Bulletin
BOOK REVIEWS
García Herrero, María del Carmen. Del nacer y el vivir: Fragmentos para una historia de la vida en la baja Edad Media. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2005. 422pp. Reviewed by Marta V. Vicente, University of Kansas.
In Del nacer y el vivir: Fragmentos para una historia de la vida en la baja Edad Media María del Carmen García Herrero has compiled a stimulating collection of her essays that narrate life in medieval Iberia from the perspective of women and their bodies. The texts focus on life in the Crown of Aragon, mostly in Zaragoza and Huesca, and are drawn from documents in Zaragoza’s notarial, municipal, and parish archives, as well as from Inquisition files and documents from the city’s diocesan archive. The book, consisting of fifteen chapters is divided into three sections: I, “Sobre el parto y la crianza”; II, “Amor, matrimonio y otros modos de regular la convivencia”; and III, “Violencia y mediación.” Four chapters include full transcriptions of the main document used for that chapter’s case study. In particular, in chapter 12—“Una burla y un prodigio: El proceso contra la Morellana (Zaragoza, 1462),” a case-study of a woman who murdered her hostess—the article itself is only nine pages long, while the transcription of the document is twenty-six pages. The interest of this particular chapter is in the transcription of this fascinating case study, a criminal process housed in the municipal archive of Zaragoza.
The main contribution of this collection lies, first, in making accessible to a wider audience articles that the author has mostly published in local journals or hard-to-get conference proceedings. Second, this collection recovers stories drawn from local history that describe the complexity and difficulties of daily life in late medieval Zaragoza. García Herrero’s transcriptions of four of the most interesting cases will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval history, women, gender, and sexuality studies. The topics covered in the book range from the practice of midwifery, the education of children, abortion, infertility, bigamy, murder, and female erudition; all of them bring us closer to the drama of life and death in medieval Zaragoza. There are dying mothers worried about the future of their newborn children, and parents without biological children who created surrogate families. Overall, García Herrero depicts a world characterized by the fragility of the nuclear family vulnerable to death, the arduous life of illegitimate children, the difficulties of abortions, the emotional burden of infertility, the perils of bigamy and murder. A real jewel in this book is chapter 4, “Matrimonio y libertad,” which studies a series of love stories between partners of unequal social backgrounds, such as the case of Antonio de Arino and Gracia Pérez. The couple had secretly contracted marriage against her parents’ consent, and despite her family’s pressure, Gracia had her marriage recognized and validated by the church. In this and many other chapters the reader begs for more, since most of the documents are so rich one wishes the author had provided further analysis to help us better locate the collection’s case studies within a larger context, going outside Aragon to compare them with the rest of Spain. Nevertheless the book is interesting for the rich archival material that the author has put together.
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Pérez, Joseph. History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Translated from the Spanish by Lysa Hochroth. Introduction by Helen Nader. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. xv+149 pages. Reviewed by Bethany Aram, Seville, Spain.
This concise history, published in Spanish in 1993, reinterprets the causes as well as the consequences of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from the realms of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand. Synthesizing multi-volume works unavailable in English, it rejects idealized claims about the nature of medieval convivencia, or peaceful co-existence among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Rather than three cultures, Pérez sees two dominant cultures, Muslim and Christian, in which Jews participated depending on where and when they lived. According to Pérez, Jews were tolerated only in times of economic expansion and political stability, which began to break down in the fourteenth century. Pérez also challenges the idea that Jews constituted a financial and business elite or bourgeoisie whose expulsion devastated the economy, arguing that Jews and Christians exercised the same trades and professions before 1492.
Drawing upon the work of Yitzhak Baer and Luis Suárez Fernández, Pérez begins with a succinct and sensible account of the Jewish experience in medieval Spain. While discussing the status of Jews under Visigoth, Islamic, and Catholic rule, Pérez consistently distinguishes between prominent individuals and the majority of the Jewish population. While highlighting the achievements of Jewish intellectuals in Córdoba and Toledo, Pérez cautions against idealizing a golden age of Spanish Judaism. He describes the rise of Christian intolerance in the thirteenth century, which culminated in the fourteenth-century crisis, analyzed in Chapter 2. Pérez identifies the origins of the myth of the Jewish usurer as debtors’ inability (or unwillingness) to repay sums owed to Jews, noting later that Jewish moneylenders sometimes served as figureheads for ecclesiastical institutions in the same business. In Castile the civil war and victory of Enrique Trastámara over Pedro I further devastated the Jewish communities.
Beginning with the killings of 1391, Chapter 3 discusses mounting pressures on Jews to convert to Catholicism, including the legislation of 1412 in Castile and 1414 in Aragon. The social and economic success of many converts inspired resentment among Old Christians, which surfaced in Toledo in the riots and purity of blood statute of 1449 and in propaganda spread by the enemies of Enrique IV. Chapter 4 details how doubts about the sincerity of converts to Catholicism led Queen Isabel to decree the strict separation of Jews from Catholics, to appoint the first inquisitors in 1480, and – in an immediate precedent to the decision of 1492 -- to expel all Jews from the dioceses of Seville, Cádiz, and Córdoba in 1483. Chapter 5, which discusses the measures of 1492, analyzes three versions of the edict, including one prepared by the inquisitor general, Tomás de Torquemada, also translated as appendices. Convincingly, Pérez demonstrates the Inquisition’s leading role in the expulsion. As for the economy, Pérez argues, the expulsion produced a temporary crisis rather than the onset of Spain’s decline.
This book makes an important case against Spanish exceptionalism. If Isabel and Ferdinand were some of the last Western European sovereigns to tolerate Jews in their realms, their decision foreshadowed subsequent attempts to forge political unity through religious unity, as in Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, thus ending toleration for Protestants in France. In the context of this interesting argument, however, notions of “nation,” “nationalism,” and the “European community” appear anachronistic.
As a translation of the Spanish original published in 1993, this book does not incorporate the recent related work of scholars including Yom Tov Assis, María Gloria de Antonio Rubio, Haim Beinart, Enrique Cantera Montenegro, Juan Carrasco, Elka Klein, Mark D. Meyerson, Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho, David Nirenberg (mentioned in Helen Nader’s Introduction), Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Béatrice Leroy, and Luis Rubio García.
Díaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Ed. and trans. George K. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv + 231pp. Reviewed by David A. Wacks, University of Oregon.
The University of Chicago Press, after a hiatus of fifteen years, has reissued in paperback George Zucker’s translation of Paloma Díaz-Mas’ essential overview of the history, language, and literatures of the Sephardic Diaspora. There have been other panoramic histories of the Sephardim, such as Esther Benbassa, and Aron Rodrigue’s Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries (2000), and Jane Gerber’s The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (1992). What most sets this work apart is that Díaz-Mas is a philologist who gives equal time to socio-historical topics on one hand, and literary-linguistic topics on the other. To wit, she divides her work into sections on Historical Background (33 pages), History of the Sephardim (35 pages), Language (38 pages), Literature (48 pages), The Sephardim and Spain (26 pages), and The Sephardim Today (28 pages). As befits her training and appointment as Professor of Spanish Literature at the Universidad del País Vasco, she is particularly strong on the linguistic and literary issues and includes very interesting and detailed sections, for example, on what she refers to as the Adopted Genres of modern Sephardic literary practice, namely journalism (132-36), narrative (136-39), theater (136-145), and autograph poetry (145-48). This section, in addition to a fascinating aside in the section dedicated to the “Second Diaspora” of Sephardim in North America (62-66), brings to light, among other facts, the existence of an active Ladino press in New York City during the early twentieth century.
The chapter on “The Sephardim and Spain,” original to the 1992 English translation, is particularly commendable in its assessment of the ways in which Sephardim and their relationship with Spain have been imagined by Spaniards. Díaz-Mas keeps a safe critical distance from her material, even holding herself accountable for romanticizing the Sephardim in her own creative writing (168-69).
Zucker’s translation is respectful of Díaz-Mas’ original text, while accessible to non-hispanophones and non-specialists alike. He has made sound decisions in adopting a notional rather than hyperliteral translation, and especially in reproducing the original text of Ladino sources accompanied by his English translations, “to let the Sephardim speak in their own voice” (viii). This is particularly beneficial for readers who remember enough high school Spanish to appreciate the original language but for whom the Spanish edition would not be accessible.
There are a few areas where Zucker might have improved his interpretation of Díaz-Mas’ work. Despite his useful “Translator’s Additional Bibliography” consisting of English language texts on Sephardic topics, neither he nor Díaz-Mas has updated the bibliography since the 1992 hardcover edition of Zucker’s translation. In the last fifteen years, a good deal of work has been published in all of the areas covered by Díaz-Mas, and it seems a disservice to readers both general and specialized to have let this detail slip. In addition, there are a number of typographical errors and faulty transliterations from Hebrew or from Spanish phonetics to English. He refers to the prominent thirteenth-century Catalan Rabbi Nahmanides by the incorrect acronymic “Rambam” (5) (Mamonides was the Rambam, Nahmanides the Ramban). The transliteration of the Aramaic betrothal ceremony in the section on Marriage (5) contains several errors, and we later learn of the Romance Bible of a Rabbi Moshe Arragel of “Guadalara” (102) (Guadalajara). However, these and other such errors are on the balance cosmetic and do not detract substantially from the book’s appeal. In any event they are probably more telling of editorial policy than of the scholarship of either Díaz-Mas or Zucker.
Perhaps the strongest recommendation I can give this book is that it got me excited to learn (and teach) more about some of the overlooked areas of Sephardic language and literature. With the exception of the runaway popularity of the Sephardic ballad and song tradition, historical studies have tended to dominate the field both in the academy and among the general readership. Like Díaz-Mas and Zucker, I am a professor of Spanish with an interest in Sephardic studies. And while there exists a great deal of Sephardic literature, from rabbinic musar (ethical) treatises to journalism and modern novels, almost none has been edited in a Romanized, glossed format accessible to students of Spanish literature. This book not only brings together a wealth of bibliography and cultural information delivered in an effective and engaging narrative, it underscored the need to make these materials available for a larger audience of students of Hispanic culture. While the great majority of you are historians who may not think of Sephardic culture in these terms, the current rise of Spanish in the United States and increasing interest in Jewish culture in the mainstream has created the perfect storm for Sephardic studies in North America. And Díaz-Mas and Zucker’s book is an excellent tool for exploiting this interest and parlaying it into productive academic and public discussion.
Casey, James. Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 314 pp. + xi. Reviewed by David Coleman, Eastern Kentucky University.
James Casey’s Family and Community in Early Modern Spain is a richly detailed dissection of an urban and provincial elite in early modern Spain. Despite the book’s broad title, Casey does not engage the topic of the family across social classes. What he loses in breadth, however, is more than compensated by the depth of his treatment of the values, mores and behaviors of his true topic—those families that constituted Granada’s ruling class through the early modern era. From an impressively broad range of sources ranging from civil court records to creative literature to family annals and much more, Casey constructs an image of a local social and political order undergirded by what he argues were the remarkably resilient core values of honor and lineage.
Through the course of twelve thematic chapters, Casey spins off of this central thesis a wide array of challenging and thoughtful arguments. His consideration of marriage strategies and inheritance patterns, for instance, leads him to conclude that Granada’s elite in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century city was neither a hermetically sealed oligarchy nor an entirely open group that provided easy access to upwardly mobile individuals and clans. Instead, Casey’s nuanced examination offers us the metaphor of a “circulating” elite—one in which the apparently “new” families that accessed local political offices throughout the early modern era were most often intermarried, junior branches of formerly powerful lineages whose senior cousin lines had either fallen on hard times or died off without an heir. Within this system, Casey contends, clan reckoning and the memorialization of ancestry exerted an overwhelming cultural force that consciously and subconsciously shaped the identities and choices of those individuals involved in it. The resulting overlapped ties and relations among these “circulating” lineages, moreover, generated a culture that valued moderation over excess, stability over change, clan over individual, and tradition over innovation. To Casey, Granada’s dynamic “frontier” society of the decades following the city’s 1492 Christian conquest had thus given way to a society that, although not entirely “static,” was increasingly rigid and largely resistant to outside influences or change in the century and a half that followed the suppression of the Second Rebellion of the Alpujarras (1568-1571).
Casey arrives at these conclusions via research that is unapologetically qualitative and descriptive rather than statistical or “data-driven.” He masterfully displays his deep familiarity with the city’s early modern history and its powerful families without cluttering the text with charts and numbers (although eight genealogical tables included as an appendix are helpful). Yet even in the midst of a book that so skillfully weaves dozens of strands of narrative and anecdotal evidence into an apparently seamless whole, many scholarly readers may find themselves wondering if in the midst of all the talk of “honor,” resistance to change, and the “narrowness of local life,” there may lurk lingering ghosts of longstanding Anglophone stereotypes about early modern Spain enumerated so effectively in recent works by Richard Kagan among many others.
Of course, to say that this book seems to reinforce so many of these traditional stereotypes does not by itself imply that the stereotypes have no basis in the historical record. Casey’s study may in fact reinvigorate debate about precisely these issues. This is especially true given that this study has appeared on the heels of Ruth MacKay’s equally challenging 2006 book “Lazy, Improvident People”:Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History—a work that explicitly attempts to dispel the traditional Anglo-American stereotypes (above all the supposed obsession with “honor”) that this study posits as core values in early modern Granada. Faculty who teach graduate seminars on early modern Spanish history should note that reading MacKay’s recent book alongside Casey’s might make for fascinating debate as well as encourage fresh inquiry.
Berco, Cristian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 248 pp. Reviewed by Harry Vélez Quiñones, University of Puget Sound.
The study of early modern homoeroticism in Spain has come a long way since its beginnings in the 1980s. Mary Elizabeth Perry’s volume Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville (1980) and Rafael Carrasco’s Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia: Historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785) (1985) readily come to mind. It is of the latter that one is reminded as one reads Cristian Berco’s Sexual Hierarchies. Analyzing documents that Carrasco had previously worked with, namely the sodomy trials carried out by the Aragonese Inquisition, Berco proposes a new reading that gives preference to homosocial bonds, social class, and age over questions of gender construction and sexual identity. “Despite specific instances of intolerances, single bursts of repression, male homosexual behavior formed part of the encompassing structure of masculine identity and sociability” (39), Berco asserts. Thus, he posits that the so-called nefarious sin, universally considered as “crimen inter christianos non nominandum,” was but an “integral part of the male sexual mindset, a potential erotic encounter present at the core of male sociability” (39). In this fashion, readers are invited to consider a radically different view of the social and sexual landscape of Golden Age masculinity. In it, what we have theorized as sexual minorities disappear and their sexual behaviors, traits, and habits become part and parcel of what being male in early modern Spain was all about. As Berco sees it: “Under a framework of gender and age hierarchies, a patina of homosexual behaviour subtly covered the architecture of male sociability” (40).
Sexual Hierarchies is divided into six short chapters. The first three explore the dynamics of male-on-male sodomy, its breadth, and its subversive potential. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 concentrate on the way the Aragonese Inquisition operated in cases of sodomy and examine issues such as its relation to local authorities, the social context of cases, and the limits of social control.
“[T]he staleness of the identity debate” (131) appears to be one of the driving forces behind Berco’s monograph. And yet, Berco admits the possibility that a subculture structured along the axis of same-sex desire may have existed in early modern Spain as he ponders in the book’s conclusion: “Are some of the Spanish mollies we have encountered pointing to a primitive gay urban culture, a space where drag foremothers slowly established a niche of difference marked by sexual preference?” (133) However, Berco suggests that we dismiss their significance, as he goes on to state: “This is certainly arguable, but I wonder about the ultimate relevance of asserting such a point, except for moving the chronology of gayness back to the early modern era, and thus destabilizing what everybody knows is an overtly rigid paradigm regarding the emergence of a gay identity in the nineteenth century” (133). As mentioned earlier, for Berco this would be futile since it would merely advance the agenda of one side of a fruitless contest between scholars of gayness and “deconstructionists,” what he terms “a debate between the deaf and the mute, with two camps with differing epistemological assumptions about evidence, history, and identity battling it out” (133).
The principal problem with Berco’s otherwise attractive volume is what appears to be a limited interpretation and understanding of how homoerotic desire is embodied in and performed by individuals. Following a heteronormative position that blindly and absolutely equates penetration with a masculine act perpetrated upon a feminine or feminized other, he appears to give full credence to a strategic deformation in the interpretation of sodomy nearly as common now as it appears to have been then. Such a paradigm of sexuality had evolved from Greek and Roman models. In these, males would always retain the prerogatives of their gender and their status as long as they were the insertive partner in any sexual encounter. In addition, sexual desire for boys and teens had its place in the construction of masculinity.
Following that logic, being the insertive partner and openly claiming that position as one’s exclusive role in sodomitic encounters could lead to lesser punishment in as much as it could be equated with being the less perverted of two sodomites. Since anal sex between males was seen by inquisitors, moralists, law makers, and others as a degraded imitation of coition, the absolute standard of penetrative sexuality, he who would take the lesser or passive position in such a scheme, that is, he who would consent to “being used as a woman,” would generally be judged more harshly, especially if he was an older man or the older partner. It is this way of viewing the crime of sodomy that engenders the sexual subject positions of bugarrón or bugre and puto or marión. Sodomy, however, was both a grave sin and a crime. It should be evident that those accused of it would devise rhetorical and cultural strategies to avoid being detected, accused, and penalized as a sodomite. Indeed, the testimony of those processed by the Aragonese Inquisition supports this. Claims of being solely involved in insertive anal sex with other males have to be read against the very way in which the crime of sodomy was prosecuted. Tops and bottoms were sodomites and knew that they could be held as such by others. The fact they could be punished differently on account of whether they were the insertive partner or the passive one was complicated further by questions of class, race, religion, and age. Yet, as I remember hearing during my school days in that late medieval island that is Puerto Rico: “La ley de Herodes: Tan maricón es el que da como el que coge.” Much like tango, it takes two to engage in pecado nefando.
In the concluding pages of Sexual Hierarchies Berco asks, “Why should we make identity the defining issue in the history of sexuality?” (133). The work of scholars such as Dan Heiple, Matthew Stroud, Robert Ter Horst, Sherry Velasco, Baltasar Fra Molinero, María Mercedes Carrión, Sidney Donnell, and José Cartagena Calderón could help answer that question from several perspectives, but it appears to be absent from the bibliography of this monograph. Had Berco, for instance, considered Heiple’s research, he would have had to consider the advice Father Ledesma gave confessors concerning sodomites in his Primera parte de la Summa en la qual se cifra y summa todo lo que toca y pertenece a los sacramentos (Salamanca, 1608). For Ledesma, it was imperative that confessors distinguish between at least two types of sodomites, one of which he refers to as “ocultos y secretos” and those others he labels “públicos y notorios.” These two different categories of sinners required that the confessor employ different strategies in order to be able to administer penance. That early modern sodomy was a variegated tapestry in which many sexual practices, different performances of masculinity, and assorted levels of personal and cultural awareness coalesced is what Ledesma knew and what Berco dismisses, preferring instead to focus on the study of homosocial bonds centered on the presumed supremacy of the “all encompassing system of penetrative sexuality” (32). Berco would have us believe “the question of a homosexual identity dissolves within the aspects that characterized the more common dynamics and masculinity” (32).
Having chosen to approach the stories, testimonies, and other evidence of sodomites, their accusers, and the inquisitors who oversaw the process through the lens of heteronormativity, what Berco reports is significantly different than what Carrasco and others had earlier shared with us. In Berco’s monograph the early modern queer disappears or else is confined to a reduced space sparsely populated by the odd molly-like being and his fairy drag foremother. His contribution to the history of sexuality in Sexual Hierarchies does away with the crisis of masculinity that Sidney Donnell and others have painstakingly studied in favor of chronicling one more chapter in the endless saga of penetrative sexuality.
The reasons why so many scholars have fore-grounded questions of identity to such an extent in their studies on early modern sexuality ought not to be relegated to a rhetorical vacuum. As the work of many colleagues has shown, the pervasive silence that surrounds the mental structures of heteronormative thought is every bit as damaging as the one that deafened and twisted the plural voices whose traces survive in inquisitorial documents and other literary and non-literary texts in the early modern period.
Despite its critical bent and the notable absences in its bibliography, Sexual Hierarchies is destined to be a controversial and hotly discussed volume. Berco’s placement of homoeroticism at the center of early modern Spanish masculinity is a polemical but fruitful move. As recent sexual scandals involving lawmakers from Florida, Idaho, Washington State, and the Balearic Islands have shown, cultural strategies that allow self-identifying heterosexual members of a community to engage in homosexual acts while desperately clinging to the privileges of heteronormativity still abound. Moreover, Berco’s monograph makes available to English readers a wealth of information previously available only in Spanish. In conclusion, Sexual Hierarchies makes a significant contribution to a debate that can only lead to a deeper understanding of gender, masculinity, and queerness in early modern Spain.
MacCormack, Sabine. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xix + 320 pp. 19 illustrations. Reviewed by Daniel Stolzenberg, University of California, Davis.
In Cuzco—the former capital of the Inca empire, refounded as a Spanish colony by Francisco Pizarro in 1534, and today a regional capital in southern Peru—frescos in the vestibule of an old house depict Julius Caesar and Pompey charging one another on horseback, spears raised. Painted in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, the images offer vivid testimony of the penetration of classical motifs into the Andes in the century following Spanish conquest. They are reproduced in Sabine MacCormack’s On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru, which explores the influence of classical knowledge on historical understanding in and about Peru and the Andes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consisting of MacCormack’s readings of early modern texts by authors of Spanish and Amerindian origin, the book is organized into thematic chapters dealing with subjects such as the pre-Hispanic past, war and political life, the founding of cities, and the civilizing power of language.
Its cumulative portrait of the classical tradition holds the book together as multifarious and open-ended, offering no particular ideology, but rather serving as an adaptable set of conceptual tools for thinking about history and culture. In this respect it fits in with recent work by European intellectual historians who have described Renaissance classical studies in similar terms. Readers familiar with this scholarship will learn much of interest about early modern histories of South America but are unlikely to have many cherished assumptions challenged. MacCormack’s target lies elsewhere. In opposition to scholars of colonial Latin America such as Tzvetan Todorov and Walter Mignolo, who have described the use of classical and European models in the interpretation of Amerindian culture as the silencing of indigenous voices, MacCormack demonstrates the heterogeneity, ambiguity, and flexibility of the classical texts that played such a prominent role in the works of early modern writers on the Andes.
The plasticity of the classical tradition as a resource for understanding New World phenomena was, first, a function of the diversity of examples offered by Latin and Greek literature. Different lessons were to be found, for example, in the histories of the civil wars of the late Republic than in Tacitus’s chronicle of imperial decadence. Both the Spanish and the Incas were subject to Roman comparisons, and often enough the former were found wanting while the latter measured up. One of MacCormack’s most interesting claims is that Europeans’ encounter with the classical past equipped them with a deepened understanding of cultural difference, which they brought to the study of the Andes. For all their cozy familiarity with the classical world, humanistically trained scholars knew that the ancient civilizations they so admired had been radically different from their own. Not least, ancient history taught them that pagans were capable of good governance and virtuous action, a lesson that was not lost on historians of the Inca such as Garcilaso de la Vega. MacCormack does not deny that in many cases classical models led to the simplification and misunderstanding of Andean phenomena, but she shows that such models could also generate more complex and accurate portraits. In many instances—for example, the study of Quechua by Europeans trained in Latin grammar—an initial phase of crude parallels is seen to lay the groundwork for subsequent deeper understanding of local particularities.
On the Wings of Time is not tightly argued, as perhaps befits a book whose central claim is one of indeterminacy. While one learns much from MacCormack’s erudite textual analyses, the book is weakened by its lack of sustained argumentation. In particular, a provocative and intriguing claim given prominence in the introduction, that the classical tradition constituted a significant and integral part of early modern Andean culture, does not receive systematic substantiation in the chapters that follow. This reviewer is sympathetic to MacCormack’s assertion that the classical tradition came to belong to the indigenous people of the Andes, and thus, “to claim that those who thought and wrote about such matters were silencing the indigenous people of Peru and of other Andean countries amounts to denying those people part of their own historical experience” (xviii). But this claim raises a series of questions about the extent, variation among social groups, and change over time of knowledge of classical culture in Spanish Peru that MacCormack’s anecdotal examples from texts by indigenous authors cannot begin to answer. Nonetheless, what the book does, it does well. It makes a compelling case for studying early modern European and Latin American cultural history together, and (like the author’s earlier Religion in the Andes) shows how much a scholar with profound knowledge of classical literature can contribute to historical understanding of the colonial American experience.
Campbell, Jodi. Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 175 pp. Reviewed by Sara Beam, University of Victoria.
Jodi Campbell’s study of kingship on the Madrid stage is a work of theater history that allows the plays to be the centerpiece, an unusual choice that is amply justified. Campbell argues that the repertoire of seventeenth-century Spanish comedias engaged in a public dialogue about the virtues of kingship. The plays reveal that, counter to the propagandist image created by the king’s court, public audiences saw and read plays that presented a decidedly critical view of the monarchy.
Campbell begins with an engaging portrait of the context of playwriting, production, and reception in seventeenth-century Madrid. She convincingly argues that a good proportion of the audiences in the corrales were drawn from the middle and lower ranks of society and that playwrights were catering to their tastes. The plays thus performed and later published (the form in which she has access to this repertoire) reflected a market audience rather than the concerns of the king’s court. Far from being an extension of court propaganda, Madrid’s public theaters were considered highly immoral by some members of the court; royal officials lost interest in trying to regulate the corrales once the comedia genre was gradually marginalized by court machine plays after 1650.
Campbell’s analysis of the repertoire—a selection of twenty-six plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, and Juan Bautista Diamante that present kings as central characters—supports this reading of the corrales as a public space somewhat autonomous from the court. The plots of several plays hinge on the questionable legitimacy of the king’s heir and reveal that the candidate’s purity of blood was less relevant to good kingship than the prince’s moral fiber and approval by his subjects, both by members of the court and by the common people. In those plays in which the king’s tyrannical or lustful actions threaten to destabilize public order, comedia audiences never witnessed full-blown rebellion against the monarchy but instead expected wrongheaded kings to realize the error of their ways in the final scenes of the play. The plays, taken together, address the dangers of tyranny and the need for kings to restrain their personal impulses in order to serve their subjects well. Throughout, Campbell is attentive to similar themes in recent literary studies on the comedia. Her analysis supports rather than challenges their conclusions, but draws on a less canonical repertoire, which she successfully argues is more representative of actual theater-going practices.
Campbell situates this repertoire within a historical debate about the nature of absolutism. She argues that the theater was an effective space for political engagement despite the attempts of Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares to centralize political authority. She does an excellent job of showing just how unsuccessful such efforts at centralization were when it came to regulating the theater and satirical publications in the capital. She also reveals that the ideas represented in the comedias—that there were limits to a king’s rightful authority—dovetailed with many Spanish political theorists of the period.
Her rather superficial treatment of the question of absolutism and the substantive politics of the court, however, limits the scope of her investigation. Although Campbell mentions some recent work on Spanish absolutism in passing, it would have been interesting if she had contrasted the debates in the comedia more with the actual complexities of governing seventeenth-century Spain than with a straw-man vision of absolutism projected by the king’s court. The theatrical repertoire, however, works against more detailed political analysis: the plays considered by Campbell were sometimes written in the 1640s and published twenty years later, making it difficult to link specific plotlines to particular political events. Significantly, none of the plays addresses the pressing question of the rights of traditional mediating bodies such as the Cortes, so much at stake in the resistance to Olivares’ political reforms.
Such reticence about the pressing political questions of the day is not surprising since, after all, people went to the theater to be entertained, not politically radicalized. The value of Campbell’s study is to show us that audiences in Madrid found a wide variety of representations of kingship to be consistent with their worldview. Kings were fallible human beings, and seventeenth-century Spaniards were well aware that their needs would never be well-served by tyrants.
Pons, Anaclet and Justo Serna. Diario de un Burgués: La Europa del siglo XIX vista por un valenciano distinguido. Valencia: Los libros de la memoria, 2006. Reviewed by Jesús Cruz, University of Delaware.
Diario de un Burgués is an exceptional, valuable, and innovative book. It is exceptional due to the historical source on which it is based: the personal travel diary of a Spanish provincial notable. It is valuable because, despite the subjective and local tone of the main source, the authors masterfully avert delivering another piece of local history, so unfortunately common among some segments of present day Spanish historiography. It is innovative because it provides a new perspective on many aspects of the history of nineteenth-century Spain by using cutting edge approaches from microhistory, cultural history, and cultural studies. The book is elegantly written, thoroughly researched, and very well edited. In the panorama of modern Spanish historiography--this book is a breath of fresh air.
José Inocencio del Llano, the valenciano distinguido, left a traveling diary of nearly a thousand pages to the delight of these two historians who found it when conducting research on the history of Valencian railroads. While the text, according to the authors, lacks literary quality, it provides a factual and unembellished testimony of the daily life of a prototypical member of the Spanish bourgeoisie during the second half of the nineteenth century; del Llano made the first entry in 1842 when he was fourteen and dated his final entry 1895. The diary’s plain prose is enhanced by the erudition of these two historians who vitalize and invigorate José Inocencio’s dull narrative. The result is an interdisciplinary text in which history, literature, and cultural analysis blend to provide a well-crafted contribution to our knowledge of nineteenth-century Spanish and European bourgeois culture.
Above all this is a book about travel. It is the story of a bourgeois gentleman who visited the leading European capitals of his time, who experienced first-hand the wonders of the first World Exposition in London, who strolled along the boulevards of Paris during the years of Baron Haussmann, and who enjoyed the cultural and social stimulation that Madrid could offer to a notable from the provinces. What motivated José Inocencio to travel so much? Were his travels exceptional at a time when transportation and accommodations lacked the speed and comfort, respectively, of the present day? These are the two fundamental questions put forward by the authors at the beginning of the book. The reasons for José Inocencio’s costly and sometimes audacious journeys were diverse. To some extent they seem to have been educational, part of the formation of a future businessman, a member of a commercial and industrial family whose destiny was inevitably linked to the international markets. But for the most part these travels were inspired by a new cultural impetus. Some were undertaken for the pleasure of visiting fashionable places, making acquaintances in distinguished circles, shopping in elegant stores, acquiring unique products, and enjoying the comfort--that new nineteenth-century concept--of luxurious urban interiors and avant-garde means of transportation. These were essentially travels of distinction, manifestations of elegance and refinement that were characteristic of the new life styles that the bourgeoisie was imposing. This explains why most of del Llano’s journeys were to northern and central Europe--those parts of the world ebullient with modernity--or to the big Spanish cities, the fashionable European spas, and the vacation resorts close to his native Valencia. As a traveler for pleasure, José Inocencio del Llano was engaging in a recently emerged activity –tourism-- still restricted to a select minority. But, as Pons and Serna point out, these were also the trips of a tourist fascinated with progress, with technology, with fashion, and with the physical care of his body. Del Llano’s journeys to modern cities, health spas, and cultured environments were an expression of modernity, of the desire of bourgeois Spaniards to be part of the European bourgeois experience.
Modern tourism arose in the tradition established by the English upper classes of sending their offspring to engage in what was known as the European Grand Tour. At a certain age these affluent youngsters were sent southward to complete a sort of journey of initiation through the main regions of the continent, not only to learn about art, history, and the lifestyles of continental Europeans, but also to enjoy the pleasures of travel. During the nineteenth-century the Grand Tour tradition was embraced by many other elites across Europe. The case of José Inocencio del Llano shows the adoption of that fashion by upscale Spaniards. As may be expected, the itinerary chosen by these traveling Spaniards was not toward the south but rather toward the more developed north. It was an inverted form of Grand Tour that scholars know less: the tour of the southern and eastern Europeans to the nodes of nineteenth-century western civilization. Pons and Serna highlight how occasionally our distinguished traveler had accidental or planned encounters with members of his restricted Valencian social circle. He by chance ran into fellow countryman on the boulevards of Paris, when visiting the exhibitions of the Crystal Palace, or at the Panticosa spa. On other occasions he goes to specific places to meet friends and relatives who were also traveling for pleasure or for business. Del Llano’s testimony demonstrates the existence of a culture similar to that of the British and French, as described by historians of modern tourism. The difference is that these Spaniards, like their Italian, Portuguese, or Russian counterparts, traveled to the heart of advanced Europe seeking experiences of modernity. This, in my opinion, is the most suggestive aspect of this study. These “tourists of modernity” have left an abundant amount of testimonies. Besides the case of del Llano, Pons and Serna mention the correspondence of Juan Valera, but there are plenty of other examples of nineteenth-century Spanish travelers that deserve an extensive study, beginning with Ramón Mesonero Romanos and up to Emilia Pardo Bazán.
Through the description and analysis left by this curious traveler, Pons and Serna recreate the main elements of the nineteenth-century European bourgeois universe. They write about the projection of bourgeois values and conduct in the making of new forms of sociability, the introduction of new notions of elegance, and the spread of a new consumer culture. They recreate the fascination of this social group with comfort and technology. They refer to the bourgeois obsession with hygiene and with the shaping of the body. They also offer insightful observations about the making of the modern city to accommodate bourgeois cultural needs and economic ambitions. Although the authors do not neglect local details --the genealogy of the del Llano family, the role it played in the economic and political of Valencia, etc.-- they always connect the particular with the general history of Spain and Europe. Thus, while basing their account in Valencia Pons and Serna offer an innovative interpretation of the making of nineteenth-century bourgeois Spain. They portray a bourgeoisie with a life style, a culture that is being shaped by the same molds that formed other European bourgeoisies, mainly the French and the British. Many of the values, habits, and actions of José Inocencio del Llano, and most notably his taste for traveling and vacationing, were characteristic of the new bourgeois culture that was becoming hegemonic over the course of the century. Pons and Serna highlight with “thick” descriptions and penetrating analysis the significance of that life style and its crucial role in the shaping of modern Spanish society.
Boone, M. Elizabeth. Vistas de España: American Views of Art and Life in Spain, 1860-1914. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007. 280 pp.; 31 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Reviewed by Michelle Pauken Swindell, University of Texas at Dallas.
Boone’s original contribution analyzes American artists’ changing interpretations of Spain as both countries grappled with issues of national identity and imperialism. The link between Spain and the United States is well-known in regard to art collecting, literature, and politics in the nineteenth century; however, Boone’s in depth analysis of artists’ visual conceptions of Spain is unprecedented. This thoughtful and well-constructed book expands upon Boone’s dissertation and her 1998 exhibition catalogue España: American Artists and the Spanish Experience for the Hollis Taggert Galleries in New York.
Boone introduces American fascination with Spain via non-visual culture, particularly through the university curriculum, increasing political interests, and the growing numbers of American travelers in the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of the expansion of railroads in Spain.. Beginning chronologically with Samuel Colman in 1860, the first American artist to travel to and extensively depict Spain, chapter 1 explores how the artist’s topographical images serve as a type of illustration for travel literature and Washington Irving’s documented Spanish experiences. Reiterating the idealism of these texts, Colman’s Spanish landscapes create a form of escapism from America’s civil tensions. In chapter 2, Boone takes a more traditional approach to the Spanish/American connection by looking at the influence of Bartolomé Murillo and costumbrismo painting. The Old Master’s style, as well as the Spanish tropes, were reinterpreted by American artists, such as George Henry Hall, in the 1860s. Despite Spain’s increasing modernism, the images produced reflect a Spain unchanged by time. The artists in the 70s and 80s, on the other hand, received their influences from Diego Velázquez and contemporary, Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. As Boone argues in chapter 3, Spain’s changing political climate as conflicts with North Africa escalated, along with French influence in Spanish painting, led to a predominance of Orientalist subjects by American artists. This chapter also includes a worthwhile discussion of the controversy associated with Thomas Eakins’ well-known Gross Clinic, which was produced as a result of the influences of Spanish realism.
Chapter 4 focuses on Mary Cassatt in Spain. Her original paintings concentrate on women as subjects and reflect a melding of traditional Spain and French modernism. This chapter, which utilizes social history as its methodology, discusses the role of flirting and how it manifests itself in Cassatt’s work and that produced by Spanish and American male artists. In contrast to women as image makers, Chapter 5 explores John Singer Sargent’s use of Spanish women as his subjects, particularly dancers and cigar rollers. These works are then analyzed in relation to their American audience.
Chapters 6 and 7 address Spain’s split identity as “Sunny Spain” and “España Negra.” In comparison to earlier landscape painters, artists such as William Merritt Chase and Robert Frederick Blum, began to create more naturalistic images of Spain and its people. In most cases, this led the artists to travel to more remote towns rather than urban areas to maintain a convincing level of realism. While their paintings reflected ideas of American dominance, there is a sense that by establishing residency and learning the language that these artists working in the latter part of the nineteenth century were painting from within the culture rather than outside of it. Chapter 7 takes this integration even further by looking at the creative exchange between Spanish and American artists and writers in 1898, thus the name “Generation of ’98.” These artists struggled with the identity of “Old Spain” and the complexity of modernist ideas as they tried to create the “real” view of Spain. The resulting images reflected this uncertain identity.
The 138 images included in Boone’s text have been carefully selected, and in many instances are works that have received very little exposure. In addition, her extensive bibliography and the three appendices (a chronological list of American artists in Spain, visitors and copyists registered at the Prado, and visitors registered at the Alhambra) are particularly useful to scholars.
The pioneering aspect of Boone’s undertaking should be recognized, and this book is far from the final word on the subject. Because over three hundred Americans visited Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century, there are moments when the names of artists overwhelm the reader, particularly in chapters 6 and 7. Boone addresses several key ideas in American representations of Spain, making it impossible to adopt one methodology. Even though there is a chronological progression, each chapter must be taken on its own. Boone’s formative text clearly paves the way for further research and is an invaluable resource for scholars in Spanish and American art.
Smith, Angel. Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898-1923. International Studies in Social History, v. 8. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. 405 pp. Maps, tables, illustrations, bibliography. Reviewed by Andrew H. Lee, New York University.
Angel Smith provides readers with a well written and solidly argued study of the close relationship between the social and labor crisis in Catalonia and the collapse of Restoration Spain. This is a significantly better researched and more nuanced history of the origins and development of the CNT than its predecessors, especially Spanish Anarchism: The Heroic Years, written by the anarchist Murray Bookchin in 1977.
Smith opens by stating his goal: to write a social history that also addresses broader political manifestations. Using a wide range of primary sources, including the archives of the Count of Romanones and Antonio Maura, newspapers and ephemeral publications, as well as important secondary works, he makes a convincing case that the industrial conflict in Barcelona and the subsequent alliance between the military and Catalan employers were crucial ingredients for Primo de Rivera’s coup of September 1923.
Smith engages important debates over the role of the economy, skill, gender, immigration, violence, and state repression in the trajectory of Catalan labor and the creation and development of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. This results in a clear picture of the reasons for the persistence of the CNT, the weaknesses of its rivals, and the strength of the reaction the cenetistas provoked.
He begins by examining the economic and social changes that underlay the transformation of Catalan industrial society, going on to discuss the perspectives of the state and employers toward labor and their respective strategies for maintaining control. He also provides a careful examination of labor’s responses. Throughout the work, Smith seamlessly weaves in gender and culture as important factors in this history rather than as sidelights.
This is labor history as it should be written. Social solidarity does not exist in a vacuum in the work, nor is it exclusively limited to the “popular classes.” It can work in opposition to those classes, when members of other classes demonstrate solidarity in opposing general strikes and other actions by labor. The reasons why an individual worker may willingly have joined the Sindicatos Libres rather than the CNT are clearly laid out.
The factors underlying the institutionalization of violence, specifically of the “action squads,” the members of the CNT whose sole employment was as thugs, are also carefully examined. Smith offers a strong analysis of violence against workers and employers, showing the generational conflicts that led to Barcelona becoming known as Chicago on the Mediterranean.
My one complaint, which is not addressed to the author, is that the price of the book ($89.95) puts it out of the reach of most readers. This is an important contribution to Spanish historiography, and it deserves a wide audience. Please make sure your library buys a copy.
Payne, Stanley. The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: Origins of the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. x + 420 pp. Reviewed by Samuel Pierce, University of Florida.
Between 1933 and 1936, Spain’s political parties became increasingly polarized, until political violence became common and the country collapsed into civil war. This study, a revision and expansion of the second half of Payne’s 1993 book entitled Spain’s First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936, is an engaging and well-informed inquiry into the failure of political compromise in the Second Republic. In this new work, Payne is especially concerned with apportioning blame for the Republic’s collapse, concluding that every political party bore some responsibility for destroying Spain’s democratic government.
Like Juan Linz (The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, Part II, 1978), Payne believes that the Republican political spectrum included loyal, semi-loyal, and disloyal parties. The disloyal groups, such as the anarchists and committed monarchists, never accepted the Republic and actively worked to overthrow it. Numerous times during the Republic, these groups launched armed insurrections against the government, including the failed Sanjurjada and various anarchist risings. These groups, however, tended to reside on the fringes and did not enjoy significant popular support before 1936. More of a problem for the Republic were the semi-loyal parties, such as the Socialists and the Catholic CEDA. While these groups accepted the Republic as Spain’s de facto government, they did not embrace republicanism and instead wished only to use the Republic for their own ends. They reserved the right to work against it if necessary.
The Republic’s loyal parties included Manuel Azaña’s left-leaning Acción Republicana and Alejandro Lerroux’s centrist Radical party. According to Payne, Azaña and his followers suffered from a sense of “patrimonial Republicanism,” by which they equated the Republic with their own legislative program instead of as a set of political ground rules that could accommodate numerous ideologies. However, in order to carry out their proposals, Azaña and the other left Republicans needed the support of the Socialists and so tolerated their extralegal activities and even considered using a civil pronunciamiento to oust the CEDA from power. When the Popular Front coalition returned them to power in early 1936, they threw moderation to the wind and worked to implement even more radical reforms.
By contrast, Payne believes that centrist groups like the Radicals and other liberal Republican parties were the only groups that “took up positions primarily in defense of constitutional democracy and the rules of the game” (353). This conception of the Radical party owes much to the work of Nigel Townson (The Crisis of Democracy in Spain: Centrist Politics under the Second Republic 1931-1936, 2000), who has argued that the Radicals offered a true centrist possibility for stabilizing the Republic. Ultimately they failed to do so, in part because the revolutionary insurrection by left-wing groups in October 1934 strengthened the position of the right. Payne does not praise all liberal Republicans, however. He aims special criticism at Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, the President of the Republic, whom Payne calls “the major single factor in thwarting more effective government” who “possessed a kind of messianic complex” and practiced a “personalistic” style of politics (136). Ultimately, his intervention failed to produce a moderate governing coalition, and in late 1935 he took a leading role in destroying the political authority of the Radicals.
The collapse of the center led to increased polarization during the first half of 1936 and created the conditions in which extremists from both ends of the political spectrum would engage in significant acts of political violence. Payne argues that Azaña, “who somehow thought that his alliance with revolutionaries would not encourage revolutionary activity” should share in the blame for the increasingly chaotic social and political situation facing Spain, especially because he refused to target violent offenders on both sides, focusing instead on suppressing the Falange (193). The government’s failure to contain the violence, which peaked in July, was used as a justification by the military conspirators who sought to topple the Republic.
Payne’s work demonstrates the complexity of the Republic’s political landscape, showing that a failure to create a stable center coalition doomed it. His analysis convincingly shows that the main problem with most parties was a lack of commitment to parliamentary democracy, which led them to consider violent alternatives seriously. While his conclusion that the left was more to blame for the collapse of the Republic than the right will generate considerable debate, his synthetic account of the Republic’s demise is currently the most complete study of this period, a well-written and cogent analysis. However, as Payne notes, his study is far from the last word on this subject, and much research remains to be done, especially on the last six months of the Republic.
Buchanan, Tom. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory. Sussex Series in Spanish History, Sussex Academic Press: Brighton (2007) 267 pp. Reviewed by Peter Stansky, Stanford University.
Tom Buchanan is the author of two previous books on Britain and the Spanish Civil War: his first was a discussion of a particular aspect, the war and the British labor movement (1991); the second was a more general account, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (1997). Now in a collection of ten essays, seven not published before, he has explored in some depth both general trends and examples of British behavior in relation to Spain, paying most attention, not surprisingly, to those on the left.
These are illuminating essays, written in a clear-eyed way without the potentially distorting approaches that are so tempting in the case of the Civil War. The cause of the Republic is seen neither as overwhelmingly heroic nor as one dominated by manipulation by the Communists, dedicated to serving the needs of the Soviet Union. The book begins with a discussion of the traditions of British perceptions of Spain. During the war itself the view from the left dominated public opinion and favored the Republic. There were many determined activists in Britain, most dramatically the 2,400 British volunteers, 500 of whom died in Spain. The British government policy of non-intervention effectively undercut this support. That did much to help Franco win the war and it also meant that the Soviet Union, through its supply of paid-for arms, came to dominate the Republic. One will never know whether, if Franco had been defeated, World War II would have taken place. Probably it would, but certainly Germany and Italy would have been in a weaker position (although in reality Franco proved to be a far less reliable supporter than they had hoped).
With the use of extensive sources and a keen sense of personality, Buchanan provides us with several case studies of the involvement of various British individuals. He takes a dispassionate view, which works well. His figures are human beings in all their complexity and defects. One essay discusses G.L. Steer, whose reporting for the London Times and his subsequent book had a considerable effect in making the world aware of the bombing of Guernica. In a later essay, Buchanan traces with perception the career of the prolific author, John Langdon-Davies, who wrote mostly about Catalonia. Even a most humanitarian effort, Spanish Medical Aid, the subject of another essay, was full of personal rivalry. In its administration, as in so much else in the war, those who were Communists or very supportive of the party were determined to serve it with a religious fervor. They could be efficient and ruthless, and their determination frequently was very helpful to the cause. But the needs of the party could pervert the “good fight.” Buchanan presents a nuanced view of the past, as in his excellent essay on Bob Smillie, the grandson and namesake of the famous labor leader, a founder of the Independent Labor party. The young Smillie died—some thought he was murdered—in a Republican jail, where he was a prisoner because his party, the ILP, was identified with the allegedly Trotskyist POUM, that demonized enemy of the Communists. Buchanan sorts out the story with great care, pointing out that although Smillie was not given adequate or timely medical treatment for his appendicitis, it was unlikely that he was deliberately neglected in order to hasten his death. Those who tried to get him out of prison may have been in error in not trying to use the British consular service, which was suspected, probably correctly, of favoring Franco. Most intriguingly, Buchanan discusses how the tragic story fit into the ever-weakening position of the ILP in Britain, its relation with the Labor party, and a reluctance to hurt the cause of the Republic through exposing divisions on the left.
Buchanan also writes well about the British arts. There is a general essay on British artists and Spain, and another telling the story of the artist Felicia Browne, a completely inept soldier killed in the militia. (Although she was a politically insignificant figure, I was surprised to discover that the British intelligence services were opening her mail. One suspects that the state’s monitoring of political activities, particularly of the left, was far more extensive than one might have thought.) In a piece on the British volunteers, Buchanan displays a keen sense of their relation to those they left behind. The two concluding essays on the afterlife of the Spanish Civil War in Britain are less compelling than the other, more specific studies.
On a personal note, I accept Buchanan’s point that William Abrahams and I exaggerated in Orwell: The Transformation (1979) by too easily accepting George Orwell’s claim that Bob Smillie might have been murdered. In no retaliatory sense, I will point out that Buchanan has made a double error about John Cornford, whom Abrahams and I wrote about in Journey to the Frontier (1966). The iconic portrait of Cornford was not taken by Helen Muspratt but by Michael Straight. He is confusing it with the well-known picture of John and Ray, “The Islanders,” taken by Muspratt’s partner, Lettice Ramsey.
But I mustn’t end on a carping note. This is a splendid collection of essays for anyone interested in the Spanish Civil War, in this particular case its relation to Britain and the British.
Bowen, Wayne H. Spain During World War II. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 279 pp. Reviewed by Eric R. Smith, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.
Wayne Bowen’s Spain During World War II surveys Spanish and English language research on Spain’s foreign and domestic politics from the end of the civil war until 1945. In addition, Bowen’s footnotes reveal a heavy reliance on Arriba, the official organ of the Falange, along with other periodical sources. He argues that the Franco regime survived by the caudillo’s political maneuvering through a handful of key institutions, each with divergent agendas.
The first two of the book’s eight chapters address the international situation, which serves as the context for the domestic and cultural matters taken up later. Bowen’s previous book (Spaniards and Nazi Germany, 2000) dealt with Nazi and Spanish relations, and Spanish Naziphiles appear again here alongside a multitude of other actors. Anti-communism and anti-liberalism were grand unifiers where little other ground for agreement existed between factions. Indeed, “unitary” was the term the Falange began using in late 1943 as a descriptor for the regime instead of “totalitarian.” The tests the regime faced attest to the limits of the latter term.
Franco weathered several military conspiracies by 1944. The Falange, the only fascist institution in the regime’s coalition, desired a Spain with a diminished role for Franco. During the May Crisis of 1941, Franco appeased Falangists by appointing moderate members of the organization to key government posts. By 1944, when the war turned against the Nazis, Franco replaced them. Reacting to the allied victory in the war and fears that Spain’s dictatorship might now draw attention, Franco permitted municipal elections by male heads of households beginning in 1945 in order to emphasize “the conservative Catholic aspects of the regime, while denying or minimizing the semi-fascist elements of Francoism” (91).
A panoply of internal conflicts tried Franco’s regime. Throughout these years, Carlists retreated from politics almost completely. Monarchists and the church tended to be anti-Falangist and the Falangists distrusted Opus Dei, who seemed too much like the hated Masons. The Acción Católica and Carlists were uncomfortable with aspects of the Sección Feminina’s agenda of women’s athleticism. By 1941 when many young Falangists had become disillusioned with Franco, the División Azul, which was fighting the Soviet Union in alliance with the Nazis, achieved increased recruitment as youth sought other corridors to advancement and influence. Yet Franco’s acumen in isolating threats to his rule and appeasing key constituencies prevented any serious threat from surfacing.
There were yet other actors in the early regime. Under the leadership of Salvador Merino, the sindicatos (combined worker and employer organizations legally created in 1940) turned out hundreds of thousands of workers on various politically significant days much to the fear of the Falange and the regime. By mid-1941, there were nearly four million members organized into twenty-four sindicatos by industry or profession.
Bowen’s longest chapter looks at the Spanish economy. His treatment of the agricultural sector is especially interesting given the difference in approach between Franco and the Republic. Spain de-industrialized after the civil war and the regime made a number of poor decisions that assured the situation would persist. Working conditions and government rationing in the early years of the regime eventually required the adoption of some of the same measures the Republic had instituted. Wages fell to as little as 70 per cent of 1936 wages during the world war while the minimum wage and other labor rights were lost under the regime. Although in the course of his tenure Minister of Labor José Antonio Gir?n introduced family subsidies, minimum vacations, expansion of retirement funding, health insurance, and other programs, a ban on employment by former republican sympathizers assured a vast pool of unemployed. Nearly 500,000 Spaniards were without work in 1940. Axis sympathies further exacerbated the economic crisis by inhibiting trade with the Allied nations.
Bowen’s assembly of secondary research also underscores the need for more work in the archives. For instance, Bowen repeats the claim made previously that “women of the Sección Femenina exercised more autonomy and freedom of action than any previous women’s organization in Spanish history. . .” (177). For Bowen, this seems intended to reveal the heterogeneity of experiences under Franco’s rule – his primary thesis – but the veracity of the claim depends much on how one defines “autonomy and freedom of action.” Other women hardly reaped such benefits. The dictatorship permitted prostitution for years, but also banned contraceptives. Sexually transmitted diseases ran rampant and the ranks of unemployed women – especially former republicans (who were considered degenerates anyway) – filled out the prostitutes’ ranks.
Bowen’s substantial effort also concludes with a summary of his research in the context of recent historiography. Bowen takes seriously the contentious work of Pío Moa, who insists that the Republic caused the civil war. The discussion is unnecessary as Bowen’s labors here have value beyond how his work hinges to such claims.