Spanish Humanism on the Verge of the Picaresque: Juan Maldonado's Ludus Chartarum, Pastor Bonus, and Bacchanalia (review)

To most aficinados of Spanish literature, the term picaresque evokes images of canonical novels such as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, Francisco de Quevedo's Buscón, and Francisco López de Úbeda's La Picara Justina. Few readers would think of finding traces of the picaresque narrative—its mimetic portrayal of low-life and profound social, moral, and didactic intention—in the three works by the Spanish Renaissance humanist Juan Maldonado that are translated, studied, and coedited in the present volume by Warren Smith and Clark Colahan. Originally intended to awaken the reader's consciousness on the sociopolitical and religious corruption of the time, picaresque writings have continued to attract the curiosity of students and scholars alike. And it is precisely the sense of intellectual curiosity that has prompted Smith and Colahan to delve into some of the most engaging, albeit little-known work by Maldonado. A professor of humanities at the University of Burgos, he is best known for the Latin dialogue Somnium (modeled on Cicero's Somnium Scipionis), which tells of being caught in a dream interplanetary space with a vision of recently Christianized America. The merit of this bilingual edition and its accompanying critical study is that it brings to the forefront the importance and relevance of three of Madldonado's other works, which, in their intrinsic conceptual framework, pave the way to the future picaresque discourse found in the best novels of the genre.

A linkage to the later picaresque prose is suggested by Smith and Colahan first by examining Maldonado's instructional colloquy, the Ludus Chartarum Triumphus (1541, 1549) describing games where luck and skill are at play, not unlike the traits associated with the best rogues found in Spanish literature: the Ludus's portrayal of daily life in a Spanish Renaissance town, the work's dramatic and comic dimensions as well as its pedagogical and edifying purposes are all ingredients of the picaresque narrative.

In his Pastor Bonus of 1529 (printed 1549) Maldonado provides a detailed literary portrait of ecclesiastical corruption and offers a program of regeneration, a point studied by Marcel Bataillon and others over the years. The church hierarchy, notes Maldonado, is given over to wealth, luxury, and pleasure, and the ordinary priest is seen as ignorant and self-serving, a figure that brings to mind five of the nine future masters of Lazarillo.

The third of Maldonado's works included in the present volume is the Geniale Iudicium siue Bacchanalia, a farcical play with comic allegory and slapstick cast at carnival time, with a story of a victory of self-control over gluttony. As the editors point out, illustration of a vomiting scene in this work evokes a similar image in the episode of the roasted turnips in the first tratado of the Lazarillo. The presence of the grotesque, together with a good measure of irony and satire in the Bacchanalia, provide a further bridge to the incipient picaresque narrative of the sixteenth century.

Smith and Colahan should be commended for their scrupulous rendition of Maldonado's Latin texts and the corresponding English translation of works that are surely now going to be read with increased interest by the academic community. Their introductory commentaries to the Ludus and the Pastor Bonus are brief but informative; it is a pity, however, that their critical assessment of the Bacchanalia in relationship to the picaresque is not more fully elaborated.