Capturing the Pícaro in Words: Literary and Institutional Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid 9780429444906, 9780367000332

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Capturing the Pícaro in Words

Capturing the Pícaro in Words discusses the framing of the transient marginals of early modern Madrid in the literary pícaro. It compares the perceptions of constables, shopkeepers and criminals to those of mass-produced literary representations, and argues that the literary representations “displaced” the pícaro, assigning the marginals different places in the literary texts in order to centralize the problem of urban vagrancy. The texts “spanished” the pícaro, thus establishing the image of a culturally homogenous group, and, lastly, “silenced” the pícaro, under-representing the power marginals in the city derived from their knowledge of the information flows in the city. Konstantin Mierau is Senior Lecturer for European Culture and Literature (Spanish) at the Department of European Languages and Cultures of the University of Groningen.

Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture Edited by Lesley A. Coote University of Hull

Alexander L. Kaufman Ball State University

Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture examines the nature, ­function, and context of the outlaw and the outlawed—people, spaces, ­practices—in the pre-modern world, and in its modern representations. By its nature, outlawry reflects not only the outlawed, but the forces of law which seek to define and to contain it. Throughout the centuries, a wide and ever-changing, and yet ever familiar, variety of outlaw characters and narratives has captured the imagination of audiences both particular and general, local and global. This series seeks to reflect the transcultural, transgendered and interdisciplinary manifestations, and the different literary, political, socio-historical, and media contexts in which the outlaw/ed may be encountered from the mediaeval period to the modern.

Series Advisory Board: Sayre N. Greenfield (University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg) Kevin J. Harty (La Salle University) Valerie B. Johnson (University of Montevallo) Stephen Knight (University of Melbourne) John Marshall (University of Bristol) Joseph F. Nagy (University of California, Los Angeles) Thomas H. Ohlgren (Emeritus, Purdue University) W. Mark Ormrod (University of York) Helen Phillips (Cardiff University) Graham Seal (Curtin University) Linda Troost (Washington and Jefferson College) Charles van Onselen (University of Pretoria) The King and Commoner Tradition Carnivalesque Politics in Medieval and Early Modern Literature Mark Truesdale Capturing the Pícaro in Words Literary and Institutional Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid Konstantin Mierau For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Capturing the Pícaro in Words Literary and Institutional Representations of Marginal Communities in Early Modern Madrid Konstantin Mierau

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Konstantin Mierau to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mierau, Konstantin, author. Title: Capturing the pícaro in words : literary and institutional representations of marginal communities in early modern Madrid / by Konstantin Mierau. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Outlaws in literature, history, and culture ; 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018020263 (print) | LCCN 2018025339 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429444906 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367000332 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Picaresque literature, Spanish—History and criticism. | Spanish literature—Classical period, 1500-1700— History and criticism. | Marginality, Social, in literature. | Madrid (Spain)—In literature. Classification: LCC PQ6147.P5 (ebook) | LCC PQ6147.P5 M54 2019 (print) | DDC 863/.087709—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020263 ISBN: 978-0-367-00033-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44490-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Olivier, Florian and Janine . . . always gentle on my mind.

Contents

Preface: Displacing, Spanishing and Silencing Madrid’s Pícarosviii Acknowledgementsxvi List of Abbreviationsxvii Note on Translation and Transcriptionxviii

Introduction: Madrid and the Picaresque Novel

1

1 Displacing the Pícaro31 2 Spanishing the Pícaro79 3 Silencing the Pícaro122 Bibliography168 Index187

Preface: Displacing, Spanishing and Silencing Madrid’s Pícaros

Early modern Europe (ca. 1492–1789) is often defined as a period of upheaval, both social and economic. Yet such definitions pay little detail to the peoples that lived, worked, failed and thrived within Europe’s ever-growing cities. Early modern Madrid, like its northern counterparts, Paris and London, was a hive to a growing population of transients who, unable to immediately access the safety and stability of mainstream society, subsided on the margins of the city and, more often than not, the law. Day labourers drifting from city to city, Christian refugees fleeing Ottoman expansionism in the East, mendicant pilgrims, Sinti and Roma, migrant moriscos, generations of beggars and cripples.1 These transient marginals occupied the squares, inns and cheap housing of sprawling early modern capitals and major ports such as Seville, Lisbon and Antwerp.2 They waited for employment to come their way, begged for alms, stole and forged. Sooner or later they would move on, voluntarily or not, to another city, another place in which to carve out an existence. It would seem obvious to state that the experience of these transient people vastly differed from that of official travellers such as government envoys, ambassadors and contracted soldiers. Yet the distinction between those in the centre and those on the margins of early modern society is far from clear. The early modern experience was fluid and changeable. Societal position was, for the vast majority, not a certain and definite life-long platform, but a finely balanced juggling act between greatness and destitution. It was a time when ill fortune could throw the most accomplished professional soldier into poverty, and today’s ambassadorial aid into tomorrow’s vagabond. To this day, the historiography of these peoples has shown considerable hiatuses, in particular, when it comes to the study of their literary representation. This study analyzes the role of literary texts as historical actors in the representation of transient marginals of early modern Madrid.3 It focuses on literary representations of transient marginals in picaresque and costumbrist novels set in early modern Madrid through works such as Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), Guía y avisos de forasteros (1620) and Historias peregrinas y ejemplares (1623) representing wandering indigent

Preface ix youths with a knack for criminal life: the so-called pícaros. These first literary representations of the city, and of the pícaros, in particular, laid much of the groundwork for the repertoire of motifs associated with the transient marginals of the capital. Due to their nature as foundational narratives, the literary representations of the transient marginals by way of the pícaro continue to influence both literary representations and the historiography of the urban underground of early modern Madrid. This study argues that, in the early seventeenth-century debate on urban transients in Madrid, seminal texts such as Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), Guía y avisos de forasteros (1620) and Historias peregrinas y ejemplares (1623) framed the historical transient marginal in the image of the pícaro in three key modes. The literary representations “displaced” the pícaro in the city, assigning the marginals different places in the literary representation of the city in order to centralize the problem of urban vagrancy; the texts “spanished” the pícaro, omitting the ethnic diversity of Madrid’s transient marginals, thus establishing the image of a culturally homogenous group; and, lastly, “silenced” the pícaro, under-representing the power marginals in the city derived from their knowledge of and access to the information flows in the city. Each of these tendencies has contributed to an overall framing of the extraliterary transient marginal, both in the debate on urban poverty in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, as well as on the subsequent historiography on transient marginals in the city. The principal aim is to engage both the status quaestionis on transient marginals in early modern Madrid, and the status quaestionis on the first generation of literary representations of early modern Madrid as the two are mutually constitutive. As mentioned earlier, the transient population’s lack of a stable and formalized position within mainstream society means that most do not show up in the municipal administration. They were not citizens in the eyes of the municipality, nor members of a parish, nor did they have any official business in Madrid. It is for these reasons that literary examples of the transient experience are often used to fill the void left by the lack of documented administrative history. Due to the realist aesthetics of literary texts such as Guzmán and Guía y avisos, the literary pícaro is often used to fill in the blanks in the history of transient marginals in the city. This tendency poses a problem of interpretation for the study of the literary representation of early modern Madrid’s transient marginals and, by consequence, the study of the referentiality of picaresque narrative. In the absence of sources outside the literary realm that represent perspectives on the transient marginal, the marginal as a historical actor is conflated with the literary pícaro. In this conflation, a significant aspect of the marginal as a cultural phenomenon is lost—that is to say, the dynamic of representation and the multiplicity of perspectives on marginals, foreigners and outlaws that characterized the development of early modern Madrid. The central themes of “displacing,”

x  Preface “spanishing” and “silencing” developed in this monograph, will illustrate the origins and subsequent effects of the dynamic of representation underlying the literary pícaros of Madrid. In the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries, Madrid was a centre of intellectual debate, of academies where poets, playwrights and novelists discussed life and art with social reformers, city officials and merchants.4 In these gatherings, treatises on the confinement of the poor, caveats against false poor and literary explorations of the criminal mind were presented and read side by side. The authors of these texts did not subsist on writing alone; they held government functions and dealt with city police and administrators through various public offices. Mateo Alemán, author of the picaresque classic Guzmán de Alfarache, to name but one example, had worked as an investigative judge, was member of religious fraternity working on poor relief and was friendly with Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, the royal medic and author of the 1598 Discurso del amparo de los legítimos pobres, an elaborate treatise on poor relief. Pérez de Herrera, in turn, was responsible for the construction of several hospitals in the capital. In short, Madrid was the arena of a discourse on the transient marginal that consisted of various genres and perspectives in which literary representations may have had an unprecedented protagonism, yet most certainly did not function in an isolated environment that consisted only of “literary” text. Precisely because the literary representations of the transients by Mateo Alemán cum suis formed part of a debate, their aim was far from representing for the sake of depiction alone. The literary texts present possible worlds that project alternative designs for the city and the relationships in it. The literary texts functioned alongside various other textual practices representing transient marginals: testimonies from city police, decrees by the municipality, inventories of criminal cases and statements from witnesses at criminal trials involving vagrant foreigners. Juxtaposing these sources will tease out the differing perspectives on transients with whom the literary narratives communicated. This microhistory-inspired approach complements dominant and successful methodologies in the study of the picaresque that have interpreted the pícaro in the light of macro-scale historical developments, such as mercantilism, capitalism, a converso or protestant mentality.5 The introduction “Madrid and the picaresque novel” discusses the relation between the development of Madrid as a capital and innovations in the literary representation of transient marginals in early modern Spanish prose narratives. After presenting an analytical approach informed by the work of Lefebvre, De Certeau and Even-Zohar, the introduction will discuss how Madrid, as a growing city, enabled new spaces and social phenomena, such as derelict houses inhabited by unregistered tenants engaging in various forms of illicit trade, thus challenging the process of literary representation. Having addressed the socio-historical

Preface xi development of early modern Madrid, and its impact on the evolution of representations of the transient people in early modern prose, the introduction will proceed to outline and analyze the key developments within the picaresque novel of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Finally, this opening chapter will contextualize the prose representations of the picaresque by juxtaposing the literary representations with other sources. This microhistorical approach to the source material will establish a level of contextualization suited to the objective of capturing the singularity of the literary framing of early modern Madrid’s transients in the figure of the pícaro. The core of the book is structured around three chapters, each devoted to exploring a key mode characteristic of the picaresque genre. Chapter 1, “Displacing the Pícaro,” will demonstrate how the literary representations repositioned the place of the pícaro in the city in order to represent positions within the debate on urban poor relief, the treatment of delinquents and visions on the place of delinquency in the city. The pícaro’s place in the city is a highly significant subject against the backdrop of late-Renaissance urban planning, particularly in the case of late sixteenth-century Madrid, which was developed with rather clearcut preconceived ideas for an ideal renaissance capital. The chapter will depart from the stereotypical depiction of pícaros as a community of urban rogues living in homes in the centre of Madrid as presented in works such as the seminal picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán. I will argue that there was no such urban space freely available to the transient population and that, contrary to their literary image, pícaros, outlaw youths, were at the behest of state agendas to eject them from the very location where Alemán placed them in his literary world. In doing so, I will highlight how such a house of rogues as presented by Alemán was antithetical to the king’s envisioned city centre in which vagrants and outlaws were in fact forcibly relegated to the periphery. In the literary representation, space is claimed, assigned and instrumentalized. By placing the house of the pícaro into the centre of the imperial court, the episode in Guzmán de Alfarache warns of the dangers of a community of pícaros that would be allowed to convene in their own closed quarters. This prospect was not unlikely, given the many government plans for housing the poor in parish hospitals. This study will interpret such a literary image as a voice in the debate on urban poor relief and policies on urban vagrancy that were devised and debated at the time. Contemporary readers would have immediately recognized the artificial and polemical nature of the text and interpreted it vis-à-vis other prominent positions in the ongoing discourse on poverty, the abuse of the infrastructure for poor relief by people falsely posing as poor and urban criminality. Chapter 2, “Spanishing the Pícaro,” shall focus on the people with whom the pícaro relates, arguing that understanding the transient

xii  Preface requires an understanding of his connections in the city. This vantage point allows us to discuss the referentiality of the literary “associations of rogues” in the texts of Mateo Alemán, Liñán y Verdugo, Carlos García and Cervantes, starting from an episode in the Guía y avisos in which a new arrival to the city is unwittingly involved with a criminal gang. The referentiality of these texts will be interpreted in the context of pleas and trial records involving criminal gangs in early modern Madrid. One of the central notions in current interpretations of literary representations of criminal associations is that the typologies of outlaws (way layers, burglars, pimps)—a common motif of the picaresque—were intended to criticize the professional guilds of their time. Rather than represent the criminal underworld, they are considered a literary inversion that has little or no bearing on the historical criminals.6 However, pleas from Madrid constables, inventories of criminal cases and trial records represent the rogues as highly specialized and effective at employing cross-cultural networks. Moreover, the extraliterary gangs were highly heterogeneous; in inner-city Madrid there were Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians and Turks who collaborated with each other, and with Castilians and city officials in intricate criminal schemes for several decades before being apprehended. These networks operated throughout the peninsula and their information network outperformed the municipal police. Strikingly, the diversity of the urban underground that can be found in the institutional sources is all but absent in the literary associations of rogues. This points towards a homogenizing nationalization of the urban outlaw in the literary representations, a de facto “spanishing” of the rogue. The heterogeneity of the criminal network shows that part of the power and perceived threat of urban outlaws lay in their ability to connect with various ethnic communities on account of their ability to speak various languages. Due to the frequent use of literary sources by principal historians in the discussion of delinquency in early modern Madrid and Spain, who thus perpetuate the “spanishing” of the pícaro, the diversity of the transient marginal and the criminal underground has, thus far, received little attention.7 Chapter 3, “Silencing the Pícaro,” will focus on the information-­ sharing practices of the transient marginal in the city. This vantage point takes us to a discussion of the role of urban vagrants and criminals in the exchange of information at the royal court. As will be discussed in the chapter, literary texts assign the marginal a power over information in the city. From the Guzmán de Alfarache to such stories as Gonzalo de Céspedes’s y Meneses’s Historias peregrinas y ejemplares, I will highlight how contemporary authors ascribed the criminals a claim to truth among the many types of information that circulate in the city (gossip, hearsay, true accounts). As they are dispersed through the city and enter houses and palaces, they are privy to any and every news, which makes them a force to be reckoned with.

Preface xiii This perception coincides with that of such historical actors as the alguazil de los pícaros Mateo Pérez, a special constable assigned to vagabonds, who seeks to infiltrate the communities of rogues by means of paid informants. This plea from the special constable shows that Mateo Alemán and his kin’s literary projections of closed communities of rogues sharing valuable information coincided with the constable’s perception of the city. The power of the pícaro, both in the perception of the author and the constable, resides in his control of and access to information, and it appears that in Mateo Alemán’s fictional world, this power allows the pícaro to claim a place in the court. The privileged and much-discussed nature of information in the early modern capital endorses yet again the notion of the well-informed pícaro who capitalizes on his knowledge. Moreover, promulgations from the city council show that the exchange of information in public places was, in fact, subject to prohibition in late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury Madrid, an element which is entirely absent in the literary representations. In a time prior to the first gazettes, this prohibition was aimed at relegating communication to separate spheres: the parish, the guild, the family, thus preventing an empowerment through information by the urban community as a self-aware whole. This gives reading about a city population gossiping at leisure in the literary representation a new meaning, as it juxtaposes a freedom in the possible world of the literary text to the repression in the city as experienced by historical actors. In a place where public exchange of information is outlawed, the marginal’s territory is enlarged and intertwined with that of the law-abiding citizen by creating the necessity for an illicit go-between. The three perspectives are connected through such recurring themes as the relation between the transient marginal and urban exchanges of information, which is manifest in the relationship between the place of the outlaw in the city and his grasp of information flows, as well as the heterogeneity of the outlaw’s network that allows him to adapt to communication flows in various languages and between various cultural backgrounds. It reveals the danger represented by well-informed, multilingual and multi-ethnic criminal networks, characterizing the pícaro, the Spanish urban outlaw par excellence, as member of a cosmopolitan network centred on the exchange of information as a tool to power and argues that many of his contemporaries—authors, judges, watchmen and neighbours alike—perceived him as such. The findings are not only relevant to the isolated case of early modern Madrid or the Spanish picaresque novel. The sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque novel is one of the first genres to present the urban outlaw as a well-rounded protagonist with a cumulative life experience, and this innovation quickly inspired translation into and adaptation in other language areas. It represents aspects of the urban experience—criminal enterprises, marginalization, life beyond the boundaries of the law—that

xiv  Preface had known little or no literary representation until the mid-sixteenth century. Although it developed from a long-standing tradition of delinquent and trickster texts, the picaresque novel provided a representation of the urban outlaw from the outlaw’s perspective. In the words of the eminent specialist of the Spanish picaresque, Francisco Rico, this constituted the greatest literary innovation since the Greeks.8 Reducing the scale of analysis of this historic event to the street corners, squares, individuals and practices that first affected and were affected by these seminal texts, will take us to the origins of a literary phenomenon that continues to inform the cultural narrative on urban transient marginals, well beyond Madrid and Spain.

Notes 1. María F. Carbajo Isla, “La inmigración a Madrid (1600–1850),” Reis 32 (1979): 67–100. María F. Carbajo Isla, La población de la villa de Madrid: desde finales del siglo XVI hasta mediados del siglo XIX (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno editores. S.A., 1987). Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Extranjeros en la vida de los españoles (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 1996). Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital europea. Madrid entre 1561–1606 (Madrid: Turner/ Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1989). 2. Donatella Calabi and Stephen Turk Christensen, Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. The study is informed by theories of urban space posited by Henri Lefebvre and Michel De Certeau, whose work has inspired much of current theoretical thought in the “spatial turn.” See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For recent studies on the spatial turn, in particular in relation to literary representation, see Jörg Döring and Tristan Thielman (eds.), Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur-Sozialwissenschaften (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008), Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann (eds.), Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaft und der Spatial Turn (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009). 4. Michel Cavillac, “La reformación de pobres y el círculo del doctor Pérez de Herrera (1595–1598),” in La Monarquía de Felipe II: la casa del rey (Volumes I—II), eds. José Martínez Millán and Santiago Fernández Conti (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre/Tavera, 2005), 197–204. 5. Microhistory bases historical narrative on particular historical agents, events or locations and, in doing so, intends to reclaim the significance of the particular in a historiography dominated by an emphasis on the macro-perspective, grand narratives and great figures. Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2001), 97–119. Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35. Microhistory has also been characterized by an interest in the lost peoples of historiography: outlaws, transients, vagabonds, the unregistered wandering masses of the early modern period. It is this approach, I argue, that is most apt for reconstructing the extratextual counterpart of the literary pícaro in representations of Madrid’s urban marginals, precisely as a means of teasing out the processes of representation. Binne de Haan and Konstantin Mierau, Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel: A First Exploration into Comensurable Perspectives (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

Preface xv 6. Héctor Brioso Santos, Sevilla en la prosa de ficción del Siglo de Oro (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 1998). Bronislaw Geremek, La estirpe de Caín. La imagen de los vagabundos y pobres en las literaturas europeas de los siglos XV al XVII (Madrid: Biblioteca Mondadori, 1991). Claudio Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study of the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature (New York: Garland, 1987). 7. Diversity in early modern cities is an emerging theme in a recent research perspective less biased by the tendency to nationalize the early modern city retrospectively. See Calabi and Turk Christensen, Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe. 8. Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969). Francisco Rico, The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Acknowledgements

I would like to kindly thank the series editors Lesley Coote and Alex Kaufman of the series Outlaws in Literature for accepting this experiment on the intersection between literary analysis and urban history. Their guidance has been instrumental in bringing this project to fruition. I would also like to thank Rina Walthaus, Sebastian Sobecki, Giovanni Levi, Klaus Meyer-Minnemann and Matti Peltonen for their insights on ideas, papers and earlier versions of the chapters. My particular gratitude goes out to Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra for initiating me into the practice of Madrid’s municipality and the study of its sources. Many thanks to Matthew Apperley for the assistance in editing the manuscript.

Abbreviations

AGI AGS AHN Archivo de Protocolos AVM BNE

Archivo General de Indias Archivo General de Simancas Archivo Histórico Nacional Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid Archivo de la Villa de Madrid Biblioteca Nacional de España

Note on Translation and Transcription

Unless otherwise specified, translations of the original Spanish sources are mine. The original text is provided in the endnotes for reference. For citations from text editions of the primary literature or archival sources, the spelling as per the edition was maintained. In the case of citations from sources from the municipal archives of Madrid and the crown administration, the original spelling was maintained.

Introduction Madrid and the Picaresque Novel

The quintessential literary pícaro is a first-person narrator of marginal descent; his parents are often criminal, and his tale is one of thievery, deceit and failed attempts to rise in social rank. With this narrative voice, the picaresque novel provides a representation of life on the margins, from the marginal’s perspective. This early modern innovation in fictional narrative arose in Spain in the mid-sixteenth century with the publication of the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and reached international fame with the publication of Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán in 1599.1 Lazarillo was placed on the inquisition’s index of prohibited books (the index librorum prohibitorum) due to its irreverent depiction and overt criticism of clergy, and after 1573 circulated mostly in a purged version.2 Guzmán, however, was translated into German, Italian, English and French, as well as Latin, and was widely considered an instant classic, thus consolidating a genre that still remains vibrant today. The picaresque mode is fully represented by Nobel laureate José Camilo Cela’s 1942 Familia de Pascual Duarte and reverberates in the 1990s genre of the hood movie (e.g. Boyz n the Hood 1991), Menace II Society (1993)) and such recent TV series as Orange Is the New Black (2013–2017), all of which share the inside narrative voice of the marginal reflecting on his or her life and appeal to vast audiences. These and related representations of marginality continue to play a key role in informing the place of the marginal in the shared imagination of society. The consolidation of the picaresque novel and its rise to international acclaim is intimately related to the history of Madrid. In 1561, what had been a town of secondary importance at best and the occasional hunting retreat for the kings of Castile, was chosen as the permanent location of the court of Philip II (1556–1598). In fact, it was the lack of history and ample space right in the geographical centre of the peninsula that represented the promise of a clean slate for the construction of a renaissance capital. And so, between 1561 and 1600, a metropolis was built around a rather unprepared mediaeval town. Imperial Madrid immediately attracted immigrants from every part of the connected world. It turned into a place of great poverty and extreme wealth where crime raged and

2  Introduction criminal ingenuity tested the institutions of law and order beyond their limits. The successes and failures of this project provided intended and unintended places for the forging of various types of human relationships. This development challenged the process of literary representation and stimulated literary innovations, among them the picaresque novel. The stock characters, plots and narrative devices of established genres such as the epic simply fell short when confronted with the complexity of this new urban cosmopolitan culture. The emerging picaresque genre spawned a growing body of work providing representations of the urban underground with an unprecedented realist aesthetic, which appealed to a growing urban readership. The following chapter will show how the nascent capital influenced the nascent genre of the picaresque and how the resulting literary representations continue to influence the image of the city in historiography, particularly when it comes to the urban underground. The present attempt at untangling the complex reciprocal relationship between the picaresque novel and Madrid in the construction of the figure of the pícaro is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space. For Lefebvre the concept of space can be broken down into three main areas: “spatial practices (the way space is performed/produced), representations of space (conceptualized space) and representational space (space as lived and perceived, public, private, open, clandestine etc.).”3 Each element in this trichotomy is implied by, and part of, the other; the literary representation feeds on perception, yet provides models for the perception, which may in turn induce spatial practices that change the nature and representation of space, in a perpetual and mutually determining dynamic. Key elements are place, the actor and the practices that produce space, as succinctly defined in De Certeau’s notion that “space is a practiced place.”4 In this theoretical framework, the transient marginal, of which the pícaro is a key cultural representation, can be interpreted as an actor who “practices places,” and the source material can be divided into representations of space (the literary texts) and representational space (the agent perspectives voiced by constables, judges and witnesses) and the spatial practices, that, from the historian’s perspective, can only be deduced by either of the previous.5 In order to conceptualize the interaction between these types of representation, I turn to polysystem theory.6 Polysystem theory conceptualizes culture as the interaction and development of systems such as languages, art forms, literary genres and literary canons. It considers the whole as a repertoire of possibilities, as the “culture repertoire” at the disposal of a given culture.7 Key notions are repertoire (the culture repertoire as a whole and subsets of repertoires), transfer (the transfer of repertoire from one system to another), evolution (development of a system) and centre and periphery (relationally defined positions within a system).8 Polysystem theory thus allows for the visualization of the interaction between

Introduction 3 repertoires (the rhetoric of a policeman requesting a raise as opposed to the literary devices of the novel) within a constellation of systems. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre hypothesizes that the Renaissance was a period during which the inscription of urban space took place with an extraordinary sensibility: Yet did there not at one time, between the sixteenth century (the Renaissance—and the Renaissance city) and the nineteenth century, exist a code at once architectural, urbanistic and political, constituting a language among country people and townspeople, to the authorities and to artists—a code which allowed space not only to be “read”; but also to be constructed?9 Urban space and its population could be interpreted as a source text or even literature of sorts that interferes with literary narrative, in this case the picaresque novel. According to Even-Zohar, “Interference can be defined as a relation(ship) between literatures, in which a certain literature A (a source literature) becomes a source of direct or indirect loans for another literature B (a target literature).”10 Even-Zohar proposes the categories of “invention” and “import” to distinguish different types of interference: In the making of repertoires, independently of the circumstances, the major procedures seem to be “invention” and “import.” These are not opposed procedures, because inventing may be carried out via import, though it also may relate to the labor involved in the making within the confines of the home system without any link to some other. Even in cases of inventiveness which cannot be traced back to a simple source, import may have been present. In short, import has played a much more crucial role than is normally admitted in the making of repertoires, and hence in the organization of the life of groups, as well as the interaction between groups.11 In the case of literary representations of Madrid this “making of repertoires” constitutes “imports” of characterizations of transients, descriptions of spaces, developing stereotypes and so forth. “Innovation” takes place when characterization of transients is (purposefully) selective, when places are changed or relocated, thus resulting in a new repertoire that speaks to the source literature with a counternarrative. The success of these imports and innovations in the picaresque was very much connected to the demands of the reading (and book purchasing) public. In his discussion of Madrid as a discursive space, Ruiz Pérez points out that: Madrid, its dining rooms and speakers’ corners, and, increasingly, the cabinets and alcoves of its population, transformed into an exemplary space of literary consumption, in which a growing number

4  Introduction of readers redirected their taste and that of the publishers towards themes and genres that continued to awaken the suspicion of moralists, as it had among the humanists of the previous century.12 Madrid was a commercial hub and the location of an immense imperial administration. The many scribes, bureaucrats and merchants knew how to read and write, but were considerably less knowledgeable of literary standards. These readers differed from the traditional class of readers of previous generations. They did not measure the quality of literature along learned ideals, but instead based it on their own interests. According to Ruiz Pérez, this readership increasingly read literary representation against their perception of the city: [. . .] The chronotope of the court enters into a close relationship with the reality of life, but also the reading reality of the receiver at whom the texts are directed, and this reader finds in them [the literary representations] the models for a known reality, the key to the behaviors of the characters in which he recognizes himself both as actor and as reader.13 Madrid, then, was characterized by a specific “interpretative community,” i.e. an identifiable group of readers that shared a common way of interpreting and valorizing a set of texts.14 This community knew the city and considered it a key to the reading of literary texts. They read literary representations of the court through the prism of the representational space they perceived. One of the key themes that appealed to this new urban readership was that of transient beggars and criminals, primarily because these transients played a significant role in their everyday lives. The readers in Madrid, with their interest in vagrants and criminals, are, moreover, closest to the physical production of these literary representations. They determined the first successes of early seventeenth-century novels such Guzmán de Alfarache and Don Quixote that would subsequently rise to lasting international acclaim. What is more, many other Spanishlanguage classics that pre-dated the establishment of the capital in Madrid (Lazarillo and Celestina) were re-edited and translated, as a consequence of the international success of Guzmán de Alfarache, Don Quixote and others. Thus Madrid’s readers played a central role in shaping the form and the content of the internationally operative concept of “Spanish literature” and, particularly, that of the “Spanish picaresque novel.”

The Transient Marginals of Late Sixteenth-Century Madrid The prominent role of transients, vagabonds and petty thieves in literary representations of Madrid—in Madrid—is a direct consequence of

Introduction 5 the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon. For Madrid, the last decades of the sixteenth century were marked by the rapid growth and reform of the city after Philip II’s decision to establish the formerly peripatetic court in Madrid. Although Philip’s reasons for choosing Madrid are still subject to discussion, it is generally accepted that the foremost reason for choosing Madrid was its potential. Castilian cities such as Toledo and Seville had considerably longer traditions as nuclei of power and thus settled structures. Therefore, they could not offer what Madrid could: open space.15 Madrid’s potential was used for a number of great public building projects and social reforms in the city. Philip II and his architects were inspired by Renaissance notions of city planning and aimed to apply these to the newly founded capital. Their objective was to develop an open, clean, systematic city. The capital was to reflect the imperial status and ambition of the monarchy.16 Phillip II attempted to dictate building practices by means of decrees, and the junta de urbanismo instituted in 1590 attempted to determine the layout and use of public space with regulations that were communicated by the town council.17 City planning was also the subject of arbitrios, treatises advising the king on solutions for existing problems. The extensive memorandum by Francisco de Sotomayor for example, recently studied and attributed by Jesús Escobar, advised the king to widen streets and remove mediaeval adobes.18 All in all, the city was an early example of concerted city planning in early modern peninsular Spain. However, the project was developed in an environment scattered with the remnants of a mediaeval town still dominated by century-old planning regulations.19 The palace buildings, avenues and plazas stand as testimony to the successes of Philip’s undertakings. Yet for all of Philip’s successes, his advisors repeatedly complained about the areas of the city that failed to live up to the standards they had set. These arguments generally pointed to both the run-down houses that had remained and the undesirable occupants that lived within them.20 As a result of Philip’s choice for Madrid as the location of the court, the formerly stable population of Madrid grew significantly, from 35,000 in the 1550s to 100,000 in 1600.21 Aside from these registered citizens, many immigrants, vagabonds, day labourers, soldiers between contracts, government officials and rural folk who came to town for administrative matters wandered the streets and occupied the houses of the new imperial capital. Although record keeping was a great part of Madrid’s core business, there was no specific mechanism to record this fluctuating part of the urban population, and the further one descends down the social ladder, the less evidence becomes available.22 The fluctuating population, in particular the lower echelons, defied and evaded institutionalized record keeping, and, by consequence, continues to challenge historical study.23 This lack of visibility in regard to the transient marginals of Madrid in institutional sources indicates a more general challenge in the field of

6  Introduction social and urban history of the early modern period. Cowan points out the problem of lacking statistics for the lower classes of society for most European early modern cities.24 As ever, those higher up the social scale show up in official correspondences, university and military records: sources in which transient marginals seldom show. The early modern paper trail is substantial, yet, as shown earlier, socially selective. However, at first glance, the early modern literary canon appears to be considerably less socially selective given its interest in the marginal. This case can be seen most readily by the prominence of marginal types in the picaresque genre. The social discrimination of the paper trail implies that whereas higher social classes can be studied as both subjects and objects of representation by means of juxtaposing different textual sources, the lower one descends down the social ladder, the more literary representation is equated with the referent. In the case of early modern Madrid, this problem is exacerbated due to the increasing availability of literary representations of the lower classes in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century.25 In spite of the considerable discourse on poverty with explicit reference to transient marginals, hard data in the form of numbers, occupations and mortality rates is missing. This means that the relationship between literary text and transient marginals cannot be studied in the way in which we can study the settled population of Madrid. This lack has caused many historians of the social history of Madrid to privilege literary representation of the city as a source for the historiography of transients. My analysis will, therefore, focus on precisely those texts that have been used as sources for the social history of transient marginals. In addition to the aforementioned Guzmán de Alfarache (1599/1604) by Mateo Alemán, it will discuss Buscón (1626) by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645) of which manuscript versions circulated as early as 1604, several of the Novelas Ejemplares (1613) by Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra (1547–1616), Guía y avisos de forasteros (1620) by Antonio Liñán y Verdugo, and Historias peregrinas y ejemplares (1623) by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses (1585–1638).26 The protagonist of Guzmán de Alfarache is a prime example of a transient marginal; he is of Sevillan origin and only inhabits the city temporarily. His role in the city, however, is active and far from insignificant. He buys a house, works and shares food and information with other temporary inhabitants of the city. Likewise, Pablos in Buscón is from Segovia, and his narrative informs readers of the lives of the city’s beggars and imposters. The many stories and anecdotes of Guía y avisos de forasteros also feature visitors and migrants, whose discoveries of the city are used as exemplae for future visitors.27 These texts are part of the first generation of literary representations of early modern Madrid. They are the first wave of prose representations of the court, and they refer to the four decades between 1561 and 1600, which was a period of unprecedented growth in the history of Madrid.

Introduction 7 These texts form the prelude to an extensive body of prose narrative texts centred on the court that would appear during the reign of Philip IV (1621–1665).28 They describe the reconstruction of parts of pre-1561 Madrid, the rapid construction of suburbs, and the increase and makeup of the population. Between the post quem date of the 1561 installation of the court, and the ad quem of the publication of the corpus of primary texts that informs this study, these references situate the narratives in the last four decades of the sixteenth century, the first period of growth. The end of this first period in Madrid’s history as the imperial capital is marked by the temporary move of the imperial court to Valladolid in 1601. The court was to return to Madrid in 1606, where it would remain to this day except for a brief exile during the final throes of the civil war in the twentieth century. The first generation of literary representations of Madrid makes for a fascinating case study, as it is not determined by an elaborate literary tradition of representations of Madrid.29 There are no specific literary precursors providing representations of Madrid as a capital, which must be imitated or emulated according to the Renaissance notion of imitatio, thus providing more room for imports from the “text of the city.”30 Moreover, this first generation refers to an environment that is considerably less determined by its own history than other early modern Spanish and European principal cities of the time; Madrid was a nascent capital under construction. It is subject to various interrelated projects of representation: that of the municipality who was trying to describe and control the sprawling metropolis, the reports of lawmakers and judges, of policemen, of merchants and of citizens requesting favours from the king and the municipality in pleas. The authors of the first literary representations communicate with these representations, and one cannot isolate their narratives from this dynamic. The coming chapters will focus on Guzmán, Guía and Historias as points of departure for three case studies focusing on the themes “displacing,” “spanishing” and “silencing,” respectively. In order to contextualize these central texts vis-à-vis more general tendencies in the narrative literature of the time, the analysis shall draw from such texts as Cervantes’ exemplary novel Rinconete y Cortadillo (1613) and Carlos García’s La desordenada codicia de los bienes agenos (1619), classic texts among the representations of the criminal underworld often used to characterize early modern Spain’s urban criminals and vagrants. The analysis will also consider Antonio de Guevara’s treatise Menosprecio de corte (1539), an early source on court culture. These and other texts will allow us to comment on the intersection of literary tradition and extraliterary material. The literary texts will be contextualised with key texts in the debate on urban poverty and poor relief such as the Tratado de remedio de pobres (1580) by Miguel de Giginta and the Amparo de Pobres (1598) by Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, in order to

8  Introduction interpret the discursive aim of the “displacing,” the “spanishing” and the “silencing” of the pícaros in Madrid. The analysis will take into account representations of transient marginals in various genres. The selection of literary texts consists of picaresque novels, costumbrist novels and affiliated miscellanea. Guzmán is the quintessential picaresque novel; however, it has influences related to the novela bizantina, an epic genre of Greek origin that found new epigones in the early modern period after the rediscovery of Heliodor’s Aethiopica in 1526. Guzmán also incorporates material from Italian novels, primarily those of Masuccio. The other texts are also generic derivatives from Guzmán and the Italian novella of Boccaccio (The Decamaron, fourteenth century) and Masuccio (Il Novellino, fifteenth century), yet they are equally problematic when it comes to determining their genre. Like Guzmán, both Guía and Historias peregrinas should be considered hybrid forms. Guía is one of the first of a subsequently flourishing tradition of costumbrist novels framed in the humanist form of the instructive colloquy, yet also heavily inflected by the picaresque novel and humanist drama such as La Celestina and La lozana andaluza. Guía also contains many digressions of miscellaneous and encyclopedic nature. The stories in Historias merge the Italian novella with a proclaimed interest in presenting the principal cities of Spain.31 Although Guía and Historias do not feature the particular narrative mode of the picaresque (first-person narrator and retrospective), they share many elements ascribed to the genre. Frequently, for example, the lengthy interpolated monologues of picaresque types in these narratives replicate the characteristic first-­ person retrospective narrative voice of the picaresque.

The Genre of the Picaresque Novel Versus the Historiography of Madrid The picaresque itself is not a clearly demarcated literary genre by any standards; discussions as to what does and does not constitute a novela picaresca continue to this day.32 The primary effect of this debate on our understanding of the transient marginal is that it has determined which texts have been included and excluded in the study of urban poor among the fluctuating population, and which texts have, therefore, dominated the status quaestionis on the literary representation of the transient marginals. The overemphasis on bestselling picaresque novels has also made it difficult to test interpretations for the influence of genre. Selecting texts from different genres, such as Guía and Historias, which forms the basis of this study, will allow for an analysis of the genre-specific and the general in regard to the representation of transient marginals. As shall be highlighted in more depth later, the tendencies frequently ascribed to the picaresque genre have over-determined previous interpretations. For example, the psychological depth of the pícaro, which has caused

Introduction 9 scholars to overemphasize the individuality, or even the eccentricity, of the pícaro, has kept scholars from studying the pícaro as a member of a group. This, in turn, has caused various studies to forego the fact that the pícaro is often part of a group, and, furthermore, that the supposed extratextual object of representation also operated in groups. Guzmán is considered the first true picaresque novel because it proves that the structural and thematic innovations pioneered in Lazarillo have managed to function as a template for a genre.33 Guzmán inspired such canonical texts as Simplicissimus Teutsch (1669) by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1622–1676), Gil Blas (1715–1735) by AlainRené Lesage (1668–1747), and continues to resonate in works such as Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) by Michel Houellebecq (1958–). Before the Lazarillo, marginal characters had been presented as minor characters, or they were framed by an omniscient narrator and, therefore, spoke in the third person. This was the case of the German Narrenschiff (1494) by Sebastian Brandt (1457–1521) and Eulenspiegel (1510) attributed to Herman Bote (1450–1520). These texts, although having features in common with the picaresque, lacked the internal perspective of the picaresque. The Spanish La Celestina (1499) by Fernando de Rojas (1470–1541) and La Lozana andaluza (1528) by Francisco Delicado (1475–1535), featured marginal protagonists, yet they consisted entirely of dialogue, and thus also lacked the internal perspective that would distinguish Lazarillo, Guzmán and Buscón. The Spanish term picaresca is—somewhat confusingly—used to refer to both the literary genre (the picaresque novel) as well as the miscellaneous social category of vagrants, destitute beggars and petty delinquents. This confusing double use oftentimes results in a conflation of the literary type and the social actor, a conflation that is in fact part of the picaresque’s narrative framing and appeal. The delinquent narrator of the picaresque constantly claims veracity whilst also casting doubt on his own tale. Guillén called it the autobiography of a liar; the pícaro is the prototypical unreliable narrator.34 The much-discussed metatextual awareness for the problematic nature of representation has given rise to interpretations of the picaresque classic Guzmán—a major source of inspiration for the 1605 Quijote—as one of the first novels. All the while, the unreliability and metatextual awareness for the inherently artificial nature of representation already question the use of Guzmán cum suis as sources for factual insights into the social history of transients in early modern Madrid. Part of the problem of defining the picaresque genre has to do with the manifold literary forms that intersect in the picaresque. Although there is a certain family resemblance that characterizes Lazarillo, Guzmán, Buscón and their many imitations, each of these texts draws from particular literary and non-literary material.35 Lazarillo is modelled, in part, on the vitae of saints and kings. However, it blends the point of view of

10  Introduction the vitae with more profane genres, such as the tradition of the humorous letter of Italian origin. As Francisco Rico expounds: The “iocosa,” “faceta” or—in Castilian—“graciosa” was generally structured around a single episode or anecdote in which the object of laughter was the very same author of the letter; it enjoyed gossip, sassy allusions, the irony of everyday incidents; quite easily it turned apocryphal and was attributed to entirely fictional characters.36 There is also convincing evidence that the picaresque takes significant formal cues from non-literary genres, such as testimonials submitted by persons seeking royal office or permission to travel to the colonies.37 This element is perhaps most visible in Lazarillo, yet formal aspects, such as addressing an unspecified individual reader who is most probably a figure of authority, also resound in Guzmán and Buscón. The picaresque genre left its immediate imprint on other genres that featured characters of lowly descent and criminal behaviour. These characters—also referred to as pícaros or pícaras—are presented in other narrative modes, such is the case of Cervantes’s criminal youths in Rinconete y Cortadillo (1613), as well as such famous female pícaras as Justina in Libro de entretenimiento de la Pícara Justina (1605), Elena in La ingeniosa Elena (1612), Teresa in La niña de los embustes (1632), and their many epigones. There are, moreover, various texts set in Madrid that merge costumbrist and picaresque elements with the emerging genre of the short story, such as Salas Barbadillo’s El caballero puntual (1615) or Castillo Solórzano’s Las Harpías de Madrid (1631).38 Due to the presence of pícaro characters, much of the current status quaestionis on the picaresque genre is extended to the interpretation of picaresque types in other genres. The influence of the picaresque extended beyond the borders of Spain. Besides the 22 editions both in Spain and abroad, Guzmán was translated into most European languages within a few years of its first publications: among others, into German by Aegidius Albertinus in 1615, Italian by Barezzo Barezzi in 1616, into English by James Mabbe in 1622, and French by Jean Chapelain in 1619.39 The foreign additions were often accompanied with editions of founding texts of the picaresque such as Lazarillo and Celestina, thus introducing in the European literary system a substantial body of representations of “Spanish” marginal types. There is increasing consensus on the role which the picaresque novel has played in the rise of the European novel. According to Robert Ter Horst, “The European novel is, in the broadest sense, a translation of Cervantes, Cervantes understood as incorporating himself and his Hispanic predecessors, most notably Alemán and the author of the Lazarillo.”40 This means that new insights on the picaresque have implications for our understanding of the development of the modern novel.

Introduction 11 The conflation of pícaro and transient marginal may in fact be traced back to comments on genre in the picaresque and picaresque-related texts themselves. In the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries, there was a common conception of the picaresque as a group of texts featuring pícaros or the lives of marginal types in general. This awareness of the picaresque as a genre is expressed by a pícaro called Ginés de Pasamonte, who appears in the first part of the Don Quijote. In the scene, Don Quijote runs into a group of shackled prisoners on their way to the galleys, and he interviews them about their crimes and their future plans. The brief narrative of Ginés de Pasamonte reflects the essential generic traits of the picaresque genre: a first-person narrator with a criminal background reflecting on his or her life’s tale. Ginés confesses his sins, and he brags that the book which he will write will cause a “bad year for Lazarillo de Tormes and for all of that kind that have been written and will be written.”41 This metafictional reflection demonstrates that at the turn of the sixteenth century, there existed a common conception of the picaresque as a type of text that fed quite directly on life as it was whilst being characterized by the subjectivity of the delinquent narrative perspective instrumentalized by authors that oftentimes had lived both central and marginal experiences. Mateo Alemán, for example, reflected on the discursive intention of his text. When pondering the peculiar nature of Guzmán in his prologue to the first part, Mateo Alemán coins the term poética historia, situating Guzmán between the contemporary notions of poética and historia; that is, fiction on the one hand, and historiography on the other.42 From the start, the historiographical element in the a priori generic frame of the picaresque is related to the particular and acute problem of urban poverty and delinquency. In a letter he wrote about Guzmán in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Alemán proclaimed that he wanted to use Guzmán (which he refers to as “el pícaro”) to inform his readers about the behaviours and motives of the false poor: “My main intent in the first part of the pícaro [i.e. Guzmán] I composed was to reveal the strategies and precautions employed by the fictive [poor].”43 Alemán also notes that he would have wanted to write a treatise, yet found that he could develop the character of the idle rogue better in the newly devised form.44 From a genre-historic perspective, this liminal position “betwixt and between” historiography and fictional narrative problematizes the relation between poetic narrative and historiography.45 In his very terminology, Alemán expresses his awareness of mixing the historical with the fictional in his treatment of the clearly defined problem of urban delinquency. From the outset, there is in Guzmán an intentional and significant distance between the historical referentiality and the fictional dimensions of his text, and an awareness that the historical and the fictional aspects communicate. The implications of this distance apply, in particular, to the transient marginal.

12  Introduction The picaresque has a predilection for street-level actuality over grand historical events. As Jauralde Pou puts it in his discussion of Guzmán de Alfarache: In vain, we search the texts for historical reference to the Lead Books of the Sacromonte, the decoration of the Escorial, the misdeeds of Gonzalo Pérez, the disputes of the Jesuits or the Invincible Armada, which were the themes of actuality in those years. The author prefers the radically individual perspective: individuals, types, characters, behaviors . . . preferring ethical principles and moral schemes to historical facts.46 Mateo Alemán’s interest in history focuses on a specific aspect of human experience: the subjective experience of marginal places, people and practices. This interest provides a host of representations of urban spaces: privately owned houses, derelict houses, taverns, streets and squares. The pícaro is an essentially urban phenomenon; consequently, the picaresque is characterized by predominantly urban settings. Representations of behaviour also abound, such as thievery, gossip and gatherings. What is more, the narratives present the people who convene in these places and engage in this behaviour: the petty thieves, their communities and their interactions with other members of the urban public. The picaresque coincided with the interest of sixteenth-century social reformers in the problem of urban poverty. In the eyes of these social reformers and legislators, the problem of transient marginals was one directly associated with the problem of poverty and the so-called false poor. In late sixteenth-century Spain, the writings of social reformers such as Miguel de Giginta (1534–1588) and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera (1558–1620) were prime examples of treatises on the matter. They formed part of a discourse on poverty that found its inspiration in such works as the 1526 De subventione pauperum by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), who operated out of Bruges and offered his text to that city’s municipal government.47 The social reformers saw in the vagrant masses a considerable problem for the growing cities of early modern Spain, and they composed elaborate treatises offering solutions to these problems. Whereas the social reformer’s central objective was to present and defend solutions to the problems caused by transient marginals, treating them as a large-scale phenomenon, the focus of the picaresque rests on presenting individualized scenes of everyday life. According to Guillén, “Picaresque narrative is marked by its proximity to social and historical fact. For this reason, it is less conventional than other types.”48 The picaresque as a genre is considered to have a tendency towards incorporating immediate social reality, the lower echelons, in particular, “Lazarillo attributes a central role to the representative of a social class which hitherto had contributed only small parts and supernumeraries to works of

Introduction 13 imagination.”49 This position still characterizes much of current thought on the picaresque genre. More recently, Maiorino writes: Mateo Alemán, Francisco de Quevedo, Ribera, Murillo and Velázquez brought to the fore folks who begged at street-corners, worked for low wages, and starved in destitute hamlets [. . .] no one wrote about the dispossessed existence of common folks until the novelists gave them a voice.50 I will, however, show that this voice was in fact subject to significant processes of manipulation, a set of displacements, socio-ethnic homogenization and a general silencing. That is to say, rather than being given a voice, the “folks who begged at street corners, worked for low wages, and starved in destitute hamlets” were given a spokesperson in the form of the literary character of the pícaro, who ended up in places that do not correspond to the places occupied by marginals, spoke a language that does not represent the multilingual reality of the marginal, and is reduced to a powerless, effectively silenced, object. Due to this interest in everyday life and the point of view of a marginal character, the picaresque has been a privileged source in studies of the sixteenth-century debate on poverty.51 The narrators of the first generation of literary representations of Madrid manifested a keen eye for everyday occurrences—the practice of everyday life—in the words of Michel De Certeau; they depict such apparently regular activities as meetings held by city youths, the modus operandi of street gangs, or gossip in the city.52 Most of the literary texts in the corpus proclaim the intent to represent a historical reality (be it a city in the case of Céspedes y Meneses, Liñán y Verdugo and Castillo Solórzano; be it a criminal type in the case of Alemán, Quevedo, Carlos García and Luis de Guevara). The proclaimed intentions of the authors in their prologues and dedications, as well as the apparent depiction of historical fact has inspired numerous studies of the history of Madrid to use these texts as a source for life in Golden Age Madrid, or as a source for representations of urban rogues, wandering youths and migrant workers. Prominent examples of this tendency are the work of the erudite collector of literary representation of the town and court Simon Díaz, but also the works of Deleito y Piñuela, Valbuena Pratt and Maravall.53 When discussing the history of marginals of foreign origin in early modern Spain, Domínguez Ortiz also turns to the picaresque for material: [. . .] The elements of which we shall speak found themselves in the lowest echelons of the social scale, inside or outside of the law, as bandits, as beggars or pilgrims, exercising a lowly profession, but always on the margins of the picaresque and of misery, if not entirely in it. This aspect is most known and divulged in numerous literary

14  Introduction sources, but we cannot omit this aspect, as it concerns considerable masses, and we shall therefore discuss it briefly.54 Nonetheless, two decades ago, Peter Dunn indicated the tautologous tendency to use the literary pícaro to write social history, and to use social history to interpret the significance of the pícaro.55 A decade later, Hector Brioso Santos, in his study of literary representations of early modern Seville, also discussed the problem of considering literary sources a reflection of social reality, referring to it as a “methodological mirroring.”56 The problematic valorization of literary sources concerning early modern vagrant poor is not restricted to the Spanish pícaro. In his study Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, Robert Jütte raises doubts about the referentiality of literary representations of transients: Were there really “orders” of beggars and vagabonds in early modern Europe, and how much reliance can be placed on essentially literary sources in the absence of independent sources as accounts of social reality? To answer these questions one has to look at judicial records, which yield a wealth of information on organization and cohesion among beggars and vagrants as well.57 Jütte’s questions are pertinent to the debate and can in fact be elaborated as the difference between literary representations and perceptions in other sources has more implications than merely re-establishing a “social reality” supposedly more correct than the literary texts or proving the conceptual inadequacy of conflating the literary possible world with the extratextual world, as Dunn has already shown. It could be argued that the selections in the literary text communicate with the selections manifest in sources such as judicial records, which provide agent perspectives on the phenomenon of urban vagrants. The following analysis will consider neither type of source to be independent, focusing instead on the relationship between them.58 The conflation of the literary pícaro and the extratextual transient marginal affects the current historiography of sixteenth-century Madrid. Through picaresque and costumbrist narratives, a repertoire of motifs and commonplaces has entered the historiography of Madrid and its transient marginals; for example, the idea of Madrid as an anonymous place of confusion, a city in which everyone gossiped freely, and the idea of the pícaro as an inherently lone operator. These literary motifs are repeated in historical studies of Madrid and its transient marginals. But they remain unsubstantiated by comparative research. Among this repertoire of motifs and commonplaces there is also the question of the literary “associations of rogues,” to which Jütte refers to earlier. There is, it seems, a rather arbitrary approach to the referentiality of the literary pícaro. At times, researchers ascribe a proximity to everyday life to the

Introduction 15 character, but at other times, they ascribe the character literary exaggeration. If many scholars are quick to equate the pícaro with his extraliterary referent, they tend to make an equally unsubstantiated exception for the “associations of rogues,” which they consider a fiction with little referentiality towards the extraliterary marginals.59 This position, as we shall see in Chapter 2, “Spanishing the Pícaro,” is as alive today as it was when first posited by Chandler’s Literature of Roguery, and was subsequently used to interpret the transient marginals of early modern Madrid.60 This, at times arbitrary, distinction between the fictional and the factual in picaresque texts is mostly based on the current status quaestionis on the literary models which inspired the picaresque; representations with a topical structure or identifiable precursors are deemed literary, whereas representations without such a topical structure or identifiable literary precursors are generally considered to have a factual relation with extratextuality.61 Although this logic can be followed to a considerable extent, a number of problems must be addressed. First of all, readership expanded greatly in the late sixteenth century; therefore, a readership emerged that had considerably less developed literary horizons than the reading elite of the preceding centuries.62 This means that the distinction between fictional and factual modes based on a presumed knowledge of literary precedents is less relevant to the analysis of how representations of extraliterary referents were received by readers in Madrid at the time. As argued earlier, the perception of the extraliterary city gains in importance as a key to the interpretation of the city as represented in literature. Moreover, symbolic modes ascribed to literature also functioned in the construction of urban space, for example, in the collocation of churches and palaces, and the layout of squares. This notion is defended by Henri Lefebvre in general terms for the Renaissance and has been studied in the particular case of Madrid by Jesús Escobar, who studied the construction of the Plaza Mayor after the installation of the capital in Madrid.63 The symbolism of the urban spatiality is coded and decoded by the urban population. Thus symbolic aspects of the literary representation of the transient marginals, those considered fictional or literary, may in fact have entered literary texts by way of a representation of extraliterary urban spatial symbolism. In recent scholarship on the picaresque, there has been an emphasis on non-literary narrative models for the picaresque texts—for example, Folger’s study of the elaborate requests submitted to the council of the Indies by persons intending to make their fortune in the Americas.64 This approach, which has yielded important insights in the development of the picaresque genre, has further implications: what is valid for the authors and their life’s tales also applies to the representation of the urban space and the urban population. That is to say, just as we can find the narrative model for the presentation of individual histories in non-literary texts, we must investigate non-literary representations of urban social space.

16  Introduction We can find these models of representation of space in inventories of the city by the municipal authorities, in court cases, testimonies and descriptions of criminals by city police. These models may provide insight into the practices of representation underlying picaresque spatiality. In other words, after the reconstruction of non-literary textual models for the pseudo-autobiographical representation of self in the picaresque, we can proceed to investigate non-literary models for the construction of social space in the picaresque and costumbrist literature of Golden Age Spain. The relative invisibility of the extraliterary transient marginals can also be related to the scale of analysis chosen in existing studies of the picaresque. There is a lively strain of studies on the emergence and evolution of the literary pícaro in relation to long-term historical developments, such as the emergence of capitalism and a bourgeois mentality or related cultural aesthetic modes such as the baroque. Such is the case of the work of Maravall, Cavillac, Rodríguez and, more recently, Cooley, Sánchez and Ruan.65 In doing so, the literary character of the pícaro is considered a signifier for long-term historical developments. In other cases, the social themes within the picaresque are studied as representative of developments in Spanish thought on social order, covering such themes as the urban/rural dichotomy, the problem of honour and the pícaro’s sense of belonging. Maravall’s influential La pícaresca desde la historia social is a telling example. In Maravall’s work, the study of society is based on an extended corpus of picaresque novels and plays, whilst any other sort of material (court cases, criminal records, municipal administration) is all but absent.66 These literary representations of delinquency are not sufficiently distinguished from the extraliterary phenomenon of vagrancy and delinquency.67 The study makes claims about the referentiality of the picaresque, yet it does not question the blind spots and deformations in the picaresque, be they intended or otherwise. Besides scale, the status quaestionis on the transient marginals of Madrid is limited by a priori categorization. The works of Domínguez Ortiz and Bravo Lozano on groups of marginals in early modern Spain treat Sinti and Roma, moriscos (Muslims nominally converted to Christianity), conversos (Jews nominally converted to Christianity), and other marginalized categories as separate phenomena.68 These studies are the principal references for the history of foreigners in early modern Spain. The tendency to divide the foreigners into categories and study them separately ignores the interaction between different backgrounds in Madrid.69 In the late sixteenth century, Amsterdam, London and Paris were growing with equal speed, conditioned by the influx of foreigners, exotic wares such as tobacco and chocolate and information about the conflict in the east and colonies in the west.70 Recent studies are revealing the complexity and diversity of their respective situations. Madrid, the capital of an empire, should also be represented in the study of cultural encounters in early modern urban society. This study will show that

Introduction 17 the transient marginals of early modern Madrid did in fact cooperate across various ethnic and national divides. It will show that early modern Madrid was a place where Turks and Greeks cooperated with Armenian counterfeiters and Castilian scribes and students to obtain money from Castilian bishoprics under false pretences. The omission of relationships among foreigners of diverse backgrounds in Madrid ignores and negates a considerable aspect of early modern Madrid, thus silencing and homogenizing the marginal. Microhistory provides a well-suited tool for approaching the problem of the transient marginals of early modern Madrid and their literary representation. From the very start in the 1960s, microhistory has set out to study the “lost peoples” of history.71 Focusing on social groups that were omitted in historiography, microhistory has studied the effect of power relations in a specific period of historiography.72 The notion of a structurally underrepresented “lost people” has particular methodological implications for the significance of sources. According to Carlo Ginzburg: If the sources are silent about or systematically distort the social reality of the lower classes, then a truly exceptional (and thus statistically infrequent) document can be much more revealing than a thousand stereotypical documents. As Kuhn has shown, it is the marginal cases that bring the old paradigm back into the arena of discussion, thus helping to create a new paradigm, richer and better articulated.73 Studying marginalized groups can challenge received notions about a society and this study will show that a single trial involving a heterogeneous group of foreign vagrants apprehended in a tavern in Madrid can help in reinterpreting the relationship between the literary taverns and the extraliterary taverns of early modern Madrid; a small selection of pleas by Madrid constables can provide new insights into the typologies of criminals in the “Anatomies of Roguery” and their bearing on categories of criminals used by the judicial system. For some time now, microhistory has produced counterproof for established historical narratives, by showing in what aspects individual experiences or specific events are characteristic or distinct from general historical narratives. I shall extend this probing attitude to the contextualization of the literary pícaro. If the “lost peoples” have been ignored because of their supposed insignificance and marginality, where does this leave the marginal non-literary counterpart of the pícaro who is commonly held to be the non-plus-ultra of representations of marginality? This study argues that literary representation is an important aspect of the historiography of the “lost peoples”; in fact, it will demonstrate that it has been instrumental in the omission of these people in the texts that have formed the idea of Madrid, and of Spain.

18  Introduction In addition to its interest in the lost peoples, microhistory proposes to scale down the level of analysis. Microhistory has come to be known as the detailed historical investigation of circumscribed units of analysis, often an individual event, place or life (e.g. The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg and The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis).74 The perspective of the agent is central in this approach. Microhistory is focused on individual subjectivity, which is an interesting parallel with the picaresque genre’s interest in the particular subjectivity of the pícaro, first-person narrator of his life. This focus on the particular has guided the choice of archive material. In order to contextualize and analyze the place of the literary narratives, I shall use material from the Libros de Gobierno and the Ynventario de causas criminales, which can be found at the Archivo Histórico Nacional. Moreover, I will cite from a selection of Consultas de gracia, or pleas, submitted to the Cámara de Castilla which can be consulted at the Archivo General in Simancas.75 These records covered the period 1560–1620. The Libros de Gobierno are a collection of decrees, promulgations and correspondence collected by the sala de alcaldes de casa y corte, the city government of early modern Madrid.76 The subject matter is diverse: day-to-day management of city affairs, food supply, policing, hygiene and public health, rules applied to public houses, poor houses, rules on vagrancy, recruitment and regulations concerning public spectacle. It comprises decrees, reports, testimonials and letters. The Libros de Gobierno are an often consulted source for historians of early modern Madrid. The Libros de Gobierno are also an important source for Sieber’s study of the creation of Madrid as capital.77 Alvar Ezquerra used it as his base material for the study of the supply of the capital under Philip II.78 Amezúa y Mayo was one of the first to publish material from this source in studies of literary representation.79 In his compendium of representations of Madrid in Golden Age theatre, Herrero García cites it heavily, without actually juxtaposing the theatrical and the municipal source.80 There are a plethora of articles based on this source in the Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños. However, they have only been used sporadically for the study of literary representation. A considerable part of Chapter 2 is based on a trial case concerning a peninsula-wide operating network of foreigners apprehended in a tavern in Madrid in 1614. The trial record of over 70 folia provides an extended testimony from the “alguacil de los pobres,” the special constable assigned to the poor in the city, as well as various testimonies from the vagabonds he arrested; it provides a large number of specific names, statements about forged wills, forged begging licences, and scams to cheat bishops out of money for the rescue of (possibly fictitious) family members.81 The testimonies provide insights into the activities of a group of transient marginals who share a living space. They also provide insight into the relationships among the arrested transient marginals. It is

Introduction 19 important to keep in mind that the trial record is an account framed by the questions of the court officers of Madrid’s town council (who preside over the trial), and of the record keeping of the official scribes.82 Many of the court officers of the town council submitted requests to the Cámara de Castilla, the chamber of Castile. This government body decided on such diverse matters as requests by government officials and by anyone who came into contact with the law or the government.83 The chamber of Castile was also approached by convicts asking for pardon, and by citizens asking for exemptions from housing requirements. These records have yielded various reports from individuals directly and indirectly related to the transient marginals. Due to the abundance of the material and the rather rough inventory of the sources, the query was restricted to two years’ worth of requests, 1579 and 1614, respectively. These particular sources yielded pleas by the constables assigned to the pícaros, and pleas by landlords who let their houses to transient marginals. Applying a microhistorical approach to the study of places and people represented in the picaresque avoids explaining literary representations of transient marginals in terms of large-scale ideological or economic structures (i.e. imperialism, capitalism, Baroque) and takes us to a commensurable level of proof and counterproof. Rather than close reading literary works in a macrohistorical context of interpretation, close reading is contextualized with microhistorical analysis.84 Giovanni Levi posed that: The unifying principle of all microhistorical research is the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved . . . Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations although the initial observations were made within relatively narrow dimensions and as experiments rather than examples.85 By reducing the scale of analysis of the literary pícaro, I intend to lay bare the overlaps and disparities between the literary corpus and the representations found in letters, decrees and court documents. This approach is based on the firm conviction that scholars of historical literature should analyze archival sources in the original. In studies of literary representations of early modern Madrid, there is a tendency to access sources through previous historical studies and editions of archival source material. That is to say, when material from the sala de alcaldes is cited it is through the editions by Amezúa y Mayo, Del Corral, Alvar Ezquerra or similar studies.86 This means that the framing of the historians reverberates in the respective literary studies, as the historical

20  Introduction studies only provide selections from the archival material, from which literary scholars then make their own selection. In general, the historical studies on late sixteenth-century Madrid, which serve as sources for contextualization for literary scholars, have rather large-scale approaches; they provide statistics on the poor in the city, crime rates and so forth, which implies a reductive approach to the source material. Rather than reproduce integral pleas from tenants in the city, and analyze these for references to practices in the city or for strategies of representations, such studies focus on isolated elements of the pleas according to year and neighbourhood for a period of several years. In doing so, they intend to answer questions about the change in building strategies in the city or the extent of poverty. Along the lines of this approach, there are various historical studies on crime, marginality and poverty.87 However, as they tend to focus on patterns in these phenomena, these studies—for all their obvious benefit—capture only isolated aspects of the transient marginals of late sixteenth-century Madrid. Focusing on patterns and repetitions, obscures the particularity and the singularity of the situation. Ginzburg pointed out the problem of focusing on repetition: “To select as a cognitive object only what is repetitive, and therefore capable of being serialized, signifies paying a very high price in cognitive terms.”88 Especially in an environment undergoing such rapid change as late sixteenth-century Madrid, the “normal” will be under strain, and therefore it would be a conceptual stretch to impose regularity on the material. The aim of this study is to lay bare the exceptional relationship between a city under construction and the emergence of a literary stock character—the pícaro— that would go on to represent the city’s transient marginal. The literary scholar’s theoretical framework and knowledge of the status quaestionis concerning the literary texts will contribute a very different assessment of the archival sources. Literary scholarship is much more geared for teasing out the singular, those moments of innovation that sparked a new genre, a form or representation, a new mind-set. Microhistory will help to capture the singular combination of a city under construction and a literary form equally under construction. Not only does this approach intervene in the historiography of Madrid, it also solves a problem that has been indicated by literary scholars such as Lubomír Doležel, who comments on the practice of interpreting specific fictional characters as representations of universal structures: “Fictional particulars are claimed to represent actual universals—psychological types, social groups, existential or historical conditions.”89 In the study of picaresque literature this is a practice common to Maravall, Cros, Cavillac, Rodríguez, Sánchez and Ruan. For Doležel the problem is one of logic: “If fictional particulars are taken as representations of actual universals, mimetic criticism becomes a ‘language without particulars.’ ”90 The following case studies will reclaim the particularity of Madrid’s transient marginals, by reframing the literary pícaro.

Introduction 21

Notes 1. Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969). Francisco Rico, The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 2. View Felipe E. Ruan, “Market, Audience, and the Fortunes and Adversities of Lazarillo de Tormes Castigado,” Hispanic Review 79, no. 2 (1573): 189–211, 2011b, for a detailed analysis of the purged parts of the original 1554 Lazarillo de Tormes. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 38–9. 4. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 5. The Lefebvre-based approach allows us to tie in with research associated with the “spatial turn.” Within the “spatial turn,” Lefebvre has spawned a great amount of debate and development. In recent studies of early modern urban space, the Lefebvre-based approach has proven productive. Given this increase in scholarly output, it would seem timely to contribute a study on the transient marginals of early modern Madrid. In this sense, our study ties in with such recent spatial-turn inspired studies of early modern capitals as Griffith’s study of London Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 and Newman’s Cultural Capitals: Early Modern Paris and London. However, our study is distinguished by its emphasis on the role of narrative in the production of the city. The study also connects to a growing body of work on literary space in Spanish literature, such as Pedro Ruiz Pérez, El espacio de la escritura: En torno a una poética del espacio del texto barroco (Bern: Peter Lang, Perspectivas Hispánicas, 1996). Pedro Ruiz Pérez, “La corte como espacio discursivo,” Edad de oro no. 17 (1998): 195–212. See Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), Jesús Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Mercedes Maroto Camino, Practicing Places: Saint Teresa, Lazarillo and the Early Modern City (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 6. Itamar Even-Zohar, “Special Issue: Polysystem Studies,” Poetics Today 11, no. 1. (1990). Philippe Codde, “Polysystem Theory Revisited: A New Comparative Introduction,” Poetics Today 24, no. 1 (2003): 91–126. 7. Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Making of Culture Repertoire and the Role of Transfer,” Target 9, no. 2 (1997): 373–81, here 373. “The culture repertoire is the aggregate of options utilized by a group, and by its individual members, for the organization of life.” 8. Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Studies.” This spatial conception of culture is deeply rooted in Lotman’s school of semiotics. The idea of the semiosphere is a central notion in Lotman’s development of semiotics: The space of the semiosphere carries an abstract character. This, however, is by no means to suggest that the concept of space is used, here, in a metaphorical sense. We have in mind a specific sphere, possessing signs, which are assigned to the enclosed space. Only within such a space is it possible for communicative processes and the creation of new information to be realised. (Juri Lotman, Kunst als Sprache: Untersuchungen zum Zeichenkarakter von Literatur und Kunst (Leipzig: Reclam, 1981), 207)

22  Introduction Within this semiosphere, the sign always functions in relation to the semiosphere: “Primacy does not lie in one or another sign, but in the ‘greater system,’ namely the semiosphere. The semiosphere is that same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist” (Lotman, Kunst als Sprache, 208). 9. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 7. 10. Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Studies,” 54. Even-Zohar, Itamar, “Laws of Literary Interference,” Polysystem Studies [=Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990)]: 53–72. 11. Even-Zohar, “The Making of Culture Repertoire and the Role of Transfer,” 373. 12. Ruiz Pérez, “La corte como espacio discursivo,” 199, Madrid, sus cenáculos y mentideros y, cada vez más, los gabinetes y alcobas de sus habitantes se convierten en el espacio por antonomasia del consumo literario, en el que un número creciente de lectores reorientan su gusto y la producción editorial hacia temas y géneros que siguen despertando el recelo de los moralistas, tal como hiciera entre los humanistas de la centuria anterior. 13. Ruiz Pérez, “La corte como espacio discursivo,” 210, El cronotopo de la corte entra en estrecha relación con la realidad vital, pero esencialmente lectora del receptor al que se dirigen estos textos, y éste encuentra en ellos la modelización de una realidad reconocida, la clave de los comportamientos de los personajes y el espejo en el que se reconoce a sí mismo como actor y como lector. 14. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (London: Harvard University Press, 1980). 15. The topic, which lies outside of the scope of the present study, has a considerable bibliography. See Santos Juliá, David Ringrose and Cristina Segura, Madrid: Historia de una capital (Madrid: Historia Alianza Editorial, 2006). Jesús Escobar, “Francisco De Sotomayor and Nascent Urbanism in Sixteenth-Century Madrid,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 2 (2004): 26. Antonio Fernández García (ed.), Historia de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993). Richard L. Kagan, Cities of the Golden Age: The Views of Anton van den Wyngaerde (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital europea: Madrid entre 1561–1606 (Madrid: Turner/Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1989). 16. Claudia W. Sieber, The Invention of a Capital: Philip the II and the First Reform of Madrid, PhD dissertation (Johns Hopkins University, 1985). Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17. Miguel Molina Campuzano, Planos de Madrid de los siglos XVII y XVIII (Madrid: Instituto de administración local, 1960). These decrees are a vital source for royal intervention in the private areas of the urban space; as such, they were also of interest to the first historiographers of the city. Quintillana, for example, reproduces these decrees. See also Virginia Tovar Martín, “Madrid en el siglo XVI: La moderna capital nueva,” in Historia de Madrid, ed. Antonio Fernández García (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993), 133. 18. Escobar, “Francisco De Sotomayor,” 357. There are various examples of planned cities in the American territories which were considerably more systematic than Madrid at the time; however, these are situated in the periphery of the empire, whereas all eyes were focused on the central capital, Madrid. 19. Tovar Martín, Madrid en el siglo XVI.

Introduction 23 20. Molina Campuzano, Planos de Madrid de los siglos XVII y XVIII. Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid. For example, the ‘Memoria de las obras de la villa’ by Francisco de Sotomayor in which the city planner complains to Philip II about the ruinous effect of pre-1561 building on the city’s appearance. This source was attributed to Francisco Sotomayor by Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid. 21. It is hard to ascertain exact numbers as to the total population of Madrid. Among the many different estimates, Kagan’s represents the median. All estimates agree that the population had more than tripled. See Turina Morán, José Miguel and Bernardo J. García (eds.), El Madrid de Velázquez y Calderón: villa y corte en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación Caja Madrid, 2000), Kagan, Cities of the Golden Age, José A. Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI y XVII) (Madrid: Taurus, 1986), Sieber, The Invention of a Capital, Jaime Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), María F. Carbajo Isla, La población de la villa de Madrid: desde finales del siglo XVI hasta mediados del siglo XIX (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno editores. S.A., 1987). 22. Carbajo Isla, La población de la villa de Madrid. Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital. 23. The question of the fluctuating demographics of early modern Madrid constitutes one of the boundaries of the historiography on the city. In his meticulous study of parish and government administration records, Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital repeatedly mentions the problem of gauging the fluctuating population of Madrid. Although most relevant scholars point out the invisibility of the unregistered population, some prominent studies, such as Ringrose, Madrid: Historia de una capital, entirely fail to discuss this missing crowd. 24. Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe: 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1998), states that: Given the paucity of sources it is difficult to know if migrants ever intended to remain in a given town or not. As one moves up the social scale, there was a greater likelihood that, whatever their initial intentions, many found themselves integrated into existing urban communities, from which there was little incentive to leave. (Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe, 13) See also Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 25. The study of the representation of Philip II, Guzmán’s antithetical contemporary, is quite instructive here, see Manuel Fernández Álvarez, Felipe II y su tiempo (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1998), Geoffrey Parker, Felipe II. Historia (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1991)—on national stereotypes see Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 26. For Guzmán, I shall be using the 2009 edition by María Micó for citations. For cross-reference, I shall use Enrique Miralles García (ed.), Guzmán de Alfarache (Barcelona: PPU, 1988), and the online facsimile available at http://adrastea.ugr.es/search~S9*spi?/.b1536690/.b1536690/1,1,1,B/l962~ b1536690&FF=&1,0,,0,-1 — For Lazarillo de Manzanares I shall be using the online version by Suárez Figaredo, 2005 available at http://users. ipfw.edu/jehle/CERVANTE/othertxts/Suarez_Figaredo_Lazarillo_de_Man zanares.pdf — For Guía I shall be using 2011 edition by David Gonzalez

24  Introduction Ramirez. David González Ramírez, Del taller de imprenta al texto crítico. Recepción y edición de la de Liñán y Verdugo (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2011). For cross-reference, I shall use the online version by Suárez Figaredo, 2005 available at http://users. ipfw.edu/jehle/CERVANTE/othertxts/Suarez_Figaredo_GuiaForasteros.pdf. For the Historias, I shall use the 1980 edition by Fonquerne. However, it must be noted that the Fonquerne edition misses an important part of the short story “Los dos Mendozas” in which Céspedes y Meneses introduces Madrid and its history. In fact, in the princeps that can be consulted at the BNE, there is a two-page description of the city that Fonquerne states to have considered irrelevant. 27. The selection consists of past and present bestsellers, such as Guzmán and Buscón, and texts that have received relatively less attention outside the immediate philological sphere, such as Guía and the Historias. Many of the texts are listed in compendia on literary representations of Madrid; however, it is striking for example that Guzmán, which is arguably the best known of our texts, is not included in various compendia of literary representations of early modern Madrid such as those by Simon Díaz or Barella. Although generally included in the compendia and often used as sources for social history, the first costumbrist short stories featuring Madrid (often considered minor works) such as Guía and Historias have received considerably less scholarly attention by literary scholars. Part of this lack of attention can be explained by the lack of editions and the quality of editions. Fortunately, scholarly attention for the minor texts in this corpus has increased. In 2011, Gonzalez Ramírez published a new critical edition of Guía complete with a meticulous philological study. New editions of Guzmán under the auspices of experts such as Francisco Rico and Michel Cavillac are forthcoming, and the work of Castillo Solórzano is being re-edited. However, there is still a need for an up to date critical edition of the Historias peregrinas, as the 1980 edition by Fonquerne is missing a two-page introduction on the history of Madrid, which is an integral part of the short story ‘ “Los dos Mendozas,” and which the editor considered irrelevant. The history of Madrid is included in the otherwise outdated edition by Cotarelo y Mori. The other works in the corpus of the present study are also less represented in recent critical editions. 28. Ruiz Pérez, “La corte como espacio discursivo,” 200–1, provides a first overview and discussion of prose literary representations of Madrid under Philip IV. Although Ruiz Pérez emphasizes the immediate referentiality of texts such as Guía to the era in which they are published, I think it is important to note that the very first group (Guzmán, Buscón, Guía and Historias) refers to the reign of Philip II in their paratexts and in the temporal settings of their narratives. 29. There is increasing attention for the court as a privileged site of literary production and innovation. See Ruíz Pérez, “La corte como espacio discursivo,” who discusses the city as a discursive space; Nieves Romero-Díaz, Nueva nobleza, nueva novela: reescribiendo la cultura urbana del barroco (Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2002), who studies new literary notions of nobility in the courtly novels, and Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Espacio urbano y creación literaria en el Madrid de Felipe IV. (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2004), who studies the representation of the city as a sensorial phenomenon. 30. For the notion of imitatio in Spanish Golden Age fiction, see Rogelio Miñana, La verosimilitud en el Siglo de Oro: Cervantes y la novela corta (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2002), Ascensión Rivas Hernández, De la poética a la teoría de la literatura (una introducción) (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad Salamanca, 2005).

Introduction 25 31. Caren Altchek Pauley, Social Realism in the Short Novels of Salas Barbadillo, Céspedes and Zayas (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Microfilms International, 1985). 32. Claudio Guillén, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” in Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: U de Princeton, 1971), has been fundamental in coming to a generic definition of the picaresque. The picaresque genre is favoured by an extensive bibliography. An enlightening and recent study on the genre of the picaresque, and its influence on European literature, is Klaus Meyer-Minnenmann and Sabine Schlicker (eds.), La Novela Picaresca: Concepto genérico y evolución del género (siglos XVI y XVII) (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008). Prior to that, Peter N. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), provides an overview of the debate on the genre of the picaresque. A general introduction to the genre in English is given by Peter N. Dunn, The Spanish Picaresque Novel (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979). See also the very authoritative study by Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969), on point of view in the picaresque, which may be complemented with Edward H. Friedman, The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), who makes a particular study of narrative discourse in the female picaresca. See also Paul Julian Smith, Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), for a post-structuralist reading of subjectivity in the picaresque. See Carroll B. Johnson, Inside Guzmán de Alfarache (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), for a psychological study of the pícaro’s point of view. On the literary sources of Guzmán consult the still very authoritative study by Edmond Cros, Protée et le gueux—Recherches sur les origines et la nature du récit picaresque dans «Guzmán de Alfarache» (Paris: Didier, 1967). 33. See Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction, 9. See also Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista, Guillén, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” MeyerMinnenmann, “El género de la novela picaresca.” 34. See Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961). 35. Howard Mancing, “Prototypes of Genre in Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 20, no. 2 (2000): 127–49. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 36. Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista, 20, La , o—en castellano- tendía a centrarse en un solo episodio o anécdota en que el objeto de burla o risa era el mismo autor de la carta; gustaba del chismorreo, la alusión picante, la ironía a propósito de las pequeñeces cotidianas; y fácilmente se convertía en apócrifa o se atribuía a personajes de todo ficticios. 37. Robert Folger, Picaresque and Bureaucracy: Lazarillo de Tormes (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta—Hispanic Monographs, 2009). 38. Romero-Díaz, Nueva nobleza, Agustín Amezúa y Mayo, Cervantes, Creador de la Novela Corta Española (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1958). 39. José María Micó (ed.), Introduction to Alemán, Guzmán (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009), 13–79. Katharina Niemeyer, “. La Primera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache (Madrid 1599),” in La Novela Picaresca. Concepto genérico y evolución del género (siglos XVI y XVII), eds. Klaus Meyer-Minnenmann and Sabine Schlickers (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008), 77. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction, 47.

26  Introduction 40. Robert Ter Horst, The Fortunes of the Novel: A Study in the Transposition of a Genre. Studies on Cervantes and his Times, 8 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 290. 41. Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha I, ed. John Jay Allen (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004), 277, “Mal año para Lazarillo de Tormes y para todos cuantos de aquel género se han escrito o escribieren.” For more information on the notion of the picaresque in its time, see Peter N. Dunn, “Cervantes De/Re-constructs the Picaresque,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 2, no. 2 (1982): 109–31, Jorge García López “Rinconete y Cortadillo y la novela picaresca,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 19, no. 2 (1999): 113–24, Meyer-Minneman, “El género de la novela picaresca.” 42. See Binne de Haan and Konstantin Mierau (eds.), “Bringing Together Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel: Studying Menocchio, Guzmán de Alfarache, and Kin,” in Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel: A First Exploration into Commensurable Perspectives (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 1–17, in particular, the introduction. See also Niemeyer, “.” 43. Cros, Protée et le gueux, 348. Michel Cavillac (ed.), Amparo de los pobres (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1975), Introduction to the Amparo, CLXXX, [. . .] Mi principal intento en la primera parte del pícaro que compuse, donde, dando a conocer algunas estratagemas y cautelas de los fingidos, encargo y suplico por el cuidado de los que se pueden llamar y son sin duda corporalmente pobres. 44. Michel Cavillac, Guzmán y la novela moderna (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2010), 76. 45. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 46. Pablo Jauralde Pou, “El Guzmán de Alfarache de Mateo Alemán,” Piñero Ramírez (2002): 82, en vano buscaremos en el texto referencias históricas concretas a los plomos del Sacromonte, a la decoración del Escorial, a las travesuras de Gonzalo Pérez, a las contiendas de los jesuitas o a la Invencible, que eran los temas de actualidad para aquellos años. El autor prefiere la perspectiva rabiosamente individual: individuos, tipos, caracteres, conductas . . . mejor principios éticos y esquemas morales que hechos históricos. 47. On these ‘Discourses of Poverty’ see Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (London: University of Toronto Press, 1999). On Miguel de Giginta see Félix Santolaria Sierra (ed.), Tratado de remedio de pobres (Barcelona: Ariel Histórica, 2000), in the introduction to Giginta, Tratado. On the social reformer Pérez de Herrera, see Cavillac in the introduction to Pérez Herrera, Amparo and Cavillac, Guzmán y la novela moderna, 73–92. For a study of poverty in early modern Spain, see Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 48. Claudio Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study of the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature (New York: Garland, 1987), 2. 49. Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery, 70. 50. Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 3.

Introduction 27 51. See Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, Geremek, La estirpe de Caín, Geremek, La piedad y la horca: historia de la miseria y de la caridad en Europa (Madrid: Alianza, 1989), Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain. 52. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 53. See Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain 1516–1659. (New York: Basic Books, 1971), Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Extranjeros en la vida de los españoles (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 1996), José Simón Díaz, Guia literaria de Madrid: Arrabales y Barrios Bajos (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 199), José Del Corral, Gentes en el Madrid: formas de vida en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Silex, 2008). These are just the most prominent examples of a much more widespread tendency. 54. Domínguez Ortiz, Extranjeros en la vida de los españoles, 67, [. . .] Los elementos de que se trata se hallaban situados en lo más bajo de la escala social, dentro o fuera de la ley, como bandidos, como mendigos o peregrinos, ejerciendo una profesión humilde, pero siempre en los límites de la picaresca o de la miseria, si no por completo dentro de ella. Es éste el aspecto más conocido y divulgado por numerosas fuentes literarias, no pudiendo omitirlo, por referirse a masas considerables, lo trataremos con brevedad. On the question of poverty in the work of Domínguez Ortiz, see the overview of his work and influence on two generations of historians working on urban poverty by Pablo Pérez García, “Los pobres en la época moderna: La obra de Domínguez Ortiz y su contexto historiográfico,” Historia Social no. 47 (2003): 95–111. 55. See Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction, 126. 56. “Espejismo metodológico,” Héctor Brioso Santos, Sevilla en la prosa de ficción del Siglo de Oro (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 1998), 21. 57. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. 58. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction, developed the conceptual side of this problem by using the notion of the ‘possible world’ to conceptualize the epistemological status of Lazarillo, Guzmán and Buscón. The notion of the possible world will also inspire my approach to the distinction between fictional narratives and extraliterary sources; however, Dunn paraphrases historical studies on Spain and the status quaestionis on the picaresque as his underpinnings for comparing text and context. Precisely because I am not satisfied with the status quaestionis on the transient marginal, I will contribute my own analysis of both the literary texts and new archival source material on the specific situation of turn-of-the-century Madrid to the discussion. 59. See Brioso Santos, Sevilla en la prosa de ficción del Siglo de Oro, Geremek, La estirpe de Caín. 60. Frank Wadleigh Chandler, The Literature of Roguery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907). 61. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery, Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery, Dunn, The Spanish Picaresque Novel, Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction. 62. B. W. Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 63. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid, Escobar, “Francisco De Sotomayor.” 64. Folger, Picaresque and Bureaucracy. This approach is an important step ahead from purely literary text-based analysis of constructions of self, such as Jennifer Cooley, Courtiers, Courtesans, Pícaros and Prostitutes: The Art and Artifice of Selling One’s Self in Verbal Exchange (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2002).

28  Introduction 65. José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del Barroco (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975). José Antonio Maravall, The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Michel Cavillac, Gueux et Marchands dans le Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604). Roman picaresque et mentalité bourgeoise dans l’Espagne du Siècle d’Or (Bordeaux: Institut D’études Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines de l’université de Bordeaux, 1983), Juan Carlos Rodríguez, La literatura del pobre. Segunda edición ­corregida y aumentada (Almeria: Editorial Guante Blanco, 2001). Cooley, Courtiers, Courtesans, Pícaros and Prostitutes, Francisco J. Sánchez, An Early Bourgeois Literature in Golden Age Spain: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache and Baltasar Gracián (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), Felipe E. Ruan, Pícaro and Cortesano: Identity and the Forms of Capital in Early Modern Spanish Picaresque Narrative and Courtesy Literature (Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2011). 66. Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social. 67. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, also indicates that Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social, simplifies matters by equating the literary with the extraliterary pícaro. 68. Domínguez Ortiz, Extranjeros en la vida de los españoles, Jesús Bravo Lozano (ed.), Minorías socioreligiosas en la Europa moderna (Madrid: Síntesis Editorial, 1999), Jesús Bravo Lozano, “Autóctonos e inmigrados: El poblamiento de Madrid,” in Historia y documentación notarial, el Madrid del siglo de oro: jornadas celebradas en Madrid, 2 a 4 de junio de 1992, ed. by Antonio Eiras Roel (Madrid: Consejo General del Notariado, 1992), 131–58. See also Carmelo Viñas y Mey, Forasteros y extranjeros en la España de los Austrias (Madrid: Sección de Cultura Artes Gráficas Municipales, 1963). 69. The question of cultural encounters is becoming increasingly relevant given the recent interest in cultural encounters in principle early modern cities. See Donatella Calabi and Stephen Turk Christensen, Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 70. Griffiths, Lost Londons, Newman, Cultural Capitals. 71. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 72. See Muir and Ruggierio, Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. 73. Ginzberg in Muir and Ruggiero, Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, 8. 74. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35, Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2001), 97–119. Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History and Theory 40, no. 3 (2001): 347–59, Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 75. Parts of this material have been transcribed in earlier studies. For example, the Libros de Gobierno, which will play a considerable role in the first two case studies. Much of this material has been presented in articles and source editions; mostly articles published by the Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños and one monograph by Villalba Perez dedicated to the Ynventario de causas criminales. Villalba Pérez has published extensively on the

Introduction 29 criminal history of the city. (See Enrique Villalba Pérez, La administración de la justicia penal en Castilla y en la Corte a comienzos del siglo XVII (Madrid: Editorial Actas, 1993), Enrique Villalba Pérez, “Notas sobre la prostitución en Madrid a comienzos del siglo XVII,” Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, no. 34 (1994): 505–20, Enrique Villalba Pérez, ¿Pecadoras o delincuentes? Delito y género en la Corte (1580–1630) (Madrid: Biblioteca Litterae, 2004). Other sources have not been transcribed as far as I am aware, such as the inquisitorial record of the court case against a group of supposedly Armenian counterfeiters, which I shall be discussing in Chapter 2. However, no monograph has been dedicated to the study of the transient marginals as a problem of representation, probably due to the dispersed nature of the information. Therefore, in addition to primary source material I shall make ample reference to the sizable body of historical studies on early modern Madrid, both as sources for editions of archival material and as sources for the way in which transient marginals are framed in historical studies. For example, I shall make use of studies by Molina Campuzano and Del Corral of the regalia de aposento, the institutionalized allocation of quarters to government officials in private homes in the capital. I shall also refer to parish records studied by Alvar Ezquerra and Carbajo Isla, official correspondence between city planners and the crown studied by Escobar, and records of civil court cases such as those studied by Herzog. Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, Felipe II, la corte y Madrid en 1561 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1985), Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital europea, Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, “Espacios sociales del Madrid de los Austrias,” in El Madrid de Velázquez y Calderón: villa y corte en el siglo XVII, eds. José Miguel y Bernardo J. García Morán Turina (Madrid: Fundación Caja Madrid, 2000), 151–68, and Carbajo Isla, La población de la villa de Madrid, Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid, Escobar, “Francisco De Sotomayor,” Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (London: Yale University Press, 2003). 76. AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1197 & 1198 and related sources such as AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1171 the material is fairly dispersed and only sparsely indexed. On the history of the sala de alcaldes see: Ana Guerrero Mayllo, El gobierno municipal de Madrid (1560–1606) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1993) and Miguel Herrero García, Madrid en el teatro (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1963). 77. Sieber, The Invention of a Capital. 78. Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital. 79. Agustín Amezúa y Mayo, Opúsculos Históricos—Literarios (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1951). 80. Miguel Herrero García, Madrid en el teatro. 81. AHN, Inquisición, 76, exp. 5. 82. See Mark Phillips, “Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance,” New Literary History 34, no, 2 (2003): 211–29, for a discussion of the problem of the mediation of the inquisitor and the historian between the testimonials of the peasants. He also discusses the lack of awareness for this mediation, particularly in Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 83. Martínez Millán and Fernández Conti, La Monarquía de Felipe II, for a study of the crown’s administrative body. 84. This approach is distinct from and complementary to the approach of sociocriticism, which combines close reading with a quest for the literary

30  Introduction manifestation of ideological structures. See Edmond Cros, “Social Practices and Intratextual Mediation: Towards a Typology of Ideosèmes,” in Sociocriticism, Theories and Perspectives II, no. 2, ed. Edmond Cros (Montpellier: Institut International de Sociocritique, 1985), 129–48. 85. Levi, “On Microhistory,” 97–8. 86. For example, in Cavillac, Gueux et Marchands dans le Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604), Cavillac, Guzmán y la novela moderna, García Santo-Tomás, Espacio urbano y creación literaria en el Madrid de Felipe IV. 87. For example, the study of housing and rent prices by Ceferino Caro López, “Casas y Alquileres en el antiguo Madrid,” Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños no. 18 (1983): 97–153, on the poor in the parish of San Sebastian between 1578 and 1618 by Miguel Ángel García Sánchez, “Urbanismo, demografía y pobreza en Madrid. La parroquia de San Sebastián, 1578– 1618,” Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños no. 43 (2003): 45–84, or the study of crime in Villalba Pérez, ¿Pecadoras o delincuentes? 88. Ginzburg, “Microhistory,” 28. Phillips, “Histories, Micro- and Literary,” 223. 89. Lubomír Doležel, “Mimesis and Possible Worlds,” Poetics Today: Aspects of Literary Theory 9, no. 3 (1988): 477. 90. Doležel, “Mimesis and Possible Worlds,” 477.

1 Displacing the Pícaro

Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) tells the story of a man born in Seville, who leaves his home as a boy, and then travels through Spain and Italy until he is brought to justice and condemned to the galleys. On the galleys, he finds faith, repents, and writes his life’s tale.1 The protagonist’s first destination, having left Seville in the throes of adolescence, is Madrid: And thus I decided to press on towards Madrid, as the court was there at the time, and in it everything flourished, with many of the order of the fleece, many a great figure, many prelates, many knights, people of principal stock, and, above all, a young king who had recently married.2 Such overdrawn expectations voiced by a young and naïve protagonist approaching a grand city are a well-documented stock element of the representation of the journey to the city in the early modern literary representations of cities. It can be found in such classics as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Buscón (1604/1626), Pícara Justina (1605), Las harpías en Madrid (1631), and many others.3 It is the elaboration of a motif that had known a long tradition in the romances of chivalry, that other European literary success story of the sixteenth century. The description of young Guzmán’s first stay in Madrid is one of the earliest prose narrative representations of Madrid as a court. Tellingly, the description starts with the protagonist’s transformation from wandering boy into pícaro: So by the time I arrived in Madrid, I entered the city looking like a righteous galley slave, travelling light, in stockings and shirt, which were dirty, worn and old, for that is what was necessary in order to earn [as a beggar]. Thus unraveled, although I looked for someone to serve, praising myself with good words, no one was assured that I would not commit some bad deed and no one wanted me in his house because I was repugnant and lacked a coat. They thought I was another rogue thief [pícaro ladroncillo] that would rob them and then run off.4

32  Displacing the Pícaro The madrileños identify him as a pícaro on account of his appearance and refuse to take him into their service.5 Soon after his arrival in Madrid, he finds a connection with others of his kind. Towards the end of the chapter, he speaks of a house he shares with others like him: We had our own house on the square next to Santa Cruz, bought and repaired with the money of others. That is where we had our meetings and feasts. I got up with the sun; I diligently visited the meat vendors and bakeries, I entered the butchers; every morning I stocked up for the day; the members of the parish that did not have a servant paid me to deliver them their food; which I did, diligently, without losing so much as a hair.6 Guzmán recounts his routine on the Plaza de Santa Cruz, working as an errand boy (esportillero) for the merchants and the members of the parish. He refers to the shared house as “la de los pícaros” which, if we fill in the ellipsis, could be taken to read la casa de los pícaros or the “house of the pícaros.”7 He describes his life in the house as follows: “Having combined all the goods everyone had acquired during the day, we discussed over supper what was going on in the court.”8 In their house on the Santa Cruz square, he and the other pícaros get together during the evenings to share food, and to tell each other what they have seen and heard throughout the city. Houses inhabited by rogues are a stock motif in the picaresque genre. The informed reader may recall Monipodio’s patio in Seville in Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares (1613), the house inhabited in Madrid by Don Toribio and his brethren in Quevedo’s Buscón (1605/1626), the houses used by Elena in Salas Barbadillo’s La ingeniosa Elena (1612), and Teresa in Castillo Solórzano’s La niña de los embustes (1634) or the “garito de pobres” in Vélez de Guevara’s Diablo cojuelo (1641). In fact, houses shared by pícaros can be found in most if not all picaresque narratives, yet none of these houses was claimed to be owned by their delinquent dwellers, and none of them was shared by a community of equals, as seems to be the case in Guzmán de Alfarache. Guzmán is Sevillan, only recently arrived in the city, and yet here he is already speaking of owning a house in Madrid. This, then, is a literary representation of the place assigned to the transient marginals within the literary possible world. The house on the Plaza de Santa Cruz plays a central role in the chapter on Guzmán’s first stay in the capital.9 The episode provides a telling case study for the way in which the growing capital and its intended and unintended spaces were converted into a literary place for the transient marginals. This case study will illustrate and analyze the process of “displacing” the pícaro. The analysis will show, firstly, how the literary representation displaces the pícaro by combining various historical phases and locations that would reveal the artificial nature of

Displacing the Pícaro 33 the episode to contemporary readers. It will then discuss how the pícaro’s tactical movement through the city communicates with representations of space by city planners, policemen and authors of treatises on urban development writing in and about Madrid. Lastly, this chapter will show that these various displacements manifest a specific position in the debate on poor relief in early modern Madrid. In 1579, the court officers of the town councils pronounced the following promulgation: [. . .] The court officers of his majesty’s town council order that no innkeeper, male or female, of those on the Plaza de Santa Cruz, nor those by the pillars of the housing blocks of this town should be allowed to have pícaros nor vagabonds in their service nor should they be allowed to give food to the aforementioned pícaros or vagabonds under the threat of two years of banishment from the court and ten ducats [. . .].10 In this promulgation, the town council of Madrid prohibits innkeepers on the Santa Cruz square from providing pícaros and vagabonds with work or food.11 The promulgation proves the presence of sufficient numbers of transients considered pícaros on the Santa Cruz square in the late 1570s to require policy.12 The prohibited activities are the mirror image of the activities Guzmán describes in the earlier episode. Speaking of his life on the square, he tells us that: I got up with the sun; I diligently visited the meat vendors and bakeries, I entered the butchers; every morning I stocked up for the day; the members of the parish that did not have a servant paid me to deliver them their food.13 Guzmán makes his living as an errand boy (esportillero), with his own basket (espuerto), bringing food from the shops to the members of the parish who do not have their own servants. It is the same trade to which Rinconete and Cortadillo, the pícaros in training in Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares, are introduced in Seville. These two boys travel from rural Castilia to Seville where they establish themselves as errand boys and thieves when the occasion arises. They are immediately noticed by a lookout for the organized thieves and obliged to join their ranks. The 1579 promulgation has been mentioned in various studies as the earliest evidence of an institutional use of the term pícaro.14 However, in 1578, the president of the Consejo Real de Castilla, Antonio de Pazos wrote to the then king, Phillip II, of a constable called “portillo, alguazil de pícaros.”15 This means that the title alguacil de pícaros as a synonym for alguacil de pobres/vagabundos was already used in the year prior to the promulgation prohibiting the presence of pícaros on Santa Cruz.

34  Displacing the Pícaro However, although the term pícaro was starting to come into use in the last decades of the sixteenth century, it was still far from widespread. In the picaresque genre’s prototype, the 1554 Lazarillo de Tormes, the term pícaro is never used. The fact that Guzmán’s first adventures as a self-proclaimed pícaro should occur on the very square that is mentioned in connection with pícaros by the city administration (which is also one of the first documented uses of the term) indicates the close relationship between the city as experienced by historical actors and Guzmán. This proximity, however, must not be mistaken for direct referentiality, as the promulgation also reveals several differences between Guzmán’s narrative and the situation as it is represented by the municipality. The differences between the literary episode in Guzmán and the situation as represented in the promulgation and other sources sheds new light on Mateo Alemán’s representation of Madrid. The established position is that Mateo Alemán’s depiction of urban space in Guzmán de Alfarache was realist, or to put it in the terms of Even-Zohar, a direct import without invention.16 Much material has been presented as proof of said realism—for example, German Bleiberg’s edition of Alemán’s Informe secreto, an investigative report Alemán wrote on the treatment of forced labourers in the saltpetre mines of Almadén.17 Brioso Santos and Francisco Rico rely considerably on this report to defend the realism of Alemán’s work. Another key argument held by scholars is that Alemán’s father held the position of surgeon at the jail of Seville. As a result of this, Alemán’s well-documented first-hand experiences with delinquents have been considered proof enough to support the argument that the depictions in Guzmán of everyday life are realist—that is to say, a direct import.18 However, this apparent certainty has led to a centralizing of the impact of the realist presentation, with scholars foregoing detailed analysis of the fringes of this realism, the point where observation is manipulated, rearranged in time and space. For Guzmán there is a sizable body of work on the literary source material Alemán worked with; the work of Edmond Cros is still an important reference. The seminal 1967 Protée et le gueux studies the many literary traditions, myths, stock characters and precepts manifest in Guzmán. However, no literary source is indicated for the Santa Cruz scene.19 This then points at either innovation or the import from a sphere thus far unexplored, such as the text of the city, or a combination of the two. According to Even-Zohar, “Even in cases of inventiveness which cannot be traced back to a simple source, import may have been present.”20 What follows shall demonstrate that the Santa Cruz episode is a complex combination of import and innovation that displaces the pícaro in both time and space. Literary text, according to the notion of the chronotope proposed by Bakhtin, provides form to a constellation of time-space with its own internal logic, which in spite of referentiality to lived space, is not bound

Displacing the Pícaro 35 to the same parameters as the time-space constellation of a watchman’s description of the city.21 Due to the specific parameters of fictional text, this allows for endless combinations of temporalities and spatialities. Time travel, to use a somewhat crude example, can be represented in literary text without endangering the logic of the chronotope presented in, say, Mark Twain’s 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. However, when establishing the referentiality of the text vis-à-vis mediaeval England or nineteenth-century Connecticut, in order to study the various instances of import and innovation, the incongruences become apparent and superimposed temporalities are exposed. On a less immediately apparent level, but a nonetheless highly significant level, the casa de los pícaros episode discussed earlier also shows a complex combination of different historical periods and locations in the development of Madrid.

Displacing the Pícaro in Time In his reconstruction of the temporality of Guzmán, Michel Cavillac proposes that Guzmán’s stay in Italy after his first stay in Madrid is supposed to refer to the historical period between 1561 and 1568.22 This temporal framing is supported by the temporal indicators provided by young Guzmán in his projection of the capital prior to his arrival: [. . .] And thus I decided to press on towards Madrid, as the court was there at the time, and in it everything flourished, with many of the order of the fleece, many a great figure, many prelates, many knights, people of principal stock, and, above all, a young king who had recently married.23 “Rey mozo recién casado,” refers to the young Philip II who had recently married Isabel de Valois. In doing so, Alemán situates the Madrid of the first voyage in the 1560s. Guzmán was published two decades after the promulgation; however, within the internal chronology of Guzmán, the Santa Cruz episode predates the promulgation by a good 15 years, which would place the episode in the mid-1560s. The reference to the king echoes the picaresque genre’s prototype, Lazarillo, who ends his account referring to the year in which Charles V held court in Toledo, which, as no specific date is given, could refer to either 1525 or 1538.24 In both Lazarillo and Guzmán, temporality is thus established in reference to the presence of the king. The episode in Guzmán echoes the carnevalistic juxtapose, and thus possible confusion, of jester and king, a time-honoured folkloric motif.25 However, in the early 1560s, there was not yet an abundance of pícaros, and the Santa Cruz square was still on the outskirts—the so-called arrabales—of the city. The difference is highlighted in the amounts of

36  Displacing the Pícaro arrests in the city in the Ynventario and the efforts of the sala de alcaldes to deal with crime and vagrancy in the city. It is also highlighted in the efforts made by parishes, confraternities and theatres in order to get a grip on vagrancy in the city in the late seventies, eighties and nineties.26 Thus the temporal setting, the time of the narration, is not compatible with the reference to the thriving Santa Cruz square, as the Santa Cruz area would only become a thriving part of the city centre in the seventies. This inconsistency then could serve as evidence of direct reference to historical time being suppressed for narrative purposes. Firstly, by making a connection between king and rogue, a picaresque cliché and, secondly, by referring to a reality contemporary to the publication of Guzmán rather than the historical time that would correspond to the narrative time of the character’s youth. Guzmán was published almost four decades after the visit of the “rey mozo y recién casado,” in fact after the death of Philip II. It is known that Alemán was in Madrid or close to Madrid between 1564 and 1566; it is also known that he was imprisoned in 1583 and that he resided in Madrid during much of the eighties.27 However, it cannot be determined with certainty whether or not he was in Madrid in 1579, the year of the promulgation. The promulgation and the many parallels in the literary episode may indicate that Alemán saw what the town council saw and then incorporated this observation in his novel. Although the temporal frame of the novel refers to a time before the promulgation, the publication takes place after the promulgation, and after various promulgations prohibiting vagabonds on the city squares.28 Alemán might possibly have heard the town crier proclaim the promulgation and, with it, that term “pícaro” which would go on to become synonymous with his book. He may have heard of the promulgation from one of his many friends in the court, for example court medic Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, of whom more shall be discussed later. The square and the rogues on it may have inspired Alemán to insert the episode of the casa de los pícaros in the life of his rogue. However, in doing so, he created a partially anachronistic representation of Madrid. In the Santa Cruz episode, Alemán locates the social reality of the extratextual Madrid of the late 1570s in the early 1560s. Most certainly the inner-city problems in the early 1560s were quite different from the situation in the late 1570s. For the purpose of the verisimilitude of the pseudoautobiography, the protagonist’s adulthood would have had to have been reached by the 1590s corresponding with a youth in the 1560s; the young capital simply was not old enough to accommodate one man’s life journey in combination with social problems that had only become pressing in the last two decades of the century. By the time the novel was published in 1599, there will have been very little of the original madrileños from the early 1560s left. History is being written, in spite of time, due perhaps to the absence of witnesses;

Displacing the Pícaro 37 the first interpretative community of Guzmán would hardly have been able to identify the anachronism. Here a possible world is encroaching on the historical narrative. Looking back four centuries, a decade or two may seem a trifle, but contextually, the difference was significant. This temporal displacement is not restricted to Guzmán. The same difference between the contemporary events at the time of publication, and the temporal reference of the narrative, hold true for the representations of the city in the majority of other prominent works of the first generation of literary representations of early modern Madrid. Quevedo’s Buscón, which tells the story of the son of a thief and a prostitute from Segovia who travels Spain and spends a considerable period in Madrid, was written and circulating in manuscript before the move of the court to Valladolid and published in 1626, thus refers to a context three decades prior to the context of publication. The representation of Madrid by Liñán y Verdugo and Céspedes y Meneses, which shall be discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3, also refer to several decades prior to the time of publication; both addressing an audience that had never known the represented city nor lived the events about which they read. This selection and reshuffling of temporal references also shows in a minor, but telling, internal incoherence in Guzmán’s description of Madrid during his first visit. Briefly before the Santa Cruz episode, Guzmán tells us, “Back then there were few of us and we went idle; now there are many of us and we are all busy.”29 He is thus contemplating the increase of the pícaros in Madrid between the time of his youth and the time of his maturity around 1600, implying that there were only a few pícaros during his first stay, and that by the time of the writing of the book in the 1590s, their number had increased significantly. This characterization corresponds with the development that can be deduced from the municipal sources. However, it does not quite fit with the description of the feasts and the dispersion of the pícaros throughout the city in the chapter with the Santa Cruz episode: “Well, as they roam the town from one end to the other all day, through different streets and houses, and because there are so many of them and they are so dispersed.”30 There is thus a noticeable inconsistency in the temporal indicators in the narrative when examined in relation to the historical growth of the Madrid between 1560 and 1600, and the related increase in vagrants in the period. This inconsistency indicates that, when it comes to the house on the Santa Cruz square, Alemán refers more to the context of the promulgation in the late 1570s and the social reality of the time of the publication of Guzmán than to the era of the “rey mozo recién casado.”31 The anachronism vis-à-vis the Madrid of the 1560s would have hardly been noted by Alemán’s contemporaries, as they would recognize the pícaros and their practices as part of their daily reality. The conflation creates what Foucault conceptualized as a heterotope: a space that actualizes various temporalities in one space.32 To contemporary readers, the

38  Displacing the Pícaro temporal displacement frames the presence of pícaros as a permanent problem, which requires an equally permanent response, be it confinement of the pícaros or acceptance.

Displacing the Pícaro in Urban Space In addition to permanency, the Santa Cruz episode frames the problem of the pícaro as central. Yet if a house of pícaros existed on Santa Cruz, one would suspect some sort of official paper trail. However, there is no mention of a house in the Libros de Gobierno or in the Ynventario de causas criminales. What is more, in the Cámara de Castilla records in Simancas, there are various mentions of court cases against people who provide shelter to vagabonds or gente de mala vida. The active policy to evict marginals from houses in the centre implies that a group of pícaros/house owners would be subject to the same persecution, but as yet no mention has been found of a specific house on Santa Cruz, or a similar square, owned by pícaros. In fact, in the early seventeenth century, the immediate time after the publication of Guzmán, there were complaints by citizens about “ganapanes y esportilleros” or mendicants and errand boys, gathering for loud parties in the graveyard of the Santa Cruz church; had there been a house, why gather in the open space?33 As in the case of the temporal referentiality discussed earlier, it would also seem that Alemán displaces the pícaro in space. The Santa Cruz square was the location of a church, the royal prison and a marketplace.34 Church and marketplace are also described by Guzmán in the second part of his narrative in which he returns to the square as an adult: I took my coat and we went hand in hand, the two of us, to one of the official scribes of the tribunal, who was a good friend of his, and taking him to Santa Cruz, where there is a church on the very same square, in front of the jail and the offices, in secret we told him about the case.35 The Santa Cruz church also appears in other contemporary literary representations of early modern Madrid. For example, in Guía y avisos, it is listed as the most central church of Madrid.36 Between church and prison, salvation and punishment, between tolling bells and the cries of prisoners, there was a market. The episode, with all its sensorial intensity, befitting of the description the cultural historian Johan Huizinga gave of the intense life of the late mediaeval period, constitutes yet another continuity of the past in the Renaissance city.37 In this place of oppositions, Alemán choose to locate a house owned by these very pícaros. The location of the pícaros and their house between the poles of the church and the prison reflects, in the urban space, the dichotomy of faith

Displacing the Pícaro 39 and abandon, between which our protagonist oscillates in the work as a whole. It is of vital importance for the understanding of this analysis, which at first sight may appear excessively microscopic, that these parallels between the character and the Plaza de Santa Cruz would not have been possible had the text referred to a house on the Plaza Mayor, which had neither church nor prison, or most of the other parishes. The positive choice for the Plaza de Santa Cruz is not arbitrary. It reflects the dualities that have defined the literary pícaro and distinguish him from his preliterary inspiration. The choice of the square as the place for the pícaros is related to its semiotic potential. The Plaza de Santa Cruz becomes a fictional space within a work of narrative prose replete with references to literary tradition and established practices of literary spatiality.38 When it comes to literary space, Alemán is well-versed in classical motifs. The place in which the protagonist is conceived is illustrative: It was early summer, late may, and the Pago de Gelves and San Juan de Alfarache the most splendid of the area, due to the fertility and the disposition of the earth, which is one and the same, and the vicinity of the famous Gualdalquivir river, which moistens and enriches with its waters all the gardens and flower beds. And with reason, if there was a paradise on earth it would take its name from this place.39 This exemplary locus amoenus represents his mother’s willingness and fertility, and his father’s virility. It demonstrates both Alemán’s craftsmanship, and his sensibility for the symbolic value of space. Lefebvre posited that the sixteenth century was a time in which the social space of the city was a text legible to the urban population.40 To the sixteenthcentury reader, the city is just as much a signifier that is characterized by such bipolarities as salvation (church) and damnation (prison) which also suffuse the narrative of Guzmán. In Guzmán, there is an interaction between literary tradition and the inclusion in this tradition not only of a social type that had known little literary protagonism up until then but also of new and concrete urban spaces, which are also inscribed within a code of literary space.41 The explicit reference to the Plaza de Santa Cruz invites the reader to conceive this space in the framework of the work’s overall “poetics of space,” according to which the places of action have their respective significance both in relation to their extratextual referent as in relation to the other spaces in the narrative.42 This means that metaphorical connotations ascribed to, or better yet, inscribed in, spaces such as the road, the tavern or the already mentioned locus amoenus can also be considered to function as a code for the interpretation for such apparently “realist” episodes as is the case of the Plaza de Santa Cruz.43 As I have argued in the previous chapter, the literary text is in itself an example of a reading of the text of the city. It is a representation of a representation that makes explicit a possible reading of the text of

40  Displacing the Pícaro the city. Contemporary readers projected onto their urban environment notions of spatiality that did not yet distinguish between the realist and the mystical, the ritual and the everyday, making for a much more fluent continuity between the text of the city and the city in literature. The striking correlation between place and literary character points towards a positive choice for the square as the location of the casa. In the episode, “the text of the city” reflects the thematic bipolarity of the work as a whole, giving this bipolarity a physical representation. The duality of salvation and damnation is equally manifest in both the square and the protagonist. But more than make explicit this abstract symbolism in the concrete spatiality of the city, the association between protagonist and literary space is embodied in the first literary pícaro. It is embodied in the catholic metaphorical repertoire that informed much of contemporary readers’ interpretation, the path of man is closely associated with the idea of the city. This is most explicitly formulated in the Augustinian duality of the city of God and the city of men.44 Alemán, as is well-known, was a close reader of Augustine.

The Pícaro’s Movement in the City: Tactical Displacement The fixed position of the house is at odds with the idea of the pícaro as a man on the run. Let us take a look at an episode in which Guzmán makes his escape from a merchant who has entrusted him with transporting a large sum of money: My man started to walk ahead, and I followed suit with an incredible desire to find a gathering of people in some alley or a house where I could do my deed. Fortune provided me with an opportunity befitting my desire. After entering the puerta principal, three streets down I escaped through a little door and then navigating from corner to corner, in order not to draw attention, I proceeded with favorable wind until the “puerta de la Vega,” where I let myself drift till the river. I crossed the river to reach the Casa del Campo, and covered by the night I walked among the weeds, the poplars and the raspberries, until I was a league from there.45 This rapid succession of crowded marketplaces, back alleys and riverbanks demonstrates both Guzmán’s wit and his speed; there is a feline quality to his movement through the city. His movement is a succession of evasive manoeuvres culminating in his getaway with the money. If we should follow José Antonio Maravall’s qualification of the Baroque as a contorted society, then the pícaro is perhaps the epoch’s most accomplished contortionist.46 In a place which is controlled by law and its enforcers, the pícaro has to make do with the spaces that exist on the margins of central control.

Displacing the Pícaro 41 When analyzing the power relations as reflected in spatial practices, De Certeau proposed the distinction between strategic spatial practices and tactical spatial practices.47 In De Certeau’s terms, the pícaro is a tactical actor in the urban space devised and controlled by the strategies of the authorities. The authorities plan the layout of streets and the subsequent policing thereof based on a predetermined strategy, whereas the marginal has to make do within the established parameters. He is continually, as De Certeau would say, poaching on the territory intended for others. Buscón, that other picaresque classic, provides us with yet another example of the pícaro’s movement in the city. In an episode discussing how he and his fellow rogues navigate through the city, he tells us that: We walked moving like a snake, from one stoop to the other, so as not to run into the houses of debtors. At times, a passerby would ask him for the rent of the house, another for the rent of the sword, yet another the rent of the blankets and shirts, so that I soon came to see that he was a rented knight, quite like a mule.48 Pablos, the protagonist, and his brethren move through the urban space in snake-like undulation, reminiscent of the up-wind navigation of Guzmán, evading debtors. They too have to negotiate their environment tactically. The pícaro’s movements make explicit the limits of control, indicating the spaces that exist beyond the grasp of the state, the spaces that enable illicit practice in the city. It produces a counternarrative to official narrations of the city, thus instrumentalizing the literary city for placing the marginal. The development of literary representation as a system thus replicates and reinforces the dialectic between the city as conceived by institutions and the city as practiced by the marginal, doing so, at first in a non-canonized literary form. The literary exploration of these spaces tests the spaces of power and expands the space of literature. According to Even-Zohar: As with a natural system, which needs, for instance, heat regulation, cultural systems also need a regulating balance in order not to collapse or disappear. This regulating balance is manifested in the stratificational oppositions. The canonized repertoires of any system would very likely stagnate after a certain time if not for competition from non-canonized challengers, which often threaten to replace them. Under the pressures from the latter, the canonized repertoires cannot remain unchanged. This guarantees the evolution of the system, which is the only means of its preservation.49 Following this hypothesis, we could argue that the erratic spatiality in Guzmán de Alfarache and Buscón would exist in an antithetical

42  Displacing the Pícaro relationship to texts that represent the spatial practices of authority. In the municipal administration of the sala de alcaldes de casa y corte we find a partition of the city into neighbourhoods and streets for purposes of administration and control. The document has no date but it is found among documents of the last decade of the sixteenth century. The document is titled “Los quarteles, senpiecan desde la plaça mayor.” It starts out with the first quarter, the “quartel del palacio”: From the square, Calle de Toledo, down to the Puerta cerrada to your right hand, down the street, passing in front of the house of the ambassador to the emperor, and to the Puerta Segoviana de la peste, and the Puerta de la Vega and into the palace square, and to the Calle Nueva [. . .].50 The list continues for some time, covering, among others, the “quartel de santo domingo,” the “quartel de san luis” and the “quartel de san Francisco.” In the paragraph on the “quartel de la merced,” there are some telling references to life in the city such as the public brothel and the meat market, as well as some of its inhabitants, the well-known actor Velázquez among others, revealing the immediate nature and intention of the list: From the square, Calle de Toledo, down to the Puerta de Toledo, the entire street on the left side, the street of the limps, the brothel and the square of the meat market, to the Calle de Labapies, in front of the house where the actor Velázquez and then up the street where the house of Nicolas de Penalosa is [. . .].51 It appears to be structured in the form of a walk, identifying with the patrol of a constable. It shows the spatial practice of authority: authority chooses its route; authority maps space in a coherent repetitive representation. Much of the activity of the city administrators consisted in creating inventories of neighbourhoods based on lists of streets, prominent buildings and, at times, well-known tenants and allocating police to the various neighbourhoods. These inventories were used to instruct city police but also to partition ambulant trade, locate markets and determine window prices during public festivities such as bullfights in the squares. One has to appreciate the importance of these and other lists, in an environment in which the first city maps were as yet absent. The first map of Madrid is from 1622 (the now lost map by Antonio Mancelli) and the famous Texeira map is from 1656.52 Moreover, such maps were exclusive and far removed from the practice of the municipal administration or reproductions for the general public. As far as the practice at the street level is concerned the representation of space is textual and narrative. The list of streets and neighbourhoods is an attempt to represent and

Displacing the Pícaro 43 control urban space through enumeration; it underpins the lists of places mentioned in prohibitions published by the sala de alcaldes. These prohibitions covered all aspects of life in the city; among others they prohibit congregation, begging or ambulant trade. The promulgations tend to start with the central squares (the Plaza Mayor) and the main gates (Puerta del Sol, Puerta de Toledo) and then proceed towards the periphery of the town. The strategic space of authority is also represented in literary texts featuring pícaros. However, these tend to be from other genres, such as novels of manners or instructional narratives. In Guía, a work published in 1620 that could be considered a hybrid between a novel of manners and a visitor’s guide, one of the characters attempts to explain the city to a newcomer. Let us make a division of Madrid, or a description, not in a strictly cosmographical way but in general, and let us divide the city in the four parts that look to the east and west, south and north. Let us start with the entry from the east. Starting with the south-eastern part, following Atocha avenue to the Plaza Mayor (the main square), we can find, before entering the city “our lady of Atocha,” monastery of the order of the Dominicans, and the monastery of Saint Elizabeth of the Augustinian nuns, the royal monastery, the foundation of the virgins, daughters of his majesty’s servants; then, close by the general hospital, and in front of it the hooded nuns, and at a short distance the needy, the hospital of Antón Martín, the daughters of our lady of Loreto, the sisters of Magdalena, the parish of Saint Sebastian, the monastery of the holy trinity, the monastery of the Dominicans, which is called the College of Saint Atocha, and the parish of Santa Cruz [. . .].53 This description extends for several pages and covers all directions (oriente, poniente, mediodía, setentrión). It forms part of a literary work and is designed as reference for readers. It has as such an encyclopedic function quite similar to the lists drawn up by the town council and it is comparable in length and structure to those lists. In this case, the narrator attempts to describe the city for visitors to the court, listing streets and parish churches where visitors can fulfill their Christian duties. The narrator promises more description, saying that next time he would dedicate attention: [. . .] to make a cosmographic description of the place and population of Madrid, of its latitude and longitude, of the land on which it stands, the climate it enjoys, the airs that bathe it, the number of its houses and citizens, putting each matter in its place, and it shall not lack more advice to the stranger.54

44  Displacing the Pícaro Here too, as in the municipal list, urban space is represented through systematic enumeration, following the perspective of the visitor on foot. It is the perspective of a visitor who has nothing to fear, who is not forced to plan movement as a reaction to authority. In Guía, the text of the city is used as a palimpsest, upon which the edifying discourse of the costumbrist work is inscribed.55 In later costumbrist guides to Madrid, this partition and consecutive rendition can move, inflated by anecdotal material, from the level of text, to the level of the paratext. An example of a similar division of the city, now as the paratextual structuring principle of the literary work can be found in such costumbrist works as the 1646 Peligros de Madrid by Baptista Remiro de Navarra in which the names of quarters and prominent streets have become the chapter headings, and each quarter has acquired a specific fame and related repertoire of anecdotes.56 However, Guía also indicates the limits of authority-controlled space: a considerable part of its narrative consists of warnings as to what parts of the city are in the hands of the underworld: thieves, imposters and loose women, elements that are only hinted upon in the lists of the municipality. In contrast to the spatiality in the costumbrist texts and the instructions for city police, the pícaro manages to find and exploit the gaps; the pícaro has to react to the strategy of the urban society as manifest in the representations of the sala de alcaldes. This brief juxtaposition shows a strategic spatial practice, as represented in the texts of the municipality and in Guía, and a tactical counter-practice as represented in Guzmán and Buscón. Authors and administrators alike mapped the city through the perspective of defined subject positions: strategic, methodological in the case of the municipal authority and the upstanding visitor; erratic, evasive and tactical in the case of the pícaro. There is thus a rapport between the municipal sphere and the literary sphere in the sense that the oppositions between strategic and tactical spatial practices in the city are reflected in the literary realm, at times corresponding to the different genres that represented the early modern metropolis. These literary representations of spatial practices problematize the pícaro’s place in the city as represented in the casa de los pícaros episode. It is for these reasons that claims of a house owned by pícaros on the square are incongruous with what can be reconstructed of the history of the Plaza de Santa Cruz and it is inconsistent with the general evasive, tactical spatiality of the pícaro. Although the plaza reflects the dualities of the pícaro, a fixed place on the square cannot be explained by the overall tactical nature of the movement of the pícaro. More and more, it becomes apparent that Alemán presented a possible world that functioned in contrast to the actual place of transient marginals in the city, confronting contemporary readers with an image of permanence and centrality.

Displacing the Pícaro 45

(Dis-)placing the Pícaro in the Debate on Urban Development Madrid under Philip II was evolving from a provincial town to a metropolis. People of various origins and social categories flocked into what had been a mediaeval town and what was now the location of a Renaissance imperial capital.57 The large majority of the population were new arrivals, among them many like Guzmán, Sevillan, with roots in the Levante.58 The Plaza de Santa Cruz was located in what had been the arrabales (the area outside of the city walls) of Madrid before it was appointed as capital. After 1561, the Plaza de Santa Cruz started to form part of the centre of the capital, at about 50 metres from the current Plaza Mayor, which was called the Plaza del arrabal in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.59 A couple of years later, a protagonist of Salas Barbadillo’s El tribunal de los majaderos would marvel at the transformation the city’s outskirts underwent: “[. . .] To see in Madrid so many new buildings, and all of them occupied. New houses are born, and those that used to be far from the centre are now its main streets.”60 The Plaza de Santa Cruz is a clear example of this transformation of the peripheral into the central; the casa de los pícaros is located on the periphery of the old and in the centre of the new; it has moved from one to the other by remaining in the same place whilst the constellation of the city around it was fundamentally changed.61 The sprawling city is not just a fact that is reported in texts, it also provides for new plot structures. In the short story “Los dos Mendozas” by Céspedes y Meneses, a Castilian nobleman has a man killed in a field outside of Madrid. A decade or two later his sons buy a house in one of the new neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city, and it turns out the house is built on the exact same site of the killing. This change in the relative position is largely external or extrinsic to the house, whilst at the same time, it is not an element of deliberate city planning. It is informative to distinguish between the intentional spaces and the accidental spaces that are created in the birth of the capital, and thus enrich the repertoire of spaces that could find their way into the literary text. Inspired by Renaissance notions of city planning and keen to apply these to Madrid, Phillip II and his architects developed plans for the reform and standardization of street views immediately after permanently establishing the court in Madrid in 1561. In their contribution to the study The Power of Place, Muir and Weissmann state: The renaissance civic-humanist bureaucrat, ever anxious to remake society in his own image and likeness, created a large urban planning literature, describing ideal cities and their socially useful and aesthetically perfect star-shaped, circular, or grid forms, having rationallydesigned central places, spacious piazze, and wide boulevards.62

46  Displacing the Pícaro Their objective was to develop an open, clean and systematic city that reflected imperial status and ambition, based on fairly recent Renaissance notions of city planning.63 In this endeavour “every effort was taken to provide pleasant vistas.”64 In these plans, ample mention is made of casas de malicia. This term refers to low-rise buildings of abominable state dating from the era prior to 1561. According to Escobar: To help guide continuous reforms in the rapidly expanding city, a new advisory group for public works was established in September 1620. Modeled after the Committee of Public Works of the 1590s this unstudied group sought to correct aesthetic ills in Madrid. Having become accustomed to the uniformity of the plaza mayor, nothing was more repugnant to the committee than to see an aged and dilapidated house “standing between two [notable] houses built anew and in conformity with an established plan.”65 The government plans for the city also mention the necessity of reforming these casas. Not only would reconstruction improve the appearance of the city, the construction of four or five stories high buildings would also increase living space in the centre, thus catering to the demand for housing for government officials.66 Promulgations concerning the design and—where it was deemed necessary—renovation of facades attempted to regulate the appearance of homes, such as the house supposedly owned by Guzmán cum suis.67 To Philip II and his advisors, the decrepit remains of Madrid’s mediaeval periphery were aesthetically repugnant. These remnants constituted a stark contrast with the vision of Madrid as a symbol of good government and its role as the administrative centre of an empire.68 The move of marginal elements of mediaeval Madrid from the periphery of the town to the centre of the capital did not go unnoticed by Philip II and his advisors. The literary import of these remnants perpetuates their existence and thus involves them in the formation of the image of the city in a striking juxtaposition to the urban project of the crown. In this context, the “place” of the pícaro is a strong signifier. According to Muir and Weissman, “For the socially marginal—the poor and working classes, adolescents and women—neighbourhood was more fluid and amorphous, and could include piazza, street corner or alley.”69 The place of the marginal is characterized by the fact that it is not fixed. Moreover, the mere presence of the pícaro colours the place. “The residual specialness of certain places could, as well, come from sources other than the sacred. Just as there could be a generalized spatial holiness, so too there were locations polluted by crime or evil.”70 The place of the pícaro has a symbolic element; his presence reflects on the place, perhaps pollutes the place. In Alemán’s text, the pícaro not only controls the street, as we shall elaborate in Chapter 3, he has also encroached on that sacred territory of the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie: home ownership.

Displacing the Pícaro 47 In the narrative, Guzmán does not elaborate on the construction of the house, nor does he provide a description of the interior, but he does say that he and his brethren had bought and repaired the house with other people’s money. The fact that the house was repaired, rather than built, implies that Alemán’s casa would have been based on one of the houses that remained from the pre-1561 era, because there would have been little need to repair a house that had been recently built, especially if it would have been intentionally built “a la malicia,” as a repair would have been counterproductive to the appearance of misery.71 The fact that all post-1561 buildings had an immediate government-imposed and/or preconceived purpose, is an even more convincing argument for the case that the casa de los pícaros refers to an older building. The casas de malicia must be distinguished from the so-called casas a la malicia, houses that were deliberately constructed to give the appearance of having poor living conditions and little interior space, by hiding an otherwise spacious interior behind a deceptive façade.72 This was a common practice in order to evade the requirement to provide housing for government officials at the court, the so-called obligación de la regalía de aposento. Casas a la malicia thus used the sign value of the actually derelict houses, inversing the practice of ostentation generally associated with the occupants of early modern Madrid.73 The appearance of the house was also used to obtain favours from the crown, as can be seen in a plea from 1579 requesting exemption from the regalía de aposento: The chamber has seen a report by Doña Ysabel de Mendoza, who was the wife of the deceased Don Juarez, in which is stated that she has an outstanding house in this town, in which Don Antonio Pandilla has been residing, and that this house is so old and in such a bad state that it can no longer provide housing, and if it is not repaired fast it could break down and she begs your mercy that she may be allowed to repair and improve the house, and that she be exempted from the obligation to house officials for ten years.74 These pleas were often fraudulent, as a 1579 report indicates, in which reference is made to the practice of intentionally building houses too small to be able to provide aposento.75 But before we digress into the well-documented building practices in the city, let us focus on notions of spatiality that can be deduced from these pleas. The practices indicate a conscious conception of the sign value of urban space on the part of the citizens of the villa y corte, further corroborating Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It could be argued that—when it comes to the reception of Alemán’s possible world—this conscience for sign value extends to the interpretation of Alemán’s appropriation of urban space in his fiction. From the widespread use of the decrepit outward appearance of houses as basis for argumentation in pleas, we can derive specific proof for the notion that

48  Displacing the Pícaro there was a sensitized awareness for the social value of housing in the city, and thus a readership sensitive to the meaning of providing a house for the pícaro. Much like the protagonists of a “roman-à-clef,” the real and the constructed elements will have been quite obvious to the urban readership. The idea of a house in the city centre filled with pícaros, who were also the proprietors of the place, presents a stark contrast to the idea that the pícaros were a marginalized group, without power or representation in the urban space. Villalba Pérez stated that in late sixteenth-century Madrid “Vagabonds were entirely marginal groups which could be disposed of without any consideration if ever they should threaten the rest of the city.”76 Alemán’s fiction differs from this position. The centrality of the place and ownership imply a power of acquisition and a social capital that, in Bourdieu’s terms, allow them to maintain their place in the city.77 This image seems at a stark contrast to the historian Maiorino’s assertion, “At the ground floor, however, one would always find pícaros, beggars, thieves, prostitutes and an array of less than productive people who have always been kept away from, and ignorant of, whatever was taking place on the upper floor.”78 The permanent installation of the court in Madrid did not put an end to the construction of such small abodes that provided houses for the urban poor.79 However, by 1600, this type of construction no longer took place in the very centre, the zone including the Plaza de Santa Cruz. The scholar Molina Campuzano has highlighted the aforementioned based on the minutes of the meetings between the municipality and the Aposentador, the official in charge of allocating housing to government officials. The Aposentador also informed Philip II of the urban developments, such as the problem of the casas de malicia: Now, the mayor’s council and a number of advisors, made him [Philip II] realize, that although the concessions had provided, to certain degree, the improvement, appearance and development of the population, there were still small houses being built which provided little living space, and that were not in line with the requirements of the 1584 decree, in far off and out of the way places, that served as a refuge for gente de mal vivir and that distorted the appearance of the town.80 Although this shows that there were ample houses that provided shelter for so-called gente de mal vivir, it also shows that these houses were located in areas that were out of the way (“remotas y apartadas”). Guzmán insists that the house was next to the Plaza (“junto a la plaza”), and the Plaza de Santa Cruz was at no point remote or out of the way.81 The casa could be interpreted as representative of a past that was incongruous with the contemporary objectives of urban planning. The same could be concluded for its literary representation, yet where one was a

Displacing the Pícaro 49 result of the accidental, the other may well have been intentional. The decrepit houses that inspired the casa de los pícaros were not a reaction to city planning but a remnant of the mediaeval city that provided a possible object for literary representation in which past and present coincide. The choice to introduce this accidental space in a literary possible world was deliberate. Here too, there is striking coincidence between place and character. Next to catholic duality, which we discussed earlier, there is the duality of the historical and the modern. According to Sánchez, the literary pícaro represents a bourgeois synthesis that probes and deconstructs the feudal division of class.82 This oscillating position of both place and character on the threshold between past and future constitutes an ambiguous situation of hybridity, perhaps liminality that is then associated with the protagonist.83 As an example of a complex case of the “making of repertoire,” this literary place comes into being at the intersection of urbanism and literary innovation. In light of this, the element of the accidental in the making of repertoire is highly significant. No house in the town and court was constructed for Guzmán cum suis, as the Plaza Mayor was built for purposes of urban development according to Renaissance notions of city planning, and mansions were built for the nobility at court and the housing of government officials. It is a representation of space, which makes use of a serendipitous extratextual referent. To the city planners, urban space is a site for the representation of their notions of an imperial Renaissance metropolis; the author confronts this ideal with the perspective of the pícaro. To the pícaro, the city is a space in which claiming a place is a mode of survival. The casa, as a liminal image that merges past and future, associates the pícaro with the continuity of the past in the present. It represents the continuity of indigence and criminality in the “cleansed” aesthetics of the Renaissance city. The image opposes the merged to the bipolar; the pícaro, on the plaza, between church and jail, synthesizes rather than idealizes one of the two options; he is neither solely criminal or solely hero. The minute analysis of the spatial referent reveals the spatial dimension of the protagonist’s characterization and points in the direction of a construction of literary character which was founded in the sensitivity for the signifying potential of the Madrid of the late sixteenth century. The Plaza de Santa Cruz and the casa de los pícaros, as far as literary places go, have no direct literary precedent in Spanish literary history. This is due to their singular, new, fast-changing extratextuality (the plaza with all the connotations we discussed previously) that Alemán augments with the idea of a house of pícaros. With this creation, the idea of a community of real estate-owning pícaros in the heart of the imperial capital was born. This representation of the place of the urban transient marginal thus takes up an unwanted urban reality and then modifies and problematizes it. Not all ideas introduced and explored in literature have

50  Displacing the Pícaro to result in a literary tradition. The import may be unsuccessful as far as continuation in the literary domain is concerned. Such a serendipitously created idea may have little influence, disappear or be transformed to the point where it loses most of its initial power. The subsequent casas de pícaros in the picaresque, some of them in Madrid, are plentiful. Don Toribio’s in Buscón, Monipodio’s in Rinconete y Cortadillo, the “garito de los pobres” in the Diablo cojuelo. However, each is different in its way. Don Toribio’s house is not granted a specified location in the court; it is rented by a group of clothes-sharing pícaros, who are apprehended by the city police shortly after Pablos’ joining them.84 An interesting corollary is the communal nature of the inhabitants who share money, clothes and food, reminiscent of the “todo lo de todos” of Guzmán’s description of the communal dinners where the pícaros share food and information. In that respect, Monipodio’s gang is quite different from the other two, as the structure of the group is hierarchical and interwoven with the police structure. The reader may remember that there is an alguacil who comes by to collect his share, and who is welcomed by Monipodio: In the meantime, a lad came in running and said, disheartened: “the watchmen of the vagabonds is coming for the house, but he is without the constables.” “Keep calm everyone” said Monipodio. “He is a friend, and he never comes to harm us. Calm yourselves, for I shall go and speak to him.”85 The specified central location, impunity and communal structure were not perpetuated in the picaresque genre. On the level of genre, this element constitutes an unsuccessful import. However, the lack of after-life in other (picaresque) texts is put into perspective by the long-term success and the many translations of Guzmán into other vernacular languages. As previously mentioned, the house on Santa Cruz is a central and fixed space. This brings us to the problem of the impunity of the pícaro, who is otherwise characterized as a man on the run in Alemán’s possible world. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, real estate prices increased significantly in the Santa Cruz vicinity.86 In fact, already in the 1570s, the sala de alcaldes took measures to prevent fraud in the taxation of houses in the court.87 What is more, the houses in the Santa Cruz vicinity are increasingly standardized according to Philip II’s promulgation concerning the construction of houses in the court.88 This means that arguably readers in Madrid would have picked up on the house on Santa Cruz as an expensive, central and visible property in an increasingly improved area. In Alemán’s conception, the pícaros thus had considerable power of acquisition, if by proxy, and could show off their property with impunity. In other words, Guzmán and his fellow pícaros buy real estate with other people’s money, and no one steps in to impede them. In fact, Alemán does

Displacing the Pícaro 51 not mention the persecution of the pícaros. This persecution would have been quite easy given that they had—as Guzmán claims—such a centrally located fixed place of encounter. The juntas y fiestas would hardly have gone unnoticed, quite like the parties of the gánapanes in the Santa Cruz churchyard did not go unnoticed. The fact that Guzmán does not speak of persecution is both striking in the light of the 1579 promulgation prohibiting pícaros on the square, and the general activities of the municipality regarding houses occupied by gente de mal vivir at the time. The city government was very active in eradicating decrepit houses and persecuting the transient poor who rented or occupied real estate in the city centre. It also punished citizens who let their houses to gente de mal vivir as was the case of Bartolome González, who submitted the following request to the Cámara in 1579: Bartolome Gonzalez citizen of Madrid says that he was sentenced by the mayor’s council of your court to ten years of banishment because he was accused of having housed people of the bad life, humbly supplicates his majesty to order the end of the banishment given that the poor man has a wife and children who are in extreme destitution due to his absence.89 Another was the case of Isabel Pérez, who “[. . .] Had the custom of receiving in her house people of the bad life and men and women to fornicate.”90 The constables even persecuted people who provided a place for people passing through, who later turned out to be fugitives.91 Both Bartolome and Isabel were banned from the city for several years. And their cases do not stand alone, many homeowners were prosecuted for what the court officers saw as the ill use of their property. The selections of Alemán and Quevedo differ considerably. The house of Don Toribio is rented temporarily in the centre of the court by a band of pícaros, which is in fact apprehended by the alguaciles, based on a criminal charge expressed against them by one of their debtors.92 Alemán’s pícaros live in impunity. After the manipulations of time and space, the idea of impunity is yet another distinctive element of Alemán’s possible world. This points at a discursive end quite distinct to the mere realistic representation of a part of urban life that up until then had not been represented. The fixed and overt nature of the house, and the absence of the mention of persecution, constitutes a stark contrast with the pícaro’s persecution in the city both within and without the literary realm as presented by others.

Displacing the Pícaro and Poor Relief in Madrid One of the key challenges in grasping the notion of the pícaro, and by consequence, the relation with the transient marginal, is that it undergoes

52  Displacing the Pícaro various transformations both during the narrative of Guzmán and as a result of the reception of Guzmán. The text presents a notion of the pícaro that is both more elaborate and essentially distinct from that of a poor urban youth, part errand boy, part thief. Before Guzmán de Alfarache the term pícaro was restricted to the semantic field “thieves, swindlers, gamblers, counterfeiters, vagrants, and other undesirables,” as described by Dunn.93 This pre-literary inscription of the term pícaro coincides with the 1579 promulgation in which the term pícaro is used in combination with vagabundo, vagabond, in the context of begging or brief employment as an errand boy. The literary representation of the pícaro in a limited number of texts at the end of the sixteenth century enriches the notion of the pícaro with that of the fake poor. Cavillac speaks of a “modalidad discursiva a lo pícaro” that preceded Guzmán, referring to the debate on fake poverty.94 In late sixteenth-century Spain, this debate was spearheaded by writers such as Pérez de Herrera and Miguel de Giginta.95 Rutherford pays key attention to the enormous step made by Alemán in the popularization of the term pícaro, positing that “There is no doubt about the marginality of this word between its first appearance and its consecration in Guzmán.”96 Guzmán is the definitive point in which the term “pícaro” incorporates the notion of a social position and that of marginal activities, on the one hand, and failed attempts at social mobility as a generic literary theme, on the other. That is, it is the historically identifiable threshold where one phase in the life of the protagonist (that of pícaro in its restricted, pre-literary sense) is converted into a pars pro toto for a protagonist who passes through various stages, among them that of pícaro in its restricted original sense. This fundamental extension of the notion “pícaro” is, as we shall discuss next, both the reason for the projection of the term unto all sorts of transient marginals and, at the same time the root of a host of unwarranted conflations, in that with its elaborated use, the original sense of thief and vagrant continues to influence the representations of transient marginals in historical narrative. With the casa de los pícaros on the Santa Cruz square, Alemán develops the notion of the pícaro far beyond that of urban poor. Reading the episode based on municipal sources such as the promulgation, with its exceptional use of the word pícaro in relation to the Plaza de Santa Cruz, has allowed for an identification of the semantic amplification of the idea of the pícaro with Alemán’s reconfiguration of late sixteenthcentury Madrid. From an ideological macro-perspective, the new literary space that is the casa de los pícaros on the Santa Cruz square could be considered a representation that subverts the imperial project of the Madrid as created by the Habsburgs. Referring to De Certeau’s notion of the poaching urban actor, it could be considered the reflection of a tactical reaction by an undesired part of the urban population, for which the

Displacing the Pícaro 53 town council had no ready-made solution.97 Such an interpretation, however valid, could obscure the interpretation of a perhaps more immediate debate in which Alemán may have engaged. Much of the interpretation of Guzmán has been based on the effects of the text, the possible readings that it has opened up and the genre it has spawned; however, this is less relevant if we ask with what immediate discursive aims Alemán manipulated the urban space of late sixteenthcentury Madrid. The fact that the house is a fiction purposefully displacing the pícaro, its connection with the notion of the pícaro, and the fact that Alemán’s contemporaries, Pérez de Herrera and Giginta, proposed in their treatises the creation of houses for the urban poor, highlights that the casa de los pícaros should be interpreted in the light of the poor-relief programmes of Pérez de Herrera and Giginta.98 Central aspects of the description of the casa de los pícaros were that it was financed by others: “comprada y reparada con dinero ajeno,” the exchange of information in the house: “referíamos lo que en la corte pasaba” and the quality of information exchanged in the house: Do not think that because they are of low breed, they should stray further from the truth or be less certain. You are truly mistaken, for the opposite is true, and as it happens they know the essential of the matters, and there is reason for this, because when it comes to understanding, there are some and many that, if they put their mind to it, have a good insight. Well, as they roam the town from one end to the other all day, through different streets and houses, and because there are so many of them and they are so dispersed.99 These aspects gain significance in the light of contemporary poor-relief measures such as the casas de misericordia advocated by Miguel Giginta de Elna and the albergues para los verdaderos pobres proposed by Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera. Miguel de Giginta’s 1580 Tratado de remedio de pobres discussed the problems of poverty and vagrancy in Spain, and translated this analysis into concrete proposals. One of the proposed remedies was the construction of poor houses, first in Madrid then in other cities. Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s 1598 Amparo de Pobres discusses the same subject matter and proposes the installation of general hospitals. Pérez de Herrera writes, “The first thing is that in each large or midsized locality a shelter and house for the poor should be built respective of the size of the locality.”100 Both treatises find much of their inspiration in the work of humanist social reformers such as Juan Luis Vives, in particular, his 1526 treaty De subventione pauperum.101 Both texts discuss the place of poverty in Christian doctrine based on the necessity of poverty within the concept of charity. They also discuss the problem of fake poor and beggars who would be perfectly capable of real work. Miguel de Giginta,

54  Displacing the Pícaro a cleric, had ample experience in charity work, to which he refers in his introductory letter to the president of the Cámara de Castilia: And as I was staying in this court close to the royal hospital, many a time I saw the strange spectacles of the poor who died at the entrances for they could not be attended to inside, in addition to what I saw was happening in other parts of the town.102 Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera worked on the king’s galleys and treated many forced labourers, an experience on which he reflects in his introduction: Serving his majesty as medical officer on the Spanish galleys, in the twelve years I spent on them, getting to know at times (sometimes sailing various days) many forced rowers, the reasons why they had been sentenced to the galleys and what causes had brought them such ill fortune, I knew that many of them in the course of their lives had stolen and committed other offences, walking around asking for alms in order to cover their sinful life, and with this cover they entered houses to beg, and to find out during the day where they could rob and break in at night, and where the goods would merit such a deed and where there would be little defense.103 This hands-on experience constitutes an interesting overlap with Alemán’s experience as an investigative judge interviewing the forced labourers in the Fugger-owned mines of Almadén, where he interviewed petty criminals of various backgrounds. Juxtaposing the texts of social reformers and Alemán’s representation of Madrid’s pícaros is an interesting case study, as it shows how a shared interest in an urban subject matter coincides in authors who have comparable experience with pícaros yet work with distinct genres; the treaty or arbitrio on the one hand, and the newly devised form of the picaresque novel on the other. As we shall see, these different forms allow for distinct explorations of the same problem. In the houses proposed by Pérez de Herrera and Giginta, the poor would find shelter, food, spiritual guidance as well as being under control and put to work for the common good.104 For both reformers, the notion of an organized life and control of the poor were central to their proposals. Pérez de Herrera presents various ideas about how to structure the daily life of the poor: And for this it would be beneficial if in each town hall every year one or two persons would be assigned to watch over them, from among the citizens (of which it would be known that they had the right qualities), so that one should be the “father of the youths”

Displacing the Pícaro 55 who would with the help of caretakers take care of those that come from elsewhere with no mode of income, so that they shall not be punished for vagrancy, as they have not been informed. In order for them not to succumb to a life of crime, it is important not to offend them over trivial matters, because if one should deprive them of their honor, they shall insult you in a thousand different ways, as they will have lost shame, as the Spanish Nation—being what it is—is such a friend of conserving it. And the other, obliged by his badge (for it is important that both should have one in order to be respected, and that they be of different colors), should go to the square of the village, he should see to it that the day laborers, both of the field work and the hand work, who shall be named the father of the laborers, helping them to it, and that he should arrange the work, because it is said that some, in order to remain idle, ask for day wages that are in excess of what they deserve and what is customary, so that no one shall take them, and thus remaining without work commit the crimes they please, and then tell the constables that find them idle, that they go to the squares to find work but that they cannot find anyone who would give them work. And when there is someone they fear, they will not do this and all of them will be occupied, and in doing so many excesses shall be avoided.105 The occupants would be rewarded for assisting in the organization of life in the house, which would boost their self-esteem. Work would be found for them by an official, the padre de trabajadores, who would go out to the Plaza Mayor to contract the residents out for jobs. Miguel de Giginta proposed that houses be built to provide shelter for the many roaming poor: And, once said houses are ready, with a margin of a couple of days, it should be promulgated that all the poor can find shelter in them, assuring them they will find anything they should need, with the liberty of coming and going as they want.106 He managed to convert his proposals into reality, some turned into a success, and others failed. After an intensive interaction with the town council, recently documented by Alvar Ezquerra, the first of these houses was built in the 1580s.107 The Hospital General was first located on San Jerónimo and later moved to Atocha.108 After the construction of the Hospital General, the town council decreed that all beggars should go to the Hospital where they would receive shelter and to henceforth refrain from begging in the city.109 The promulgations and the correspondence between Giginta and the town council show that Giginta’s ideas had a tangible impact on the organization of urban space in the city. Pérez de Herrera, protomédico of

56  Displacing the Pícaro the king, also obtained financial aid for his project of remedying the situation of the poor.110 In his treatise he proposes poorhouses in the court, referring to practices in other towns: I would consider it of convenience that your majesty, if it should so please you, order that in all of the reign, in the parishes and localities a brotherhood of compassion for the poor should be founded, electing each year an administrator who shall be called the father of the poor or the administrator of the parish [. . .] as they say has been done in the cities of Victoria, Lisbon and Valencia, and as they have started to do with much charity and care in Madrid, in the parish of San Martin [. . .] which is being imitated in the other parishes of the court, as they are starting in San Ginés and San Sebastian with much fervor and care.111 Although Pérez de Herrera’s plans would not become a reality in the urban space until the first decades of the seventeenth century, Alemán, among others, would have been familiar with Herrera’s plans and ideas. Furthermore, Alemán had direct contact with Herrera as the two worked together in the parish of San Martín and had business dealings together.112 By the time Alemán finished Guzmán, the Hospital General was already built and operating. As a result, roaming youths had been summoned to the poorhouses and forbidden to beg in the streets without a special licence.113 It is for these reasons that any analysis of Alemán’s text must consider the visible changes to urban space as a point of reference in the debate between reformers and literary authors, between the idea of the poorhouse, its physical manifestation in the general hospital, and the possible world of the casa de los pícaros. There was a practice in the city which was both the result of the texts of the arbitristas and the object of representation in Alemán’s text. This representation then functions in a discursive field made up of the arbitrios, the brick-and-mortar manifestations of these ideas, along with all the wanted and unwanted side effects of the construction projects discussed earlier. In the terms of Lefebvre, the literary representation fictionalizes, evaluates and extrapolates from this situation, thus introducing another representation of space to function in the production of space.114 There are many significant differences between Giginta’s and Pérez de Herrera’s plans.115 However, as far as the poorhouses are concerned, Giginta and Pérez de Herrera are aligned in their belief in the possibility of reeducating the poor and in the necessity to provide them with a fixed place in the city. Many of Alemán’s ideas on poverty and the problem of the false poor coincide with those of Pérez de Herrera and Giginta. Since the 1960s, critics have been able to refer to the letters written by Alemán (published by the scholar Edmond Cros) and the Informe secreto (published by German Bleiberg). This material has provided key insight into

Displacing the Pícaro 57 how Alemán communicated his thoughts outside of the literary realm. Moreover, Cavillac, Ann Cruz and others have studied the many coincidences between the three authors.116 However, there are various significant elements in the episode from Guzmán de Alfarache that diverge from the ideas of Alemán’s contemporaries. The young pícaro states that the house was acquired with the money of others, quite like the casas de misericordia or the albergues de pobres would have been financed with the money of the citizens and the parish crowd. There are various ways in which the poor houses were financed. In addition to money from the crown, an increasing part of the funding of poor relief was received from the theatres in the city, as has been reconstructed by Carmen Sanz Ayán and Bernardo García.117 In both the treatises and Guzmán, the place for the pícaro is a fixed place. This reflects a general Renaissance interest in fixing spatiality. Moreover, the fixed place of the court requires by consequence a spatial determination of the relative position of all social strata. The pícaro has to react to this change in urban geography. Mercedes Maroto Camino, in her study of Lazarillo has probed into the promise of the idea of the city as a buen puerto, a benevolent port that determines the pícaro’s perspective on urban society, and the attraction of the city; this attraction is in many ways the promise of a place of his own.118 This place for the pícaro is constructed in distinct ways in the texts of the social reformers and the picaresque novel. Where Pérez de Herrera and Giginta aim to impose place on the vagabonds, Alemán’s pícaros claim a place for themselves. In the historical context of the promulgations, the dynamic of the occupation of the Santa Cruz square by pícaros and the efforts by the town council to remove them from there and displace them to the Hospital General stand testimony to the struggle over place. The houses of Giginta and Pérez de Herrera were also associated with parishes.119 Giginta’s Hospital General was located on San Jerónimo and Pérez de Herrera proposes the parishes of San Martín, San Ginés and San Sebastian as possible sites for his albergues de pobres. San Martín was in fact the parish in which Alemán and Pérez de Herrera collaborated. The parish of Santa Cruz, which did not have a poorhouse in the late 1590s, would have been sufficiently similar but essentially distinct from the houses of Giginta and Pérez de Herrera. That is to say, Alemán constructs an image with sufficient elements that invite a comparison of the house of pícaros with the proposed and real poorhouses of his contemporaries, whilst at the same time maintaining its status as a fiction by locating the house in a place where it would be recognized as fictional by an important part of his readership: the “movers and shakers” in the city such as Pérez de Herrera and his circle.120 The houses of the three authors are places of encounter for vagabonds and pícaros. Moreover, these places are separate and distinct from the squares and taverns, usually associated with the pícaro. The tavern is a

58  Displacing the Pícaro space where all levels of society mix; the casa de pícaros and the poorhouses have a much more homogenous clientele when it comes to social status, and in them, the pícaros are left to themselves. As such, the houses are places distinct from the places traditionally associated with the socially marginal.121 This difference opens up a new possibility, or more a challenge perhaps, for literary exploration. Whereas there are literary topoi for taverns and squares, the poorhouse is a fairly recent invention and reality in the urban space of late sixteenth-century Madrid. Like the pícaro, the poorhouse as a tool for the reform of the poor has a limited literary history. Interestingly the literary treatment of the poorhouse requires a rounded poor protagonist; it requires the inside perspective of the pícaro. The changed urban spatiality thus requires a new type of protagonist. It may, one could conclude, not be the crass socio-economic circumstances that spawned the voice of the pícaro, but much rather the contemporary attempts to assign a specific place to the vagrant transient marginals—that, truth be told, haunted cities since Babylon and before— in the new metropolis that inspired a literary exploration of this place, and with it produced the need for an inside perspective. The most prominent point of divergence between Guzmán and the treatises is the interpretation Alemán provides of the pícaro’s use of the place. When he describes the routine in the house he tells of the dinners they share, and how they discuss the things they hear whilst they are dispersed throughout the city during daytime. Well, as they roam the town from one end to the other all day, through different streets and houses, and because there are so many of them and they are so dispersed, they hear a lot of things from many people [. . .] Having combined all the goods everyone had acquired during the day, we discussed over supper what was going on in the court.122 The pícaros, of which there are many, hear a lot from many different citizens. There is a claim to objectivity in this statement. The combination of the idea that the dispersed pícaros hold claim to qualitative information with the possession of a house in the centre of Philip II’s capital, provides a very different image of the poor in the city than the one offered by Giginta and Pérez de Herrera. Beyond the dichotomy of true and false poor, Alemán provides his readers with the idea of the informed poor, who derive power from their knowledge of the city. It is perhaps in this light that we could interpret the heading “Más vale saber que haber” of the chapter in Guzmán in which the protagonist describes his stay in the house on the Santa Cruz square.123 With Bourdieu, we could pose that Alemán conceives the power of the vagabond based on the social capital that can be derived from information in the urban space. This power can be developed thanks in part to the fixed place funded by others. If we

Displacing the Pícaro 59 accept that this idea was to function as an antithesis to the proposals of Giginta and Pérez de Herrera, that funding would come from the perhaps naïve charity of the citizens. Alemán creates a separate, closed spaced owned by its inhabitants, who form a homogenous and integrated group. The taverns and square are public, under social control. The casa de los pícaros, on the other hand, is closed, and, within it, the pícaros can exchange information in large numbers away from the watchful eye and without the interference of the executive power of the town council. It is, therefore, significant that Alemán should choose to locate the “juntas y fiestas” in the centre of the court.124 In this episode, the supposed marginality of the urban vagrant is not reflected in the place assigned to the literary pícaro in the urban geography represented by Alemán. The power of the poor may have an oxymoronic ring to it. But this is where we arrive at a productive element in the import of extratextuality in Alemán’s text. This is where the accidental nature of the urban space and the exploring projection of the author join in the formation of a new synthesis of urban poverty, a new concept, a reevaluation that goes beyond a notion of poverty based solely on materiality. Understanding this reevaluation requires a critical consideration of the current definitions of urban poverty in the light of the nascent public sphere in the early modern period, a subject that is receiving increasing scholarly attention.125 Alexander Cowan’s definition of (urban) poverty is based primarily on material need: In the context of early modern European urban history, we may define poverty as the absence of personal resources to act as a cushion at a time of personal or general difficulty or, alternatively, among those of higher social status, as the inability to keep up the standards expected of the person of one’s rank.126 Although highlighting the material nature of poverty, this definition does not take into consideration the possibility of power and or wealth based on the possession of information. Cowan’s definition is representative of much of the current discourse on urbanization and poverty in the early modern period, but it does not take into account the increasing importance of the exchange of information in early modern cities.127 In the early modern city, there was increasing attention to the integrity of information, and access to information gains in importance.128 The evidence presented here shows that, in this context, information, the access to information and, by consequence, the struggle to control information, was gaining in relevance in the early modern city. This increasing relevance is manifest in the episode in Guzmán, and in many others of the first generation of literary representations of early modern Madrid, as shall be discussed further in Chapter 3.

60  Displacing the Pícaro The constructed nature of the episode indicates that we should not consider Alemán’s representation of late sixteenth-century Madrid as the mere import from the text of the city but much rather as forming part of the very development of the notion of poverty. The complex nature of information both as a cohesive and discriminating content of the urban network and as an object of literary representation, in particular, in the case of early modern Madrid, requires further study. In Chapter 3, we shall discuss at length the representation of information exchange in the first generation of literary representations of early modern Madrid, but in order to understand the significance of the exchange of information in this house, which is a central element in the description of life in the house on Santa Cruz, we must start with a first glimpse of the subject. Much like Giginta and Pérez de Herrera, Alemán, who had been an investigative judge, was familiar with the reality of the urban vagabond.129 Yet Alemán did not have the objectives of the arbitristas nor did he have to adhere to the logic of the treatises. Unlike the arbitristas, Alemán had little capacity for advancing his career by serving the interests of his superiors and the powerful in general, as is illustrated by his dispute with the wealthy Fugger bankers over the outcome of his investigation in the Fugger mines.130 His sense of justice is reflected both in his representation of poverty as in the programme to unveil the fraudulent strategies of the false poor. Instead of submitting a proposal, Alemán projects in his fiction the possible outcome of the proposal, doing so with the constructed image of a house of pícaros in the centre of the city. From the evidence discussed, it appears that Alemán introduced the idea of the power over information as part of the debate on urban poverty and vagrancy. He did this by presenting the vagabonds as spread out over the city. The information-sharing element is found in many picaresque texts, for example Don Toribio’s gang in Buscón, who find their way through the city based on which debtor to avoid, and assign places to beg so as not to show up in the same place too often, or the gang in La desordenada codicia de los bienes agenos (1619), which will be discussed at length in Chapter 2, the meticulous administration of Monipodio’s criminal guild in Rinconete y Cortadillo, the gang in the Diablo cojuelo who have extended protocolled meetings. However, as much as we can refer to a motif of the communal life of lowlifes, of all these writers Alemán is the only one who envisions the information sharing in a broader perspective. The pícaros in the house on Santa Cruz not only discuss directly relevant information about begging and stealing but also information about the activities of the other citizens. Alemán is not only warning of a disorderly lifestyle; he is presenting the problem of the information-based emancipation of the marginal. The struggle over information was a part of everyday life on Madrid’s squares and streets. We know from a chain of promulgations starting in 1585 that the court officers of the town council repeatedly prohibited

Displacing the Pícaro 61 congregations for the sake of gossip in the last two decades of the sixteenth century.131 The municipality identified the pícaro as a distinct problem in the struggle over information in the city. Moreover, in 1583, the “alguacil de los vagabundos de la corte” named “Mateo Pérez de Portillo” asks the chamber for funds to pay informants that may provide him with information about the gangs in the city.132 Your majesty has asked me to remit a request by Mateo Pérez de Portillo, the constable of the vagabonds of the court and he supplicates your Majesty to grant him a grace [. . .] so that he may execute his office better, for which he cannot go without a horse and two helpers and goods so that he can employ agents who can give him information concerning certain delinquents and vagabonds.133 Mateo Pérez Portillo expresses the same suspicions of what goes on behind closed doors as Mateo Alemán when he writes about the juntas y fiestas and the suppers during which the pícaros inform each other about life in the city. In the chain of command of the municipal authorities, Pérez Portillo is probably the person closest to the pícaros on Santa Cruz. In the episode, Alemán projects what the council and the constable suspect and wish to control by means of promulgations and spies, and which Giginta and Pérez de Herrera cannot see, or perhaps purposefully omit, in their respective treatises. The possibility to construct the image of the knowledge-empowered marginal is in many ways dependent on the literary form Alemán is devising as he constructs his novel, his poética historia. Alemán confronts the treatises with the “inside perspective” of the pícaro, who expresses his own particular, and at times incoherent, perspective; in the second part of Guzmán, the protagonist reflects on the inversive and distorted nature of his perception: “But, as I am bad, I cannot judge anything to be good: that is my misfortune, and that of my peers. I convert violets into poison, stain the snow, mistreat and befoul with my thoughts the budding rose.”134 The perspective of the pícaro is not restrained by the necessity of coherence. It is free to oscillate, to personify ambivalence and to present perspectives that otherwise may not have passed the censor. The complex focalization of the “confesión de un mentiroso” as it was called by Claudio Guillén, or the mise en abyme of the paradox of Epimenides to which Francisco Rico refers in his analysis of the picaresque point of view, offer the possibility to construct a voice entirely different to the logic of the treatises.135 Whereas Giginta and Herrera attempt to elaborate their plans within the generic frame of the treaty, Alemán’s analysis is based on an understanding of the essential incoherence of the pícaro. Alemán offers a ludic, chaotic and opportunist space, which in spite of being largely a fiction may end up being closer to the truth of spatial practices in the city than the ideal urban space of

62  Displacing the Pícaro the social reformer’s treatise. Hence too, the vastly more complex literary heritage of the picaresque novel as opposed to the chapbook “Anatomies of Roguery” found in other literary systems.136 Alemán did not merely assimilate and reproduce the position of such contemporaries as Giginta and Pérez de Herrera. Alemán contrasts an idealized vision of poverty and remedies for poverty, with a dramatized vision of the practice. The intellectual step Alemán makes in this very episode is tremendous, as he brought a debate conducted by a few to a mass international readership. For the arbitristas, assigning a closed space to the pícaros, whose terrain were the squares, streets and the neighbourhoods outside of the city walls, had the purpose of cleaning the streets. Alemán investigated what the city’s poor would do once the door would be closed, not from the outside but from the inside. There is an incongruence between this analysis and his work for the parish of San Martín, but the subjectivity of the pícaro offers a possibility to synthesize this incongruence. B. W. Ife stated: What Guzmán is demonstrating here and elsewhere throughout the book is that things are a good deal more complex than people like to think, that moral and social questions are intricate and often insoluble, and above all that people are prey to powerful conflicts of character.137 His was a position Cavillac rejected as anachronistic, as it appeared to him as excessively modern in its acceptance of the coexistence of polar opposites. The aforementioned analysis of the spatiality in Alemán’s text and the richness in the significance of the episode cannot but tend towards agreement with Ife. The casa de los pícaros is the representation of a place that is the unintended outcome of city planning and actual practice, which is then instrumentalized within a literary framework. Through the reshuffling of urban space and the distinct phenomena in it, Alemán creates an image that functions within the discourse on poor relief and poor houses in the metropolis. Alemán himself discussed the aims of his literary creation in general terms both in the paratext of Guzmán de Alfarache as well as in letters to peers.138 With his representation of the Plaza de Santa Cruz, Mateo Alemán wrote a house of pícaros in order to communicate with his contemporaries, doing so not in the form of yet another arbitrio but in the frame of a newly devised literary form. Our semiotic analysis of the extraliterary referent has provided a detailed insight into the potential for the making of repertoire provided by late sixteenth-century Madrid. We have seen how the sometimes chaotic growth of the city created unwanted spaces such as the casas de malicia, moved century-old peripheral neighbourhoods into the centre of a

Displacing the Pícaro 63 Renaissance imperial city, and attracted all types of people who then roamed these places. This chaos then provided a rich pool for the making of repertoire.139 The debate on the concrete implication of poor relief in Madrid during the last two decades of the sixteenth century, particularly the idea of poorhouses, was quite specific and rather short-lived, given the failure of Giginta’s project, the changing role of the Hospital General and the role of the theatres (the so-called corrales de comedia) in the project of poor relief. This changing emphasis could explain why Alemán’s position in this debate has always been discussed as concurring with the position of Herrera. Having established the constructed nature of the casa de pícaros through a microhistorical study of the referent, it has become possible to focus, instead, on the many significant differences between Alemán and his contemporaries. Alemán’s particular and immediate discursive aim also goes a long way to explain why this house, owned by a community of pícaros, should turn out to be so singular in the genre of the picaresque novel: Alemán’s emulators—who formed part of an interpretative community that would read the scene against the particular city which they perceived alongside the reading—would recognize the debate in which this house belongs, and focus on other elements instead, just as many of the other polemic and moralizing elements in Guzmán were never reiterated in the continuations, imitations and translations of the work. The rejection of the idea of a house of rogues in subsequent picaresque and costumbrist representations of the court reflects on the acceptance of such particular discursive fictions in these genres. The ensuing chapters will address two problems raised in the present chapter. Chapter 2 shall delve deeper into the extratextual referent of the pícaros and vagabonds that populated the squares and back-alley inns of Madrid. Chapter 3 will discuss the status of information exchange in the city.

Acknowledgements This chapter synthesizes and elaborates arguments and materials originally published in Konstantin Mierau, “La casa de los pícaros en el Guzmán de Alfarache, un pregón de 1579 y la poética del espacio urbano de Mateo Alemán,” in Pictavia aurea. Actas del IX Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro, ed. Alain Bègue (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013), 543–52; and Konstantin Mierau, “ ‘Más vale saber que haber’ Información urbana y la visión de Mateo Alemán del poder del pobre en el espacio urbano,” in Pauvres et pauvreté en Europe à l’époque moderne (xvie—xviie siècle), ed. Luc Torres and Hélène Rabaey (Paris: éd. Classiques Garnier, 2016), 281–94. The chapter is published with the permission of the respective publishers.

64  Displacing the Pícaro

Notes 1. There is considerable debate as to the interpretation of this conversion, ­particularly in the light of the author’s converso background. See Judith Whitenack, Confession and Conversion in the Guzmán de Alfarache (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1980), Michel Cavillac, Guzmán y la novela moderna (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2010). 2. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. José María Micó (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009), I, 266, “Con esto determiné pasar adelante y por entonces a Madrid; que estaba allí la corte, donde todo florecía, con muchos del tusón, muchos grandes, muchos titulados, muchos prelados, muchos caballeros, gente principal, y sobre todo, rey mozo, recién casado.” 3. Mercedes Maroto Camino, Practicing Places: Saint Teresa, Lazarillo and the Early Modern City (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), provides a study of the image of the city as a promising port of good fortune in Lazarillo de Tormes. 4. Alemán, Guzmán, I, 275, De manera que cuando llegué a Madrid, entré hecho un gentil galeote, bien a la ligera, en calzas y camisa: eso muy sucio, roto y viejo, porque para el gasto fue todo menester. Viéndome tan despedazado, aunque procuré buscar a quien servir, acreditándome con buenas palabras, ninguno se aseguraba de mis obras malas ni quería meterme dentro de casa en su servicio porque estaba muy asqueroso y desmantelado. Creyeron ser algún pícaro ladroncillo que los había de robar y acogerme. 5. Encarnación Juárez-Almendros, El cuerpo vestido y la construcción de la identidad en las narrativas autobiográficas del Siglo de Oro (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006), provides an insightful analysis of the role of dress vis-à-vis the tactics of the construction of the identity of the protagonist: Las frecuentes transformaciones del aspecto de Guzmán de Alfarache se equiparan con una personalidad profundamente escindida y con un sujeto totalmente abyecto. Sus oscilaciones entre su querer pertenecer o su rechazar al grupo, entre reconocer las reglas y romperlas, entre pasar de incógnito o ser reconocido se expresan en numerosos cambios de identidad que consigue a través del vestido. Juárez-Almendros, El cuerpo, 5, The frequent transformations of Guzmán’s appearance correlate with a profoundly divided personality and an entirely abject subject. His oscillation between wanting to belong to a group or rejecting it, between acknowledging and breaking the rule, between masking his identity and wanting to be recognized are expressed in the manifold changes in identity brought about by a change in clothing. 6. Alemán, Guzmán, I, 333–4, Teníamos en la plaza junto a Santa Cruz nuestra casa propia, comprada y reparada de dinero ajeno. Allí eran las juntas y fiestas. Levantábame con el sol; acudía con diligencia por aquellas tenderas y panaderos, entraba en la carnecería; hacía mi agosto las mañanas por todo el día; dábanme los parroquianos que no tenían mozo que les llevase la comida; hacíalo fiel y diligentemente, sin faltarles un cabello. 7. Alemán, Guzmán, I, 334. 8. Alemán, Guzmán, I, 334, “Nosotros, pues, recogido todo lo de todos, en cuanto se cenaba, referíamos lo que en la Corte pasaba.” 9. Although Guzmán’s first stay in the city provides a highly interesting literary representation of the young capital, it is missing in such compendia as José Simon Díaz, Guia literaria de Madrid: Arrabales y Barrios Bajos (Madrid:

Displacing the Pícaro 65 Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1993). As far as Madrid in Guzmán is concerned, there is a tendency to select Guzmán’s second stay in the city. When it comes to the study of urban poverty and rogue communities in Guzmán, there is a strong tendency to study the Micer Morcón episode in Rome and the Ordenanzas mendicativas, as is the case in the recent studies by Geremek and Brioso Santos. Between the one and the other, Guzmán’s episode with the house-owing pícaros of Madrid has escaped the attention of scholars. See Bronislaw Geremek, La estirpe de Caín: La imagen de los vagabundos y pobres en las literaturas europeas de los siglos XV al XVII (Madrid: Biblioteca Mondadori, 1991). Claudio Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study of the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature (New York: Garland, 1987), Stanislav Zimic, Las Novelas Ejemplares de Cervantes (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1996), Héctor Brioso Santos, Sevilla en la prosa de ficción del Siglo de Oro (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 1998), Simón Díaz, Guia literaria de Madrid. 0. AHN, Consejos, Libros, 1197, fol. 15, 1 [. . .] mandan los señores alcaldes de la casa y corte de su magestad que ningun bodegonero ni bodegonera de los que estan en la plaza de santa cruz ni de los postes de los portales desta villa tengan ningún moco picaro ni vagamundo les sirba ni les den de comer a los dichos pícaros ni vagamundos so pena de cada dos años de destierro de la corte y de diez ducados [. . .]. 11. For relevant work on the alcaldes de la casa y corte, the names of the officials and their terms in office, the families represented in the council, see Isabel Cabrera Bosch, El Consejo Real de Castilla y la ley (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1993), Enrique Villalba Pérez, La administración de la justicia penal en Castilla y en la Corte a comienzos del siglo XVII (Madrid: Editorial Actas, 1993), Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, El nacimiento de una capital europea: Madrid entre 1561–1606 (Madrid: Turner/Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1989). See the introduction. 12. The document provides the only specific mention in the Libros de Gobierno of pícaros and their activities on the Santa Cruz square prior to 1599, the year of the publication of the first part of Guzmán. Likewise, before 1600, neither the Plaza nor the term pícaro are mentioned in the Ynventario de causas criminales (AHN, Consejos, Libros, 2783), which lists all criminal cases treated by the sala de alcaldes. 13. Alemán, Guzmán, I, 333–4. 14. Agustín Amezúa y Mayo was the first to reproduce parts of the promulgation in his study of Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares, indicating it as the first mention of the word pícaro in the municipal sources. (Amezúa y Mayo, Cervantes: Creador de la Novela Corta Española (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1958), II, 80–1.) Amezúa y Mayo also mentions the promulgation, without producing a transcript, in a footnote of his study of the novela cortesana. (Agustín Amezúa y Mayo, Opúsculos Históricos-Literarios (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1951), I, 220.) Cavillac cites Amezúa y Mayo and reproduces parts of the promulgation, excluding, interestingly, the reference to the Plaza de Santa Cruz. (Michel Cavillac, Gueux et Marchands dans le Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604). Roman picaresque et mentalité bourgeoise dans l’Espagne du Siècle d’Or (Bordeaux: Institut D’études Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines de l’université de Bordeaux, 1983), 67.) Most recently, Rutherford, who also takes Amezúa y Mayo as his reference, used the promulgation in his chronology of pre-literary uses of the word pícaro. (John Rutherford, Breve historia del pícaro preliterario (Vigo: Universidade de Vigo, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2001), 55.)

66  Displacing the Pícaro 15. José Martínez Millán and Santiago Fernández Conti (eds.), La Monarquía de Felipe II: la casa del rey (Volumes I—II) (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre/Tavera, 2005), II, 780, reproduce part of a letter to the king in footnote 1386. Unfortunately, the memorial is in too bad a state to be consulted at present AGS, PE (Patrimonio eclesiastico): billete de Antonio Pazos a Felipe II de 15 de diciembre de 1579 “Serena, Católica, Real, Majestad: en fin siempre Dios permytte que el que mal haze lo pague, dígolo porque con las buenas dyligencias hechas se halló el matador de Don Dyego Ramyrez que es Don Beltrán de Guevara al qual sacaron los alcaldes de San Francisco sin ningún ruydo ni contradycion, y stá en la carcel a buen recaudo. A sydo buen instrumento para esto portillo el alguacil de los pícaros que puso en ello mucha dyligencia. Note from Antonio Pazos to Phillip II of the 15th of December of 1579