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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the decades immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the question of the Renaissance, which had never attracted much scholarly attention even before the war, almost completely disappeared from consideration in Spanish historical thought. Concerned with seeking a psycho-historical explanation of the catastrophic event which had shattered the political and social fabric of their society, historians turned more than ever to the Middle Ages in search of those peculiar strains that presumably shaped the national character and which in turn would provide an answer to past and present events. The reappearance of this romantic search for the elusive “popular spirit” of the nation was nowhere more evident than in the teachings of two major historians who from their exile in the Americas were to exert for quite some time an exorbitant influence on a new generation of scholars both within and outside of Spain.
1 The journal, Cuadernos de historia de España, founded in 1944, became the official publication of the Instituto de Historia de España of which Sánchez-Albornoz was the director. He had a wide influence among historians, while Castro had a similar impart on critics and historians of literature both in the United States and in Spain. The latter's emphasis on the Jewish and Arabic elements in the formation of the Spanish national character, the centerpiece of his historical interpretation, became a symbol of opposition during the Franco regime. Their opposing views are laid out in Americo Castro's La realidad histórica de España (Mexico City, 1954) and in Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz's España un enigma histórico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956).
2 Jose Antonio Maravall, El concepto de Espana en la Edad Media, 2d ed. (Madrid, 1964).
3 J. A. Maravall, Carlos V y el pensamiento politico del Renacimiento (Madrid, 1960). Some of the material included in this book had already appeared in articles or had been presented as papers.
4 These views, which Maravall rejects, are repeated and exaggerated by E. Curtius in a chapter specifically entitled “Spain's Cultural Belatedness”; see his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W.T. Trask (New York, 1953), 541-43. It should be pointed out that when Spanish historians and literary critics speak of the survival of medieval elements as significant factors in the Renaissance, they are usually referring to the “popular” component which supposedly coexists, in all its ramifications, with the erudite culture of the time.
5 Of his many articles, collections of studies and books on this period, suffice to mention just a few of his works: Estado modemo y mentalidad social: siglos XV a XVI, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1972); La cultura del Barroco (Barcelona, 1975); Utopía y reformismo en la España de los Austrias (Madrid, 1982); La literatura picaresca desde la historia social: siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid, 1985).
6 Maravall, Carlos V, 9 ff.; see also El concepto de Españla, chap. 9.
7 Maravall, Carlos V, 18, where he extensively quotes Huizinga on this matter.
8 Ibid., 51, my translation.
9 Johan Huizinga, El otoño de la edad media, Span, trans. J. Gaos, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1930).
10 Even María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La idea de la fama en la edad media (Mexico City, 1952), may have been inspired by Huizinga.
11 Maravall, Carlos V, 18ff.
12 Ibid., 16: “En formas artísticas, literarias, políticas, de técnicas literarias, de vida social la proximidad de la vida española a la italiana es superior a la de ningún otro europeo.”
13 Ibid., 16. To this effect, he quoted a French translation of Vitruvius published in 1539 from a Spanish version.
14 J.A. Maravall, Antiguos y modernos. La idea delprogreso en el desarrollo inicial de una sociedad (Madrid, 1966). Maravall joins a host of other scholars who around this time are writing on this issue. He is particularly inspired by the study of G. Margiotta, Le origini italiane della ‘querelle des anciens et des modemes’ (Rome, 1953), which he tries, with great success one might add, to emulate.
15 Spanish Renaissance culture produced what, as far as we know, is the first treatise in which the ancient world is compared with the modern, an issue which toward the end of the sixteenth century was to become known as la querelle des anciens et des modernes. The dialogue, Ingeniosa comparación de lo antiguo y lo presente (Madrid: Bibliófilos Españoles, 1898), decidedly favors the modern world. A printed edition of the work, which has been attributed to Cristobal de Villalón, appeared in 1539.
16 For a thorough examination of this issue and how it has been seen by modern historians, see H. Baron, “The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Present Renaissance Scholarship.” It first appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959) and was reprinted in a revised version in Renaissance Essays, ed. P.O. Kristeller and P.P. Wiener (New York, 1968); it is now included, with additional changes, in his collection of studies, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1988), 72-100. Evidently, Baron's study did not come to Maravall's attention.
17 Maravall, Antiguos y modernos, chap. 5.
18 See n. 24.
19 Though humanism manifested itself in different ways in accordance with the cultural tradition of each country, there are nevertheless certain underlying practices and aspirations that these manifestations share to some degree. It seems unlikely that Spanish humanism would be so radically different from its Italian counterpart. For the socio-political aspect of Italian humanism, see H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966; 1st ed., 1955); or the series of articles by E. Garin predating his Scienza e vita civile nelRinascimento Italiano (Bari, 1965) or L'educazione in Europa, 1400-1600 (Bari, 1966).
20 A treatise by Mosén Diego de Valera, Espejo de verdadera nobleza, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. M. Penna (Madrid, 1959) was translated into French with the title of Trésorde la noblesse and published in Paris in 1497.
21 Though no reference is made to any particular scholar, Maravall seems to point to E. Garin's “La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del Trecento e i barbari Britanni” which first appeared in Rassegna della letteratura italiana 64 (1960) and was later included in L'eta nuova (Naples, 1969), 139-66. Garin returned to the topic in his “Petrarca e la polemica con i moderni” in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIVal XVIII secolo (Bari, 1975), 71-88.
22 The blurring of present with past issues and concerns in nowhere more evident than in another study in which he proposes to shed light on the socio-economic background of a well-known literary work, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as La Celestina, composed sometime in the last decades of the fifteenth century. In El mundo social de la Celestina (Madrid, 1968), Maravall gives us a picture of the world of the time, in which certain social patterns of the clase ociosa (leisure class), resulting from the new economic forces of an incipient capitalism, are not much different from those described by T. Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1953). First published in 1899, Veblen's study, a critique of mature capitalism, is hardly analogous to the historical reality of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain.
23 Maravall, Antiguos y modemos, see chapters in pt. 3.
24 J.A. Maravall, “Un humanisme tourné vers le futur: littérature historique et vision de l'histoire en Espagne au XVIe siècle,” L'humanisme dans les lettres espagnoles, ed. A. Redondo (Paris, 1979), 337-48; “El Pre-Renacimiento del siglo XV,” Nebrija y la introducción del Renacimiento en España, Actas de la III Academia Literaria Renacentista (1981), ed. V. Garcia de la Concha (Salamanca, 1983), 17-36.
25 J.A. Maravall, “La diversificación de modelos del Renacimiento: Renacimiento francés y Renacimiento español,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 390 (December 1982): 551-614.
26 The reference to F. Chabod is to a work which appeared in the Actes du Colloque sur la Renaissance (Paris, 1958), a colloquium held two years earlier, whereas Maravall's reference to E. Garin is to the “Interpretazioni del Rinascimento” from Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari, 1954), which dates back to 1950.
27 W.K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1948); and the later account by C. Vasoli, which includes a valuable assessment of the interpretations put forth during the intervening twenty years, Umanesimo e Rinascimento (Palermo, 1969).
28 For a detailed and analytical presentation of the latest interpretations regarding the question of the State and of the economic and social history of the Spanish Golden Age, see Jean-Frédéric Schaub, “La penisola iberica nei secoli XVI e XVH: la questione dello Stato,” Studi Storici 36 (1995): 9-49; and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, “Cambiamento e continuità. La Castiglia nell'impero durante il secolo d'oro,” ibid.: 51-102.
29 M. Fernández Álvarez, La sociedad española del Renacimiento (Salamanca, 1970).
30 Not considered here are J.A. Maravall's Estudios de historia del pensamiento español. El Renacimiento (Madrid, 1984), which is a collection of studies of an eclectic nature on topics and issues of the time, including the articles we have examined and José Luis Abellán, Historia crítica del pensamiento español. Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1979), vol. II, which is clearly an improvement, both in accuracy and organization, on M. Solana's Historia de la filosofía española. Época del Renacimiento, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1941). Abellán's El erasmismo español, referred to above, is a separate study which he later included in his Historia critica.
31 The introduction first appeared in Italian, Miguel Battlori, “Il pensiero della Rinascenza in Spagna e Portogallo,” Grande antologia filosofica (Milan, 1964), 7:280-337, later translated and revised in his Humanismo y Renacimiento (Barcelona, 1987), 1-51.
32 Ibid., 3ff.
33 Marcel Bataillon, Érasme et l'Espagne (Paris, 1937). I am using the Spanish translation, Erasmo y España. Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, 2d ed., trans. A. Alatorre (Mexico City-Buenos Aires, 1966).
34 Eugenio Asensio, “El erasmismo y las corrientes espirituales afines,” Revista de Filología Espanola 35 (1952): 31-99.
35 José Luis Abellán, El erasmismo español (Madrid, 1976). The study was later included in its entirety in the second volume of his Historia crítica del pensamiento español, op. cit.
