Reading, Writing, and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain

Ryan Prendergast

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409418658
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317070924
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading, Writing, and Errant Subjects in Inquisitorial Spain explores the conception and production of early modern Spanish literary texts in the context of the inquisitorial socio-cultural environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Author Ryan Prendergast analyzes instances of how the elaborate censorial system and the threat of punishment that both the Inquisition and the Crown deployed did not deter all writers from incorporating, confronting, and critiquing legally sanctioned practices and the exercise of institutional power designed to induce conformity and maintain orthodoxy. The book maps out how texts from different literary genres scrutinize varying facets of inquisitorial discourse and represent the influence of the Inquisition on early modern Spanish subjects, including authors and readers. Because of its incorporation of inquisitorial scenes and practices as well as its integration of numerous literary genres, Don Quixote serves as the book's principal literary resource. The author also examines the Moorish novel/ la novela morisca with special attention to the question of the religious and cultural Others, in particular the Muslim subject; the Picaresque novel/la novela picaresca, focusing on the issues of confession and punishment; and theatrical representations and dramatic texts, which deal with the public performance of ideology. The texts, which had differing levels of contact with censorial processes ranging from complete prohibition to no censorship, incorporate the issues of control, intolerance, and resistance. Through his close readings of Golden Age texts, Prendergast investigates the strategies that literary characters, many of them represented as legally or socially errant subjects, utilize to negotiate the limits that authorities and society attempt to impose on them, and demonstrates the pervasive nature of the inquisitorial specter in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish cultural production.

Chapter 1
Texts Produced, Consumed, and Controlled

Don Quixote’s considerations of the book as a source of influence, an object of examination, and the victim of punishment are related to the broader question of a text’s power as well as to the Church and the State’s strategic efforts to mitigate the written word’s influence over readers in early modern Spain. Cervantes’s novel goes beyond the topic of the book as cultural object to encompass more complex issues of the control of reading (i.e., the access to specific knowledge) in the inquisitorial context.1 Through the representation of Don Quixote as an errant character who challenges social norms of belief and behavior, Cervantes creates a space for a consideration of the resistance to the hegemonic discourses of the Crown and the Church. Adolfo García García proposes that “en la época de Don Quijote, España se había convertido en un monolítico Estado-Iglesia cuya única organización al nivel de todo el vasto Imperio era el Santo Oficio. Y ese loco iluminado que es el Quijote, se convierte en un intelectual que se atreve a actuar y criticar a todo el sistema social incluso a la Inquisición” (144) [in the age of Don Quixote, Spain had turned into a monolithic State-Church whose sole organization at the level of the entire vast empire was the Holy Office. And this enlightened madman who is Quixote becomes an intellectual who dares to act and to criticize the entire social system including the Inquisition]. Although research has demonstrated that there was a significant amount of local variance regarding attitudes toward errant subjects and the enforcement of institutional policies meant to control them, thus challenging the idea of a monolithic Church-State, the choice to frame Don Quixote as an intellectual bears scrutiny.2 I propose seeing the protagonist as much more than a character in a piece of comic, recreational literature dedicated to the entertainment of readers with the follies of a mentally unstable country gentleman given to acting out fantastic chivalric stories.3 Instead, casting Don Quixote and its protagonist as actively engaged in an intellectual critique of early modern Spanish culture and social structures imbues the novel and its central character with the power to both question and undermine the imposition of orthodoxy, while associating them both with the production of knowledge.

This is best exemplified in the ways that a number of the novel’s characters read, interpret, and act differently, thus directly confronting the homogenizing strategies of the Church and State. Don Quixote could not be completely “tongue-tied” by Counter Reformation authority, and its main character is not deterred by the multiple attempts to subdue him or correct how he reads and interprets. Books of chivalry, treated as heretical by some in the novel, give rise to an extremely vocal, and at times even dissident, Don Quixote, who contaminates a number of characters that he meets in his travels by enveloping them in his chivalric imaginary and actions. Through his reading and embodiment of chivalric tales, Don Quixote not only functions as an example of the dangers of reading but also examines the potential for reading to provoke profound change in a single reader or group of readers.

The goal of this chapter is to trace the role of books as well as the perceived and actual power that a text and a reader could wield both in Don Quixote and the broader context of early modern Spain. Cervantes’s novel engages with institutional efforts to filter information and restrict access to knowledge, by demonstrating how Don Quixote and the other readers in the novel gain power because of their reading and hermeneutic abilities. This chapter also explores how some of the characters who are readers manifest an obsession with reading. In doing so, Cervantes confronts many of the anxieties that royal and inquisitorial officials had regarding the transformative potential of reading and the increased access to the printed word that accompanied the advent of the printing press.

The systematic scrutiny of the printed text, authors, booksellers, readers, and reading habits was one point of overlap between the Inquisition and the Crown that is readily linked to both power and the circulation of knowledge.4 They often worked in tandem: the state apparatus was typically in charge of evaluating texts before their publication and granted permission for a book to be printed, while the Inquisition usually dealt with books that were already in circulation. Perhaps what was most dangerous about books in the hands of a reader was the possibility for misinterpretation or the communication of unfiltered information, and this was the basis for the debate regarding two distinct Golden Age reading publics, the lector discreto and the lector vulgar.5 There was no way to control exactly how someone would understand a text, giving rise to the institutionally sanctioned censorial procedures to monitor content and control access.6 If questionable material could be kept out of the hands of undiscerning readers, officials might be able to curtail the dissemination of ideas and ideologies considered erroneous or heretical. Of course, the control of the printed word did not prevent manuscripts from circulating among readers of all classes, making the task of filtering out undesirable information or ideologies that much more difficult.7 Given that there could be significant lag time between the publication of a book and its prohibition, readers could engage with the text’s ideas, write them down, or merely memorize some of the basic principles, sharing them later on. The prohibition of a book after publication, therefore, would only partially control its diffusion. And, as we will see in Chapter 4 with the efforts made to monitor theatrical productions, royal and inquisitorial officials were well aware of the power of non-print materials to engage with ideological issues and to influence even larger numbers of people. In trying to surveil the production and circulation of texts, the censors essentially undertook the impossible task of controlling the circulation of ideas.

Don Quixote represents how a text in the possession of a certain kind of reader (in this case, Don Quixote) might have uncontrollable results, especially as that reader circulates and begins to influence others. The novel examines the anxiety surrounding a reader’s ability to properly interpret written material through its protagonist and dramatizes the fear of and contempt for books that authorities adopted in early modern Spain. The first and most well-known instance is when Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper want to destroy all of the books of chivalry in his library because they have caused what they perceive as Alonso Quijano’s mental illness. A number of critics have discussed the inquisitorial implications of the scrutiny of Alonso Quijano’s library, but it is important to review both this episode and what has been said about it to better understand the place of inquisitorial discourse in the novel. Georgina Dopico Black reads the episode within the larger framework of the early modern library, noting that books, like bodies, were considered possible vehicles of contagion (“Canon’s Afire”). Stephen Gilman has suggested that the episode is more concerned with a critique of chivalric tales despite all the allusions to an inquisitorial auto de fe that he carefully points out.8 I would argue that in addition to staging the contagious nature of books as Dopico Black suggests, the episode more directly critiques the capricious nature of censorship and the methods undertaken to punish the books in question.

Alonso Quijano’s housekeeper wishes to burn all the books, but the Priest and the Barber are initially more judicious in their desire to condemn the guilty texts. The housekeeper also indicates her belief in the books’ diabolical nature because of the damage they have inflicted on her employer, and Quijano’s niece calls them “desalmados libros de desventuras” (I, 5: 127) [“inhuman books of miserable adventures” (33)]. Like the housekeeper, she declares that they should not pardon any of the books because each one had a hand in converting Quijano into Quixote. The narrator describes how strongly these two women feel about the need to destroy the books of chivalry while also offering his own opinion about these texts by saying: “tal era la gana que las dos tenían de la muerte de aquellos inocentes” (I, 5: 130, my emphasis) [both of them equally eager to see the death of these innocents (35, my emphasis)]. The narrator’s strong stance regarding the innocence of the books engages the thorny issue of censorship’s subjective nature.

The niece and the housekeeper base their decision on their own fears regarding the role of the books of chivalry had in Alonso Quijano’s transformation into a knight errant. Since they give no indication that they have read the books, their reaction seems to be an emotionally charged and dogmatic one. Their rhetoric, laced with religious references, reflects that they have adopted a quasi-inquisitorial party line regarding the potential danger of the written word. But the Priest’s initial censorial zeal wanes, and he quickly tires of evaluating the books. Deciding that they will no longer peruse the texts, the Priest and his accomplice, the Barber, condemn all but a few to the bonfire that the housekeeper and niece have started in the corral. Because the chivalric tales have made Alonso Quijano behave differently, the chosen texts are quickly punished. However, the censorship process is represented as capricious in addition to being entirely subjective since the Priest and Barber save a few books—among them, ironically, Amadís de Gaula, whose protagonist is Don Quixote’s model of knight errantry—that they deem worthy of a reprieve from the flames.

The historian and inquisition scholar Virgilio Pinto Crespo carefully illustrates the complex system dedicated to vetting texts that the Inquisition established in order to protect readers from the dangers of heresy. He begins his study by stating that books were a “factor difusor de herejía” [disseminating agent of heresy] and that the control established regarding their printing, sale, or reception was justified in order to cut off a book’s circulation or distribution (Inquisición 29). A number of officials saw the book as a key vehicle for the dissemination of anti-Catholic doctrine, for in the hands of the wrong reader it could become just as deleterious to Catholic hegemony as a vocal heretic. As a result of the suspicion with which Inquisitors and their censors regarded the written word and the desire to better manage the access to potentially damaging material, the Holy Office focused its efforts to create an environment of suspicion and fear towards new books which led to the denunciation of many texts that could have been interpreted as being even remotely unorthodox (Inquisición 29–30).9

Inquisitorial documents that deal with the censorship of books demonstrate that for the Holy Office the perceived threat of the book was palpable, and its control was a priority. The indices of prohibited books, the most famous of which is the 1559 Valdés index, further evidence the systematic approach to controlling books’ influence. Precisely because a book can encourage people to think differently, challenge their religious or ideological beliefs, and in some cases inspire the imagination, it is a mode of communication that must be monitored. Pinto Crespo proposes that the grounds for the development of a complex bureaucracy that included inspections of libraries and bookstores to verify the removal of prohibited books as well as the evaluation of the many texts reported to inquisitors emerged from the Holy Office’s desire to be the arbiter of ideological control (Inquisición). The fear of other religious beliefs was at the heart of a good deal of the censorial fervor, yet religious intolerance was not the sole contributing factor. The end result of all this fear and suspicion was the desire to evaluate, and when there was cause, to censor written material destined for publication or already in circulation and thought to be harmful. According to officials in 1536: “Muy bien nos parece y muy provechoso que no se impriman obras algunas sin ser examinadas por los inquisidores…” [it seems correct and beneficial that no works be printed without being examined by inquisitors] (qtd. in Reyes Gómez 128). This statement follows edicts in 1530 and 1531 that granted the Inquisition the power to visit public and private libraries in search of prohibited books. A 1532 letter of the Council of the Inquisition urges that “no se pueda traer a España libros nuevamente impresos …especialmente obras de Lutero” (AHN Inq. Lib. 321, f.224 v)10 [newly printed books not be brought to Spain…especially the works of (Martin) Luther]. This statement makes clear the perceived threat of foreign books in general as well as the more prominent and specific threat of Protestant theology.

Don Quixote engages in the debate about dangerous books and censorial practices in its earliest chapters by framing the novels of chivalry as the agents of Alonso Quijano’s transformation and by showcasing the processes that ought to mitigate the damage. However, by presenting the scrutiny of the library as haphazard and the censors as decidedly biased, Cervantes lays bare some of the inherent problems of secular and ecclesiastical tactics of control in the orthodox context of Counter Reformation Spain. Admittedly, there is no express condemnation of the quasi-inquisitorial characters, but their criteria for prohibition or expurgation are suspect. What is at stake has much more to do with a reader’s ability to appropriately interpret information rather than the mere act of reading or owning a book.11

Readers and Reading in Don Quixote and Early Modern Spain

A number of scholars, including Roger Chartier, Margit Frenk, and Fernando Bouza, reference episodes in Don Quixote when discussing the literary representation of reading practices or the influence of print culture in early modern Spain. The novel’s representation of the practice of communal reading seen at the inn, Alonso Quijano’s solitary, silent reading, and Don Quixote’s visit to the printing shop in Barcelona, though considered anecdotal evidence, are supported by historical accounts of early modern reading and printing practices. Add to these examples Cervantes’s depiction of the numerous other readers (and here we must include those who listen to texts being read aloud), the circulation of various kinds of manuscripts as well as the presence of characters who write or discuss writing, then Don Quixote, as a book about books, is manifestly concerned with reading and writing in its various manifestations. However, a more sustained consideration of these scenes of reading in the context of Inquisitorial Spain is needed. Reading in Don Quixote comes to imply the spread of transformative ideas with Don Quixote as the embodiment of this possibility with all its positive and negative connotations.

A few words about the complex issue of readers and reading practices in early modern Spain are necessary here. Historians and literary critics have attempted to demarcate the parameters for considering the numbers of readers, the kinds of texts available to the literate public, and what people were reading while at the same time pointing out the many difficulties that complicate the study of this topic.12 The determination of early modern literacy rates has often been based on signatures on tax or notarial documents, references to book ownership, lists of books in estate catalogues, or signatures in inquisitorial trials.13 However, as Sara Nalle has shown through her analysis of inquisitorial interviews, there were more people able to read, write, and even own books than other studies might indicate.14 Fernando Bouza has made a convincing case for the far-reaching exposure, especially in urban centers, to what he calls “literate culture” through contact with “abundant inscriptions carved or painted on façades, walls, bridges, fountains, and doors” in addition to “the edicts, placards, lists of indulgences, and paper notices pasted on the walls of the most frequented places” (Communication 40). What becomes clear is that although it may be impossible to determine exact numbers,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Specters of Control
• 1 Texts Produced, Consumed, and Controlled
• 2 Frontiers of Muslim and Morisco Identity
• 3 Inscriptions of Transgression, Confession, and Punishment
• 4 Specters, Stages, and Spectacles
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index