Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain

Shifra Armon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367668914
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317100027
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain's fall from imperial power after 1640. This book culls genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose fiction, to restore the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court to the history of masculinity. Refuting the current conception that Spain's political decline precipitated a 'crisis of masculinity', Masculine Virtue maps changes in figurations of normative masculine conduct from 1500 to 1700. As Spain assumed the role of Europe's first modern centralized empire, codes of masculine conduct changed to meet the demands of global rule. Viewed chronologically, Shifra Armon shows Spanish conduct literature to reveal three axes of transformation. The ideal subject (gendered male in both practice and law) became progressively more adaptable to changing circumstances, more intensely involved in currying his own public image, and more desirous of achieving renown. By bringing recent advances in gender theory to bear on normative rather than non-normative masculinities of early modern Spain, Armon is able to foreground the emergence of energizing new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.

Chapter 1
Masculinity, Conduct, and Empire

La cortesía es el mayor hechizo político de grandes personajes.

[Courtesy is the most influential spell cast by great statesmen.]

—Baltasar Gracián

As Renaissance states consolidated and became more complex, they came to depend on bureaucrats and ministers to carry out the business of government. “[M]ucho menos se puede regir la nave de una República y de un Reino” wrote Andrés Mendo in 1662, “ni fabricar en él el edificio del gobierno político, si no hay muchos que ayuden y cooperen [scarcely can the ship of state of a Republic and a Realm be governed, nor can the edifice of public administration be erected within it, without the help and collaboration of many men].”¹ The development of the administrative councils, courts, and other organs designed to channel the efforts of those many men into a more or less effective crew has been well documented.² Less attention has been paid to the protagonist of palatine activity, the man of court, as the arc of Spain’s fortunes rose and fell from 1500 to 1700. This chapter delineates the spatio-temporal matrix within which the Spanish courtier came to represent a new ideal of Spanish masculine conduct.

Historians caution that the multitudes who flocked to court to help steer the giant ship of the Spanish state included at least three very different social profiles: letrados, or university-trained functionaries and jurists; rich merchants and other non-nobles recently elevated to the aristocracy; and the old nobility who abandoned their lands for posts in the royal ministries and household (García Marín 45–98). To unify the many into a conceptual whole and to instruct them in the ways of court comprised the ostensible raison d’être of the literature of courtly conduct. But conduct literature also offers a glimpse into the contentious process of Spanish identity formation through which a new post-Medieval model of vassalage, the cortesano or courtier, was constructed and contested. In order to trace the changing face of Spanish seigniorial masculinity from 1500 to 1700, it will be useful to situate the rise of the Austrian court in Madrid and to understand how the court has been characterized by others. We will start with an overview of the diverse and often competing ends that the history of early modern Spain has been made to serve, and the major historiographic currents that condition the perception of imperial Spanish culture. The documents on courtly conduct to be examined in this study were printed and published. Therefore, it is also important to see how these products have been organized into categories that shape perception of their production. I argue that the widespread exclusion or occlusion of conduct literature from generic classifications of early modern print culture reflects limitations in these classificatory systems. To restore conduct literature to prominence requires reconnecting with its function within the nexus of court culture. The next task this chapter sets for itself is to place conduct literature at the locus of the royal court. For this purpose it will be useful to review the conditions leading to the rise of palatine culture during the European Renaissance with particular attention to the changing social position of the new gentleman of court. Finally, we will apply the concept of transculturation to the relationship between the monarch and his retinue. Through transculturation, the royal model of magnificence and refinement becomes the courtier’s inspiration and ultimate desideratum. The man of court will be seen to adopt three regal behavioral strategies: eminence or fame, dissimulation, and adaptability. These “masculine virtues” will come to distinguish the Renaissance nobleman’s performance of seigniorial manliness from that of the Medieval knight.

Views of the Court

As the first European monarchy to forge a worldwide empire in the sixteenth century, and the first to lose preeminence in the seventeenth, Spain, like an oldest child, grew up fast, without the benefit of older siblings’ examples. Multiple challenges of governance—the administration of far-flung territories, the transformation of Madrid into an international court, and the forging of a new national identity being just three—have elicited an equally heterogeneous historiography. Historians have variably framed the period of approximately 1500 to 1700, during which Spain confronted these questions, as Spain’s Golden Age, Age of Decline, or Age of Uncertainty.³ Each of these schema foregrounds a different aspect of the process of cultural negotiation set in motion by Spain’s unexpected expansion and the concomitant centralization of state power. The age was golden in the literal sense that imported precious metals wrested from conquered New World territories constituted Spain’s primary source of wealth. Figuratively, too, historians have looked nostalgically back upon a period of imperial splendor when “the sun never set” over the Spanish Empire. During the Spanish Golden Age, Philip II (r. 1527–98) and his son, Philip III (r. 1598–1621), were invested with 32 titles, 13 of which pertained to realms beyond the Iberian Peninsula (García Cárcel 12). Subsequently, the golden mantle of nationalist pride settled over the cultural production of the same period casting such writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Quevedo, and painters such as El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo, and Zurbarán in the guise of enduring monuments to the ephemeral greatness that was Hapsburg Spain.

Spain’s seventeenth century is also widely viewed as an Age of Decline in recognition of a process of contraction on both domestic and foreign fronts. As early as 1600, jurist Martín González de Cellorigo compared Spain’s malaise to a sick body. Cellorigo, in his Memorial de la […] restauración [Appeal for the […] revival], could well point to a “común declinación de estos reinos [general decline of these realms]” (qtd. in Gelabert 206). Troubling symptoms included the sinking of Spain’s Armada off the coast of England in 1588, military defeats in the Low Countries, territorial shrinkage, rampant nepotism at the highest levels of Philip III’s government, a plague-depleted populace, and unfavorable trade balances. Under Philip IV (r. 1621–65), the ailing patient did not recover from these ills. Portugal’s successful revolt against Spanish rule in 1640, unrest in Aragón, and a subdued revolt in Catalonia gave the lie to claims of a unified Iberian Peninsula. Reflecting this sense of loss, satirist Francisco de Quevedo wryly compared Philip IV’s sobriquet, “The Great,” to a pit: the more ground it loses, the “greater” it gets.⁴ Although John Elliott paints an exceptionally favorable portrait of Philip IV and his valido [favorite] in The Count-Duke of Olivares: Statesman in an Age of Decline, historians in general tend to fall in behind Quevedo, laying the blame for Spain’s losses on the shoulders of the latter Hapsburgs (Philip III, Philip IV, and Charles II). The following passage, excerpted from a 1941 Spanish history textbook, summarizes the traditional rise and fall narrative of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain:

Examinando el carácter de los Reyes de la Casa de Austria, se encuentran en Carlos I la energía y el valor; en Felipe II, la reflexión y la prudencia; en Felipe III, la irresolución y la incertidumbre; en Felipe IV, la indolencia y el abandono; en Carlos II la imbecilidad y la impotencia.

[Examining the character of the kings of the House of Austria, one finds energy and valor in Charles I, ponderation and prudence in Philip II, indecision and uncertainty in Philip III, indolence and lack of restraint in Philip IV, and in Charles II, imbecility and impotence.] (qtd. in García Cárcel 11)

A glance at any chronology of seventeenth-century Spain reveals the Hapsburgs’ steady loss of power. In 1628, Dutch pirate Piet Heyn sank Spain’s treasure fleet in Cuba, and France declared war on Spain. In 1640, Catalonia attempted to secede from Spain and join itself to France, and Portugal declared its independence from Madrid. In 1643, the French defeated Spain’s army in Flanders, and in 1648 Spain was forced to renounce its sovereignty over the United Provinces. The 1659 Peace of the Pyrenees treaty with France upended Philip IV’s plan to wed his eldest daughter María Teresa to her uncle Leopold I of Austria, forcing him to marry her to the King of France instead (Kamen, Spain xvii). Even historian Henry Kamen, perhaps the most ardent opponent of the “decline narrative,” concedes that Spain underwent a “shrinking of horizons, a major cultural contraction” in the seventeenth century (Spain 270).⁵

Jeremy Robbins characterizes the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in philosophical terms as a skeptical age challenged by uncertainty. The expansions and contractions of Spain’s frontiers and fortunes eroded the doxa of Catholic providentialism. Bartolomé de las Casas’s disturbing revelations regarding Spanish savagery in the New World in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias [A Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies] (c. 1552) struck a blow against Spain’s sense of moral superiority over its European rivals and transatlantic subjects. De las Casas provoked national reflection on the implicit conflict between Spain’s commitment to conquest and evangelization on the one hand, and the Christian humanist doctrines of civility and ethics on the other. Miguel de Carvajal’s allegorical Scena XIX [Scene 19] published by Luis Hurtado de Toledo in 1557 dramatizes the conflict between the indigenous peoples of the New World and their Spanish masters. In Carvajal’s play, native chieftains plead for justice in a Tribunal of Death. However, in keeping with Robbins’s assertion that “Baroque literature maintains a fraught tension between absolute certainty and radical insecurity,” Scena XIX does not reach a final verdict on the Indians’ complaint (“Renaissance and Baroque Continuity” 145).

The ambivalences and uncertainties that dogged Spain’s imperial adventure gave rise to a sense of belatedness and frustration, which is evident in the changing face of Spain’s literary heroes. After 1605, Amadís of Gaul—the most famous hero of Spain’s popular chivalric romances, fearless warrior, perfect lover, and emblem of Spain’s bellicose optimism—lost currency. Instead, amid a mixture of mirth and misgiving, the reading public conceded that honor to a caricature of misplaced chivalry: Cervantes’s Don Quixote of La Mancha.⁶

The Information Explosion

Animating all three historiographic schema—Golden Age, Age of Decline, and Age of Uncertainty—is the underlying pulse of discovery: navigational and geographic discovery, discoveries in the fields of economics and statecraft, and in natural sciences and cosmography. This investigative impulse derived from sixteenth-century humanism, which optimistically promoted the notion of dignitas hominis, the contention that humankind could be molded to live in civic harmony. Marcel Bataillon, who probed the movement’s penetration into Spanish letters, wrote that humanists were those who

entusiasmados con su aprendizaje del latín clásico como medio de expresión más rico que los idiomas vulgares, y luego con sus flamantes estudios de hebreo y griego, lenguas de la Sagrada Escritura, no tardaron en sentirse partícipes de una cultura nueva, y cultivar un sentimiento de superioridad frente a la rancia rutina escolástica […]. Mientras las disciplinas escolásticas se divorciaban cada vez más de la realidad viva al exigir requintados tecnicismos de lógica formal, pretendían los humanistas […] asomarse a problemas humanos permanentes de moral y de política.

[exalted by their training in classical Latin, the richest expressive medium of all of the vulgar languages [such as Spanish], and then by their fabulous studies of Hebrew and Greek, the languages of Holy Scripture, they soon began to feel themselves avatars of a new culture, to cultivate a sense of superiority in the face of stale scholastic routines […]. While the scholastic disciplines increasingly divorced themselves from real life by demanding exaggerated technical displays of formal logic, the humanists […] sought to venture into ongoing human problems of morality and politics.] (162)

Erasmus of Rotterdam and other humanists, while not rejecting a Medieval Christian view of humanity as sinful vessels in need of salvation, also extolled the human being as a creature made in the divine image. This made that creature an intrinsically worthy and valid object of inquiry. To this end, humanists applied the grammatical and literary tools of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to rediscover lost scientific and rhetorical knowledge, reinvigorate the study of doctrinal Christian texts, and unearth forgotten classical models of sociability.

Contact with the New World fueled further humanistic inquiry. The “Discovery” granted Europeans a glimpse into undreamed varieties of habitat, industry, and culture. Printing rapidly channeled this outpouring of raw data into the hands of European readers. Of this information explosion John Elliott remarks, “The sheer quantity of ethnographic information available to the sixteenth-century European reading public continues to be impressive. Print and navigation technologies carried the world to Europe’s doorstep” (España 69). New sources of knowledge further relativized the universal claims of classical antiquity and led to further advances in medicine, the natural sciences, cartography, and much more. More significantly, they inspired new epistemologies. Francis Bacon’s Novum organum [The New Organon] of 1620, a treatise that credits the onset of the modern age to the inventions of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, laid the groundwork for replacing scholastic syllogism with a more empirical, open-minded approach to knowledge. However, Elliott’s word “information” above may be misleading because the chronicles and natural histories of the New World that so fascinated their European readers reflected many different perspectives and served many causes. For this reason, Jeremy Robbins cautions that the relationship between discovery and literature is “not so much of external influences shaping ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Homo Agens
• 1 Masculinity, Conduct, and Empire
• 2 Fame
• 3 Dissimulation
• 4 Adaptability
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index