Bulletin
BOOK REVIEWS
8. Bayo: El general que adiestró la guerrilla de Castro y el Che by Luis Diez. Barcelona: Debate, 2007. 287 pages. Reviewed by Eric R. Smith, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
Kagay, Donald J. War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. Variorum Collected Studies, 861. Aldershot, Great Britain: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. x, 328. Reviewed by James William Brodman, University of Central Arkansas.
This volume gathers together thirteen pieces by Donald J. Kagay published between 1988 and 2004 into three thematic sections: war and war-making, political relations, and political structures in the Crown of Aragon during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The primary focus of this collection is the struggle between monarchy and aristocracy, particularly seen through the prism of law.
The initial topic is article 64 of the Usatges of Barcelona, called princeps namque, which obligates subjects to aid their prince whenever he is threatened by his enemies. Kagay conceives this as a national defense clause and equates protection of the prince with homeland defense. He shows how monarchs from James I to Peter III invoked the clause to compel military service and how subjects and the Corts sought to narrow and limit their obligation. Interestingly Kagay argues that princeps namque ultimately provided a legal basis for Catalonia’s resistence to the Count-Duke of Olivares’ efforts in the seventeenth century to compel such military service.
The next article describes the logistics of warfare during the activist reign of James I. Kagay outlines in broad detail how the king summoned the host, cobbled together revenues from multifarious sources, and provisioned the army with food and matériel. Earlier ad hoc procedures became systematized as the reign progressed, although Kagay finds that improvements in organization were offset by a growing war fatigue that led barons, the Corts, and even the military orders to resist the Conqueror’s ambitions. A companion piece then demonstrates how Peter III in the next century prepared his fortified defenses in 1356 against Peter I of Castile.
The section dealing with political relations begins with a brief but disjointed attempt to theorize about opposition to monarchs – both Christian and Muslim – during a 500-year swath of Iberian history. More specific is the fifth essay, which highlights the significance of James I’s reign in the codification of royal power. Here Kagay uses the works of Pere Albert, a clerical judge trained in Roman law, to explicate the king’s claims to war powers while conceding to the aristocracy their traditional jurisdiction in less threatening times. In the ninth essay, Kagay adds some biographical material on Pere Albert along with an appendix of Latin documents recording several of his judicial rulings. The sixth piece provides a specific illustration of the power struggle between kings and barons, focusing upon a law suit brought by James II at the Cortes of Zaragoza in 1301. Kagay sees much irony in James’ ability to use the instrument of aristocratic opposition – the Union of Aragon and its laws – to gain a verdict against his baronial opponents as well as the aristocracy’s own recourse to legal principles based upon the Roman law they so greatly distrusted. The theme of baronial resistence continues in the next article, which establishes a typology for aristocratic resistence during the reign of James I. Here Kagay continues his earlier discussion of the conflict between regalist and feudal images of kingship and adds some observations about the different tactics used by Catalan and Aragonese nobles. The eighth article further illustrates the king’s recourse to legal procedures by citing the case of Bernat de Cabrera, a Catalan noble and advisor to Peter III who was executed for treason in 1364. Despite fabricating much of the evidence against his one-time counselor, the king nonetheless had to observe the rituals of judicial procedure. Another sign of the institutionalization of law and legal procedure is the judicial inquest, addressed in the tenth article, that replaced “God-proofs” with oral and documentary testimony. Yet, as with so much in the Crown of Aragon, its implementation was challenged by particularist interests and confounded by overlapping clerical and secular jurisdictions. Nonetheless, it became for the king a means with which to assert his authority and protect his interests. A use of the inquest in 1396 is then examined. This grew out of the arrest of Bernat Metge, an official of the recently deceased King John, who was charged with malfeasance by King Martin I and his queen. Among other things, the incident demonstrates, according to Kagay, the growing gulf between the aristocratic culture of court and the bourgeois values of urban elites who were expected to foot the king’s bills.
The penultimate piece is a reflection upon James I’s Llibre dels Feyts as a work of historical memory that blends together chivalric traditions, regalist ideology and written documentation. Kagay sees the military narratives as the most reliable. The final essay addresses how Muslims are depicted in this work as well as in the legislation of James I, revealing a many-layered and complex relationship between Muslims and their Christian conquerors.
Fox, Gwyn. Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden Age Sonnets by Iberian Women. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. 290 pp. Reviewed by Sandra Delgado Merrill, University of Central Missouri.
Subtle Subversions continúa la conversación de las últimas décadas sobre las escritoras del Siglo de Oro español. La obra de Gwyn Fox cuenta con una introducción, seis capítulos, conclusión, una excelente bibliografía y el índice.
Por la introducción,“Revisiting the Baroque,” sabemos que será un estudio sociohistórico sobre la vida de las poetas a través del análisis de su producción artística. Para justificar el método a seguir, Fox se apoya en las ideas de Gerda Lerner en The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (1993) respecto a una forma nueva de leer obras de mujeres que descubre “powerful but hidden and slanted worldviews, expressed through a language of metaphor and symbol that is often subversive of the male tradition” (12). Entonces, asevera Fox, el soneto les permitía demostrar su capacidad intelectual, por ser una forma poética elevada, y criticar sutilmente el patriarcado operante. Las poetas son las españolas Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán; Leonor de la Cueva y Silva; sor María de Santa Isabel, quien escribió bajo el seudónimo Marcia Belisarda; doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza; y la portuguesa, sor Violante del Cielo. Ofrece algunos datos biográficos, información sobre los manuscritos y estudios realizados. Seguidamente, da una somera explicación sobre el soneto y su importancia en la época, finalizando con un excelente resumen de la idea principal de cada uno de los seis capítulos.
El capítulo 1 titulado “Politics, Patronage, Parentage” es de gran importancia por ser las poetas cortesanas. En “Wooing the Patron” Fox, haciendo uso de una gran erudición sobre el pensamiento intelectual y el ambiente social de la época, dilucida la importancia del patronazgo para estas mujeres. En “Political Patronage” contempla sonetos de Sor Juana, Ana Caro, Antonia de Nevares y Leonor de la Cueva escritos para miembros de la nobleza, mientras que sor Violante establece un paralelo entre la corte terrenal y la de los cielos (52). En “Romancing Royalty” y “Patronage and the Family” analiza versos escritos para eventos en la corte como funerales, nacimientos, etc. y para aquellos con influencia en el destino de sus familias.
Con los sonetos del capítulo 2, “Marriage, Motherhood, Patriarchy,” Fox reflexiona sobre la importancia de la familia en la sociedad española de la época. “The Yoke of Marriage” resume ideas de moralistas como Luis Vives y Fray Luis de León respecto a la educación de la mujer y presenta el matrimonio como vehículo para mantener el estatus social y como unión con Cristo. Anota la crítica que las poetas ni se casaron ni se expresaron al respecto; excepto Ramírez que escribió un romance sobre el matrimonio de su hermana (81). En “The Paterfamilias” y “Women’s View of Motherhood,” sor Violante humaniza a San José y la Virgen y los presenta como los ideales del padre y la madre: San José es un padre feminizado y la Virgen una mujer en control (99).
Continuando con la humanización de la Virgen, en el capítulo 3, “Children and Siblings,” Fox contempla la relación tierna entre madre e hijo expresada en sonetos dedicados a los misterios de la Virgen. En “Children” y “Love among Siblings,” se
analizan ideas contemporáneas sobre la importancia de una relación afectiva entre padres e hijos y hermanos, y su expresión en los sonetos (114).
En el capítulo 4, “Femenine Friendship,” se consideran sonetos “that celebrate female solidarity and frienship” (17). “Burlesque” presenta poemas juguetones escritos para amigos y amigas, al igual que uno de Marcia Belisarda donde se burla de su propia capacidad como poeta (155). Los poemas en “Sonnets of ‘Other Selves’” y “Friendship and Death” describen mujeres capaces de una amistad sólida y sincera, desbancando ideas de la época sobre la inconstancia de las mujeres.
Las mujeres se apropian de una producción típicamente masculina para combatir ideas misóginas de la época en el capítulo 5, “Women’s Love Sonnets.” En “Women and Petrarchism” las poetas subvierten las reglas del amor cortés, presentan una voz femenina que desidealiza el amor y un amante sin género específico (206); idea que es necesario explorar un poco más, a mi manera de ver. Para Fox, en “Love and Self-Knowledge” y “Heroic Constancy” las poetas presentan mujeres con apetitos, capacidad de razonar, aprender de la experiencia (227), fuertes, leales y con valores morales, como la constancia (237).
El último capítulo es reservado para “Luisa de Carvajal” y sus sonetos místico-eróticos. En ellos la crítica observa un énfasis en la participación del cuerpo en la placentera unión del alma con Cristo (253), que se manifiesta en el deseo de alianza en el sacramento de la comunión (256), el martirio y el uso de los métodos de meditación de los jesuítas (257).
En la conclusión Fox reitera las ideas que ha venido presentando sobre la vida intelectual y afectiva de las mujeres en el siglo XVII español. Son, entonces, mujeres que usaban cualquier oportunidad para afirmar su capacidad de pensamiento abstracto y de raciocinio, de expresar sus sentimientos genuinamente (a sus padres, hermanos y amigos) y establecerse como miembros importantes de su comunidad y sus familias (286). La Vírgen es para sor Violante una figura humana y fuerte (289), posible de emular como mujer y madre (287). Observa Fox acertadamente que aunque las poetas criticaban un sistema que permitía a los hombres libertad de movimiento (286), ellas vivían dentro de él y lo manipulaban a su conveniencia para obtener más independencia y poder (288).
Gwyn Fox ofrece en Subtle Subversions un agudo análisis de los sonetos haciendo uso de su amplio conocimiento sobre el mundo social e intelectual del siglo XVII para presentar una innovadora lectura que, sin lugar a dudas, estimulará el estudio de la producción de estas poetas. Las traducciones son magistrales, aunque, debo anotar, no estoy de acuerdo con algunas de ellas. Será una obra de consulta muy valiosa para los estudiosos de la literatura y la historia de Barroco español.
Río Parra, Elena del. Cartografías de la conciencia española en la Edad de Oro. México, D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008. 310 pp. 18 ills. Reviewed by Patricia W. Manning, University of Kansas.
As cultural studies have expanded the types of works considered credible objects of scholarly attention, a number of fields of cultural production initially dismissed by scholars have received renewed attention. Elena del Río Parra’s book, Cartografías de la conciencia española en la Edad de Oro, is an excellent example of what can be achieved with such an approach. Casuistry, the study of concrete cases in moral theology in order for clergy to better advise the laity, became polemicized in the early modern period by accusations of moral leniency by Protestants toward Catholics and even within the Catholic community as casuistry became closely associated with the Society of Jesus. In the eighteenth century, when the order was suppressed, the study of cases was derided. Río Parra asserts that the body of early modern casuistical literature can be used as a mode to better understand the issues that were of the greatest concern to residents of early modern Spain (13).
In relating the content of large compendia of cases written for clerics in Latin and smaller compilations in Spanish, Río Parra’s research calls into question several facile assumptions about this field of moral theology. For example, in contrast to the popular image of a Protestant stance against casuistry, Cartografías indicates that Protestant writers, such as Hugo Grotius, produced their own compilations of cases (62-64). Rather than aspire to the encyclopedic situations that characterize Catholic collections of cases, Protestant texts seek to apply general principles and place more weight on the individual’s decision within the limits allowed by predestination. Regarding the primacy of the Jesuits as casuists, Río Parra’s notations of the religious orders to which authors of casuistical texts belong in her list of works cited demonstrate that the study of cases was not the exclusive domain of the Jesuits. This information will provide a helpful starting point to facilitate further research about the role of casuistry within particular religious communities.
In Catholic treatises on cases, issues surrounding the proper administration of the sacraments form a significant locus of concern. So detailed were these considerations that several casebooks specify the reactions clerics should have to various types of insects falling into consecrated bread and wine. In this transubstantiative context, words and their potential power, whether for religious purposes in exorcism rituals or for blasphemous ones in curses and in prayers deemed heretical, also receive considerable attention. Given the fundamental importance accorded to the sacraments, it is not surprising that criteria for excluding candidates from the priesthood are discussed in minute detail, including issues such as the degree to which specific physical challenges should prevent men from entering the clergy. Yet, the cases at times surprise in the degree of agency they can grant to the laity. For example, a number of guides emphasize the need for laypeople to know how to baptize in case circumstances necessitated that they do so in an emergency (79).
As works written for clerics to apply in pastoral settings, these texts consider a wide variety of issues, from whether a very poor individual may work on a feast day, and Friar Juan Enríquez believes one may (183), to the circumstances in which a person may licitly leave a marriage (163). The manuals also consider situations brought about by early modern historical circumstances, including the possible treatment of a person forced to abjure his or her religion after being held for ransom. As Río Parra indicates, peninsular casuistical texts often did not include cases that responded to the situations most relevant to clerics in the Americas, so these matters were taken up in synods or councils in the colonial dioceses. Such a precisely organized system of moral reasoning inevitably created a category of what Río Parra terms “officially marginalized" or excommunicated people and unorthodox ideas (222). Even in excommunication, however, Catholic officials took a similarly detailed approach and carefully allocated the circumstances in which excommunication should fall to a bishop or the pope.
After a thorough outline of the types of matters considered in these casuistical works, Río Parra turns to their impact in other fields of cultural production. In examining Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla, Río Parra notes the absence of any casuistical guilt on the part of Don Juan and asserts that Tenorio is the first representation of a “soulless atheist” in Spanish theater (263). Moreover, lest one believe that this case-based approach to culpability only affects theology, Río Parra very effectively traces casuistry’s impact on secular legal discourse. Not only did Philip II incorporate the decrees of the Council of Trent into Spain’s legal code (45), but also, as Río Parra asserts, the use of the phrase “Acts of God” in contemporary legal discourse ultimately has casuistical roots (272-74).
López –Lázaro, Fabio T. Crime in Early Bourbon Madrid (1700-1808): An Analysis of the Royal Judicial Court’s Casebook. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. iii + 413 pages. Reviewed by Richard Herr, University of California, Berkeley.
Fabio López-Lázaro has used the archives of the Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte to reveal the workings of government justice at the local level in Madrid. His is an impressive piece of research. He has brought good preparation to the task, a knowledge of various kinds of law, Roman, canon, Spanish, European, and Anglo-American. He has analyzed some 3000 court cases drawn from six different years in the reigns of Carlos III and Carlos IV. His approach is both statistical and anecdotal, making excellent use of individual cases, well told to appeal to the reader, to illustrate his findings.
The Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte was a unit of the Council of Castile established to keep order in Madrid and its territory and to administer justice. López-Lázaro contrasts its procedures and its duties to present day equivalents, including those in the U.S. For one thing, its duties including policing the capital. The twelve alcaldes or judges were individually responsible for separate barrios of Madrid, assigned to lead nightly patrols (rondas) and report any crimes or disturbances, a task they had largely sloughed off to their deputies, the alguaciles. Then as a court they met together to hear cases they had uncovered, or more frequently ones that had been brought to them by others.
The kind of law applied by the court differs sharply from that of today, but, it may come as a surprise, was not inferior in rendering justice. The judges learned civil and canon law in the universities, rather than the statutes the kings had promulgated. Perhaps as a result their decisions responded less to any of these than to common law (ius commune) based on natural or divine law. Due process was their highest concern, not only in the sense of the close following of proper procedure, for which they were sticklers, but in seeking just solutions. Crime was thought of as a sin rather than as a violation of secular law, and judges were also guilty of sin if they made incorrect convictions. To protect themselves they took mass before entering court. The accused was held innocent until proven guilty, and there was habeas corpus. Torture was seldom applied and only in heinous capital cases. In the end, what the judges sought to achieve was justice and fairness rather than accord with written law and statutes, what I would understand as equity. One comes away from the many cases this study describes with a high respect for the Sala de Alcaldes as a purveyor of justice. López-Lázaro makes clear that the accepted picture of early modern Spanish justice has wrongly assumed it was all like that of the Inquisition.
In another contrast to present-day practice, the Sala de Alcaldes in the majority of its cases was acting as not an agent of the state but of individuals who resorted to it to legitimize private vengeance as a judicial verdict. The law did not distinguish sharply between civil and criminal justice. The punishment for tort was similar to that for crime. Murder was not a public crime but an offence against the individual and his or her family. Normally some person had to bring the charge of homicide against a suspect before the court would take up the case. Such too were cases of estupro (rape), a term which applied not only to acts of violence but to what we would call statutory rape and the breaking the promise of marriage after prenuptial sex. In rendering its decisions, the Sala was acting as an agent of family control as well as of social control. López-Lázaro sees a symbiosis of court and society, the court responding to the culture of Spanish society, and the public drawing moral lessons from the drama of the court, although here I find in his appeal to sociology and psychology an unnecessary attempt to dress up a solid and convincing study in fashionable social science clothing that lacks adequate supporting evidence.
What López-Lázaro brings out tellingly is the impartiality of the court in its treatment of the different social classes and the two genders. Servants successfully sued their masters as the masters did the servants; wives brought charges against their husbands for violence, and husbands against their wives for cruelty. In one famous case the court gave the wife the satisfaction of convicting her husband (an hidalgo) to a house of correction for “not living with her as befitted their married state and misspending their wealth” (p. 268). He was to remain there at her will. She kept him confined over twenty years until he died. When a case was brought before it, the court could take the opportunity to bring charges against both parties, and even the witnesses. It behaved as a mediator as much as a judge and sought to achieve just solutions and maintain social control. In few of these decisions did the court apply written law.
This is a major study to add to the growing social history of early modern Spain. Two observations occur to me. The first is to ask if the application of justice in independent villas, in señoríos, or in small villages approached the fairness of that in Madrid. The Sala received appeals from local authorities in serious cases, and individual alcaldes were sent to the provinces as commissioned judges with authority over local magistrates to investigate serious crimes and uprisings. But what about local justice in run-of-the-mill cases? The author notes the rural priest Juan Antonio Posse’s observation that rural husbands treated their wives brutally with impunity (p. 284).
The other observation is that if the rendering of justice was in tune with the daily culture and enjoyed the respect of the public, this is evidence that at the street level people may have had little complaint with the working of royal government. It becomes easier to understand why the drive of the Liberals in 1812 and later to replace Old Regime institutions with constitutional ones found little enthusiasm among ordinary Spaniards.
Paquette, Gabriel B. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759-1808. Basingstroke, Eng. and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xi, 244 pp. Reviewed by Andrea J. Smidt, Geneva College.
In Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform, Paquette has written a book that is a much needed contribution to the under-researched field of eighteenth-century Spain and her empire. Not only does his book reveal the world of enlightened ideas and governance strategies prevalent in the peninsula among the Bourbon ministers of Charles III and Charles IV, it is also a sound transatlantic study comparing and connecting that world to the intellectual and political universe of the governing ministers and colonial elites in Spanish America, highlighting the resulting approaches to governance, especially in the realm of political economy. Paquette has found that “regalism, political economy, and considerations stemming from international rivalry comprised the three chief components of the Caroline ideology of governance” (p.2). While geopolitical rivalry, principally with Britain, led to the “critical emulation of foreign institutions and legislation,” the use of regalist jurisprudence contributed to a refashioning of the monarchy which would have the ultimate aim of promoting public happiness, primarily through economic prosperity. The focus on political economy led to the transformation of “major ultramarine institutions” predominantly by local administrators, as well as to the government’s promotion of and collaboration with the economic societies and consulados of the colonial elite. Overall, Paquette demonstrates that Spanish America was “an integral, not parallel, part of Iberian History” in the eighteenth century (p.153), and that rather than occupying an intellectual backwater, policy makers during the reigns of Charles III and Charles IV were involved in networks of intellectual exchange, critically evaluating not only peninsular ideas but an array of foreign ideas as well.
Paquette organizes his book into four main chapters that follow a topical and somewhat geographical order. The result is an approach that is driven less by grand theories than by the reintegration of Iberian history into the framework of Atlantic and European history. And certainly, the extensive archival research upon which this book is based reflects this by its use of sources from three continents and two islands, such as official correspondence, minutes of government and civil society institutions, and the actual works of authors cited most often in these documents.
The first chapter is aptly titled “The Intellectual Impact of International Rivalry” as it focuses on the influx and evaluation of non-Spanish ideas among Caroline policy makers in Spain that resulted from the spirit of international competition. By the later eighteenth century, the successful practices of other imperial states (especially Britain, over France and Portugal) prompted Iberian ministers, such as Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, openly to advocate their emulation, but not their direct imitation, by criticizing, adapting, and rejecting foreign ideas transmitted by original works and treatises, published translations, and the first-hand observation of foreign policies, practices, and institutions. The motivation behind emulation was not just a spirit of cosmopolitanism but also a larger feeling of patriotism, desiring the rescue, revitalization, and enlightenment of Spain and her empire. The second chapter looks at the larger role that the “very pliable” notion of felicidad pública played in formulating Bourbon policy in Spain, especially policy associated with regalism and its tendency to encroach upon Church jurisdiction with the overall goal to enlarge the function of the state. The Bourbon ideology of reform was based on three pillars: the conservation of the monarchy, the preservation of public tranquility, and the expansion of prosperity. The state’s primary responsibility to promote the general welfare of the public gave it license to intervene more in the economy and other spheres in order to achieve material plenty, which was required for public happiness, by promoting commerce and population growth. Paquette then discusses Caroline regalism, its historical roots in Iberia, its intellectual origins, and its attempt to centralize authority over the Church in Spain by arguing that state jurisdiction existed in all affairs not strictly spiritual after Bourbon ministers had first dramatically re-formulated the distinction between temporal and spiritual. The connection between public happiness and regalism here is that the former served as an important basis from which reformers in the later eighteenth century could expand regalian rights to cover Church land and other forms of wealth which, when appropriated by the state, could be sold or converted into more productive uses that would allow more people to benefit. The most notable example of this in practice was the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and the subsequent sale and redistribution of their wealth.
The next chapter then moves on to show how these intellectual foundations and debates of metropolitan men were implemented in colonial governance and reform, particularly in the “imperial periphery” of Cuba, Louisiana, Florida, Chile, and the Río de la Plata, by “’men-on-the-spot’”—“’enlightened administrators’ who applied newfangled ideas to the formulation and implementation of policy” (p.95). Here too, colonial governors and intendants sought out ways to maximize the goals of population increase and commercial growth. Their ideas focused on free trade and the emulation of Britain’s policies in their Caribbean possessions. Yet these ideas tended to arise out of practical responses to the prevalent sale of contraband, the failure of crown-privileged companies, and even the brief British occupation of Havana in 1762, rather than any commitment to laissez-faire economics. Paquette’s study of the local officials’ correspondence with ministers in Madrid demonstrates that colonial governance was not a straightforward implementation of Madrid’s demands since local circumstances often made certain policy initiatives problematic or even inapplicable. The final chapter is an attempt to gauge the response of Creole land-owning and mercantile elites to Bourbon reforms by studying the records of economic societies and consulados—bodies which also depended on commerce, population, agriculture, and public happiness. Looking specifically at those of Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Havana from 1785 to 1810, Paquette finds that the intelligentsia they housed not only was nurtured by Madrid’s policies and initiatives but also could shape metropolitan policies, in the process solidifying their elite status. While earlier Caroline initiatives had used regalist precepts to break up corporate privilege in the colonies by restricting Creoles from holding office and tightening peninsular control over colonial trade, after the revolts of the 1780s, Bourbon reformers turned their direction towards placating and even collaborating with colonial elites. One initiative was to grant a small degree of authority to the Creole-run deliberative and administrative bodies known as consulados in the imperial periphery in order to break up the power held by those in New Spain and Peru. Along with the economic societies, the Crown depended on these institutions in the midst of war with France and later Britain to develop “technical methods and the dissemination of ‘useful’ knowledge which would, in turn stimulate improvements in agriculture, industry, and commerce” to bring greater prosperity and prevent the collapse of its trade regime (p.130). Patriotism, good government, and the “universal public good” were some of the justifications used for their proposed initiatives in commerce and public works as well as for their embrace of political economy and foreign practices as models of reform for Spanish America.
Overall, this book successfully demonstrates the “intellectual vibrancy” of both the Iberian Peninsula and the imperial periphery of Spanish America. It illuminates the kinds of enlightened ideas that political elites were exposed to from foreign sources as well as those that originated in Spain and her American colonies, proving the vitality of Enlightenment in both Spain and Spanish America. The manner in which these ideas were discussed, critiqued, and adapted demonstrates how the Enlightenment in both Spain and Spanish America “developed within and in support of the established order” (p.150). By focusing on the enlightened ideas themselves and the networks of intellectual exchange for policy makers, the book does not have to rely on the resulting reforms’ relative success or failure in order to demonstrate their significance. Even so, Paquette sheds light on why the reforms did not produce the intended results in the case studies he details. On top of the key contributions already noted here, Paquette makes a helpful distinction between enlightened absolutism and regalism. After distinguishing between the two in his introduction, he argues that Bourbon officials would identify their actions more with regalism because of the particular Iberian precedents they were clearly familiar with, which went back historically as far as the Visigothic period. As minor points of contention, one might argue that by the 1760s regalism was already successful in diminishing Rome’s influence and eliminating clerical autonomy so that it no longer had to focus on breaking “the bonds to Rome which shackled royal authority” (p.73) since royal authority had proceeded relatively unshackled in creating a royal, or Caroline, church staffed by a clergy hand-picked by Madrid to be spokesmen of the kind of enlightenment advocated in economic prosperity. Since the book’s coverage of church-state relations in Spain before the reign of Charles III draws from the distant medieval past rather than the key eighteenth-century dynamics between monarchical and ultramontane authority, the larger focus on Rome takes precedence here. Finally, while the distinction made between regalism and Jansenism in the second chapter is much appreciated for the purposes of this study, the fact that, among others, Muratori, Febronius, and Van Espen—men closely associated with Jansenism—were all contributors towards the intellectual origins of Caroline regalism suggests that the link between Caroline regalism and Spanish Jansenism is more than one of just overlapping features. As a deeper investigation of that link would promise to further reintegrate Spain into the framework of European history, Paquette has identified some important areas for further research.
Smith, Theresa Ann. The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and Enlightenment in Spain. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 330 pages. 8 b/w photographs, 6 tables. Reviewed by Jennifer J. Popiel, Saint Louis University.
Theresa Ann Smith begins her book about female citizenship in Spain with a description of Goya’s Maja desnuda. This image was scandalous for what critics alleged was a licentious depiction of its central character, the nude woman, who stared out at the viewer with a bold and confident gaze. Goya’s maja is, like the historical women that we encounter in the pages of this book, alarming and public in her confrontation with male norms. However, Smith goes beyond Goya’s model and examines women who were even more forceful insofar as they made themselves objects of attention not through intermediaries but by their own words and actions. For despite a frequent appeal to a language of duties, their activism through tertulias, economic societies, and literary contexts demanded some kind of response. The Emerging Female Citizen thus depicts women who were active in Spanish cultural life and who were devoted to Enlightenment ideas in order to show how liberal ideology allowed them a space for activism even as it set up the confrontations that would result from an increasingly public and threatening discourse. Ultimately, the response that Smith describes is the one that we’ve come to expect despite the opening of a number of new opportunities for women’s advancement over the course of the eighteenth century, the universal discourse did not win out and instead female citizenship became predicated on exclusionary class and gender distinctions.
The first half of the book, entitled “Developing Ideologies of Citizenship,” emphasizes the multiple strains of Enlightenment thought and notes how shifting gender roles were not only shaped by but themselves shaped the new ideas circulating through society. By way of demonstration, we see how the first half of the nineteenth century saw fervent debate over the ideal role of women in society, culminating in a widespread assumption, on the part of intellectuals, that women had the same rational potential as men. While a new literature predicated on these claims saw women as logical participants in a reformed nation, the very works that made these claims also encouraged critics to begin vitriolic campaigns against widespread acceptance of these ideals. In the end, even “enlightened” reformers tended to come down on the side of a “separate but equal” solution to the woman question, with the result that at mid-century, privileged women could assert a right to be full members of the enlightened and active societies – both formal and informal – that promoted art, literature, and economic study, but their public participation was not welcome in the same venues as men’s contributions.
In the second half of the book, “Enacting Citizenship,” we learn how women in the last half of the eighteenth century took advantage of divisive ideologies in order to contribute fruitfully – if temporarily – to social transformation. Some, like Josefa Amar y Borbón, were angered by the sexism of royal policies regarding admission to the Economic Society and derided masculinist exclusion. They promised that women would demonstrate the strength of their ideas and the need for female action. However, now that women had been admitted to specifically female societies, this vow implied building on segregation, and indeed women claimed that the very exceptionalism of their status was the source of their strength. Privileged women insisted on feminine responsibility in order to assert their ability to run educational institutions and foundling homes for the less-privileged. However, this rhetoric also emphasized exceptionalism in another way, insofar as the non-universal discourse of rights and responsibilities continued to be predicated on class standing in addition to gender.
Smith’s work makes an important contribution to two historiographical debates. The first is the question of the degree to which Spain’s intellectual and political life was influenced by “enlightened” philosophies, including confrontations with universal ideals that opened up spaces for discussion of gender. Here, she concludes that Spain had an Enlightenment, but one in which reason and passion were not opposed, nor were faith and rationality. In the Spanish debates, women’s participation, as well as men’s consideration of the “woman question,” were proof of Spain’s enlightened status. Smith also engages with a second historiographical debate, one that still rages, over liberalism’s limitation of women to private concerns. Smith’s book moves past a political explanation for the exclusion of women from public debates, noting that separation began well before the French Revolution and that women’s activism helped construct discourses about women as much as it was constructed by them. Though liberalism may not have inevitably excluded Spanish women from full consideration, when proposed departures from a universal rational model offered particular advantages, women themselves seemed quite keen to emphasize the particular that was of personal use. This meant they capitulated on both gender and class, which leaves the reader wondering when, if ever, the outcome was truly in doubt. Given the ultimate importance of both class and gender in departing from the universal ideals, a bit more dialogue between the two historiographical questions might have served to illuminate the tensions and ultimate limitations of debates over rationality, universal capabilities, and human rights.
Messenger, David A. L’Espagne Républicaine: French Policy and Spanish Republicanism in Liberated France. Brighton/Portland: Sussex University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 196. Reviewed by David Wingeate Pike, The American University of Paris, American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy, Paris.
The subject of this work by the young Toronto scholar David Messenger is not uncharted territory, but the author has examined new archives in France, Spain, the UK and the US. The most important, by the nature of his work, are those in the Ministère des Affaires étrangères in Paris.
The book refers back to the Civil War and the Second World War before concentrating on the Liberation and the immediate post-war period. There are several points on which a reader may take issue. Messenger writes that in 1936 the French Prime Minister had “reluctantly refused” to send military aid to the Spanish Republic (p. 6). Blum did not in fact refuse it. After his return from London he reluctantly suspended it, but French matériel was indeed sent in the opening days, resulting in what I have called Blum’s triple failure. Messenger also refers to Soviet policy at that time as wanting to bring the Spanish communists to power (p. 106). Stalin’s policy for Spain has long been established: to stay out of the conflict as long as possible but to keep the Republic alive, lure Britain and France into conflict with Germany and Italy, and refine the practice of subverting republics in order to convert them into “people’s democracies.” The final result was the deep division in Republican ranks (p. 65). The essential division never altered: the communists against the rest. No one could trust them, least of all the anarchists. The Republicans carried their bitterness into exile, and in exile their cruellest experience is omitted from the book: the dispatch of 9,000 of them to Mauthausen, the most hideous of SS camps.
In its references to the Second World War, the book’s back-cover carries a jarring note: “The war had been fought against authoritarian fascism.” Those who fought fascism knew it as totalitarian, and Franco’s Spain fitted into the term, at least until 1943 when it began to evolve into mere authoritarianism. Messenger describes the war as a struggle against fascism and Nazism (p. 2) without reference to the Japanese version, and yet Spain was involved with Japan through the Philippines connection, especially when José del Castaño, Spain’s consul general, offered his craven homage to General Homma. Spanish aid to Germany is briefly mentioned (p. 28), along with the theory, not refuted in the book, that in 1940-41 Germany “planned to use Spain as the ‘gateway’ to ... Spain’s Atlantic islands” (p. 21). All that, without a single operational aircraft-carrier in the German fleet!
Messenger is right to speak of the “myth” of the Resistance in France (p. 30), but there was also the reality. On the one side, the communist response to June 1940, as published in the underground L’Humanité: “find a Wehrmacht soldier, offer him a beer.” No wonder that the PCF found it necessary at the Liberation to break into the Bibliothèque Nationale to destroy the evidence and place fake issues in place of the authentic, in the hope of transforming the record of the PCF. As for de Gaulle, he is virtually dismissed as a “Resistance leader” (p. 2) and the Resistance itself presented as exclusively leftist (p. 32). There is no reference to the Free French or to de Gaulle’s Armée Secrète.
Serge Ravanel (p. 43) deserves longer treatment because of the situation that befell him. The liberation of France was unusual. It was achieved by two separate Allied forces, invading through Normandy and Provence, and their junction in Dijon left one third of France free to liberate itself and then to pronounce itself “the independent Republic of the Southwest,” a threat that required de Gaulle’s personal visit. The infamous Épuration that followed receives only a light touch (p. 84). There is no mention of Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister who found refuge in Barcelona until Franco, on this rarest of occasions, agreed to extradite him to face trial and death for treason. The attempt of the Spanish Republicans to invade Spain in October 1944 (p. 41) was indeed an abject failure, as the commander Antonio López Tovar knew in advance. Ángel Álvarez, who took part, and later became a French mayor, informs me that all the men knew it would fail but the Spanish communist leaders insisted that all Spain would rise in support. Tovar in fact decided on withdrawal before Carrillo, sent by Stalin, arrived on the spot to pass on the order. The two Spanish guerrillero generals, Riquelme and Luis Fernández, should not be given equal status. Riquelme was a respected Republican Army general; Fernández was an impostor. As for the actions of the communist guerrilleros in Spain, their plunder of Spanish homes evoked disgust even among communists.
More needed to be said about Pasionaria on her return to France (p. 107), with orders from Stalin to send every follower of Jesús Monzón on suicide missions to Spain. Also missing is her public address in Toulouse, understandably omitted in El Patriota del Sudoeste, in which she referred to all who had fought the Germans in France as traitors to the Party. Loyalty, she implied, meant fleeing, as she had done, to the safety of Moscow. As a result, many communists abandoned the Party.
As for Franco’s dictatorship, it was sui generis. It was never what the French journalist Marcel Bidoux called it: “the daughter of Italian fascism and German Nazism” (p. 34). It was not the daughter of anyone. It was never based on a foreign model. But there it was, and what was the world to do about it? It never stopped offending international opinion. The French consul Coiffard reported: “Franco’s amnesty was more rhetorical than real. After two to three weeks of relative freedom, most exiles [who] returned from France found themselves in prison” (p. 61). Messenger shows that French opinion and much of world opinion was furious at Franco’s execution of the Resistance hero Cristino García, but Franco remained defiant, and that defiance was shared by a considerable portion of the Spanish people who at that time saw the Caudillo as their national hero (p. 90).
The position of the Anglo-Americans was that Franco could not be removed without considerable difficulty (p. 140). Their overall preference for a conciliatory policy toward Franco was called realism, and it was shared by a sizeable portion of French opinion. This was opposed by an equal number who were dismayed and even alienated by this readiness to return to business as usual. At first it was the hard-line that prevailed, but it won little sympathy in Washington and London. As a result France was forced to go it alone, but it was a failure from the start. An embargo on Spain could succeed only if all suppliers, especially of oil, took part (p. 111). Trade issues began to dominate the discussion, including the importation of Spanish pyrites (p. 94), ironically so, since French dependence on Spanish pyrites had been recognized in 1936 as a matter of life and death for the French Third Republic. With businessmen in the southwest now anxious to resume trade (p. 134), pressure grew on the government, even from the left, to reopen the border.
Messenger shows how attitudes in France in the late 1940s slowly shifted from support of a hard-line policy to a readiness to accept reality. The Cold War had arrived, exacerbating the division in Republican ranks between the communists and the rest. François Mauriac spoke for many in France when he warned that France had to abandon its “personal policy” and sign with its Western allies “in a policy of realpolitik that tolerated the Franco regime not on its record, but because it represented anti-Communism in a country of strategic importance” (p. 101).
Messenger shows that the “Spanish question” was over by the end of 1946. In the UN, Poland tried and failed where France had already failed (p. 123). The more the Cold War developed, the safer Franco became. France became aware of the danger to its security from Spanish communists, and Messenger reveals that the order in May 1948 by the French Ministry of the Interior to move certain Spanish exiles away from the Southwest to the interior of France was actually a case of Franco-Spanish collusion (p. 135). In 1950 the PCE and the PSUC were forced into exile, while in the UN it was agreed that governments could reappoint ambassadors to Madrid. By the end of 1955, all countries in the Soviet bloc had broken off relations with the Spanish Republican government-in-exile, and only Israel, Mexico and Yugoslavia continued to regard the Republic as the legitimate government of Spain. Messenger concludes that France, by its lone stand, had strengthened Franco’s hand, and by its leftist slant paid the price of losing influence with the Anglo-Saxons (p. 137).
œMessenger’s work wins its place: it provides some useful details, but attribution to a source is sometimes given where none is necessary, or, worse, given to a single source as if it were a singular and notable discovery (pp. 28, 31). The work is also marred by misspellings: Ravanel (p. 43), General Maurice Chevance-Bertin (p. 45), Ibarruri (p. 60), Indalecio Prieto (p. 73), José María Doussinague (p. 115)—all missing from the Index, along with Coiffard, Collet, Fernández—together with many missing accents in French and Spanish. Even the Acknowledgments heading comes out jumbled. Negrín was never President of the Spanish Republic (p. 55), but he, like Carrillo, however much despised—he is still alive in Malaga, but hiding from the world—still deserves a place in the Index.
Bayo: El general que adiestró la guerrilla de Castro y el Che by Luis Diez. Barcelona: Debate, 2007. 287 pages. Reviewed by Eric R. Smith, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
The power struggle between left and right that played out in the Spanish Civil War reappeared in the wider Spanish-speaking world in the postwar period. Connections between Spain and, for instance, the Cuban revolution can be made not only through Che Guevara’s father, who was an avid supporter of the Spanish Republic, or New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews who covered both events, or even through various republican exiles who witnessed the political turmoil in Latin America, but even more directly through a lesser known figure, Alberto Bayo. Che Guevara considered Bayo his only influence in the thinking that eventually culminated in the book Guerilla Warfare, and he later wrote Bayo’s epitaph only weeks before his own death in Bolivia. Bayo’s most-recognized achievement is 150 Questions to a Guerrilla, perhaps the seminal work on the topic, which is included here as an appendix. Luis Díez, a Spanish journalist for El Periódico (Barcelona), has offered this second biography of Bayo. (The first was written by Bayo’s friend Manuel Moreal: Bayo, España, y Libertad in 1963 and was followed by two recent articles in Revista de Historia Naval and Revista Española de Historia Militar in 1997 and 2005 respectively).
Utilizing archival sources and interviews, along with Bayo’s published work, Díez has assembled an homage to a twentieth-century revolutionary, if one lacking in the larger historical context expected from academic writers. The book also lacks proper footnotes, except in the case of block quotations. Diez’s is a biography in the strictest sense. More work can be done on this subject, both within histories of the left and in the larger context of Cold War struggles.
The first five chapters are short. We learn that Bayo was born in Cuba and hailed from a military family. He spent several years of his youth in New Orleans, but spent his adult life in Hispanic countries as a soldier and pilot. He opposed the Spanish treatment of Moroccans during his service in the Rif War, and in 1923 Bayo dueled and nearly killed his nemesis in Africa, Joaquín González Gallarza. Gallarza survived the duel and later went on to be a franquista Lieutenant General.
More than a third of the book, including Díez’s longest chapter, covers the Spanish Civil War. Bayo was put in charge of the counter-insurgency and defense of the Balearic Islands. There Bayo was forced to lead a combined force of regular republican military, anarchist militia, and other partisans. Events went badly from the outset with partisan squabbling and a failure to receive material support he requested to execute his orders. The lack of material thwarted his commands and Bayo faced a consejo de guerra.
After the Baleares, he served on diplomatic and spying missions as ayudante de campo to Indalecio Prieto. His American education made him valuable as an agent to England, where he was dispatched to broker a deal to buy arms for the republic on the black market. From Paris, Bayo was enlisted to break up what Díez calls a “terrorist cell” of franquistas. Bayo’s republican service followed the fate of Prieto, who was replaced toward the end of the war. With the republican cause lost, Bayo was forced into exile, eventually taking Mexican citizenship and serving as a flight instructor for the Mexican Air Force during World War II. Bayo’s political activities also ran deep. He had been involved in republican politics in the 1920s and was later instrumental in attempting to organize among the exiles a movement for a Third Republic.
Díez frequently refers to Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Chapter 10 finally connects Bayo with the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7). Where Bayo saw in Batista a caudillo like Franco and found in the M-26-7 struggle a chance to unseat a dictator and establish a future base for anti-franquista activities, Guevara saw in the Spanish Republic the historical parallel to the fate of Guatemala’s Ten Years of Spring (1944-54). The coup there had radicalized him and compelled him to Castro’s movement. The layers of similarities were evident to the Spanish-speaking left and anyone with an internationalist outlook can sympathize with these movements, which is why Díez’s book is so much bigger than its subject. That Díez’s sons were also involved in these events also adds a dimension as to the larger history of these struggles.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita and Simon Doubleday, eds. Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers. Remapping Cultural History, Volume 8. New York: Berghan Books, 2008. 267 pages. Reviewed by Michael Sawyer, University of Central Missouri.
The collection of essays in Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers continues the stated intent of the Remapping Cultural History series: to challenge current theoretical models and to rethink perceptions of history. The twelve articles that comprise the volume vary substantially in focus, but taken as a whole represent a comprehensive and profound investigation into the ambiguities of Spain’s national identities and delimitations, whether physical, cultural, linguistic, historical, political, psychological or artistic.
The sequence of essays is obviously very well thought out, with the first essay, Parvati Nair’s “Europe’s ‘Last’ Wall: Contiguity, Exchange, and Heterotopia in Ceuta, the Confluence of Spain and North Africa” taking as its starting point the country’s literal southern border. The author very competently makes the case that Ceuta is, according to Foucault’s definition, a heterotopia, in that it defies delimitation and categorization, the constant flux of cultural ideas making it an inherently fragmented and contradictory space.
The following essay, H. Rosi Song’s “Migration, Gender and Desire in Contemporary Spanish Cinema,” expands further the notion of what constitutes Spanish sociocultural identity, examining the concept of gendered migration, cultural stereotypes, and the colonial and immigrant experience in three films: Cosas que dejé en La Habana (1998), Flores de otro mundo (1999), and I Love You Baby (2001).
Joseba Gabilondo, like many others, takes issue with Mikel Azurmendi’s writings on the Spanish national state in “State Narcissism: Racism, Neoimperialism, and Spanish Opposition to Multiculturalism.” Gabilondo makes a compellingly detailed case that Freud’s ideas on individual narcissism can and should be applied to the State, and in so doing explains the causes of a new nationalism that reacts irrationally to globalization and multiculturalism.
And thus follow the rest of the essays, each one penetrating and insightful, examining and questioning numerous assumptions about the nature of the nation: Susan Martin-Márquez studies the social significance for Spanish-African shared identity of the artistic productions of Miquel Barceló and José Luis Guerín; Cristina Moreiras-Menor scrutinizes the national identity of Galicia and its relationship to Spain as revealed in Manuel Rivas’s A man dos paiños (La mano del emigrante in Spanish); Vicente L. Rafael reconsiders the roots and ramifications of the adoption of José Rizal as a national hero of the Philippines; Alberto Medina illuminates the successful attempts by the Bourbon monarchy to modernize the country, at once bringing it in line with the rest of Europe and providing a contrastive sense of difference in identity to its own Hapsburgian past; Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián delves into the critique of Spanish imperialism that he identifies in José de Viera y Clavijo’s eighteenth-century work, Noticias de la historia general de las Islas de Canaria; David Rojinsky provides an incisive analysis of Cristóbal Manso de Contreras’s first-hand account of one of the most important Spanish colonial insurrections of the seventeenth century, the Tehuantepec Rebellion; Michael Armstrong-Roche reappraises Cervantes’s Numancia, demonstrating the numerous and deep contradictions in the foundational interpretations of the work, and the logical consequences to subsequent ideas on national identity that stem from such paradoxes; Mariano Gómez Aranda probes the topic of border crossing and its inherent significance to Jewish self-identity in medieval Spain; finally, Eduardo Subirats provides what is at the same time the most general and the most comprehensive reconsideration of our common perceptions of Spanish identity with his convincingly unsettling “Seven Theses against Hispanism.”
Read together or individually, these essays mark an impressive display of knowledge of Spanish cultural and historical identity both in width and profundity, and, more importantly, of the marginalized, suppressed, or ignored elements that undermine that knowledge. If you think you know Spain, think again; you will find something, if not many things, in this collection to challenge your perceptions. A valuable resource for students and professors alike, as well as any reader with a desire to better understand the complications, ambiguities, and fluctuations of modern and historical Spain.
Bunk, Brian D. Ghosts of Passion: Martyrdom, Gender, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 244 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN -13:978-0-8223-3943-4. Reviewed by Jessica Davidson, Department of History, James Madison University.
Brian Bunk’s 2007 study of the origins of the Spanish Civil War stands as a valuable addition to the underdeveloped body of scholarship based on the cultural and gender history of modern Spain. Through an analysis of commemorative images and narrative texts produced around the time of the 1934 October Revolution, Bunk shows how the debate of gender issues led directly to the Spanish Civil War. The Revolution, which came in response to the right-wing powers in office, was to be a national uprising organized primarily by the socialist party, but the revolt fizzled out or was repressed swiftly everywhere except for Asturias. Indeed the manifestation in Asturias was also soon violently quelled by government forces. Both sides, the revolutionary leftists and the right-wing military, employed gendered interpretations of the chaos. Despite a shared definition of gender, the images created on the left and the right served to polarize the two sides of the fighting. Bunk asserts that “The imagery produced by both pro- and anti- revolutionary writers and artists depicted a conflict that involved the survival of the family and the nation.” (87) While their political motivations differed greatly, they coincided in their adherence to traditional gender definitions, agreeing that women were passive and inclined to maternal, care-giving relationships.
The strength and true contribution of Bunk’s work comes when he delves into the gendered significance of the Revolution and its memory. For example, chapter four, “Grandsons of the Cid: Masculinity, Sexual Violence, and the Destruction of the Family,” begins with a powerful analysis of a leftist journal cover depicting right-wing violence directed at the Spanish family. The image portrays a swastika-wearing soldier stabbing the bodies of fallen men and women. One woman has been raped and holds a lifeless baby in her arms. (90) This image and Bunk’s assertion that the heart of the matter for the left as well as the right was honor and the sanctity of the home (and traditional gender roles) are compelling and convincing. He continues to make this point in chapter five, “Hyenas, Harpies and Proletarian Mothers: Commemorating Female Participation.” Not only is the chapter title provocative but so are Bunk’s analyses of images of women on both the left and right in the October conflict. Bunk astutely sets the context for women’s situation in the interwar years and notes that tension over a departure from traditional female gender roles was a pan-European trend. In other words, the scene was ripe for gender controversy. Again despite the clear political differences between the two sides of the revolution both agreed on an understanding of gender that pigeon-holed women, despite their activities, as feminine, passive, innocent, and even virginal or, on the other hand, as aggressive “harpies.” This interpretation was no more emblematic than in the case of the revolutionary “woman warrior” Aida Lafuente. (133) A young leftist, she gave her life for the cause of the working class. Though clearly a challenge to traditional gender roles as a weapons-wielding woman, the left paid homage to her as a “virginal icon” who embodied purity and maternal-potential. (133) The right, however, remembered her as an unfeminine and bloodthirsty insurgent.
While the book is full of rich information, it often assumes that the reader has some knowledge of modern (19th, early 20th century) Spanish political dynamics. The Second Republic within which the Revolution occurred is an infamously complicated period of Spanish history and the author does not provide enough of a big-picture analysis of the politics. For example, establishing the concept of the “two Spains” born in the nineteenth century would orient the novice of Spanish history. In addition, in the background chapter, only a few pages are devoted to discussion of the actual revolutionary fighting in October 1934, a surprising point considering that the author’s argument centers on these events. The book’s conclusion is a bit jarring in that it analyzes the narrative and visual commemorations of the revolution not during the Civil War or Franco regime but in the early years of the transition to democracy. Not surprisingly the fiftieth anniversary of the 1934 conflict evoked mixed and politicized memories but (unlike 1936) it “did not…translate into direct political action.” (160) The significance of the figures of Aida Lafuente and the “martyrs of Túron,” religious men from a Catholic order and the right-wing’s choice of symbolic heroes, as harbingers of the Civil War was ultimately lost during the transition and instead they were made to fit the political circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s.
On the whole, the book is a needed contribution to the gender, cultural, women’s, and social history of modern Spain. Its shortcomings are slight in light of the compelling and important recognition of the role of gender in the political life of Spain both in the 1930s and today.