Let us start with definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “Hispanist” as “one versed in, or devoted to, the Spanish language or the study of Spanish”, first documented as late as 1934, in the American Webster’s Dictionary. For the Académie Française “hispanisme” appears in the eighteenth century as “tournure propre à la langue espagnole”; as in English, “hispaniste/hispanisant” is an invention of the twentieth century.
But words can be deceptive. If we understand Hispanism as an exclusive or professional interest in things Spanish, then the concept is probably one of the nineteenth century, probably contemporary with the establishment of the teaching and study of modern languages in the new University of London in the 1820s. If however, we take Hispanism to mean a concern with things Spanish in the context of a broader range of interests, it is to be found among the scholars of the seventeenth century. And a Hispanist need not be a scholar but must be a reader.
Nicolás Bas’ book focuses on the interest which English and Frenchmen of the Enlightenment took in the language, history and culture of Spain. Both England and France were conversant with some very negative ideas about Spain. The Black Legend, dating back to the sixteenth century, condemned Spain as repressive and priest-ridden. Comparable to this was the view expressed by Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers in the Encyclopédie méthodique of 1782 that Spain suffered from bad science and feudal institutions.
Bas shows however, that an alternative, more sympathetic, vision ran parallel with these negative views. His evidence is the presence of books from Spain, or in Spanish (many were printed abroad, especially in the Netherlands), or translated from Spanish, or about Spain (principally travellers’ accounts) in France and England.
His material has been scoured from an exhaustive interrogation of the records of the book trade. While some foreigners bought their books while travelling in Spain and others acquired them through personal contacts, most readers first became aware of relevant publications and then acquired them via the catalogues of the offerings of booksellers. For this study Bas has laid under contribution fifty-eight catalogues issued by London dealers – booksellers and auctioneers – and nineteen from Paris. For France another rich source is the proceedings of the Chambre Syndicale de la Librairie et Imprimerie, charged with the surveillance of new publications. Rarely have these sources been searched for Spanish books, and never have they been as exhaustively exploited as they are in Bas’ book.
The author reveals a remarkable consistency between the French and the English. In the earlier part of the period studied here interest was focused on the Golden Age. It is interesting that although in the latter part of the eighteenth century Spanish thinkers themselves such as Cadalso came to distinguish between the “true” Golden Age of the sixteenth century and the decadent Baroque, these connoisseurs and traders in Spanish literature did not discriminate between the creations of the sixteenth century and those of the seventeenth.1
As Bas recognises, Spanish books were always a minority in the foreign book trade and no bookseller dealt exclusively in Spanish. The products of the Enlightenment in Spain do make a showing in the reading cultures of France and England, but these are a minority within a minority.
Chief among the Spanish authors in these catalogues is, unsurprisingly, Cervantes, almost always represented by Don Quixote. Other authors who appear frequently but are less remembered today are Juan de Mariana (principally his Historia de rebus Hispaniae) and the lexicographer Francisco Sobrino (his Nouvelle grammaire espagnole of 1697 and Dicionario of 1705).
The arbiter elegantiarum of Enlightenment England, Samuel Johnson, was an express admirer of Cervantes. As he commented to Mrs Thrale:Your Excellency writes the Spanish language with such purity and perfection as if you had been born in Spain and were writing a century ago, when it flourished.2
Alas, Madam! said he one day, “how few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page! Was there ever yet any thing written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” After Homer’s Iliad, Mr. Johnson confessed that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, speaking of it I mean as a book of entertainment.3
Thus, if we may believe this story, a Spanish printer encountered the princeps (now lost) of a mediaeval Spanish classic on the premises of a London dealer.Don Gabriel de Sancha [the printer], whose expertise in books, both externally and internally, is well known, has assured me that the late year of 1786 he saw in London in the hands of the bookseller Huith [sic] the works of our Archpriest [the Libro de buen amor, written in the fourteenth century], printed in an octavo volume in Tortis [gothic] letter.4
The Spanish books which circulated in the two cities have long lain hidden in plain sight in the records of booksellers. The achievement of Nicolás Bas has been to exploit more than any other scholar these materials, and clarify for us the understanding of Spain – its history, literature and language – which French and Englishmen gained from their reading.
Barry Taylor
British Library. Curator, Hispanic Collections
Nicolás Marín, “Decadencia y Siglo de Oro”, 1616, 5 (1983–84), pp. 69–79.
Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, ed. Antonio Mestre (Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1972), p. xlvii: “U. Ex. escrive la lengua castellana con tanta pureza i perfección como si huviesse nacido en España i escriviesse un siglo antes, quando ella floreció”.
Johnsoniana, in The Life of Samuel Johnson, ll.d. […] by James Boswell […] with numerous additions and notes by the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker m.p., to which are added two supplementary volumes of Johnsoniana, 10 vols (London, John Murray), x (1845), p. 102.
T. Antonio Sánchez, Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo xv, iv (Madrid, Antonio de Sancha, 1790), p. xxii: “Don Gabriel de Sancha, cuyo manejo en libros, tanto por fuera, como por dentro es bien conocido, me ha asegurado que el año pasado 86 vio en Londres en poder del librero Huith las obras de nuestro Arcipreste, impresas en un tomo en 8. letra de Tortis”; cited and evaluated by Alan Deyermond, The “Libro de buen amor” in England: A Tribute to Gerald Gybbon-Monypenny (Manchester, Manchester Spanish & Portuguese Studies, 2004), p. 14.