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Reviews of Books los autores nos presentan un cuadro vivaz, enriquecido por las referencias y las citas sacadas de las obras de Cervantes, y en ocasiones, también por las de otros autores de los siglos XVI y XVII y por textos anónimos que contribuyen a completar la descripción. A través de las palabras de Cervantes no sólo aparecen descritos los lugares sino también la vida de cada día en todos sus aspectos – comida, fiestas, compras, enseres domésticos, ropa, música – y los variados tipos humanos que poblaban la ciudad, desde los ricos ‘peruleros’, los jueces de la Audiencia y los mozos acomodados de los barrios, hasta el concurrido grupo de los maleantes, prostitutas, ladrones y tahúres. El gran caudal de datos recogidos permite a los autores concluir que Sevilla es una etapa fundamental en la formación literaria y en la visión del mundo de Cervantes, pues ‘extrajo de esa “babilonia” hispalense buena parte de la sustancia vital y artística que alimentó su gran talento de creador’ (40). Hablan pues de una especial sintonía de Cervantes con esta ciudad que es posible deducir de los muchos elementos que el volumen proporciona. Las numerosas ilustraciones – antiguos grabados, pinturas de la época y alguna foto reciente – no sólo enriquecen y embellecen el volumen, sino que también resultan muy útiles en apoyo a la lectura y a la reconstrucción de la ciudad del s. XVI. y muy provechoso es también el glosario final, que recoge unas quinientas voces de germanía y palabras hoy desaparecidas pero de uso corriente en la época y que aparecen en las citas de Cervantes y de los demás escritores que se sacan a colación. Los autores se dirigen a un público culto pero no especializado en estos temas, por lo tanto no se incluyen muestras de erudición y se cita un número reducido de fuentes entre las muchas en que se ha basado la rigurosa investigación, que bien se refleja en la amplia bibliografía final y en la riqueza de datos detalladísimos. En conclusión, se trata de un volumen que celebra dignamente el IV Centenario del Quijote y contribuye eficazmente a profundizar tanto el conocimiento de la obra de Cervantes como el estudio histórico-artístico de la ciudad andaluza. AVIVA GARRIBBA Università di Chieti-Pescara
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bhs, 86 (2009) RABELL, CARMEN (ed.), Ficciones legales: Ensayos sobre ley, retórica y narración. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Maitén III. 2007. 239 pp. ISBN 978-0-9796877-0-9. This volume brings together thirteen essays from two seminars directed by Carmen Rabell at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, on the origins of literary theory and on legal discourse in the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque novella. In a brief introduction, Rabell discusses the relatively recent field of ‘literature and law’. Analogous to the response to psychoanalytical approaches to literature, studies of this type are more apt to interest, impress, and convince literary scholars than legal scholars or, for that matter, practising lawyers, and it must be mentioned that ‘legal’ is generally used here in a very general sense. Professor Rabell has engaged her students and inspired them to explore significant topics. The collection is divided into four parts. In the first part, which deals with tragedy, Emmanuel Ramírez Nieves argues that Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is not only political in scope but also a study of power and its limits, a study of tyranny in ideological and semantic terms. Examining the array of discourses – political, ceremonial, and forensic – in the play, Ramírez Nieves demonstrates that Oedipus’s faith in his judgement and in his own invincibility gives him a false sense of security that both symbolizes and condemns any mindset that will not allow for inconsistencies in life and in interpretation. When Oedipus doubts Tiresias, he shows a lack of interpretive skills that will lead to his downfall. This essay underscores what will be a common denominator in the collection: the question of forms of argumentation from legal and literary perspectives. Manuel Aponte Marrero points out that Euripides Medea does not have an Aristotelian ending in catharsis; rather than inducing fear and pity, the play awakens horror and indignation in the spectator. Medea offers a detestable protagonist, but her actions are affected by the representation of men as exploiters and opportunists, that is, by a subtext that compromises the absolute quality of evil. From a legal stance, then, men give Medea a defence. Ana Méndez Oliver, writing on Orbecche, by the Cinquecento playwright and theorist Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, emphasizes how Giraldi Cinthio
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bhs, 86 (2009) acknowledges and deviates from the precepts of classical antiquity to produce what could be called a dramatic hybrid, which incorporates contemporary politics and theology (for example, secret and politically motivated marriages, to be dealt with by the Council of Trent) into the structure of the play. Through a focus on variations of a particular narrative thread, the story of Griselda, the second section deals with off-centre, ‘ungovernable’ subjects – women and subalterns – and the ways in which texts that span centuries (from Marie de France to Geoffrey Chaucer to Juan de Timoneda) may adopt a spirit of transgression that goes against the severe conservatism of the times and places in which they were produced, or they may reinscribe the work of their predecessors. Francisco Luttecke contends that Chaucer’s version, ‘The Oxford Scholar’s Tale’, is the most radical, a comprehensive attack on the feudal order. Carmen Rabell looks at Timoneda and the Spanish adaptation of the Italian novella to suggest that, rather than slavishly imitating the Italian models, El patrañuelo fabricates ‘legal fictions’ that simultaneously foster the post-Tridentine imperative of validating the doctrine of free will and articulate a ‘social imaginary’ that will accommodate class structure and stratification within the context of the Counter-Reformation. The third section intensifies the focus on evolving social and political stances through three essays on versions of the Romeo and Juliet story by Matteo Bandello, Marguerite de Navarre, and Juan Pérez de Montalbán. Naturally, the norms of marriage, questions of control, and the female body remain in the dialogue, as does the interplay of moral codes and conduct. As Rabell observes, there is often a tension between the professed exemplarity of narrative and the content proper. Her analysis of Diego Ágreda y Vargas’s ‘Aurelio y Alexandra’, from his Novelas morales of 1620, alludes to María de Zayas’s ‘El imposible vencido’ and to Pérez de Montalbán’s ‘La mayor confusión’. This last work is the topic of an essay by Jara Ríos Rodríguez, who refers, in turn, to Marguerite de Navarre’s ‘Novela XXX’, the object of Gisela Rivera Figueroa’s study. The merging – and emerging – dialectics of Church and State proves fascinating. The essays of the fourth section look at what the editor classifies as extreme cases: ‘La fuerza de la sangre’ of Cervantes, ‘La
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constante cordobesa’ of Gonzalo Céspedes y Meneses, ‘La perseguida triunfante’ of Zayas, and ‘Quien bien obra, siempre acierta’ of Mariana de Carvajal. Perhaps because the text was unknown to me, I found especially intriguing Joan Pérez Rodríguez’s study of ‘La constante cordobesa’. The emphasis on the role of the narrator, who serves as a type of litigator, is key to the interpretation of the narrative, which concerns itself with what the critic labels a ‘destabilizing subject’. The theses presented in the essays are valid, and the sense that often one seems to be reading the work of critics-in-the-making rather than of polished investigators does not detract from the relevance of the ideas. This teacher and her students are doing good work. Readers can feel encouraged by their example and motivated by their examples to delve further into the intersections of literature and the law. EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN Vanderbilt University
JULIO VÉLEz-SAINz, El Parnaso español: Canon, mecenazgo y propaganda en la poesía del Siglo de Oro. Madrid: Visor Libros. 2006. 237 pp. ISBN: 84-7522-884-4. This book offers a fascinating, rewarding and often illuminating study of the importance of the myth of Mount Parnassus, Apollo and the Nine Muses in Spanish Golden Age poetry, especially insofar as the myth was used by Spanish writers from Juan de Mena and the Marquis of Santillana through Garcilaso de la Vega to Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora and Quevedo to create a canon of Spanish poets who deserved to reach the summit of Mount Parnassus. Vélez-Sainz begins his study with the origins of the myth and the Greek writers, Pausanias, Strabo, Hesiod, Homer, who first described Parnassus and the Muses. Virgil, Horace and Propertius later introduced changes into the myth, the most important being the notion of ascent or pilgrimage to the summit and the importance that this has in terms of the literary journey undertaken by the writer to reach the heights of fame, to appear in the literary canon. The next major period for Mount Parnassus is fourteenth-century Italy and its trio of ‘canonical’ writers: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Dante will be portrayed by
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