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fuchs, barbara. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 186 pp.More than a generation has passed since Walter Cohen's Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (1985) began inspiring us to challenge the truisms of Anglo-Spanish literary history by viewing national canons commonly regarded as ''rival'' in relationship rather than primarily in isolation. The subsequent accumulation of monographs, journal articles, edited volumes, institutes, conference panels, and dissertations suggests that ''Anglo-Hispanists'' now comprise a growing subfield within early modern studies. Among those who have energized this ''Spanish Connection,'' Barbara Fuchs has been the most prolific and visible, and so the arrival of her work on the occlusion of Spain in English literary history, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, has been eagerly awaited.Fuchs's introduction immediately brings the project into material focus. To my mind, the point that the English drew inspiration from Spanish literature-''even at the times of greatest rivalry between the two nations'' (1)-could not be made more effectively than with the accompanying reproduction of the Spanish reading list of Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge-educated Latinist, Hispanophile, and improver of the English language, who has been most often remembered as a promoter of Edmund Spenser's poetry. As Fuchs observes, the titles Harvey jotted down on the flyleaf of his personal copy of Antonio de Corro's The Spanish Grammar (1590)-including Lazarillo de Tormes, Juan Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, Jorge Montemayor's Diana, the Petrarchan poetry of Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as ''other legends of chivalry and errant knights''-''would still belong on a master's exam in Spanish Golden Age literature'' (3).Harvey's interest in Spanish language and letters should not seem especially surprising. If England and Spain were often at odds in the early modern period, they also shared a long history of dynastic alliance, commercial exchange, and cultural connection. However, largely due to the ensuing institutionalization of literary study around our modern vernaculars, the transnational nature of the Anglo-Spanish literary relationship has often gone unrecognized. By demonstrating that ''the often vociferous rhetorical denunciation of Spain in the period and beyond did not impede literary traffic'' (4), Fuchs sets out to offer a corrective to modes of analysis emphasizing native traditions at the expense of broader patterns of interchange.The book's first chapter, ''Forcible Translation,'' observes how humanist notions of copia, imitatio, and translatio could take on a martial tenor during the highly nationalistic Elizabethan years, so that its second, ''Knights and Merchants,'' can demonstrate how these processes worked, especially in relation to the drama, during the more openly Hispanophilic reign of James I. English literature's extensive debt to Cervantes comes early to the stage via Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), which one contemporary observed as ''a sort of Quixot [sic] on the Stage'' (39). Long a staple of Renaissance drama surveys, the play's allusiveness to Don Quixote has often seemed apparent to readers acquainted with Cervantes's masterwork. And yet, generations of English scholars have downplayed the possibility of a Spanish connection by insisting that Beaumont's play had been an independent development ''satirizing the same chivalric romances'' (43). As Fuchs rightly observes, even if there were no Cervantine intertextual presence within The Knight of the Burning Pestle-and I wholeheartedly believe that she is right to insist that there is-the romances the play satirizes themselves demonstrate Spanish influence. And yet, Fuchs argues, patterns of critical denial have indicated an attempt ''to contain Spanish influence in an effort to promote a national English canon that seems to depend on a refusal of influence, or its transmutation into a triumphant appropriation'' (42). …

PINET, SIMONE. Archipelagoes: Insular Fictions from Chivalric Romance to the Novel. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. xxxv + 238 pp.Archipelagoes is a fascinating, ambitious, and challenging analysis of fiction and space in chivalric literature, mainly from the Amadis to the Quixote. Simone Pinet's expert blending of traditional manuscript study and contemporary theories on narrative and space is one of her book's most important accomplishments, along with its significant contributions to nonmodern literary history and poetics. Pinet builds on the ideas of a number of theorists and literary critics, such as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Paul Zumthor to demonstrate that the gradual predominance of writing over performance and orality in the late Middle Ages eventually produced a narrative structure based on chance, hazard, and ambiguity, which arose in the idea of the marvelous in Spanish chivalric fiction (xxvi). She argues that the island became the space of adventure in Spanish books of chivalry roughly simultaneously with the emergence of the cartographic genre on islands called the isolarlo. Pinet's arguments hinge on the connections between literature (that is, narrative figured as a space) and cartography, and especially on multiple understandings of insularity, including as islands surrounded by water and as a block of buildings (xxvii). Her last main argument entails the dual shift that occurred from the popularity of cartography and chivalric romances during the sixteenth century to their ensuing substitution by the atlas and the novel.In chapter one, "From Forest to Island: Sites of Adventure from Arthur to Amadis," Pinet argues that in contrast to the pivotal role of the forest in French romance, the island and the archipelago were crucial to Spanish chivalric fiction, which she attributes to changes in Iberia's late medieval imaginary. The "insular turn" in Spanish literature reflected broader shifts in community organization, whereby urban centers replaced rural communities and isolation was connected to property ownership (22). Pinet shows that the public's interest in reading about marvels in travel accounts was connected to a chivalric ideology that dignified knightly virtues through individual deeds, which she illustrates especially in the Libro del caballero Cifar.Chapter two, "Islands and Maps: A Very Short History," explores the importance of cartography in the development of the romance. Pinet claims that what became attractive and beneficial about geography in the production of literature was the malleability of islands, the ease with which they could be arranged in different ways, and their "ambiguity and openness to relocation" (40). Fiction and maps paralleled one another as narrative producers of spaces within texts and outside them, each serving as "mirrors of the world" (30). Among the many examples that support parallels between the development of insularity and fiction in the late Middle Ages is the way that islands evoked nar ratability in the Arabic geographical imagination (45). Chapter two largely treats relevant features in the history of cartography, as well as the emergence of the cartographic genre of the isolano in the fifteenth century. Although the latter was eventually eclipsed by the atlas, isolarli also enjoyed a second wave of popularity with the atlas's rise in the seventeenth century, thus spanning approximately two hundred years. Pinet identifies a series of what she calls paradigms or abstractions that structured people's understanding of islands until the rise of chivalric literature, such as otherness, monstrosity, lost islands, sacredness, and exile. Similarly, she pinpoints another series of principles that demonstrate the utility of the insular motif for narrative space, induding the invocation of the marvelous and the hyperconsciousness of a limit. These paradigms and principles constituted possibilities for authors to explore in the isolani and in novels of chivalry. …

fuchs, barbara. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009. 200 pp.In this study Barbara Fuchs interrogates the place of Moorishness; i.e. the Andalusi past and the Spanish customs and ways of thought indebted to and inherited from the Peninsula's Muslim inhabitants, in the process of Spanish self- fashioning as well as in shaping other European nations' perceptions of Spaniards in the early modern period. Fuchs locates what she calls maurophilic literature composed in early modern Spain (after the fall of Granada in 1492 and before the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609) - a corpus of texts that recognize Andalusi history and Moorish customs as part and parcel of what would become Spanish history and culture - as but one example within many other such maurophilic customs and practices, that include but are not limited to clothing and fashion, language, architecture or the organization of lived spaces, and equestrian forms and entertainments. The texts she examines include the romances on Moorish and frontier themes, the Abencerraje, the Guerras civiles de Granada, and the Guzman de Alfarache.Fuchs begins by pointing out how Spain's Moorish past - the 700 years of Muslim presence on the Peninsula, several centuries during which Muslims would be the colonizers of Spain - problematizes Edward Said's concept of Orientalism. Perhaps more importantly for scholars of Spanish studies, it complicates Georges Cirot's and Menendez Pidal's concept of maurophilia, or the idea that the obvious Spanish attraction for things Moorish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than being the product of a deep cultural hybridity, was a mere fashion popular among a Spanish public that differed fundamentally from the Muslim cultures of Iberia. In the following five chapters Fuchs offers case studies, pairing a cultural phenomenon such as fashion or architecture with literary texts, to expose how such maurophilia was a far more complex and often contradictory cultural phenomenon defined by negotiation and self-fashioning.In the first chapter, "The Quotidian and the Exotic," the author examines how Moorish elements, including dress, food, and entertainment - which Spaniards saw as being essential to their own identity qua Spaniards - were perceived by other Europeans, particularly the French and English, as markedly oriental or exotic and foreign to the latter's notions of Western European identity. For French businessmen, the Spanish estrado, the "luxurious household space" characterized by low benches, pillows, and tapestries, which women in Spain used in the Middle Ages and early modern period, was conflated with the exotic seraglio of the East. While critics such as Maria Feliciano and Colin Smith argue that Spanish Christians' fondness for such Andalusi styles was not a sign of Islamicization, Fuchs points out that, on the other hand, there was no stigma attached to such styles (17). Fuchs then moves to a presentation of how such maurophilia did come to be marked as different and non-Spanish. Enrique IV's supposed maurophilia was demonized by fifteenth- century chroniclers sympathetic with Isabel, and his maurophilic tendencies are conflated with sexual and moral deviancy - a discourse adopted by foreign European travelers who visited Spain at the time, such as the French courtier Antoine de Lalaing whose account of Spain's "white Moors" Fuchs cites (21). In the second half of the chapter Fuchs turns toward sixteenth- century self-conscious definitions of the role of Arabic in the Spanish vernacular language, showing in quotes from Don Quijote, Antonio de Nebrija's Gramatica, and Juan de Valdes's Dialogo de la lengua illustrate how these authors index (and reveal anxiety about) Spanish cultural practices and concepts as derived from the Moors and things Moorish.Chapter 2, "In Memory of Moors: History, Maurophilia, and the Built Vernacular" outlines how Spanish historiography, particularly Juan de Mariana's Historia general de Espana portrayed the conquest of Granada as part of a history of the nation, being "the heroic endpoint to which all of Spanish history has tended" (32), while imaginative texts such as the Abencerraje offered very different versions of these events filtered through the lens of chivalry. …

Entre la voz y el silencio. By Margit Frenk. Alcala de Henares: Biblioteca de estudios cervantinos, 1997. 148 pages. Over the last two decades, studies that show the basic differences between oral cultures and those affected by writing have led to a reassessment not only of works such as the Homeric poems, composed in a primary oral culture, but also of texts written during periods when orality still held a certain sway. Margit Frenk's book belongs to this tradition, and seeks to illuminate one specific aspect: "la difusion de la escritura a traves de la voz humana hasta epoca muy reciente" (5). Entre la voz y el silencio is not a systematic study of this phenomenon. Rather, it consists of a series of essays, most of which have been previously published, and which deal with Spanish literature of the Golden Age. Margit Frenk asserts that this is "un tema apasionante" (5). This topic is rendered even more enticing by the informative essays included in this book. Chapter i serves to set the stage. Here, Frenk points to some of the more important works on orality and literacy (Finnegan, Havelock, Ife, Zumthor, etc.). She also discusses the continuing tradition of reading aloud (be it to oneself or to an audience) as an index of the enduring strength of orality from ancient Rome and Augustine through the Middle Ages. Indeed, reading aloud was frequent in Spain well into the nineteenth century. Frenk clearly shows the transition by citing from Covarrubias's Diccionario of 1611, from the Diccionario de Autoridades (1732) and from a modem dictionary. While for Covarrubias reading is pronouncing words, Autoridades includes the possibility of reading silently. The modern dictionary sees reading only as a visual task. Chapter ii takes up the question: What works were read aloud or recited to a public during the Spanish Golden Age? Some of the answers given are known and expected. La Celestina, the romances of chivalry, and the short story were often read aloud to an audience. Indeed many cuentos were memorized for later retelling, while Italian novelle and their Spanish counterparts were thought to be of appropriate length for narrating to an audience (28-29). Frenk could have added here that frame stories for a number of story collections tell of men and women reading their tales to a group, thus further foregrounding the importance of reading aloud. Surprisingly, even epic poems were read to a public that included the vulgo: "Estamos ya tocando con la mano el tema de la difusion de la literatura cults y aun cultisima entre amplios sectores de la poblacion del siglo XVII" (35). …

ALTHOUGH Vargas Llosa's extensive critical writings are taken into account by students of his work and studied in a search for influences and relationships, his enthusiastic appreciation for the chivalric novel, and Tirant lo Blanc in particular, has usually been treated as a critical aberration, if not an outright peccadillo, to be ignored and forgiven in silence. Few critics have treated his evaluation seriously, and no one seems to have dealt squarely with what is clearly a critical problem of some importance, since Vargas Llosa has not only repeated this dictum on several occasions, he has insisted on it. It is also important to note that although he frequently refers to the novela de caballerias in general and sometimes extends his remarks to specific works such as the Amadis, he is almost always talking about the unusual and unorthodox Tirant. Tirant arouses among specialists reactions ranging from enthusiasm to trepidation, and even to statements that it is not really a novel of chivalry at all. In Vargas Llosa's case, we are dealing with a critical attitude which is not at all the pardonable enthusiasm it appears at first, but rather a clearly formulated preference, a selfacknowledged influence which is itself as heterodox as are Tirant and much of Vargas Llosa's own work. Other critics have also written of Tirant's peculiar deviations from the chivalric norm. Its protagonist is a knight errant of the most classic sort, apparently modeled on the Catalan knight Roger de Flor, although other proposed sources for some, at least, of his adventures, include such authentic medieval knights as John Hunyadi, Geoffroy de Thoie and Pedro Vazquez de Saavedra.1

SINCE Don Quijote was, above all things, a man who had read a great deal, it hardly seems possible to reach a satisfactory understanding of his personality without rereading some of his favorite books. Moreover, no satire can be adequately appreciated without a systematic study of the object it ridicules. Yet in recent years scholars have neglected the study of the Quijote in the light of the romances of chivalry that inspired Cervantes and his hero. Specialists in the romances of chivalry, such as Pascual de Gayangos and Sir Henry Thomas, have not considered themselves knowledgeable enough about Cervantes to attempt it. Cervantine scholars, on the other hand, have usually lacked access to the texts of the romances.' For our knowledge of the subject we must go back to the only study which claimed to be comprehensive, that of Diego Clemencin: Clemencin, who, for the moment, remains the person best acquainted with the romances of chivalry since the seventeenth century, began in 1833 the publication of his monumental edition of the Quijote, a project that was completed by friends after his death. In the notes which accompany his text is a vast amount of information about the