An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (review)

In An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain, Adrienne Laskier Martín sets out to bring eroticism in early modern Spanish literary studies “out of the closet.” Addressing the reticence among traditional scholars of Golden Age literature to tackle the cultural and textual significance of sensuality in both canonical and noncanonical works, Martín’s book provides an important contribution to this enormous endeavor. Erudite, engaging, and eloquently written, this study focuses its attention on the unorthodox and sexualized figures of prostitutes, male homosexuals, lesbians, transvestite female warriors, and sexual tricksters. By limiting the number of works analyzed, the author is able to provide detailed and insightful readings of each text with informative sociohistorical contextualization for the genres and topics raised.

Chapter 1 (“Prostitution and Power”) engages Cervantes’s prose narrative as a series of case studies that deal with prostitution in urban and rural economics. Focusing on Cervantes’s novella “La tía fingida” and the character of Maritornes in part one of Don Quijote, the author goes beyond the more obvious erotic passages that might have scandalized the censors and moralists (as with La Celestina and other picaresque novels, for example) to examine how these texts were in dialogue with other historical works that dealt with the sociojuridical policing of sex.

Joining the recent surge in studies on male same-sex desire in early modern Spain (by historians and literary scholars such as Cristian Berco, Rafael Carrasco, José Cartagena-Calderón, Frederick De Armas, Sidney Donnell, Federico Garza Carvajal, Daniel Heiple, Pablo Restrepo-Gautier, Matthew Stroud, Peter Thompson, Francisco Tomás y Valiente, and Harry Vélez-Quiñones, to name just a few), chapter 2 (“Homosexuality and Satire”) sets its sights on the representation of male sodomy in Spanish Golden Age burlesque and satiric poetry. Not surprisingly, Quevedo’s poetry stands out for its homophobic humor, while his nemesis Góngora contributes to this tradition as well. True to the book’s promising title (Erotic Philology), this chapter also enters the debate over historical interpretations of sexual practices and identities typically ignited by Foucault’s declaration that the “homosexual” as a social identity did not exist until the nineteenth century. Martín agrees that during the Spanish Golden Age “neither homosexuality nor lesbianism existed as a sexual category, much less as a social identity,” that “the category of sodomite” existed instead (144–45). But while “early modern Spain acknowledged only the pecado nefanado [nefarious sin]—sodomy,” Martín importantly asserts that this fact “does not preclude the existence of what we would now call a homosexual subculture in that country” (48).

The discussion of the history of homosexuality naturally continues into the next chapter (“Lesbianism as Dream and Myth”), as the author weighs in on the presumed silence and invisibility of same-sex relations between women in the early modern period. Despite historical shifts in terminology related to describing women who engage in sexual acts with other women, the author demonstrates that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain was far from silent on lesbian desire in juridical, theological, and literary works. Focusing on the representation (or absence) of phallic instruments in female same-sex eroticism (especially in the burlesque poetry of Fray Melchor de la Serna, Jorge de Montemayor’s best-seller La Diana, and Cristóbal de Villalón’s El Crótalon), Martín observes that Spanish literature frequently depicts and dismisses lesbian eros as harmless sexual play, and as a result, these same-sex images can be just as phallocentric as they are homoerotic.

Chapter 4 (“Wild Women and Warrior Maidens”) traces the figure of the cross-dressed warrior maiden on stage and page from medieval ballads to seventeenth-century narratives about the famous “Monja Alférez” Catalina de Erauso. As a natural link to the previous chapter on lesbian sensuality (in fact, other scholars have analyzed...