervantes' masterpiece offers important insights into the neglected topic of rural prostitution in Spain. The discussion of literary prostitution is strengthened through the examination of works such as the sixteenth-century Manual de confesores by Enrique de Villalobos and the research by contemporary historians such as Teófilo Ruiz, María Eugenia Lacarra, Andrés Moreno Megíbar and Franciso Vázquez García, among others.

The second chapter, 'Homosexuality and Satire', deals with the ready and frequent textualization of sodomy in the satirical production of the Baroque. Martín provides a useful if condensed history of homosexuality in Europe, including information on how sodomy was repressed by the Inquisition, civil courts and society at large. This, in turn, provides a necessary contextualization for the analysis of literary representations of sodomy. Martín studies, for example, the ingeniousness and astounding malice of Quevedo's depictions of sodomites in his poetry and prose. By way of contrast, the author convincingly argues that Góngora's satirical poems, while scarcely less homophobic, manage to capture the sensuous flow of the erotic that was an essential part of the late Renaissance. The chapter reminds contemporary readers that the term sodomy in the early-modern era in fact referred to a wide variety of sexual practices, whose only common denominator was that they were crimes of non-procreation. Also interesting, if not surprising, is the discussion of how class and status determined the punishment meted out to those guilty of the 'pecado nefando'. Members of marginal classes - soldiers, slaves, foreigners, beggars, vagabonds, gypsies - were more often and more harshly prosecuted for sodomy. Powerful aristocrats and clergy, on the other hand, were often protected and spared the humiliation of public scrutiny.

In Chapter 3, 'Lesbianism as Dream and Myth', Martín bemoans the fact that early modern Spain and its literature continues to be excluded from contemporary studies on European lesbianism. To redress this lacuna, she analyses Melchor de la Serna's 'El sueño de la viuda de Aragón', a sly emulation of...