The Renaissance Society of America, Texts and Studies Series 11. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xxii + 676. € 329.00; usd $379.00.

This substantial book brings together twenty-one essays on the cultural life of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It consists of seven sections that consider in turn politics and government, empire and ethnicity, culture and society, “high” and “low” cultures, humanists and their legacy, artistic production, and currents and currency. All but three of the contributors are based in the United States or Canada, and the books and articles cited in the notes and bibliography include many by North American scholars. It performs in this way a useful service, offering an overview of how American hispanists currently perceive the period it terms the “Spanish Renaissance.”

In her lively Introduction, Hilaire Kallendorf concedes that it is more usual to describe the centuries in question in other terms (as “The Golden Age,” for example, or “Early Modern Spain”), but she draws attention to the limitations of such labels, and argues that, despite its problems, “Renaissance” is “as good a term as any” (27). She does not do justice, however, to one significant objection: the view of many scholars, not least in Spain, that it is fitting, indeed necessary, to distinguish two periods in the cultural history of the time: a “Renaissance” phase, lasting most of the sixteenth century, and a “Baroque” or “Counter-Reformation” phase that then took over. Their grounds for believing this are not considered in any detail. The omission is surprising in view of the fact that some of the essays that follow accept the distinction as valid, and employ it to good effect. J. A. Garrido Ardila, for instance, in his chapter on “The Literature of the Spanish Renaissance,” understands “Renaissance” to mean the poetry, fiction, and theatre of the sixteenth century. These literary works, he argues, laid the foundations on which the great writers of the seventeenth century (among them Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Calderón de la Barca) subsequently built. In his study of “Religion,” similarly, Henry Kamen distinguishes two phases: the early sixteenth century (Renaissance Spain), when Spanish religion “was still in all essentials late medieval: an easy-going combination of vague theology and irregular practice, with a heavy emphasis on local rituals and folk religion” (195), and the period that followed (Counter-Reformation Spain), in which the structures of the church were reformed, the clergy trained, and the laity catechized. More persuasive than the editor’s definition of “Renaissance” is the case she makes for “a non-Eurocentric, multicultural” approach to the period (23), one that takes account of areas that earlier studies often failed to explore fully, including writings by women and the lives of marginalized groups. This approach informs many of the chapters in the book. A case in point is Jeffrey Schrader’s learned essay on “Painting and Sculpture,” which draws attention to the concern of scholars nowadays to move beyond the parameters of class, race, gender, region, and period that shaped traditional treatments of the arts in Spain.

Readers of jjs will be interested to know how the book treats the Society of Jesus, and its contribution to the cultural life of Spain. The subject surfaces frequently. Hilaire Kallendorf notes that plays produced in Jesuit schools sometimes contain subtle satire of the worldly values of Golden Age society (5–8). She also defends the development of casuistry, which the Jesuits promoted, as a significant means of discriminating between good and evil, and thus upholding the value of human “Virtue” (22–23). Writing on “The Spanish Colonial Empire,” Beatriz de Alba-Koch describes how the Jesuits contributed to the creation of a “global culture” based on shared languages and a common religion, which linked Europe with Iberian settlements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. At the same time, she affirms, they were sensitive to local customs and beliefs, which they sought to integrate into the more universal world of Catholicism (118–19). Henry Kamen remarks on the impact the Jesuits made when they became active in Spain two decades or so after their foundation in Rome. He observes that their priority as an order was not the reform of church structures, nor the combating of heresy, but “spiritual regeneration,” and that to this end they developed, in particular, the practice of private confession (195–97). In his chapter on “Popular Culture,” Edward Behrend-Martínez shows how local festivals in Spain served to affirm a sense of identity in which Catholicism and Empire were important components, and he takes as an example the celebration in 1660 of the consecration of Jaén cathedral, when the Jesuits and their founder St. Ignatius were glorified as “the epitome of Spanish religiosity and purity” (266). He also observes that the close connection that existed in Spain between the law courts and the communities they served was reflected in the argument of the Jesuit Juan de Mariana that custom is the basis of law (268). A similar point is made by Ruth MacKay in her study of “community and the common good,” where she notes that for both Francisco Suárez and Juan de Mariana the relationship between monarch and people was one of mutual obligation, rooted in a shared concern for the common good (307). Bernie Cantens, writing on the philosophical works produced by Scholastic theologians in Spain, draws attention to the stature of Suárez by quoting the judgement of Martin Heidegger who considered him to be “the thinker who had the strongest influence on modern philosophy” (362), while Elvira Vilches, in an essay on “Doing Things with Money,” notes the influence of Mariana’s writings on perceptions of matters economic (524). Spanish science is considered by William Eamon, who remarks on the importance of both science and philosophy in the Jesuit schools, and in the Imperial College in Madrid (1609) the Society ran. He observes, however, that because of their fidelity to Aristotelianism, the Jesuits were not able to advance the cosmology and astronomy of their time. Instead they excelled in the study of natural history. He draws attention, in particular, to the influential work of José de Acosta on nature, geography, and human culture in the Americas, and the erudite treatise on natural history in the New World and the Old composed by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg. He also describes the reassessment of traditional views of the cosmos in the controversy about the nature of comets in which the Jesuit Francisco Kino became involved (494–96, 500–1).

The book is described on the cover as a “go-to resource for non-specialists.” The description is just. Specialists will turn to it also, for the scholarly summaries it contains suggest multiple topics for further research. And it is beautifully produced, with a large number of illustrations, many of them in color.

DOI:10.1163/22141332-00602008-13