Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in <i>Persiles</i> 9781442687578

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CERVANTES’ EPIC NOVEL: EMPIRE, RELIGION, AND THE DREAM LIFE OF HEROES IN PERSILES

Any examination of the history of northeastern North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must take into account three central, interacting sources of influence on the region’s development: the colonial, the imperial, and the aboriginal. Thus, while the relationship between native inhabitants and colonial settlers helped to define Acadia/Nova Scotia and New England in this era, it was also shaped by wider continental and oceanic connections. The essays in this volume deal with the widely varied forms of colonial habitation throughout the region, the manifold expressions of imperial exchange with this colonial world, and the persistent process of aboriginal engagement with the growing non-aboriginal presence. John G. Reid argues that these complicated processes interacted freely with one another, making northeastern North America an arena of distinctive complexities in the early modern period. Reid also explores the significance of anniversary observances and commemorations that have served as vehicles of reflection on the lasting implications of development in this era. These essays offer a fresh perspective on the region and a deeper understanding of North American history. john g. reid is a professor in the Department of History at Saint Mary’s University. his multidisciplinary volume brings together scholars and activists to examine expressions of racism in a number of contemporary policy areas: education, labour, immigration, media, and urban planning. While anti-racist struggles during the twentieth century were largely

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MICHAEL ARMSTRONG -ROCHE

Cervantes’ Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in Persiles

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

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© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utpublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9085-0

Printed on acid-free paper University of Toronto Romance Series

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Armstrong-Roche, Michael, 1962– Cervantes’ epic novel : empire, religion, and the dream life of heroes in Persiles / Michael Armstrong-Roche. (University of Toronto Romance Series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9085-0 1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547–1616. Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. I. Title. II. Series: University of Toronto Romance Series PQ6327.P5A75 2009

863′.3

C2008-907078-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

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For my father, Wallace Armstrong

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Para mi madre, Paloma Roche

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Acknowledgments ix Note on Editions, Translations, and Names xiii Introduction: Cervantes’ Epic Novel 1. Europe as Barbaric New World

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2. Christian Spirituality: The Law of Love

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3. Epic Recast: The Dream Life of the New Hero 4. Christian Politics: Church and State

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Epilogue: Cervantes’ Human and Divine Comedy Appendix: Composition Dates of Persiles 306 Notes 309 Works Cited 361 Index

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Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to begin my acknowledgments with an expression of heartfelt gratitude to my editor at the University of Toronto Press, Jill McConkey. Jill took an early and steadfast interest in the manuscript and has shepherded it with exceptional professionalism, patience, tact, and sensibility. The University of Toronto Press has long been a beacon for medieval and Renaissance studies, and the Romance Series’ decided embrace of Cervantes is to be cheered by readers of early modern literature. I thank Barbara Porter for her expert coordination of production, and for her blessed patience. I also very much appreciate the eagle-eyed meticulousness that Ian MacKenzie brought to his copy editing. John Beadle is responsible for the elegant cover design, which incorporates a particularly apt image (of a 1617 map). Carol Roberts did her usual (heroically) thorough and thoughtful work for the index. At a critical stage, Chris Collins of the University of Michigan Press provided crucial support. The anonymous readers of the manuscript came to my rescue with the gift of their time, learning, critical acumen, and imagination. Their encouraging and challenging comments have done me the enormous favour of helping me say better what I mean. This book began life as a dissertation under the tutelage of Mary Gaylord at Harvard University. Little more of that dissertation survives in the book than its title and thematic structure, which amounts to saying its premise. And yet Mary is the book’s true alma mater. She made the initial work possible by the exquisite example of her own scholarship, her deep and abiding respect for student idiosyncrasy, her sense of responsibility as a scholar and teacher, and her humanity. Mary belongs to that rare breed of scholars who let students into their workshops, demystifying the arcana of the trade and enabling novices to

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come into their own intellectual authority. A cherished mentor in graduate school, she has since proved herself the best of colleagues and friends in ongoing conversation about scholarship, teaching, and life. Mary has also been a mine of ideas for the book. Her respect for authors and texts, for readers, and for students are all of a piece and have been my guiding inspiration as a scholar and teacher. Peter Dunn was another early reader of the manuscript and provided acute and unfailingly helpful suggestions, always going to the heart of an essential matter. The writing of this book coincided with a happy period of teaching at Wesleyan University. Like few other experiences in life, Wesleyan has brought home the power of affinity to me. It has blessed me with a community deeply committed, in all the ways that count, to the teacherscholar ideal and to the promotion of a truly humanistic liberal arts education. Special thanks go to my colleagues in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, for a rare combination of intellectual stimulation and personal warmth. They have helped me test ideas for and reshape my thinking about the book. Robert ‘Bo’ Conn, Antonio González, Joyce Lowrie, Jeff Rider, and Marcello Simonetta read part or all of the manuscript and offered precious suggestions. Over the years I have profited from and taken great pleasure in Bo Conn’s intellectual intensity and extraordinary loyalty, to this project and to its author. At critical moments Antonio González and Jeff Rider, acting as chairs of the department, entered the lists with magnanimity and charity. Joyce and Ernest Lowrie were early, loving, and exceptionally thoughtful readers of the manuscript; they are old hands too at memorable entertaining. I am grateful to Ellen Nerenberg for her steady confidence and active interest in my work, for guidance about publishing, and finally (with Anthony Valerio) for often welcoming me into her home even when my mind was captive to Cervantes. I benefited from Andrew ‘Andy’ Curran’s good judgment and kindness regarding publication and other professional matters. For collegial conversation and support I also thank José Luis Abellán, Fernando Degiovanni, María José ‘Pepa’ Eizaguirre, María Luisa Eizaguirre, Octavio Flores, Typhaine Leservot, Carmen Moreno Nuño, Catherine Ostrow, Ana Pérez Gironés, Catherine Poisson, Norman Shapiro, Diana Sorensen, and Carolyn Sorkin. Rosalind Eastaway, officially the administrative assistant of Wesleyan’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and unofficially its beating heart, has been an incalculable source of expert help,

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conversation, affection, humour, seny, and tremendous charm over the years. I am grateful to attentive auditors and readers of the Wesleyan Renaissance Seminar and the Wesleyan Arts and Humanities Division Lecture Series, venues where Wesleyan’s long-standing tradition of interdisciplinarity is nurtured. Especially helpful to me in these and related Wesleyan forums (including informal conversation and email exchange) were Moisés Castillo, Susanne Fusso, Mary-Hannah Jones, Natasha Korda, Stephanie Kuduk, Priscilla Meyer, Cecilia Miller, Laurie Nussdorfer, John Paoletti, Paul Schwaber, Joseph ‘Joe’ Siry, Jutta Sperling, and Duffield ‘Duffy’ White. I take special pleasure in recognizing what I owe to my extraordinary students at Wesleyan. With their live-wire creativity, their intense curiosity, their skepticism, their vitality, their diverse experiences of reading and of life, and their urgent sense of responsibility to the world at large, they have been my unheralded collaborators in the classroom and on the written page. I thank audiences at the Harvard Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Asociación de Cervantistas (Association of Cervantes Scholars) for their attention and interest. For questions, suggestions, and comments, I am particularly grateful to Leo Cabranes-Grant, Ernesto Guerra, Carmen Hsu, Gustavo Illades, Wolfgang Matzat, Juan Silva, and María Stoopen. For encouragement of the work at crucial junctures I also thank María Fernanda Abreu, Josiah Blackmore, Georgina Dopico Black, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Augustin Redondo, Carlos Romero Muñoz, and Ann Wightman. The book could not have been written without the renewal born of periodic escapes into other lives, creative distractions, and wide-ranging conversation: for some or all of these, I thank Paul and Anna-Marie, Cecilia, and Ian Armstrong; Bakul Bhatnagar; Kehaulani Kauanui; David Low; and Cecilia Mandrile. I have also benefited from friendly and collegial conversations about various aspects of this book with Rafael Burgos Mirabal, Sara Eigen, Claudia Heiman, Bryan Jones, Isaac Maddow-Zimet, Wesley Moss, Naomi Pierce, Floyd Sweeting III, and Charlotte Tomlinson. I am especially indebted to two dear friends whom I consider unofficial collaborators, for the gift of their conversation and the shared love of Cervantes and other pleasures: Julieta Victoria Muñoz Alvarado, hermana del alma, friend and companion in so many adventures of the mind and soul since the very first day of graduate school; and Elizabeth

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Wolf, for helping me realize at a distance the Epicurean ideal of friendship, a conversation in the garden, abolishing great removes by the new magic of modern telecommunications and the old magic of the spoken word. The Interlibrary Loan Office staffs of Olin Library (Wesleyan) and Widener Library (Harvard) were vital sources of support. Among Olin Library’s distinguished and unfailingly helpful staff I would single out Edward Allen, Dianne Kelly, Dorothy Samson, and Katherine Wolfe for their expertise, patience, and generosity over the years. I am grateful, too, to the staffs of the Casa de Velázquez library, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Biblioteca Complutense in Madrid for precious, lastminute bibliographical help. Parts of earlier versions of chapters 1 and 2 were published in Spanish as an article in a collection sponsored by the Asociación de Cervantistas, which grew out of a conference specially devoted to Persiles (‘Europa como bárbaro Nuevo Mundo en la novela épica de Cervantes,’ 2004). The book’s publication has been aided by a grant from the Thomas and Catharine McMahon Memorial Fund at Wesleyan University. The dedication is for my parents, Wallace Armstrong and Paloma Roche. More than anyone, they have helped me keep body and soul together. They also prepared me in ways they could not have anticipated (and perhaps would not always have looked on benignly) for appreciating a novel that pictures life, at least in part, as a globe-trotting adventure. There is no privilege quite like belonging to more than one culture (or none or many) – not because any special wisdom necessarily comes of it but because there is possibly no greater source of human comedy.

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Note on Editions, Translations, and Names

All references to Cervantes’ Persiles are noted parenthetically within the text by page number as they appear in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional, edited by Carlos Romero Muñoz. Where I cite more than one passage from the same page in a single paragraph, I omit the parenthetical reference to avoid clutter and smooth the way for the reader. As a rule I give all quotations from languages other than English first in translation followed by the original text in parentheses. In those places where I have incorporated the sense and the rhetoric of the original text into my own prose, I leave the passage untranslated. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. For Persiles, I have kept my eye throughout on The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story, translated by Celia Richmond Weller and Clark A. Colahan. In my translations of Persiles the aim has been to render the original literally, both to highlight the senses most pertinent to the argument and to capture its richly textured, often idiosyncratic style. This means I embrace the kind of thorny rhetoric that translators often smooth over for the sake of ‘readability,’ whether snaking periodic sentences, tortured syntax, startling shifts of register and voice, prodigiously varied diction, or such stylistic tics as a fondness for pleonasm. Finally, I do not treat the protagonists’ names and aliases as if they were interchangeable. Periandro, Prince Persiles’ alias on the journey to Rome, emphasizes the hero’s Everyman quality stripped of his royal title (the name’s Greek roots, peri and andro, suggest ‘about’ and ‘man or male’). Auristela, Princess Sigismunda’s alias on the same journey, captures the heroine’s radiant – the Latin says ‘golden’ – star quality. Indeed her Roman archrival Hipólita calls her Periandro’s ‘sol’ (‘sun,’

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Persiles 677). Auristela later imagines herself the centre and circumference of Periandro’s life, and the narrator agrees (Persiles 710). I therefore refer to Periandro and Auristela whenever they are on the road in their private, adoptive guise and to Persiles and Sigismunda when the novel calls attention to their origins and especially their titled status as princes.

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CERVANTES’ EPIC NOVEL

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Introduction Cervantes’ Epic Novel

Cervantes took up the epic gauntlet when he announced that his final major work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional), dared to compete with Heliodorus.1 If Don Quijote casts its hero as a burlesque reader of chivalric literature, this tribute to the Hellenistic author of The Ethiopian Story of the Loves of Theagenes and Chariclea (Historia etiópica de los amores de Teágenes y Cariclea, henceforth The Ethiopica) would appear to make Cervantes a straight-faced writer of the Greek adventure novel. Quijote’s parodic approach to romance has often been celebrated as the high road to the brave new world of the ironic, realistic novel, Persiles’ apparent homage to it frequently derided as a turning away from a modernity the author helped inaugurate with Don Quijote. What emerges is the paradox, if not perversity, of a literary pioneer whose dying wish was to complete a novel beholden to an archaic genre of romance adventure. In the light of a realist aesthetic consecrated in the wake of late eighteenth-century Romanticism, Cervantes’ aspiration could perhaps be regarded only as a fall from grace.2 Faced with an author who seems determined to defy the march of history, some readers have been moved to deny his judgment of this valedictory novel, responding to it effectively as the frustrated first step of callow youth or the faltering misstep of an old man who had lost his way.3 Others still, seeing in Persiles an apparently invincible ideological conservatism, have attributed it to a late-life embrace of the Counter-Reformation Church or – taking a cue from Menéndez y Pelayo’s notion of ‘two Cervantes’ – to hypocrisy.4 One Cervantes was thereby turned against a better or earlier self, casting Persiles – like the novel’s main characters – as a pilgrim or barbarian outsider to the author’s most forward-looking work. Even appre-

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ciative readers of Persiles can feel compelled to break a lance for it, as if – a peregrino itself (‘outsider’ and ‘odd,’ as well as ‘pilgrim’ and ‘traveller’ in Spanish) – interest in it needed to be justified.5 And yet Cervantes had high hopes for Persiles, touting it five times before it found its way into print.6 He penned the dedication on 19 April 1616, only days before his death, and his widow Catalina de Salazar saw the novel published in 1617. Cervantes almost certainly looked on Persiles as his crowning achievement. Indeed, in his dedication for the second part of Quijote (1615) he predicts Persiles will be the best or worst ‘book ... of entertainment’ (‘libro ... de entretenimiento’) yet written in the language and then takes back the prevarication, because – as he tells it – his friends assured him it was as good as could be hoped.7 His tongue-incheek confidence was immediately seconded by his reading public. It went through seven printings in its first year, a success matching that of the first part of the Quijote (1605).8 Although Persiles was initially wellreceived at home, was translated and adapted for the stage in Spain and abroad, and spawned several imitations – one of them, in turn, possibly a source for Calderón’s play La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1636) – by the nineteenth century Don Quijote had definitively eclipsed it in fame, influence, and popularity.9 If Persiles is viewed in the light of this divergence between authorial intention and modern reception, we might then speak of a historical paradox to do with its fate. How was it that the epic that one of the greatest writers in the language believed would assure him his place on Parnassus should instead have found itself so thoroughly overshadowed by the burlesque Don Quijote? This book is my attempt to make sense of Cervantes’ hopes for Persiles. It is also my attempt to recover something of the experience of discovery that its pages may have offered its earliest readers. The guiding claim is that we take seriously the epic aspiration implied by the author’s challenge to Heliodorus. One consequence of it is that Persiles emerges as Cervantes’ summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an original light on major political, religious, social, and literary debates of its era. At the same time the study seeks to illuminate how such a lofty and solemn ambition could go hand in hand with Cervantes’ evident urge to delight, the manifest desire to write an epic that readers might regard as the most entertaining book in the language. To begin to elaborate these arguments we need first to get our bearings, to outline the story Persiles tells and what Heliodorus meant to Cervantes’ contemporaries. Persiles is about two young, beautiful, royal lovers who make their way from quasi-invented northern European

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island homelands to Rome in a journey that will last two years. The historical references, though not consistent, tend to place us in the years 1557 to 1559 (or, alternately, around 1606). Persiles is next in line to the succession of Tile (in English Thule, glossed as Iceland in Book 4), Sigismunda crown princess of neighbouring Frislanda (Friesland). The princess is entrusted to Tile’s royal family for safekeeping from wars that had embroiled her country and to prepare her for betrothal to Persiles’ eldest brother, Tile’s Crown Prince Maximino. While Maximino is off fighting wars of his own, Persiles falls madly, near-fatally in love with Sigismunda – indeed with such abandon that his mother Eustoquia, fearing for his life, sends the two protagonists packing for Rome on the pretext of a pilgrimage to receive further instruction in the Catholic faith. In principle this pilgrimage would enable them all to buy time, to find a way both to cure Persiles’ lovesickness and to honour Maximino’s birthright by primogeniture to Sigismunda’s hand. Alienated from their titles and privileges, the protagonists travel under the cover of aliases (Periandro and Auristela) as siblings, strictly observing a vow of chastity to respect Maximino’s prerogative while seeking some legitimate way to evade it – first of all through postponement. Their wanderings take them from the Barbaric Isle near Tile by sea to various made-up island kingdoms in northern Atlantic waters (Books 1 and 2), then overland from Lisbon through Spain, France, and Italy (Book 3) to their quest’s conclusion in Rome (Book 4). They meet with multiple ordeals along the way (the labours or trabajos of the title) and come across many characters with vexed destinies, trials, and stories of their own. Why Cervantes and his literary contemporaries embraced Heliodorus so enthusiastically is no secret to scholars. However, a thumbnail sketch of his novel and its Renaissance reception will help readers navigate the argument about Persiles mapped out ahead. Cervantes’ overt challenge to Heliodorus alludes to the Hellenistic author’s third-century Greek novel, The Ethiopica. The heroine of the novel, Chariclea, is an Ethiopian princess exposed at birth by her mother Persina because – to her embarrassment – the baby girl is born white. Owing to complicated twists of fate, Chariclea is raised at Delphi to become a priestess of Artemis. She meets the noble Greek youth Theagenes at a religious ceremony, and, lovestruck, they elope. Their subsequent life-threatening misadventures lead them across the Eastern Mediterranean from Greece to Egypt and at long last to Ethiopia, where Chariclea is eventually recognized by her mother, and the two lovers are wed. Featuring chaste protagonists, separation, far-flung settings from Delphi to

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Ethiopia, barbarian ‘others’ (Persians, Egyptians, and Ethiopians) to Hellenes, pirates, travel, storms, shipwreck, abductions and captivity, false deaths, dissimulation, disguise, reunion, marriage, and political succession, The Ethiopica enjoyed a revival across Europe with more or less complete translations into the vernaculars (from 1547 into French, 1554 and 1587 into Spanish, 1554 into German, 1559 into Italian, and 1569 into English) and imitations almost immediately thereafter.10 In Spanish, important generic milestones after the example of Heliodorus are the second, revised edition of Jerónimo de Contreras’s La selva de aventuras (The Forest of Adventures, 1582); Lope de Vega’s El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Homeland, 1604); Cervantes’ Persiles (1617); and Enrique Suárez de Mendoza’s Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica (Eustorgio and Clorilene: A Muscovite Story, 1629).11 The Ethiopica’s sixteenth-century revival is a fascinating chapter in the history of attempts to achieve the ever-elusive reconciliation of the classical and the popular.12 One of the contexts that made possible the intense literary polemics that preceded The Ethiopica’s revival was the emergence of a larger and more heterogeneous reading public than ever before in Spain, owing to the broad reach of the printing press and the rising literacy rates of what Richard Kagan has called the sixteenthcentury Castilian ‘educational revolution.’13 The consequent outpouring of a literature of entertainment in Spanish (Fernando de Rojas’s penetrating, bawdy Celestina; Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s chivalric Amadís de Gaula; Antonio de Guevara’s hugely popular pseudo-histories, the best-selling profane books of sixteenth-century Europe; the picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache; and Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral La Diana, together with their ‘progeny’) delighted readers and sounded the alarms of humanist and ecclesiastical moralists alike. A millennial hostility to fiction (or poetry, as it was often called, with its Greek root in the idea of making or making up), drawing alternately on Platonic and Christian arguments, could see no good in it: at best, an idle waste of time that should be spent reading history or didactic works; at worst, a pack of lies and incitements to indecency, an aesthetically and morally degenerate danger to the soul and to the republic.14 But there were humanists prepared to defend the value and utility of imaginative literature – sometimes half-heartedly as a respite from other more intellectually or morally respectable labours; at other times, as the honey-coated enticement for more or less disguised lessons; and less frequently, without apology for the truth-telling and pleasuregiving value of an intelligent entertainment that did not need to beg jus-

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tifications for itself from history, overt moral indoctrination, or social decorum.15 As E.C. Riley and Rogelio Miñana have suggested, the midsixteenth-century rediscovery and extensive commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics proved a vital step in defence of the dignity and integrity of fiction against critics who would ban it altogether or deny it any redeeming intellectual, moral, or social quality.16 Heliodorus’s Ethiopica served sixteenth-century defenders of imaginative literature as a model for prose fictions that could compete with – and yet raise the aesthetic and moral standard of – the kinds of popular entertainment that so exercised academic and moralist critics. Although never as popular as the chivalric, the pastoral, or the picaresque genres, the Greek novel achieved a greater centrality and authority in late sixteenth-century literary circles as an example for the long prose fiction, as a touchstone for debates about poetics and religious orthodoxy, and as a kind of narrative centred on high-born protagonists comparable to political genres such as epic, the mirror of princes, and the ideal commonwealth.17 Working within the horizons of a vocation that sought models for living in antiquity, many humanists turned to the Ethiopica for the classical paradigm of a fiction that would bridge the genres dignified by precept, written for an elite readership (such as epic), and the morally and aesthetically questionable chivalric and pastoral books whose popular appeal no one could deny.18 In this view, The Ethiopica would lead the way to a literature characterized by verisimilitude (in its root sense, the resemblance to truth), unity of plot leavened with episodic variety, suspense, moral exemplarity, decorum, erudition, and eloquence and nevertheless entertain a reading public fond of the wonders, implausibilities, ramifying episodes, indecorousness, and (often illicit) love stories of the chivalric books.19 And yet The Ethiopica’s chaste lovers, mistaken identities, coincidences, sudden reversals, and recognition scenes have since aligned Heliodorus’s novel with the generic mode of idealizing romance. By the late eighteenth century the kind of example that was once promoted as a way to move both epic and entertainment forward would begin to appear outmoded, superseded in a commonplace version of literary history by the realistic novel with its social concerns and quotidian ironies.20 Cervantes scholarship has tended to explain the differences and, increasingly, the similarities between Persiles and Don Quijote by appeal to this generic distinction between the romance and the novel. This has been the case even though the distinction as we know it is a legacy of Romanticism, with roots in the late seventeenth century, and

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would not have been recognizable to Cervantes and his contemporaries.21 Moving largely within that generic framework, Persiles scholarship has undergone a pendular swing in the past fifty years from readings that emphasize idealizing romance attributes to those that favour evidence of its novelistic realism. Because of the exotic northern European setting of the first two of Persiles’ four books, its subtly ironic rather than overtly parodic rhetoric, and its main plot – a pilgrimage to Rome by seemingly idealized semi-heroic protagonists – for long Persiles came to be regarded by scholars as a doubly orthodox turn: often thought naive and implausible in its apparent embrace of the pilgrim romance and sympathetic to Counter-Reformation Trent in its religion. In this idealizing tradition the pilgrimage to Rome has been read as a parable of the history of humanity,22 as an allegory of the pilgrimage of life,23 as a narrative translation of the Christianized Chain of Being linking heaven and hell with its ladder of moral perfectibility,24 and as a romance of the Christian cycle of sin, fall, and redemption.25 In contrast recent Persiles criticism has drawn attention to its own kinds of humour26 and realism;27 strains of rationalism (the novelization of a doctrine of the double truth in which natural reason casts doubt on Christian miracle and the immateriality of the spirit);28 proto-novelistic experiments in narrative irony29 and meta-fictional pyrotechnics;30 challenges to sexual31 and imperialist32 orthodoxies; political and religious allegory critical of official pieties, whose narrative logic is astrological rather than psychological;33 and formal and ideological affinities with twentieth-century Latin American magic realism and border-crossing post-colonial theory.34 The major premise of this book is that we can renew our appreciation of Persiles’ freshness, complexity, and daring by looking back to epic rather than forward to the novel and its romance foil. We are especially liable to sharpen our sense of the relation between Persiles’ formal and ideological complexity if we recover the pertinence of epic as a creative opportunity for Cervantes rather than as a generic dead end. Epic certainly captures the formal ambition and thematic range of Persiles, the encyclopedic quality of this novel. It is a story about religious pilgrims, which is itself presented as an alibi for the love story (notably for the hero, Persiles). The pilgrimage of love in turn prepares the protagonists for political succession in the final pages of the novel when, following the death of Persiles’ amorous and political rival – his elder brother, the first-born Maximino – the legal barriers to the protagonists’ ‘gusto’ (Persiles 140, 690) or preference fall away. And insisting on the epic frame enables us to see anew and fully the novel’s marked interest in politics – the crises of various kingdoms (the Barbaric Isle, Policarpo’s Isle, and

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Tile), the ideal commonwealth and false utopia of Policarpo’s rule, and the education of princes; in a word, its recurrent attention to the theory and practice of politics. Persiles’ encyclopedic scope could thus on its own justify the novel’s implied epic status, as a kind of narrative summa of Cervantes’ themes further enhanced by experiments in multiple genres within the Greek adventure mould. And yet it is also a preliminary matter of historical accuracy to read Persiles as an epic, since this is how the sixteenth-century commentators who helped promote The Ethiopica – Jacques Amyot, the French translator of Heliodorus; the humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger; the poet Torquato Tasso; and especially the theorist Alonso López Pinciano, to name the most renowned35 – gradually came to make sense of Cervantes’ avowed model. As is widely recognized but not perhaps sufficiently appreciated, in varying degrees they commended The Ethiopica to the world as a kind of prose epic, crowning it with generic laurels meant to elevate it to the hallowed condition of great verse epics such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. Since the early twentieth-century studies of Rudolf Schevill, scholars have recognized the Vergilian notes sounded on Policarpo’s Isle in Book 2: the athletic games to commemorate the king’s election, the explicit reference to Dido, and the evocation of the Carthaginian queen’s funeral pyre in the conflagration that consumes the isle.36 These intimations of epic ambition in Persiles merit extending to the whole novel, in the spirit of sixteenth-century poetics. The argument about genre here draws, in part, on a commonplace of Persiles scholarship. In his first book on Persiles (1970), Alban Forcione taught us to recognize that reading it in the light of sixteenth-century discussions of prose epic makes Cervantes’ last novel not only more intelligible but also more interesting as an aesthetic experiment. Although different in many ways, Don Quijote and Persiles are linked in Forcione’s reading by evidence of a creative and critical engagement with literary precept that accounts for a deep vein of refined academic humour in both. The debate between classical restraint and creative liberty in prose epic emerges as a major theme in two novels so often pitted against one another, as a source of characterization, of dialogue, and – in no small measure – of the novels’ ‘reality effects.’ However, Forcione discusses the prose epic context mainly in terms of the literary concerns of sixteenth-century theorists, in the dialogue of voices about standard neo-Aristotelian topics such as unity, verisimilitude, decorum, and exemplarity. I propose that we explore another dimension of Persiles’ epic bloodlines, equally prominent in sixteenth-century discussions of Heliodorus: epic’s authority to range over major public concerns such as politics and

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religion. By dwelling on this aspect of the epic legacy, we may come to notice not only what was gained but also what was lost with the triumph of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realism: the preoccupation with subjectivity and private life, in courtship and adultery narratives, makes a sharp contrast to epic’s (and therefore Persiles’ ) deep engagement with public life. In the following passage Northrop Frye captures this allencompassing sense of what it meant to undertake an epic in this period: The epic, as Renaissance critics understood it, is a narrative poem of heroic action, but a special kind of narrative. It also has an encyclopedic quality in it, distilling the essence of all the religious, philosophical, political, even scientific learning of its time, and, if completely successful, the definitive poem for its age. The epic in this sense is not a poem by a poet, but that poet’s poem: he can never complete a second epic unless he is the equal of Homer, and hence the moment at which the epic poet chooses his subject is the crisis of his life.37

Frye’s account echoes widespread views about epic held by Cervantes’ learned contemporaries, neatly summarizing two features that bear most directly on the argument of this book. What the sixteenth-century theorists associated with epic was, in part, Horace’s res gestae regumque ducumque tristia bella (Ars poetica 73), the deeds of kings and leaders and the sorrows of war.38 The model for this view of epic was The Iliad. Great stress would be placed in poetics on the highborn and morally exemplary condition of Horace’s ‘kings and leaders.’39 The Odyssey offered a different paradigm for epic exploits, the wanderings and testing of the hero in a journey through wonderlands of marvel and terror. The Aeneid, in turn, integrated the two Homeric patterns: The Odyssey’s in its first half, about the wanderings of the Trojan Aeneas to Italy; The Iliad’s in its second half, about the conquest of the Latins and the settling of the new social order that would become Rome. Persiles recapitulates and reinvigorates this epic trajectory by inverting its premises: the heroic deeds of its royal protagonists feature love not war, the wanderings and testing are brought home to the familiar world of the Catholic heartlands, and the journey to Rome exposes a social order in need of renewal more through spiritual conquest of self than military conquest of others. As Frye suggests, sixteenth-century theorists dwelled on another distinguishing feature of epic central to my reading of Persiles: its encyclopedic range and reach, its attempt to make sense of the world by embracing the prevailing forms of knowledge. Alonso López Pinciano

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(hereafter, Pinciano), the one neo-Aristotelian whose poetics (Antigua philosophía poética, 1596) we can be almost certain Cervantes knew,40 gives voice to this view when he has Fadrique declare that poetry comprehends ‘all the speculative, practical, active, and effective sciences’ (‘todas las sciencias especulativas, prácticas, activas y effectivas’), among them politics, astrology, medicine, economics, hunting, and navigation.41 Cervantes himself echoes it more than once, as when he has Don Quijote imagine poetry as ‘a tender and young maiden’ (‘doncella tierna y de poca edad,’ Don Quijote II.16), herself served by the other sciences or forms of knowledge (‘otras muchas doncellas, que son todas las otras ciencias’).42 Readers of Don Quijote will remember the canon of Toledo who lambastes the improbabilities of chivalric books, only to praise the occasion they offer a privileged ‘mind’ (‘entendimiento’) when elevated to the rarefied heights of prose epic: ‘he can show himself to be now an astrologer, now an excellent cosmographer, now a musician, now versed in matters of State, and there may even be occasion for him to show himself a magician of the black arts if he likes’ (‘puede mostrarse astrólogo, ya cosmógrafo excelente, ya músico, ya inteligente en las materias de estado, y tal vez le vendrá ocasión de mostrarse nigromante si quisiere,’ Don Quijote I.47). In the hands of such an ‘entendimiento,’ says the canon, prose epic is transformed into a ‘long and spacious field’ (‘largo y espacioso campo’) and draws on the ‘sweetest, most agreeable sciences of poetry and oratory’ (‘dulcísimas y agradables ciencias de la poesía y de la oratoria’) to reveal itself by turns ‘epic, lyric, tragic, and comic’ (‘épico, lírico, trágico, cómico’). Celebrated and elaborated by Dante and his commentators, this belief that poetry is a science encompassing every kind of knowledge derives from a humanist tradition that – encouraged by Aristotle – transferred Plato’s praise of philosophy and Cicero’s and Quintilian’s of the orator to the visionary poet.43 If Persiles is read in this light, we might say about it that Heliodorus provided Cervantes with the formal raw material for a new kind of prose fiction and the sixteenth-century literary theorists planted the notion that a modern epic modelled on The Ethiopica just might challenge the pre-eminence of the ancients and accomplish for its age what Homer’s and Vergil’s verse epics had done for theirs.44 Particularly germane to the argument of this book is the conviction that Heliodorus’s Ethiopica could serve as a vehicle for the great epic themes – arms and empire, religion, and love – dressed up in contemporary terms. Pinciano, again, puts it aptly when – in a discussion that embraces The Ethiopica – he has Fadrique declare that poets divide epic

12

Cervantes’ Epic Novel

‘matter’ as follows: ‘some poets address the matter of religion ... ; others sing [about] examples of love ... ; others [still, about] battles and victories’ (‘unos poetas tratan materia de religión ... ; cantan otros, casos amorosos ... ; otros, batallas y victorias’).45 Fadrique’s observation reminds us that ‘matter’ matters to epic and therefore to Persiles. What makes Pinciano’s epic themes so compelling is that – translated in vital, historical terms – they were among the most urgently debated issues for Cervantes’ contemporaries and early readers. An epic that aspires to be verisimilar and encyclopedic – an imitated action that addresses the truth philosophically, in Aristotelian terms – could be expected, given the right spirit, to register those debates. By holding the variety of belief and practice up to the narrative light, the prose epic could in fact become that spacious field – described by the canon in Don Quijote – on which ideas about war, religion, and love were set in play. Pinciano’s conception of epic matter, therefore, provides an interpretive premise that is historically and textually grounded in neo-Aristotelian theory and yet offers ideologically challenging, even surprising results alive to historical circumstance and especially to conflict. In a sense this book seeks to reconcile the formal emphasis of Alban Forcione’s first book, on Persiles’ ironic relation to the literary debates of the period, with the interest in Persiles’ ideological complexity shown by such scholars as Ruth El-Saffar, Mary Gaylord, George Mariscal, Diana de Armas Wilson, Michael Nerlich, and William Childers. The prose epic understanding of Heliodorus (and, by association, of Persiles) need not be seen, then, mainly as a well-worn category of antiquarian interest in view of sixteenth-century poetics. Revitalized as a creative prompt rather than diminished as an academic or generic dead end, it also serves as a hermeneutic principle that may encourage us to read Persiles in historically sensitive ways and yet recognize dimensions that make Cervantes’ judgment of it more intelligible. Nevertheless, it is important to note here that this argument about epic is not meant to deny well-established affiliations with Heliodorus and the Greek adventure novel. Instead it encourages us to consider how that Heliodoran generic legacy is confronted formally and ideologically, through the creative stimulus of literary polemics, with epic. Indeed what sets Persiles apart from The Ethiopica is, among other things, its overt challenge to epic. Persiles inscribes the dialogue and competition with epic directly in the text, notably in the amorous (and effectively, political) struggle between Persiles and his elder brother Maximino – the protagonist’s rival for Sigismunda’s hand and the throne. Maximino is consistently associated with the manners and commitments

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13

of the crude epic warrior hero (as discussed in chapters 1 and 3). Although Persiles is shown to possess martial virtues, in his characterization these are subordinated to others such as conjugal loyalty, charity, and justice implicitly advanced as the proper aims of the new epic hero. The displacement of conventional epic – with its emphasis on battles and victories over love, to borrow Pinciano’s terms – is therefore represented by the displacement and effective defeat of Maximino. In this light the brothers become incarnations of rival positions on key aspects of epic form and matter. And their rivalry may thus be seen as the text’s principal figurative warrant for reading Persiles as a literary battlefield for the soul of epic. Persiles’ distinctive relation to religion, love, and battles and victories marks a renewed sense of what epic and the epic hero could aspire to be. As I discuss over the course of this study, the struggle between Persiles and Maximino is also a struggle between competing views of what it meant to be an ideal ruler, Christian, and spouse. What, then, is to be gained by reading Persiles as an epic novel, as the title of this book would have it? Whatever else may be at stake in generic categories applied retrospectively, they encourage readers to notice some features of a text and ignore or play down others. We have just observed how Persiles draws on the characterization of Persiles and Maximino to distinguish itself from both Heliodorus and epic. Persiles finds other ways to distance itself effectively from the objects of its generic desire, whether we think of them primarily as epic or romance. The oxymoronic hint suggested by the very notion of an epic novel, generic terms more often handled – following Lukács and Bakhtin46 – as foils for one another, acknowledges the multiple strategies by which Persiles both heightens and distances itself from the epic possibilities of Heliodorus’s example. It reminds us that Persiles forswears the supernatural liberties to which verse epic and prose romance frequently gave licence, honouring the criteria for verisimilitude of its own day, if not the later standards of literary realism. Persiles also seemingly aspires to absorb in itself many of the leading genres of early modern Spain: in this updated Greek novel the reader meets with pastoral, picaresque, chivalric, novela cortesana and novela morisca characters, settings, descriptions, or episodes; Italianate novella; theatrical entremés; miracle narrative; love and religious lyric; catechism; a Platonic ideal commonwealth; oratory; and letters. Its generically hybrid condition is an oft-remarked feature of Cervantes’ fiction and more broadly of what has become – thanks especially to Bakhtin – a commonplace in discussion of what is routinely taken to distinguish the novel from both epic and romance.47 Not all readers will agree that Don Quijote accom-

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Cervantes’ Epic Novel

plishes an analogous feat for books of chivalry through parody – saving by rectifying – but to the extent that readers respond to Don Quijote not only as fool but also as hero they are effectively recognizing the possibility that a critical (and creative) reinterpretation of a genre may well salvage it for readers no longer willing or able to accept its original premises. They might also be prepared to trace continuities between Don Quijote and Persiles, in their embrace of and distance from their respective generic models and as works that absorb and refashion prevailing genres to produce hybrid texts that are richer than the sum of their parts. Earlier we saw how Northrop Frye considered the epic poet’s choice of a subject the crisis of his life, since he was unlikely to be able to complete a second epic. Persiles’ choice of subject becomes all the more strikingly conspicuous by comparison with the sixteenth-century Italian poet and theorist Torquato Tasso. Because Cervantes and Tasso were both interested in creatively reconciling epic example and theory with popular genres, and because Tasso was an epic poet (of Gerusalemme liberata or Jerusalem Delivered, on the First Crusade, 1581) and theorist (in the Discorsi del poema eroico or Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 1594), the comparison is telling, since both writers were responding to similar challenges.48 At every turn, where the major bones of contention of sixteenth-century poetics are concerned, Cervantes brushes against the grain of Tasso’s solutions by accident or design: where Tasso picks history for the main action of his epic poem, Cervantes fiction; where Tasso picks war for his main action, Cervantes love; where Tasso picks verse, Cervantes prose; where Tasso chooses to situate marvels in a remote time and place, Cervantes to situate them in the near present and at home. The choices could make Cervantes look like the more modern or advanced artist and Tasso the lesser, indeed the straw, man. To be fair to Tasso, it is important to remember that some of Cervantes’ forwardlooking choices derive from conditions specific to the Spanish literary scene. The paradigmatic challenge as Tasso appears to have understood it was to reconcile the wandering, love-struck pleasures (digressive episodes, marvels, and love stories) of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso with the edifying rigours (unity of plot, verisimilitude, and war stories) of Homer and Vergil, that is of chivalric romanzo in verse with classical verse epic.49 The paradigmatic challenge as Cervantes appears to have understood it was to reconcile the kinds of pleasures offered, for example, by Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula with the rigours of Heliodorus’s Ethiopica, that is of chivalric books in prose with a classical prose epic.50 Although Tasso admired The Ethiopica enough to recom-

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mend its virtues to epic poets,51 it stands to reason that it would figure less prominently in the Italian debates than in Spain because the vernacular competition for classical models in Italy was in verse rather than in prose. Spain had been awash in prose entertainments for a century before Don Quijote and Persiles were published. Cervantes benefited from the powerful tailwind of a Spanish literary reality that had taken a turn very different from Italy’s in the sixteenth century. Unlike the Italian case, dominated by the prestige of its literary academies with their peculiar concerns, in Spain the law of the gusto or pleasure of anonymous readers and playgoers had long since won the day against the law of academic precept, as Lope de Vega famously recognized in his Arte nuevo of 1609. Moreover, Heliodorus was thought to provide the model for a prose epic centred – respectably – on love rather than war.52 A feature of Persiles we are more likely to appreciate through the lens of the novelistic is its inventive and critical engagement with history. Cervantes’ subtitle – historia setentrional (Northern History or Story) – points us to this genre not usually associated with Persiles. A stock device in chivalric and other early modern fictions with sources in antiquity as is well known,53 the fiction passing itself off as history is a link between Persiles and Don Quijote that, in part, depends on the quibble in Spanish on historia as history and historia as story. As Riley notes, Don Quijote’s burlesque of the device is double-edged: it mocks the hoax of bogus history for the cliché it had become in fiction and yet indulges it for knowing readers.54 Bruce Wardropper also reminds us that Cervantes could capitalize on the pseudo-historical device to point his burlesque in the other direction, to ridicule the proliferation of fraudulent histories.55 The relevant distinction for epic in sixteenth-century poetics was not between verse and prose but between fiction and history.56 In this light Cervantes’ choice of a made-up theme set roughly in the present over an actual, historical theme set in the past marks a significant departure from the example of Tasso. Tasso was sufficiently beholden to critics of chivalric romanzo to restrict fiction in his own epic to episodic filigree, local embroidery on a firmly historical trunk (in his case, the First Crusade).57 Cervantes shows no signs of guilt about centring his modern epic on an invented subject. In this he would have found a kindred spirit in Pinciano, who confesses his preference for The Ethiopica over Lucan’s historical epic The Pharsalia on formal grounds and has the courage to declare it the equal of The Iliad and The Aeneid.58 By the same token Pinciano, following Aristotle, affirms the poet’s licence to alter history and suggests furthermore that poetry is superior to history: the poet, after all,

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Cervantes’ Epic Novel

deals in what could be while the historian is bound to what was; the godlike poet invents what no one else has imagined while the historian merely passes along what has been served up by others.59 In this spirit Cervantes sooner subordinates history to fiction, incorporating the occasional historical character or episode (for instance, the story of Rosamunda, which obliquely refers to Henry II’s mistress Rosemond Clifford, Persiles 222–3 and 721–2) in his fiction as if to make the point that, when the poet is in doubt, history should serve fiction rather than the other way around. And yet in Persiles fiction becomes a vehicle by which narrative art could confront historical realities squarely. Indeed, for a novel often enough consigned to the dustbin of romance never-never land, Persiles finds many ways to insist on the here and now of European life. It does so by concrete reference (to the death of Charles V in 1558 and the expulsion of the moriscos – or baptized Spanish Muslims – in 1609–14) and by presenting characters roughly contemporary with, landscapes largely recognizable to, and actions sufficiently plausible (or verisimilar, in neo-Aristotelian terms) to its first readers, as E.C. Riley demonstrated.60 Moreover, despite the occasionally made-up geography, the semi-heroic protagonists, and the sometimes stale narrative conventions, along the highways and byways of its wandering course Persiles registers a remarkable range of historical concerns: conquest, piracy, the traffic in humans, racial mixing, judicial corruption, religious reform, new forms of humanistic and scientific rationalism that were coming into their own against the grain both of royal messianism and folk belief, recurring tensions within family structures (especially challenges to the rule of primogeniture, paternal authority, and received sex and gender roles in noble families), and competition between conventionally aristocratic and bourgeois values (honour against virtue, patrimonial against companionate models of marriage). Sometimes Persiles evokes a historical debate obliquely – such as New World conquest and ethnography61 through the discourse of barbarism – while at other times, as with Philip III’s expulsion of the moriscos, it jumps headlong into yesterday’s news. Formally Persiles underlines this proto-realistic impulse and distances itself from Heliodorus’s Ethiopica with an epic journey that draws the Gothic protagonists from an exotic margin (the Barbarian and Gothic North of Europe) to a centre (the Catholic South) familiar to its earliest readers. In contrast, The Ethiopica traces a more reassuring trajectory for its third-century Hellenistic readers: with Greek or Hellenized protagonists, a story whose ethnic, political, and religious poles are located

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in the Temple of Delphi at one extreme and in the Egyptian capital of Meroe at the other, and a State religion of Egypt characterized precisely by human sacrifice. Persiles thereby reverses the Heliodoran adventure novel pattern, whose protagonists strike out from a known centre to a marvellous and barbaric periphery. At the same time that the study draws attention to Persiles’ epic, counter-epic, and historical ambitions, it seeks to shed light on how such lofty aspirations could coexist with the ever-present desire to delight, even to the point of entering the lists as – in the author’s words – the greatest ‘book ... of entertainment’ (‘libro ... de entretenimiento’) in the Spanish language.62 When Cervantes announced the publication of Persiles, an epic entertainment would have been considered – given the prevailing assumptions about epic’s edifying purposes – a contradiction in terms (like the ‘exemplary novellas’ he published in 1613). Commentary that has lent more weight to the amorous than to the religious theme – for instance, Diana de Armas Wilson’s Allegories of Love – helps prepare us to recognize that Persiles’ main action is the calque of a New Comedy plot. Characters move by wandering through a world of illusion, mistakes, and adventure from initial discord – occasioned by a blocking senex figure such as old parents, slave merchants, or a wealthy rival represented in Persiles by the elder, martial-spirited brother Maximino – to a resolution figured typically as marriage.63 Indeed the chief plot strategy of the Heliodoran or Greek novel is New Comedy writ large, blown up to epic length, prosified, and modulated with greater or lesser proliferation of interwoven plots. In contrast to other genres that inform Persiles – such as verse epic or the pedagogical mirror of princes – the Greek novel (like New Comedy) organizes the main action around the play of erotic love:64 its transgressive force, obstacles, and domestication in matrimony; its potential as a reconciler of opposites and source of renewal that overturns old social orders to make room for new ones; and as the chaotic force of wilful lust or animal nature run amok. Viewed in sixteenth-century literary terms as a model for prose epic, the Greek novel can be said to contribute to the epic discourse of The Iliad, The Aeneid, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme by having conjugal love and matrimony take the place of war, empire, and conquest as the chief goals toward which the narrative drive of epic tends.65 Thematically, Persiles may well be epic in its models and its encyclopedic scope, yet it resists its conventionally militaristic and patriarchal ideology, the assumption – shared by Tasso and Pinciano alike – that war was a more noble subject for epic than love.66 In Persiles by contrast, love is not the dangerous dis-

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Cervantes’ Epic Novel

traction embodied by woman but the main-plot heroic adventure. Persiles can thus be seen to move beyond The Ethiopica insofar as it widely expanded the range of its principal model by exploring the whole gamut of epic thematics and poetics, with incursions in other genres. It can be seen to distinguish itself from verse epic by tackling epic diction and themes with the forward-looking choice of prose and by reversing the traditional epic priority of arms over love. A crucial form of ‘entretenimiento’ offered by Persiles besides the New Comedy main plot is its paradoxical handling of marvels, which is perhaps its deepest link with Don Quijote. The pertinent sense for my use of paradox is etymological: that which lies beyond what is commonly held opinion or doxa. As the lexicographer Covarrubias noted in 1611, paradox is ‘a thing that causes astonishment’ (‘una cosa admirable’), contrary to common opinion, such as maintaining that ‘the planet earth moves round [the sun]’ (‘el globo de la tierra es el que anda a la redonda’).67 And the argument here in part is that Persiles merits inclusion in that history of the literature of paradox or paradoxography that reserves a special place for Don Quijote.68 Whether we think of paradox as a genre, mode, conceptual trope, or rhetorical strategy, it tests categorical certainties, norms, and commonplaces. Paradox figures prominently in Plato’s Parmenides; the Menippean satire of Petronius’s Satyricon, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, and Lucian’s Dialogues and True History; St. Paul’s Epistles; Augustine’s City of God; Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance); Thomas More’s Utopia; Erasmus’s Praise of Folly; Antonio de Guevara’s Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (Vituperation of the Court and Praise of the Village); and the anonymous Viaje de Turquía (Voyage from Turkey), an Erasmist dialogue about the folk trickster Pedro de Urdemalas’s journey from captivity in Constantinople through Greece and Italy back to Spain. Such otherwise diverse texts share an impulse to unsettle facile distinctions, whether between unity and diversity, reality and appearance, the familiar and the strange, high and low, body and spirit, love and law, knowledge and ignorance, folly and wisdom, jest and earnest, the court and the country, insiders and outsiders, true and false religion, or the morally edifying and the pleasurable. Christian humanist writers such as Erasmus, Guevara, and Rabelais sought to recover a moderate Epicurean ideal that would recognize laughter as a Christian value and temper the harsher forms of Stoic and scholastic rationalism, Christian asceticism, or humanist pedantry.69 The Christian humanist revaluation of entertainment (Aristotle’s, Aquinas’s, the sixteenth-century Spanish

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doctor-philosophers’,70 and Cervantes’ eutrapelia) dignified it as an end in itself, not as licence for frivolity but as a spiritually necessary release from the demands of work and worship, a joyful recognition of the intrinsic imperfection of the Christian, and a playful (and sometimes critical) enactment or imaginative projection of the ideal society.71 The paradoxical praise of what the wise, the knowing, and the powerful routinely belittled was meant to delay the moment of categorical judgment indefinitely and therefore to check the more arrogant manifestations of a self-professed reason prone to forget its limits.72 We have long since come to recognize Don Quijote’s affinities with this tradition, but have been less inclined to grant that Persiles contributes its own distinct but equally rich harvest. The innovative impulse of Persiles’ narrative structure – which inverts Heliodorus’s drive from centre to periphery – is matched by the paradox used to represent characters and places. The Barbarian and Gothic characters from quasi-invented lands are rendered as if they were historical. On the other hand, the episodes set in the Catholic South of Europe – in apparently familiar places – are saturated with the lexicon of wonder and the marvellous normally reserved for the chivalric romance and the New World chronicle. To identify a literary model for Persiles’ inversion of Heliodorus’s geography, we must look outside sixteenth-century literary theory or Renaissance epic practice. Just as Forcione found himself having to seek elsewhere for a literary model of Persiles’ and Don Quijote’s mocking, anti-classical characters (for instance, in the personal, discursive, and self-deprecating narrative voices of Ariosto, medieval romance, and the satire of Horace and Ovid),73 we are more likely to recognize an inspiration for Persiles’ ironies in sixteenth-century paradoxography. Through paradox, Persiles can be said both to look back to Lucian and Erasmus and to find a novelistic corollary avant-la-lèttre for the Russian formalist principle that art estranges or defamiliarizes the known.74 In Persiles we find both urges at work: the urge to familiarize the (apparently) exotic and the urge to alienate the (apparently) known. If Don Quijote’s paradoxical inversions bear primarily on the categories of folly and reason, Persiles’ bear primarily on the interrelated categories of the insider and outsider, the familiar and the exotic, and the near and the far. On this issue, Persiles’ pleasures in paradox are thrown into sharp relief by an oft-quoted recommendation Tasso makes in the Discorsi del poema eroico (1594) regarding marvels in epic. Tasso knew that a narrow understanding of the neo-Aristotelian imperative of verisimilitude (to achieve in art a plausible correspondence to the real world

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Cervantes’ Epic Novel

rather than a representation of philosophical truths articulated in an internally coherent way, as Aristotle himself seems primarily to have understood it) did not much endear itself to many readers keen on marvels or what we might now call the fantastic, but the poet was caught between his commitment to the theory and readers’ (and evidently his own) taste for the marvellous. His Solomonic solution, his licence for fantasy in ‘heroic poetry’ or epic, was to circumscribe legitimate wonders to historical events, the Christian supernatural, and remote and exotic locations.75 Tasso’s formulation of this last category is most germane to our purposes, since it has often been cited as a prompt for Persiles’ Northern Barbarian and Gothic settings. Whether Cervantes knew or took an interest in Tasso’s theoretical pronouncements is of less moment here than their symptomatic value as an expression of what a learned, creative, sixteenth-century Catholic poet might consider a sufficiently distant and alien geographic location for plausibly harbouring wonders. Tasso suggested that marvel-laced epic material be drawn from ‘Gothland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland or from the East Indies [i.e. Asia] or from the newly discovered countries in the vast ocean beyond the columns of Hercules [i.e., America]’ (‘Gotia e di Norveggia e di Suevia e d’Islanda o dell’ Indie Orientali o di paesi di nuovo ritrovati nel vastissimo Oceano oltre le Colonne d’Ercole’).76 In following Tasso’s advice, the writer could enliven a narrative with recourse to the fantastic elements that readers often favoured and yet appease the harsh taskmasters of literary orthodoxy (including Tasso’s and the readers’ inner censors) by locating the marvellous in remote lands. Ignorance of faraway lands would make pedantic readers less liable to question the credibility of marvels set there. Persiles in contrast appears designed as if to turn Tasso’s criteria on their head: its outsider protagonists are from the Italian poet’s Gothic North, the epic journey begins rather than ends at the Gothic and Barbaric periphery, and the exotic finisterra is Rome.77 The challenge to the chief assumption underlying Tasso’s recommendation – the assumption of a Catholic, southern European point of view (for which the marvellous will be located in the past, in Christian miracle, or in other places) – is brought home by Persiles’ near-contemporary settings in a Catholic, Southern Europe replete with exotic marvels and barbarisms of its own. And even there, it locates marvel and wonder not in Christian miracle but in ordinary character and custom. For a text that could have prompted Persiles’ paradoxical approach to ethnography and travel we need search no further than a plausible source for the geography of the novel’s northern latitudes: Antonio de

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Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas (The Garden of Curious Flowers, 1570), a characteristic Spanish example of the Renaissance miscellany in dialogue. Although the Jardín is a widely supposed, if not unquestioned,78 source for Persiles’ novelistic geography, I cite Torquemada gingerly in view of the apparently withering review that Pero Pérez the priest gives his miscellany in the renowned scrutiny of Don Quijote’s library (Don Quijote I.6). The cleric declares he is unsure which is more truthful or less mendacious, Torquemada’s Jardín or the same author’s chivalric book Don Olivante de Laura, and consigns the offending romance to the flames for folly and arrogance. Since the priest is himself a burlador (trickster) of the highest order – who plays fast and loose with the truth throughout the first part of Don Quijote and betrays a consistently ambiguous relation to chivalric books – we cannot be sure he has not simply given us through Torquemada a displaced portrait of himself or even of the author. Even assuming that Cervantes’ interest in Torquemada was a merely mocking one, it is worth noting that Torquemada introduces his Jardín with a recognizably paradoxographic insistence on the relationship between knowledge of the world and acceptance of marvels. In the dedicatory pages to Don Diego Sarmiento de Sotomayor (bishop of Astorga), the author sallies forth under the banner of a knowing ignorance with a slogan that he attributes to Socrates: ‘I know only one thing, and that is that I know nothing’ (‘Una cosa sola sé, y es que no sé nada’).79 Torquemada thereafter takes to task the kind of ignorant skepticism that is proudly blind to the marvellous variety of the world. He declares, Nature is so powerful and various, and the world so large, that every day many novelties come to light, at which Your Grace, excelling in prudence, will not wonder; and even if you had heard or read about most or all, you will take pleasure from seeing many of them gathered together, with other matters curious and strange [peregrina or pilgrim used as an adjective here to mean foreign or strange]. This has made me bold enough to address these little treatises, called the Garden of Curious Flowers, to Your Grace, that your protection and favour may help them see the light without fear of the judgment of those who speak ill of everything they see or read. (Es tan poderosa la Naturaleza y tan varia en sus cosas, y el mundo tan grande, que cada día vienen a nuestra noticia muchas novedades, de las cuales V.S.R., como prudentísimo, no se maravillará; y aunque o todas o las más habrá oído y leído, holgará de ver recopiladas aquí algunas de ellas,

22

Cervantes’ Epic Novel con otras materias curiosas y peregrinas. Esto me ha dado atrevimiento a dirigir a V.S. estos tratadillos, llamados Jardín de flores curiosas, para que, debajo de su amparo y favor, puedan salir a luz, sin temor del juicio de los que murmuran de todo lo que ven y leen.)80

In Torquemada’s account the prudent do not wonder at, nor are they disconcerted by, novedades (‘novelties’). Torquemada’s Jardín bears attending to in this context for the unusual conceptual framework it lends to material borrowed from the Swedish historian Olaus Magnus. In Torquemada the Gothic North of Europe (what we would now call Scandinavia) is presented as an exotic, marvellous, and barbaric place, a kind of New World in Europe, because in historical terms only relatively recently Christianized and therefore still steeped in pagan folklore. Persiles carries this conceit one step further by projecting it South, to metropolitan ‘civilized’81 Europe, Tasso’s reference point (as we saw) for the normative in literary creation. The novel harnesses its contemporaries’ curiosity about the exotic in Europe by embracing both the Gothic North and the Catholic South in its sweep. In Persiles, as in Torquemada’s prologue to the Jardín, verisimilitude is understood to be a function of knowledge and sensibility, a test of the reader as much as it is of the author or the text: the more informed the reader, the more receptive to truth (or the resemblance to truth) in all its strangeness. By adopting an outsider’s viewpoint, with its protagonists from that exotic North and their journey through a Catholic Europe described with the rhetoric of wonder, Persiles finds the familiar world of its first readers as marvellous and as exotic as Gothic northern Europe, the East Indies, or the New World were for Tasso. The conception of verisimilitude that animates Persiles may thus owe as much to wonder literature82 and paradoxography as it does to a neo-Aristotelian tradition of commentary that often (as in the case of Tasso) effectively codified verisimilitude in terms of what was credible and legitimate for a readership identified with a particular place (southern Europe) and religion (Catholicism).83 By dwelling on Persiles’ inventive and playful relation to a romance genre, commitment to verisimilitude, generic hybridity, the topical disguise of (translated) history, and the embrace of paradox we might well give the impression that its value would lie in its proximity to attributes we normally associate with Don Quijote or the modern novel. It can often seem as if Persiles scholarship looks nervously (or avidly) over its collective shoulder at Don Quijote. If there was a time when Cervantes’ ‘other’ works were judged according to a putative standard set by Don Quijote

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and the high novelistic tradition – marked variously by rounded character, particularity, realism, actuality, society, customs, history, biography, the bodily, the material, the dialogical, humour, and irony – it could hardly be helpful now to accept the teleological narrative unreservedly and recover Persiles and other Cervantes texts simply by assimilating them to that standard through more or less Procrustean manoeuvres. Alban Forcione has suggested that a historically sensitive and intellectually ecumenical criticism should cultivate respect for idealizing modes and genres such as romance and not seek to promote interest in Cervantes’ ‘other’ works by letting Don Quijote appropriate them.84 As he points out, the romance mode (with its emphasis on the ideal, the general, and the typical case) can be critical as well as conformist, marshalling its conventions to highlight the ways in which characters and readers (and, by indirection, society) may well fall short of professed ideals or flattering self-conceptions. These observations provide a historical, ideological, and aesthetic defence of variety in literary expression that resists the temptation to dress up personal or professionally sanctioned preferences (whether modern or postmodern) as progress narratives. They also provide an account of how romance elements do often function in Cervantes’ work. However, another way to reconsider the relation between Persiles and Don Quijote is to question whether Don Quijote itself has been well-served by a romance-novel paradigm developed largely through and for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels.85 Neither the nature of Don Quijote’s influence on later novels nor the overt criticisms offered by Cide Hamete or the friend of the prologue (who suggests Cervantes call Don Quijote a ‘satire’ of chivalric books) has persuaded all readers to take Cide’s or the friend’s comments for the novel’s or the author’s final verdict on chivalric books. In part, this is because their harshest novelistic adversaries – the canon and the priest – reveal themselves to be avid (if also, skeptical) readers and even would-be writers of them. The priest, moreover, is moved to save several from the flames, while condemning others, in his notorious scrutiny of the knight’s library. Perhaps more significant than what one or another character says about romance is what the novel does with it. The death of romance idealism is staged and restaged repeatedly in Don Quijote’s defeats and successive disenchantments (which he calls enchantments), only to rise again with each new adventure. In this sense the novel enacts an ever-renewed comedic joust, debate, or dialogue between the ideal and material that catches up characters and readers alike in a dance of desire and con-

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tempt for romance never altogether settled. By the end, even Sancho – so often taken for an embodiment of the novel’s reality principle – begs his agonizing friend for more adventures, as if Sancho (and, by association, the novel) were recognizing that without romance he – like Don Quijote – has no (literary) reason for being. Although overtly a genrecidal ‘satire’ of chivalric books, Don Quijote thus carves out a place and a purpose for romance as a projection of the new novelistic hero’s longings, hopes, fantasies, virtues, and values in a conception of literary identity that recognizes both what a character is socially and what a character wishes he were imaginatively. We need not accept this particular account of Don Quijote’s relation to romance in order to recognize that some analogous conception may be necessary if we are to avoid letting Don Quijote be appropriated – to borrow Alban Forcione’s terms – by later developments of and prescriptions for the novel. Barbara Fuchs has usefully suggested we regard romance not only as a self-contained literary mode or genre, but also as a ‘textual strategy.’86 What she characterizes as the idealizing and archaizing cast of romance may thus be lent to a whole text, an episode or scene, a character, or even just a passing image or reference. Such flexible conceptions of modes and genres liberate us from the purist imperative to consign complex narratives exclusively to one generic category, particularly self-defeating where Cervantes is concerned, since he seems consistently to have practised one form or another of what Peter Dunn has called the ‘inter-generic.’87 Whereas with Don Quijote the eagerness to anoint it the fountainhead of the modern, realistic novel has sometimes effectively stripped it of its ideal or romance dimension (parody taken for outright dismissal), with Persiles the impulse to cast it with romance has often denied it its realistic or novelistic dimension, its own experiments in ironic counterpoint. Indeed if romance is distinguished by the quest to fulfil an ideal order and the novel by the failure or subversion of that quest, Mary Gaylord argued in a pioneering article that Persiles’ anticlimactic ending suggests more continuity than discontinuity with Don Quijote.88 Thus, Persiles’ narrative pattern, rhetoric, and allusion may owe less to a putative contradiction between romance idealism and novelistic realism than to an interest in exploring how they imply, test, and turn into one another.89 In the pages that follow I look at a number of other ways in which Persiles engages in its own kinds of narrative juxtaposition of the ideal and the material often regarded as a hallmark of Don Quijote. Rather than set Persiles against or confuse it with Don Quijote, I propose a difference that represents a thematic expansion, a variation

Introduction

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on a continuous sensibility tested in new generic contexts. The new generic context displaces the centre of interest from Don Quijote’s private world to the public world of royal heirs-apparent. In Don Quijote, the narrative pivots on an individual reader whose literary pathology tests a private mythology – what Don Quijote thinks he believes – against a social world itself often nearly as marvellous as chivalric books and sometimes more dangerously lunatic than the mad, would-be knight himself. In Persiles, the narrative features young, princely lovers poised for marriage and rulership whose initiatory voyage tests various public mythologies – what many early readers thought they believed – about ethnic alterity (barbarism), orthodox religion, conceptions of heroism (the traditional tension between arms and love), and politics. Formulating the relationship in these terms highlights differences as well as similarities. We will not for the most part find burlesque humour in Persiles nor the virtuoso turn of a ‘larger-than-life’ character. And yet the ironies in Persiles are not only different in kind from Don Quijote’s, they are also in some senses bolder, aimed at rethinking key early modern discourses, as I attempt to demonstrate over the course of this book. An epic novel so often said to have turned its back on literary verisimilitude and history itself is seen here to engage with the historical realities of its day through its own kinds of irony and paradox. A word, now, about the scope, structure, and especially the limits of this study. The thematic breadth of Persiles and its formal ingenuity call for an approach at once textual, historical, and theoretical. Although I understand Persiles’ epic affiliations to mean that it is marked by a wide range of epic intertextualities (in plot, characterization, and topical allusion), an exhaustive analysis of this kind would require a much longer book. The aim here is necessarily more modest: following sixteenth-century poetics on Heliodorus as well as Cervantes’ textual practice, I take the epic aspiration to refer primarily to the novel’s thematic ambitions. For this reason I have organized Cervantes’ Epic Novel around the three major epic themes identified by sixteenth-century theorists such as Pinciano: empire (the consequence of Pinciano’s ‘battles and victories,’ chapter 1), religion (chapter 2), and love (chapter 3). The political theme – understood as the novel’s theory and practice of politics (chapter 4) – is articulated as the institutional and historical expression of the epic preoccupation with empire and religion. I work out from epic toward other genres, discourses, and historical contexts to explore how Persiles not only reimagines the possibilities of epic but also casts an original light on the major political, religious, and social debates of early modern Spain. To this end each chapter opens with a

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brief characterization of verse and prose epic handling of the theme. Subsequently I discuss epic allusion and reference as they arise in relation to a particular aspect of the argument, but the commentary follows Persiles toward other genres, discourses, historical contexts, and implications that depend on epic only insofar as there is a thematic common ground. The argument therefore takes the epic frame as the primary point of departure but does not limit its claims to genre. The study’s textual, discursive, and historical emphases in part respect the many ways in which Persiles goes beyond and even sometimes against epic precept, what I have been summing up as its novelistic dimension. They also pay tribute to the historical and philosophical ambition of verse and prose epic, in the Aristotelian sense that history deals in things as they are or were (the particular) and philosophy in things as they could be (the universal) [Poetics 1451a–b1]. And yet the analysis of epic intertextuality and historical context is chiefly meant to illuminate the text, by continually drawing the reader’s attention back to locally interesting manifestations of the larger issue being explored. Another way to put this is that the commentary aims to find the theory in the text, to allow textual analysis – cumulatively – to generate the hermeneutic terms by which interpretation is guided, and finally to translate into argument the idiosyncratic contributions the novel makes to the broader discursive reflection on those themes. Each chapter thus explores analytical paradigms that emerged from a perception of historically significant and recurring features of the text – keywords such as barbarism (chapter 1), charity (chapter 2), and sensuality (chapter 3), together with reiterated actions, characterization, and imagery – that, taken together, begin to constitute an internal poetics for the novel. An incidental advantage of paying close attention to keywords that cut across main and secondary plots is that they bring to light one of several possible organizing principles for a novel whose unity (or digressiveness) has been discussed primarily in terms of plot structure. One need not subscribe to an organic principle of textual unity to recognize that Persiles’ experiments with the neo-Aristotelian desiderata of unity and variety are no less interesting than its creative way with verisimilitude. Sixteenth-century theorists (such as Tasso and Pinciano) derived from their reading of Aristotle’s Poetics a standard of plot construction that favoured a single, focused action but understood that readers often preferred episodic variety in long prose fictions that could otherwise become unbearably tedious.90 Much as Persiles can be seen to turn the

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neo-Aristotelian doctrine of literary marvels (as voiced by Tasso historically and by Mauricio in Persiles) on its head through paradox, it provides a creative response to the neo-Aristotelian grail of narrative unity by embracing thematic links (what Pinciano called the matter of epic) that bind stories otherwise apparently unrelated to each other in characters and action. One neo-Aristotelian principle is therefore reconceived in the light of another, the imperatives of plot unity and variety in the light of epic matter. Thus, Persiles demonstrates that there may be more than one road to narrative unity and that the test of unity need not apply exclusively to the text. As I discuss in chapter 3 in relation to Persiles’ rival Arnaldo, readers too may be tested by the narrative – for the extent to which they are willing or able to perceive unity where they ordinarily see variety (if viewed favourably) or digression (if viewed unfavourably). This reformulation of the conventional neo-Aristotelian preoccupation with plot unity and variety dovetails in this novel with the broader historical issues of unity and variety in ethnic, religious, and political contexts. I try to demonstrate over the course of this study that in Persiles the dialectic of plot unity and variety is reimagined as a formal and ideological challenge to characters and readers and not regarded primarily as a prescriptive test aimed solely at texts and authors. The study thereby seeks to honour the novel’s continual negotiation of unity and variety in characters, theme, and plot without definitively subordinating any one to another. Not unlike the oft-remarked circularity of Persiles itself, with each chapter I return to the beginning and start anew. The allusion to Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is meant to remind us that, for Williams, words are indexes to the past: to examine words, their actual speakers, and their uses is to uncover a layer of history, even an entire way of life. Williams sets out to ‘study both particular and relational meanings ... in different actual speakers and writers ... through historical time,’ outlining a method by which the study of meanings may be examined historically and socially without losing sight of the internal developments and structures of language itself.91 The method essayed here assumes somewhat different emphases, since the primary object of analysis is a fictional narrative, which entails several consequences: that the principal ‘particular and relational meanings’ studied belong to fictional speakers; that, together with Williams’s keywords, I also consider significant actions, characterization, and imagery as elementary units of meaning; that a sprawling, multi-episodic narrative of this kind is seen itself to provide local contexts for interpretation of relational meanings within the text, since

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each succeeding episode alters the conditions for reading the preceding and following ones; and, finally, that together with the attention to the internal developments and structures of language is a corresponding interest in the internal developments and structures of narrative and genre. It might appear that – by paying close attention to keywords, fictional speakers, and the complex relations among the text’s parts – we risk sealing off the text from history and politics, the ‘actual speakers ... [in] historical time’ to which Williams refers. But the novel’s keywords and epic themes also figured prominently as keywords and themes in historical debates about conquest, religious reform, and rulership, that is as keywords and themes whose real-world analogues haunted real-world lives. Thus semantic and thematic analysis become means by which to bridge text and context. In order to explore the creative interplay of lexical ambiguity, generic form, and ideological conflict that shapes Persiles, my reading therefore weaves back and forth between text and context – reading Persiles with and against the pressures of the moment in which it was written and then reading that moment through the lens of Cervantes’ text. By linking Persiles’ textual strategies to political, religious, and social conflicts of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, I suggest that the novel becomes something of a parable for debates concerning the legitimacy of conquest, religious reform, the honour code, contested conceptions of matrimony (especially the relative weight of parental authority and mutual consent), and the prerogatives and duties of rulers. I hope to persuade readers that Persiles illuminates both the literary dimension of these historical issues and the historical dimension of the great epic themes. The method seeks to expand the range of evidence brought to bear on the historical debates by favouring categories offered up by the text. The approach pursued in this study also seeks to recognize the distinctive means by which fictional narratives participate in conceptual debate, tracking how characterization, action, image, motif, and intertextuality shed light on issues whose terms are usually set by propositional prose. I would argue that a common narrative strategy of Persiles – and indeed of Cervantes’ work – is the translation of concept into the kind of ‘formal’ or ‘literary’ features just outlined. That Cervantes’ narrative does not merely ‘reflect’ discursive and material contexts passively but also reflects on them creatively depends in part on noticing how particular ideas (for instance about barbarism, charity, epic heroism, or royal justice) are adopted as narrative premises and then put to the test through characterization,

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consequence, implication, and association. By showing us where particular ideas could lead as premises for historically lived lives, the vital as well as the logical consequences of acting on one or another conviction, Cervantes’ fiction opens a way back from ideological debate to history. In chapter 1 I take up the theme of barbarism, Persiles’ major trope for the wandering through exotic wonderlands, encounters with other peoples, and testing of the hero central to epic. I argue that there is a reverse ethnography at work in which Persiles’ heroes discover a barbaric New World in Europe. In this reading the Barbaric Isle becomes a narrative, as well as an ideological, template for the novel as a whole: each story told over the course of the novel re-enacts some feature of the Barbaric Isle that opens Persiles and Rome – where the Northern, Gothic protagonists end their journey – is no exception. Diana de Armas Wilson has persuasively read the Barbaric Isle as a satire of imperialism and as a parable for the ‘patriarchal’ practices – ‘the buying and selling of sexuality’ (especially women’s in the marriage market) – and related violence represented in the novel’s Catholic South.92 I complement her interpretation by reframing the relation between the Barbaric Isle and the Catholic South in terms of the language of paradox, the inversion of perspective that finds expression in the novel’s geography (especially the imperial significance of Thule) and its rhetoric of marvel and wonder. Although recent Persiles criticism on the novel’s geography of barbarism has emphasized its New World associations, I draw attention as well to other possible sources such as northern Europe and Islamic Barbary and suggest, in this light, that the novel’s ethics are as distinctive as its politics. In line with the argument put forward about the centrality of paradox in Persiles, I propose that the relation between the barbarism of the Northern Barbaric Isle (with its sacrificial Barbaric Law) and the barbarism of the Catholic world is to be understood fundamentally in terms of the difference between law and custom. Rome, especially, is presented neither exclusively as a New Jerusalem nor as a mere re-enactment of the Barbaric Isle, but in the light of the Augustinian vision of the two cities: an ideal Rome of Christian law, betrayed by the actual Rome of barbaric customs that include homicidal attacks, false testimony, and corrupt justice. I consider how this novelistic ethnography – and the law–custom distinction in particular – engages in a disquieting dialogue with the early modern Spanish rhetoric of Catholic religious reform, social contractarian thought, and just-war disputes over the legitimacy of the New World conquest. If the formal inspiration for Cervantes’ novelistic reverse ethnography can be traced

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to the paradoxographic (Lucianic and Erasmist) genres, by dwelling on Persiles’ ambivalent vision of Rome I suggest that the ideological inspiration for it may be found in the renewed urgency lent ethical reflection not only by New World–centred debates and chronicle but just as powerfully by Catholic religious reform with its jaundiced view of the papal court’s corruptions. The scholarly revaluation of Persiles is now over thirty-five years in the making, but this welcome trend has often come at the price of abandoning the crucial religious theme altogether for others many readers now see as more interesting. In chapter 2 I argue that we ought to reconsider Persiles’ religious dimension and that, by doing so, we will discover evidence for a fascinatingly idiosyncratic sensibility. Although the religious allegiances of Persiles are frequently aligned with the CounterReformation, I propose that Persiles’ Catholic orthodoxy is St Paul’s much older gospel of caritas – a well-documented feature of Catholic reform practices, sensibilities, and currents in sixteenth-century Spain. The novel’s latitudinarian leanings thus manifest chiefly as a skepticism about the relationship between charity and sacrament. This counterorthodoxy is signalled conspicuously in the text by reiterated reference to St Paul. It is more diffusely signalled by the way it invests characters from the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ (‘adonde la verdadera fe católica no está en el punto tan perfecto como se requiere,’ Persiles 651) Northern Barbarian or Gothic margins of the Church’s institutional reach with Pauline virtues, a by no means innocuous gesture as confessional lines hardened. The Pauline emphasis on ethics over doctrine and ritual bears relating to Cervantes’ own lay Franciscanism and to Catholic reform traditions in Spain (including, but not limited to, Erasmism) that had largely gone underground by the novel’s publication in 1617. Recognition of the charged significance acquired by the Pauline teachings in this period helps to account for an internal novelistic chronology centred – though not exclusively – on the period from 1557 to 1559, in the transition from the reign of Charles V to that of Philip II. This period marks the moment when a relatively open Spain (and Europe) gave way to a more closed one represented by such reactionary measures as the Valdés Index (1559) and the publication of the Council of Trent’s decrees (in 1564). The other major chronological fulcrum (1606) marks the return of Philip III’s court from Valladolid to Madrid after a five-year hiatus and yet antedates the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609–14. Together the novel’s two least ambiguous historical referents have the combined effect of erasing Philip II and casting the expul-

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sion as a future event. By adopting this novelistic chronology, Cervantes could write a Christian epic as if Trent and the morisco expulsion had not happened. He could also thus imagine a Spain that might have been if a Pauline understanding of Catholicism had prevailed. Although Persiles’ creative engagement with epic is explored throughout the book, I give the most sustained attention to the novel’s reminiscences of The Odyssey and The Aeneid in chapter 3. Persiles’ challenge to epic tradition is particularly notable in the characterization of its hero and the rivalry with his older brother Maximino. By rewarding Persiles – the poet, the lover – instead of the martial-spirited Maximino, Persiles is seen to reverse conventional epic priorities and to promote the values associated primarily with the second-born protagonist: conjugal love, charity, poetry, and justice. Socially, Persiles’ triumph over Maximino marks the novelistic ascendancy of the pre-Tridentine ecclesiastical model of matrimony, which primarily emphasized the mutual consent of spouses, at the expense of the dynastic (royal and aristocratic) model of arranged marriage and the ceremonial requirements called for following Trent. Persiles’ revaluation of the epic code not only finds a way to lend the conjugal a heroic dimension, it also associates poetry – through its evocation of key verses by Garcilaso and Vergil – with the oracular force of a higher truth. Persiles therefore breaks a lance for the epic and Christian virtues of a profane literature that had come under increasing scrutiny and even attack by ascetic writers such as Malón de Chaide (in the prologue to La conversión de la Magdalena, 1588), who singled out Garcilaso de la Vega and pastoral novels such as La Diana for leading young readers (especially women) down the primrose path of carnal love. The epic that once reserved glory for military conquest is superseded by an epic that re-conceives the hero’s relationship to women. The novel’s new kind of epic hero thus reverses the relation of priority between war and love that Tasso and even Pinciano considered most noble for epic: here love is no longer the perilous diversion from the providential destiny to make war and found an empire (as in The Aeneid), but is itself the providential epic-heroic adventure. Persiles dramatizes the centrality of politics by narrating three political transitions at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the novel. For this reason, in chapter 4 I examine the institutional face of two of Pinciano’s epic themes (religion and empire), or Church and Crown. I look particularly at the episodes that juxtapose political ideal and political practice, which often implicitly call into question southern European ecclesiastical or royal institutions, places, representatives, or poli-

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cies (including Philip III’s expulsion of the moriscos in 1609–14). The customary barbarism of the Catholic South is the dire preoccupation with honour and its often murderous consequences, which in the episodes examined over the course of this chapter are typically counterpointed to the power of persuasion. As the chapter unfolds I consider the institutional solutions to conflict that arise in Persiles: those largely created out of whole cloth by Cervantes (Auristela [Sigismunda] on the Isla de Pescadores) and those historical ones – such as the morisco expulsion – reimagined by Cervantes in his novelistic world. In particular I ask what evidence we have for the kinds of monarchs Persiles and Sigismunda will make on succession, since the novel does not require that they give up their public roles as heirs-apparent – roles they both step into at the close of the book. In this context I analyse the implied contrast between Persiles’ epic commitments and the militant crusader model of conquest and conversion represented by two epic poems mentioned while the pilgrim-heroes are in Rome: Tasso’s on the conquest of Jerusalem and Zárate’s on the conversion of Constantine. If Don Quijote can be fairly described as a novel about a great character, we might say that Persiles is a novel about the character of great rulers. One of the major symbolic acts of Persiles is to make Sigismunda co-protagonist not only of the love story, but also in the exercise of justice as the primary duty of Christian monarchs. In centring the novel on princely protagonists and their trials, Cervantes I suggest is partly giving his readers a picture of the education of princes, the experiences they should undergo, and the values they must come to uphold. To close, I examine perhaps the boldest narrative gesture of all, grounded in the protagonists’ Christological attributes and a narrative design with more than one affinity to typology. In the face of a Church that sought to deny the faithful access to the biblical texts in languages other than Latin, Cervantes fashions his own prose epic entertainment as a kind of vernacular scripture, the expression of a humanist conception of ‘poetry’ (imaginative literature) poised to rival theology as the meeting ground for the liberal arts.93 The epilogue briefly considers literary and historical implications of the argument, miming the novel’s own movement from fiction to history. Just where Persiles can appear to be at its most fantastic, with Gothic protagonists from the northwestern edge of Europe, it reveals its most acutely political edge.

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1 Europe as Barbaric New World

Tracing the Gothic princely heroes’ peril-fraught passage from a Barbaric Isle on the northwestern edge of Europe to Rome, Persiles sweeps its readers along on a journey with epic labours and delights that match those of the protagonists. The American resonances of the journey – the animal skins and bows and arrows, cultural alienation, conversions, the Babel of tongues, racial mixing, island-hopping followed by mainland-trekking, corsairs, slavery, captivity, shipwreck, ideal commonwealths, and references to barbarism – have struck many readers. And yet the novel turns such associations on their head by projecting that marvellous world of adventure and rapacity, of grace and disgrace, onto Europe. The context for this argument is a tradition of commentary that has come to see the epic quest of the protagonists from the Barbaric Isle to Rome in contrary ways. My reading builds chiefly on the perceptions of such scholars as Mary Gaylord, George Mariscal, and Diana de Armas Wilson, who have broken new ground by noticing that something, if not rotten, is not quite right in Persiles’ city of Rome.1 But the argument here also acknowledges the explanatory power of idealizing tropes and modes that portray the novel’s journey from the Barbaric Isle to Rome as an ascent from a kind of hell to a kind of heaven on earth. These idealizing readings allegorize the epic trajectory in diverse ways, by modelling them on the whole of human history,2 the peregrinatio vitae or the topos of human life as a spiritual pilgrimage,3 the ascending ladder of a Christianized Chain of Being,4 or the Christian romance that dramatizes the struggle between the forces of light and darkness.5 The larger goal of this chapter is to reconcile the insights of these two critical tendencies, by attempting to capture the dialectic between the ideal and the material put on display in this novel’s pages: the allure

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and ontological reality of virtues, hopes, and dreams in creative tension with other realities that undercut those who falsely claim to have fulfilled the ideal. Underlying the argument is the conviction that Persiles’ complexities deserve to be granted full honours within the same paradoxographic tradition that gave us Don Quijote. Rather than serve mainly as foil to the novel’s Catholic South, the Barbaric Isle is seen to function as its paradigm, as the germ of narrative patterns, actions, characters, themes, and motifs that unfold in this epic ‘ocean of story.’6 Making light of the distance between islands and mainland, between the novel’s Barbarian and Gothic North and its Catholic South, the novel traces latent forms of barbarism that arise with variations over the course of the journey to Rome. As such, the case I make in this chapter comes closest at key points to two interpretations proposed by Diana de Armas Wilson. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (2000) Wilson recognizes echoes of European (especially Habsburg) messianic imperialism in the Barbaric Law prophecy. She takes its ritual cannibalism for a judgment on royal rhetoric designed to authorize conquest by appeal to a providential mission aimed at bringing peace to the world through unity under one sovereign.7 The account offered here of Persiles’ geography, especially the imperial associations of the prince’s homeland of Tile (Thule), suggests how the epic trajectory from the Gothic North to Rome itself may participate in the narrative’s broader questioning of European moral exceptionalism. The argument of this chapter, however, bears closer affinities to a reading Wilson put forward in Allegories of Love (1991). In her earlier book, Wilson noted the parallels between the Barbaric Isle’s traffic in women and the ‘patriarchal’ practices – ‘the buying and selling of sexuality’ (especially women’s in the marriage market) and related violence – represented in the novel’s Catholic South.8 This idea that the Barbaric Isle functions like a parable for, as much as a negation of, the novel’s Catholic world merits being enlarged upon in a number of textual and discursive directions. The Barbaric Isle is read in what follows as the narrative and ideological template for a novelistic reverse ethnography that charts multiple senses in which the Catholic South emerges as a Barbaric Isle in disguise. I highlight the paradox built into the very notion of a Barbaric Law, in its textual representation in Persiles and in the contemporary understanding of both barbarism and the law. I also emphasize the pattern of internecine strife, of a society at war with itself on the Barbaric Isle and throughout the Catholic world it models. The text offers up an impor-

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tant ethical category for representing that Catholic world effectively turned against itself: the distinction between law and custom enunciated by Transila and Mauricio on Hibernia in Book 2 (Persiles 215). That is, the novel’s Catholic South is seen as at odds with itself not only on account of the recurring outbreaks of violence that other critics have noticed but also in the widespread divergence between its professed law and actual customs. I suggest that this category distinction, commonplace in the language of Catholic religious reform, in sixteenth-century just-war disputes over the conquest of the New World, and in social-contractarian thought, underpins the relation between the barbarism of the novel’s Barbarian and Gothic North and that of its Catholic South. With such a conceptual lens, we are more likely to notice the wide array of homegrown barbaric Southern customs in tension with the law in the ostensibly exemplary lands from Portugal to Italy: for instance, the prominence of duelling (which transgressed both Church and Crown law), homicidal revenge, judicial corruption, sorcery, and the staking of personal liberty to feed a poor family. The novel’s Catholic world moreover is portrayed as a natural breeding ground for the marvellous more often associated with its North, home to uncanny prophecies, magic, and improbable events. In this light I draw attention to the narrative’s use in its Catholic South of the rhetoric of wonder conventionally associated with chivalric romance and New World chronicle. The chapter seeks to reconcile idealizing and realistic readings of the novel principally in the detailed analysis of its Rome book (the final of four), under the paradoxical sign of Augustine’s vision (City of God) of the two Romes.9 Persiles’ earthly city is a Rome marked by false testimony, judicial venality, and homicidal assault – a city effectively ruled by a courtesan named for a queen of the Amazons (Hipólita). Its city of God is represented primarily not by the novel’s Romans, nor even by the Church’s representatives, but by the two outsider, Gothic heroes from remote lands where the true Catholic faith is ‘less than perfect’ (Persiles 651). Although in part on a quest to Rome to perfect themselves in the faith, they are seen as already exemplifying the principles the novel holds up in answer to Northern as well as Roman barbarism: mutual consent in love and the Roman penitentiaries’ lessons (‘liciones,’ Persiles 658) in compassion and repentance. We begin our own journey with a sketch of Persiles’ relation to epic and history on the theme of barbarism, the two genres that – for reasons outlined in the introduction – Cervantes appears to have most closely associated with his valedictory novel.

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Epic and History Even if we did not have sixteenth-century literary commentary on Heliodorus to point us in the direction of epic, we would recognize that the relatively narrow geo- and ethnographic range of fashionable narrative genres such as the pastoral and the picaresque could not have served as adequate models for Persiles’ wide canvas. Its embrace of exotic and diverse settings, peoples, customs, and languages and its trajectory from one geographic and ethnic extreme to another would appear clearly to pay tribute to prose and verse epics such as Heliodorus’s Ethiopica, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata.10 Persiles, however, departs from what we might in a tentative way call an ethnic parochialism that characterizes its chief literary precursors. This is not to say that evidence of sympathy for variously defined ethnic ‘others’ cannot be found in epic, but rather that the conventional prose and verse epic pattern is to align the hero’s ethnic, political, and religious affiliations with those of its first audiences and readers. By this standard, Persiles instead offers northern European Gothic protagonists who are paradigmatic outsiders. We can see the contrast at work in The Ethiopica.11 Heliodorus’s heroine Charicleia, an Ethiopian princess born white and exposed by her embarrassed mother Persina, is raised at Delphi to become priestess of Artemis. She meets the hero – a young, noble Thessalian called Theagenes – at a religious ceremony and elopes with him. Their adventure leads them across the eastern Mediterranean from Delphi to Egypt, ending finally in Ethiopia where – just escaping sacrifice – Charicleia is recognized by her mother, and the two lovers finally wed. This is the post-Alexandrian world of Ptolemaic Egypt. The barbarian or foreign element here is provided by Persians (in battle) and Ethiopians in the final reunion scene at the Ethiopian capital of Meroe. Politically The Ethiopica’s Greek-speaking Syrian author appears to take no chances with respect to his third-century CE, Hellenistic readership: the Persians are defeated and the novel’s Greek (or Hellenized) heroes move from a Greek metropolis to an Ethiopian periphery, where they succeed to both priesthoods and political rule over Ethiopians in a ceremony marked by the abolition of human sacrifice. Because Ethiopia is Hellenized by political succession and religious reform, the novel’s cosmopolitan characters and backdrops would seem in the end to serve an untroubled vision of Greek hegemony. Moreover, The Ethiopica ignores the most salient contemporary political fact for the Greek-speaking

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East: the existence of Rome, the Roman Empire, and Roman mastery over the Hellenistic world. The Ethiopica can ignore Rome and Roman dominion over the Greek-speaking world in Heliodorus’s day because the author follows Homeric tradition and sets his story in a semilegendary past, sometime between Alexander of Macedon’s conquests of the East and Rome’s. Another model was needed for an epic novel of adventure prepared to tackle the challenge of a contemporary action in a place recognizable to the author’s earliest readers. Cervantes’ arch rival Lope de Vega offered one solution, publishing his variation on Heliodorus in 1604. Lope’s El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Homeland)12 redefines the characteristic space and time through which adventure heroes move, bringing it all home and up to date. Centring the trajectory of its protagonists on the road from Valencia to Barcelona, El peregrino opens on the beach at Barcelona. Right away, we are introduced to the hero Pánfilo, who finds himself a castaway when the ship returning him from his pilgrimage to Rome in the Jubilee Year of 1600 sinks offshore. Natives of Castile, Pánfilo and the heroine Nise will weather their prescribed bouts of misfortune – abduction, separation, assault by brigands, captivity – largely in and about the major cities of the Kingdom of Aragon (Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza), before returning home near Madrid. In keeping with the playful paradox of his title (a peregrino – the pilgrim or traveller, but also the foreigner – in his own land), Lope discovers virtually all the exoticism he needs in once-sovereign Aragon. The adventure is mostly confined to the Iberian peninsula, save for a brief episode in southern France and another in Morocco involving the protagonists’ captivity in Fez. Persiles thus shares with The Ethiopica its interest in far-flung locations and negotiations of cultural difference. On the other hand it shares with El peregrino a chronology roughly contemporary with its first readers, which contrasts with the semi-legendary illo tempore of Heliodorus’s Ethiopica, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Vergil’s Aeneid. Although Persiles works its own variation on El peregrino’s principle that adventure can be found at home – a departure from generic norms – it carries out a paradoxical twist on that formula by anointing northern European Gothic protagonists who make their way across the Latin heart of Europe. The adoption of this novelistic premise yields the literary possibility of presenting the known from an outsider’s vantage point, unsettling rather than reinforcing assumptions about the priority, familiarity, and virtue of what early readers might have thought of as

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home. That is, the ethnographic ‘gaze’ preferentially trained on nonEuropean peoples in this period is novelistically reoriented so that Southern, Catholic Europe itself is viewed from the perspective of Northern Goth and Barbarian travellers. Compared to its prose epic precursors, Persiles would thus appear to set for itself the boldest combination of narrative challenges, eschewing an exotic never-never land for a goal, a safe historical double-time, and conventional characters identified by origin or language with its earliest readership. The potential ideological challenge implied by Persiles’ creative response to generic forbears is exemplified by its handling of the sacrificial theme. Just as The Ethiopica reverses The Odyssey through allusion in the opening pirate scene of the novel to the carnage of the Banquet Hall that brings one major action of The Odyssey (Ulysses’ contest with the suitors) to a close, so too Persiles reverses The Ethiopica by opening with a reference to the practice of ritual human sacrifice described in the concluding pages of Heliodorus’s novel. In The Ethiopica the epic journey of the heroes not only ends in the Egyptian capital of Meroe, the matrimonial and political resolution is celebrated by the abolition of human sacrifice – a practice until that moment bound up with Ethiopian religion. The Ethiopica would thereby seem to relate the epic themes of politics, religion, and love to sacrifice at the end of the novel. In Persiles the ritual sacrifice of the Barbaric Isle is located at the beginning of the novel and repeated (with metaphorical and literal variations) throughout. One of the implications explored in the argument of this chapter is that by reversing Heliodorus’s quest from (Greek) centre to (Ethiopian) periphery, Persiles also alters the thematic significance of human sacrifice. The thwarting of human sacrifice in Persiles is no triumphant end of the road. Its recurringly enacted (and not always neutralized) threat is the archetype for the whole journey from beginning to end. In Persiles it remains ever-present – even in the very heart of classical and Christian ‘civilization’ – and not, as in The Ethiopica, an exotic practice, confined to the geographic margins, and abolished through the good offices of a force equivalent to Hellenistic political rule and religious conversion. By closing the narrative with the ceremonial abolition of a barbaric practice superseded in an apotheosis that leaves no thematic (amorous, political, or religious) knot untied, Heliodorus’s novel thus embraces the promise of conversion and implies that ‘civilization’ can be achieved once and for all. By opening with a sacrificial ritual, initially thwarted but never abolished, described at the beginning of the narrative and partially re-enacted many times to

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the end, Cervantes’ novel suggests that personal and collective conversion can never be definitive. The barbaric sacrificial impulse is thus lent an ethical significance as an always latent potential, even in the shadow of the Holy See. That barbarians figure as foreigners or anti-heroes in verse and prose epic may well explain the presence of the barbarian theme in Persiles. What cannot be accounted for so easily by recourse to verse or prose epic is its prominence in Persiles, the novel’s paradoxical formulation of the encounter with ‘the other,’ and the critical edge lent that paradox by the distinction between Catholic law and barbaric custom. Plausible inspirations for these disquieting features are the rich array of literary genres (whether Lucianic, Erasmist, or carnivalesque in origin) distinguished for adopting the inversion of perspective as their chief literary strategy. However, the discursive significance of the liberties Cervantes takes with the verse and prose epic legacy may be more clearly grasped if we recognize their bearing on Persiles’ historical moment. Indeed we find telling variations on them in the contemporary rhetoric of just-war theory (the mid-sixteenth century debates led by jurists, theologians, chroniclers, and ethnographers on the legitimacy of the Spanish Conquest), social contractarian political thought, and religious reform. The questions raised about the Spanish presence in the New World by Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano, Bartolomé de las Casas, and José de Acosta (among others mainly associated with the School of Salamanca and Las Casian indigenism) constituted a discourse in which Christian and Aristotelian ethics took precedence over religious doctrine and in which barbaric Spanish (especially encomendero or ‘conquistador’) customs were insistently held to be in scandalous violation of Christian and even natural law.13 Sixteenth-century social contractarian thought offers a second, discursive parallel for the barbarian theme. The novel’s Barbaric Law particularly invites comparison with the state of nature trope invoked to model civil society before the adoption of law, notably the influential account Juan de Mariana gives in his political treatise De rege (1599). And yet a third potential source of inspiration is provided by the rhetoric of religious reformers in Spain, wont as they were to rue the deplorable customs of Christians put to shame by the example of non-Christians, such as the allegedly apostate moriscos (for example, in the estimation of the first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera).14 I have more to say ahead about the significance of these discursive contexts for Persiles. For the moment I will limit myself to observing that the geographic, thematic, and ideo-

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logical reversals Persiles operates on its leading epic precursors have rhetorical and ideological equivalents in those contexts, and especially in the distinction between law and custom that I will argue is central to Persiles’ handling of the barbarian theme. Much as Persiles reverses the epic gaze from insider to outsider and the epic quest from centre to periphery, it locates barbarism at home not in the absence of law but in the presence of customs that effectively trump it. In order to prepare the ground for that argument, we turn next to an account of the novel’s formulation of the ‘barbaric law.’ The Paradox of a Barbaric Law Close examination of the Barbaric Law and of the Barbaric Isle episode as a whole enables us to develop a typology of paradigmatic attributes, actions, and motifs (for instance, the extracted or pierced heart) that serves as a model for the episodes narrated subsequently, especially in the concluding Rome book. I draw attention particularly to the Barbaric Isle’s idolatry of appearances, its sometimes violent literal-mindedness, and the internecine strife that follows, because they are central attributes of Persiles’ representation of the Catholic South. These attributes are linked on the Isle pre-eminently with the arch–Northern Barbarian, Bradamiro, who emerges as an archetype for important Christian characters who make appearances over the course of the novel. We then consider historical sources that located barbaric isles in Europe, together with pertinent aspects of sixteenth-century accounts of the law. They will help us establish the parameters by which the Isle and its Law can be said to function as a template for the novel’s Catholic South as we make our way to its Rome. To the extent Persiles’ Barbaric Isle overtly expresses tendencies only partially manifest in the Catholic realms through which the pilgrims travel, it is more cautionary tale than exotic fantasy. Readers learn of the Barbaric Law early on, because their journey begins in the dark heart of the novel, a Barbaric Isle on the northwestern edge of the Christian-European ecumene. This Isle lies in a liminal zone just beyond the novel’s Tile, the Latin (Ultima) Thule, one of the topical edges of the known world for antiquity and as such a deliberately indeterminate space somewhere between Europe and America.15 No sooner is the hero Periandro (Prince Persiles’ alias while he travels) liberated by a freak storm from certain death on the Isle than he proposes to return to rescue his beloved Auristela (Princess Sigismunda’s alias

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while she travels). Periandro and Auristela at this point in the story have been separated for a year on account of pirate abduction, shipwreck, and captivity in the underground dungeon-caves (mazmorras) of the Isle. Periandro is moved to propose this plan in conversation with the young, beautiful, ill-fated Taurisa, whom he overhears lamenting her lot late one night in the hold of the ship and whom the Danish prince Arnaldo – Periandro’s rival – intends to sell to the Barbarians to discover what has become of Auristela. Taurisa gives the fullest account of the Barbaric Law (Persiles 137–9). A ‘fractious and cruel people’ (‘gente indómita y cruel’), the Barbarians expect a king to emerge from their ranks and conquer much of the world. This belief – also called the Law – was handed down to them as a prophecy, according to Taurisa, either by the devil or an ancient sorcerer they take for the wisest of men. The king’s identity in this elective monarchy will be revealed by an anthropophagous rite, an ordeal of succession described as follows: all foreign men brought to the island (by purchase, abduction, or shipwreck) are to be sacrificed, their hearts extracted and pulverized, and the powders sampled in a drink by the leading Barbarians. The braveheart who does so without wincing is assured the prize: the foreign bride, the crown, and the promise of everlasting glory as progenitor of a son who will grow up to lead the Barbarian people in world conquest. For the bride, the sage’s messianic prophecy stipulates the most beautiful maiden bought or stolen would go to the Barbarian whose heroic pedigree was assured by the drinking of the powders. Indeed, such is the Isle’s natural bounty, this human merchandise is all the inhabitants think they need (Persiles 147), making it a kind of diabolical parody of the Golden Age with a dystopian selfsufficiency the Barbarians attribute to heaven. Greed for the fat reward in gold ore and pearls has led many non-Barbarians – including the Christian Prince Arnaldo (Persiles 147) and King Cratilo of Bituania (Persiles 399–403 and 416) – to take up piracy in quest of hapless damsels and to engage without scruple in the slave or stolen-goods trade, much like the Barbarians of the isle in fulfillment of their Law. In Persiles the blood-thirsty ceremony of the Law as a test for political succession16 is presented as both thigh-slapping burlesque17 and deadly earnest. It may be read both as a succession ritual18 and as a parody of such rituals, as a crude joke about the irrational nature of ordeals that appear to divorce the test from the qualities tested. At the same time it is the expression of a hard truth about the nature of barbarism displayed in the course of the novel: the reward goes to the man who is a

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natural at consuming others’ hearts, who can feast on another man’s blood and not show disgust. The Barbaric Law’s features – the ritually extracted and consumed heart,19 the sacrifice of men, the trafficking in women, the messianic son, and the prophecy of world conquest – potentially call forth multiple and even divergent associations:20 religious (Bacchic, Eucharistic,21 and Christological22), sexual (the role of women as marriage tokens in patriarchal societies),23 anthropological (cross-cultural ritual sacrifice and cannibalism),24 literary (the motif of the eaten heart, the birth of a wonder-boy that ushers in a Golden Age),25 and political (the providential and messianic rhetoric of sixteenth-century European dynastic houses). For the purposes of this discussion I emphasize the theme of election, with its political and religious implications. Usurped birthrights and the repudiation of privileges associated with first-borns figure, as is well known, in the Old Testament stories of Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, and of Joseph, in which birth order is overturned by God’s election.26 Periandro (Persiles) himself speaks of ‘destiny’ (‘destino’) and ‘election’ or ‘choice’ (‘eleción’) to describe his and Auristela’s journey to Rome (Persiles 232). In the Old Testament, birthright is frequently overturned by God’s chosen or elect to fulfill a mission in his providential plan for humanity. In Persiles – an epic entertainment – the comic twist is that while Auristela sees her mission primarily as Catholic instruction in Rome, Periandro’s providential mission is to marry Auristela. I have suggested that the Barbaric Isle and its Law may be read as paradigms for the novel’s Catholic South. The principles of choice and election are a powerful illustration of this claim, since they link the Barbaric Isle to a crucial feature of the main plot resolved only in Rome. The connection between the theme of barbarism and the theme of political succession is made explicit in the Barbaric Law, a law and ritual governing the transfer of political power. It is a succession that foreshadows the final one achieved when Maximino the elder brother dies and blesses the union of his brother with Sigismunda. Persiles’ interest in Sigismunda assumes mutual consent in love or gusto, whereas Maximino’s follows the normative pattern or ley of dynastic matches arranged at a distance (Maximino knows Sigismunda only ever through a portrait). Persiles’ crowning as hero (and monarch) by election is set into motion because he chooses a bride meant for his elder brother. Periandro’s distinctive commitment to conjugal love, a commitment tested severely in Rome, therefore makes him the chosen hero of the novel according to the authorial dispensation of rewards

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and punishments. And it is this double election (he chooses his bride and is the chosen hero) that overturns the arbitrariness of birth order, the tyranny of inherited privilege, and the assumptions underlying the dynastic model of marriage whose limit case in the novel is the Barbaric Law – thereby assuring his political and personal victory over his brother Maximino. In this light his trials and example serve as a kind of running counterpoint to what the Barbaric Law presents as the model for matrimony and the attendant virtues that make a leader fit for political election. Persiles carefully sets the scene of the sacrificial moment to evoke both a Golden Age simplicity and barbaric savagery (Persiles 150–1). Periandro is borne to a great tent among smaller ones, set in a pastoral locus amoenus (‘en un apacible y deleitoso prado’) covered in animal hides. To carry out the prescribed ordeal (what the narrator describes as the trial of the Barbarians’ self-deceiving hope), the governor has given the order to fetch a man from the prison isle. In the meantime the leading Barbarians invite Periandro to sit down to a makeshift meal of assorted nuts scattered about haphazardly on the cured animal hides doing double duty as ground cover and tablecloth. Ominously, one Barbarian – Bradamiro – remains standing. He is the only Barbarian male named in this novel and the embodiment of what is most dangerous about the Barbaric Law, even as he defies it. Bradamiro is introduced a few pages earlier as among the bravest and highest-ranking Barbarians and yet a scofflaw whose arrogance knows no bounds. Indeed he is so outrageous, the narrator suggests he can be compared only with himself (‘atrevido tanto como él mismo, porque no se halla con quien compararlo,’ Persiles 149). Bradamiro takes the cross-dressed Periandro for a woman, as do all his fellow Barbarians (Persiles 150), and once he sets eyes on him is so smitten that he decides on the spot he must have her (him) for himself, whether the prophetic laws are brought to pass or not. A reprieve from the knife comes first when – in one of many ironic reversals in this novel – the Barbaric Law is turned against itself (Persiles 151–3). News of the raft bearing the young man and prison warden of the dungeon-cave puts an end to the meal. Periandro joins the others and instantly recognizes the warden as the venerable Cloelia, Auristela’s guardian, but he does not recognize Auristela because her face is shielded and she is dressed as a boy. Pushed to his (her) knees, blindfolded, with hands bound behind him (her), and the knife’s shadow on his (her) neck, Auristela – silent and meek as a lamb (‘como un manso cordero’) – is spared having her heart carved out only at the last possi-

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ble moment by Cloelia, first, and then Bradamiro. Following a year of separation, Periandro and Auristela come face to face at the height of a ceremony that threatens to do away with the princess. They have traded places sartorially and – more dramatically – by the terms of a Barbaric Law that requires a male and not a cross-dressed female heart. Desperate, Cloelia turns to the governor and denounces the pointlessness (by the standard of the Barbaric Law itself) of sacrificing a boy who is in her words the most beautiful possible woman. She then appeals to Auristela to speak up for herself, sensing the girl has given up on heaven’s providence and abandoned herself to the riptide of her misfortunes. Calling a halt to the ceremony and confusing the ‘cruel’ Barbarians, Cloelia does win time: the captain orders Auristela untied and, inspecting her face closely under light, now sees the most beautiful visage of a woman he had ever laid eyes upon – save, that is, for Periandro’s, splendidly endowed to judge by his riveting effect with the at-once androgynous and virile beauty of the ephebe. The fateful intervention is Bradamiro’s, ambiguous enough to have given rise to a rumour of homosexuality (Persiles 150n2). As Periandro and Auristela – her cover now blown – fall into each other’s arms in recognition and distress, Bradamiro misreads – once again – their joyful tears as the shared lament between friends or relatives for Auristela’s still-uncertain fate (Persiles 154–5). This is the moment Bradamiro seizes to free Periandro. With threatening mien and proud bearing, he grabs the beleaguered protagonists by the hand and dares his startled compatriots to lay a finger on them. The novel’s avatar of menace and pride, Bradamiro bellows that ‘this maiden’ (‘esta doncella’) is his (‘es mía’) because he wants her (‘porque yo la quiero’), and this man (‘este hombre’) is to go free because she wants it that way (‘porque ella lo quiere’). And therein lies the crux of the ambiguity: the narrator never spells out who is who, who the girl and who the boy. And into the breach commentators have stepped, often supposing the ‘doncella’ in question to be the still cross-dressed Periandro.27 Even if we set aside the association of transvestism with homosexuality in some commentaries, the ambiguity is telling. Cloelia has already revealed Auristela’s identity. At this point, when the heroes embrace, it looks as if two girls have collapsed in each other’s arms. No explanation is given for Bradamiro’s remarks, and since ‘esta doncella’ and ‘este hombre’ go unidentified, we must assume either that Bradamiro remains in the dark (one reason for the questions raised about his sexual tastes), or that somehow Periandro has also been found out (in which case it is possible to read

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Bradamiro’s ‘esta doncella’ as Auristela and ‘este hombre’ as Periandro), or that Cervantes sought to include the reader in the genderbending confusion experienced by the Barbarians to this point; or simply that the author forgot he had already revealed Auristela’s identity and not Periandro’s. If I dwell on this issue it is to notice that once Periandro’s disguise is recognized for what it is, in the absence of Bradamiro’s arrogant presumption the Barbarians still have what they need to fulfill their prophecy. That is, despite Cloelia’s heroic efforts, the danger to the protagonists remains very much alive, just now reversed (Periandro would be sacrificed and Auristela married off to a Barbarian). Disaster is averted because the ‘governor’ is so incensed by Bradamiro’s insubordination he arms his bow and fires an arrow so truly aimed it seals Bradamiro’s mouth, piercing his tongue and killing the man on the spot (Persiles 155). It is the same fate dealt another epic usurper, Penelope’s suitor Antinous in The Odyssey (XXII). The governor’s intemperate act provokes a melee, as a result of which the Barbarians turn on each other and send the whole island up in flames (Persiles 156). Bradamiro’s and his fellow Barbarians’ misreading of Periandro’s and Auristela’s disguise is no mere obtuseness, nor would I suggest is it only a foray into the alluring complexities of sex and gender. What could be called the literal-mindedness of the Barbaric Isle fits both into a standard pattern of disparagement of New (and Old) World ‘barbarians’ and into the novel’s own ambivalent flirtation with the now dangerous, now redeeming power of physical beauty. Advocates of ‘just war’ (as conquest was called) such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda were wont to accuse Amerindians of confusing the (sacred) figurative with the (abominable) literal consumption of flesh.28 A related charge levelled by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega – in praise of Inca forbears over their own non-Inca Amerindian subjects – claimed that Amerindians failed to think abstractly about religion, to envision an invisible God, and to grasp the ideal reality of virtues, deifying plants and animals instead.29 Against this discursive background, when the Danish prince Arnaldo initially takes the theatrically cross-dressed and veiled Periandro to meet the Barbarian leader (called variously prince, governor, and captain, for example at Persiles 147), the effect is heightened by recourse to the lexicon of religious (and courtly) idolatry: ‘he knelt, worshipping in his way the beautiful image he thought a woman’ (‘se hincó, adorando a su modo en la hermosa imagen que pensaba ser mujer,’ Persiles 148). Periandro convincingly acts the part with sighs and uplifted eyes, and

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the Barbarians are duly blinded by her (his) ravishing beauty, a moment of narrative shock and awe that brings the Barbarian prince literally to his knees. We are thus given the spectacle of a richly attired ruler, worshipping a living rather than a graven image, and a mistaken one at that. These local instances of the illusory power of appearances would appear to condemn the novel’s Barbarians. And yet the same imagery and vocabulary of adoration and idolatry are fully worked out in Rome itself, where the Bradamiros are Christians – Arnaldo, Nemurs, and especially (male and female) Romans responding to the beauty of the Northern Gothic and Barbarian pilgrims. The Barbarians have no reason to honour the first two of the Mosaic injunctions to worship no other God and to create no graven images (Exodus 20). However, the echoes of these two commandments in the idolatry of human beauty (beauty as a graven image, worship of human beauty) that obtains on the Barbaric Isle and then again in Rome can be seen to put the Christians – especially the putatively exemplary Romans – of this novel on notice. In Persiles Northern Barbarian literal-mindedness is linked to barbaric Christians such as Prince Arnaldo of Denmark, the French duke of Nemurs, the unidentified governor of Rome, and Persiles’ elder brother, Maximino, who are all taken in or entirely ruled by appearances. Among other ways, this susceptibility to looks by Periandro’s rivals for Auristela’s hand is figured by her portrait. Arnaldo and Nemurs nearly kill each other over its possession in Rome, and Maximino knows her only through one (Persiles 637–41, 701). Even a mere admirer such as the Roman governor will request her portrait as payment for trying a case (Persiles 675–6). This kind of Barbaric Isle modelling and foreshadowing of the Catholic world – with its parody of courtly love tropes – helps to explain why Persiles appears to waffle among the titles of ‘prince,’ ‘captain,’ and ‘governor’ when it designates the Barbaric Isle chief’s rank. We need not insist the vacillation was conscious or otherwise planned by the author to recognize the (perhaps unconscious) pattern. The method in the variation allows the novel a wider range of comparisons among Northern Barbarian and Christian characters, drawing attention to and anticipating Barbarian attributes such as the idolatry of appearances shared by a Christian prince (the Danish Arnaldo, whom we have met), a captain (the French Rubertino in Book 3, a robber baron called ‘capitán’ at Persiles 576), and a governor (the unnamed Roman governor of Book 4 just mentioned, Persiles 675).

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Described as a scorner of all laws, Bradamiro points up the paradox in the expression ‘Barbaric Law.’ In effect, his transgression is a violation of a lawless law. And his insistence on placing his gusto (recall that his words are ‘because I want her’ [‘porque yo la quiero’]) before the major law of his community – his bald assertion of privilege – may be seen as an emblem of the tyranny that masquerades as natural and sacred right in the Barbaric Isle’s Law itself. Periandro enunciates one version of this moral distinction on which so many of the novel’s episodes turn. Hanging on Taurisa’s every word as she tells her own and Auristela’s story, Periandro is dismayed to learn how deep Arnaldo’s interest in his beloved Auristela goes. And despite the impending danger to him (or else to Taurisa) on the Barbaric Isle, jealousy – of a rival with a kingdom to offer, in whose company Auristela had spent a year (Persiles 182) – gets the better of him. He begins to wonder just how far Arnaldo took his infatuation (Persiles 140). He also worries that Arnaldo’s wooing (and rank) may have swayed Auristela enough to make her forget Periandro because, as the narrator says, it seemed to the young prince that ‘the laws of human pleasure might be more powerful than those of religion’ (‘porque a él le parecía que tal vez las leyes del gusto humano tienen más fuerza que las de la religión,’ Persiles 140). Periandro’s sober clarity about the laws of ‘human pleasure’ (‘el gusto humano’) reminds us that gusto too has its laws in this novel, and that these are (sometimes) opposed to ‘religión’ – in this case, he means both Arnaldo’s Christianity and Auristela’s vow of chastity. We have just seen how the laws of Bradamiro’s gusto supersede (in his mind) the Barbaric Law. Much later, following the Barbaric Isle conflagration and the protagonists’ escape, the young heroes find themselves in a boat on the high seas and spot a great ship, at full sail, making for them. Both Periandro and Auristela fear the worst, and for both that fear has a name: not a Barbarian, but Arnaldo (Persiles 182–3) – his unwanted overtures, the danger that he might discover their sibling alibi (and derail their pilgrimage to Rome), and the all-around menace posed by his ill-concealed suspicions and Periandro’s barely controlled jealousy. Indeed the chief perils from the moment the royal pair escape the Barbaric Isle all the way to Rome will be Christian and not Barbarian. Taking a cue from the novel, one might call them barbaric rather than Barbarian, driven by one or another variation on gusto or passion, usually erotic, made into a higher law. Bradamiro in this ambiguous context becomes a kind of hero and anti-hero at once, the rebel against an arbitrary law who acts not out of

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principle but purely out of selfish interest. In so doing he succeeds – against his intention – in liberating our hero and heroine, foiling a premature end to the novel and setting into motion the display of less apparent, but no less cruel, forms of barbarism where reason, Christianity, and the law are supposed to prevail. The judgment that the Barbaric Law is lawless, a form of institutionalized tyranny, depends on noticing that its fulfillment calls for abduction or traffic in humans, murder, and forced marriage, all (needless to say) without the prior consent that is the chief form that rational rather than barbaric ‘law’ takes in this novel as Periandro and Auristela will demonstrate in Rome. And yet not all opposition to it is therefore not not-barbaric. Bradamiro’s objection to it is not principled, since it does not arise from a repudiation of its arbitrariness. It is instead a personal expression of that very arbitrariness, his own rather than collective Barbarian gusto held to trump Barbarian Law, but in fact the truest manifestation of it. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, in at least one crucial sense Bradamiro may be thought of as Periandro’s alter ego. Periandro’s (the prince Persiles’) lovesickness – and his mother’s accommodation of it at the expense of his brother Maximino’s rights – is described at length in the novel’s Book 4. Just as Bradamiro seeks to overturn the Barbaric Law to satisfy his personal gusto, Periandro is seeking to usurp his elder brother’s right to Auristela (the princess Sigismunda) and thereby overturn the law of primogeniture in the name of his gusto for the heroine. Pairing Bradamiro and Periandro this way illustrates the principle that the difference between heroes and villains in Persiles may not be in the goals but in how they achieve them. As we shall see, Periandro is a counter-example to Bradamiro in the degree that he manages (eventually) to overturn the law of primogeniture, satisfy his gusto, and yet remain within the limits marked by natural and Christian law. The Barbaric Isle’s immediate fate – apparent self-destruction in Book 1 – and Bradamiro’s part in provoking the internecine strife serve as an implied commentary on the contradictions inherent in a Barbaric Law. It is brought home by a powerfully ironic reversal that claims the Barbarian prince following Bradamiro’s death (Persiles 155–7). Like Bradamiro, he too pays without quarter for his ‘atrevimiento’ or presumption. No sooner is Bradamiro felled than a member of his faction avenges his death by bounding over to the prince (now called captain) and sinking a stone dagger in his chest, ending his life. The prince, captain, or governor as he is variously called, in effect a vicar for the Barbaric Law’s conqueror – destined to carry off a beautiful maid and rule

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the Barbarian people – instead becomes one more of its sacrificial victims. In this revenge killing and the factional blood feud that immediately follows (‘moved by revenge and anger’ [‘incitados de la venganza y cólera’]), the Barbaric Isle starkly foreshadows the wages of an honour code that wreaks havoc in the putatively Catholic lands of the South. The infighting that breaks out following Bradamiro’s insurgency suggests the just reward of a community that makes a law of murder and rape. Living and dying by the sword, a society that bases its legitimacy and continuation on force continually exposes itself to challenges from within. And, indeed, the Barbaric Isle is threatened more by its own than by outsiders. Once the feuding Barbarians have spent their arrows, they fall back on fists and daggers; the phrase used – ‘they assaulted one another’ (‘arremetieron los unos a los otros,’ Persiles 156) – evokes and makes a telling contrast to the Gospel’s ‘love one another’ (‘amaros los unos a los otros’). It also happens to be the exact phrase used to describe Taurisa’s unwanted suitors on the so-called snowy isle, as the pilgrims make their way South on the high seas (‘[a]rremetieron el uno contra el otro,’ Persiles 258). In one of many re-enactments of Barbaric Isle futility, the very girl who explained the Barbaric Law to Periandro – and whom Periandro saves from the Barbarians by cross-dressing in her place – is the unbidden object of two rival Christian ‘gentlemen’ (‘caballero’) suitors determined to battle it out over her hand. They will not be deterred, although the duel is outlawed by the Church (a fact emphasized when sailors refuse them burial, Persiles 260). Not only is Taurisa indifferent to both, she also desperately needs – far more than a duel – immediate medical care. She fails to get it in time, dying along with her suitors in a tellingly pointless – barbaric rather than Barbarian – bloodbath, imitative of the Barbaric Isle even in the details (one dueller runs the other through the heart, Persiles 258). Thus the Barbaric Isle – like its Christian imitators, who observe an honour code that encourages two men to fight for a woman interested in neither – appears destined to undo itself, to come apart like a house divided. In the absence of a civil or positive law based on what sixteenth-century jurists called reason (or natural law), as we shall discuss later, the Barbaric Isle demonstrates there can be no warrant against sedition. Commentary on the Barbaric Isle has naturally emphasized New World parallels and sources.30 The material features described (the animal skins and bows and arrows, rafts, unminted gold ore and pearls for currency); the motifs of island-hopping, shipwreck, captivity, and ritual cannibalism;

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and the themes of conversion, miscegenation, cultural alienation, translation, and barbarism must have triggered powerful American resonances. Indeed there is evidence that some of Cervantes’ early readers associated the Barbaric Isle with the New World, as did the first modern critics of Persiles.31 In Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla’s adaptation of Persiles (in print by 1636), the sage said to be responsible for the prophecy of the Barbaric Law – unnamed in Persiles – is called Guanacol, a quechua name that evokes a kind of llama (guanaco).32 In 1629 Enrique Suárez de Mendoza published his imitation of Persiles – entitled Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica (Eustorgio and Clorilene: A Muscovite Story) – and did not refrain from setting his own barbaric sacrificial ritual on an island vaguely referred to as the Indies.33 Eustorgio’s peril-fraught trek in search of Clorilene leads him to this island where ritual cannibalism is practised. He and his party are made prisoners by savages that worship Ceres, the goddess of fertility, conflating Old World paganism with New World exoticism.34 Just as they are about to be sacrificed, Clorilene appears in the garb of a high priestess and persuades the natives to substitute animal for human sacrifice – a clear echo of the climactic scene in Heliodorus, when the Hellenistic Theagenes and Chariclea are crowned monarchs of Ethiopia and ordained priests of the solar cult.35 Thus, Cervantes’ (and Heliodorus’s) adapters and emulators (and undoubtedly many of his casual readers) made the New World association for him. Nevertheless, Cervantes’ pointed geographic displacement toward Europe of a kind of world usually associated with America reminds us that Cervantes’ early readers possessed more than one mental map for the location of barbarism. Carlos Romero and Isabel Lozano Renieblas have fought a rearguard action in Persiles scholarship by drawing attention to northern European parallels for the novel’s Barbaric Isle, to demonstrate that it could have been modelled on more than one literary, historical, or contemporary reality.36 In that spirit I would point to several sources that attest to the southern European fascination with legends of northern European barbarism, in some details reminiscent of Persiles’ Barbaric Isle. In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (9.11–13) a story is told about the waters off the coast of Hibernia (Ireland).37 A host is gathering in Hibernia to join its king in a crusade to destroy the island of Ebuda, the roughest (‘la più cruda’) of all islands among the many said to lie beyond Ireland. Ebuda’s laws authorize its people to strike out and rob others (‘che per legge manda / rubando intorno il suo popul rapace’). They feed captured women to a voracious beast, who swims ashore to devour his daily tribute of an ever-new damsel. As on the Bar-

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baric Isle, merchants and pirates supply the women, the more beautiful the better. Elsewhere in Orlando (10.93) we learn about an Isle of Tears (‘Isola del pianto’), where the nubile heroine Angelica is chained to a bare rock. This name is given to the island off the Breton coast inhabited by the cruel, inhuman people (‘da crudele e fiera tanto / et inumana gente’) who maraud the shore in search of ravishing women to propitiate the monster. Several Spanish texts confirm this mental habit of imagining barbarians and barbarism in North Atlantic waters. In the Jardín de flores curiosas (1570) Antonio de Torquemada reports a story about a vessel sailing for Spain. Stranded on an apparently deserted island in the wake of a storm, the ship’s passengers are suddenly assaulted by savage men of cruel and fierce demeanour (‘unos hombres salvajes, con aspecto y parecer cruel y feroz’).38 The islanders surround the ship and shout so harshly their voices sound more like brays (‘daban unas voces tan mal formadas, que más parecían baladros o bramidos’). It bears noting the narrator uses the same idiom (‘dar voces’) to describe their shouts that Cervantes uses for the cries of his own Barbarians in the very first sentence of the novel. That the islanders are said to make a sound like braying (‘bramidos’) also suggests a potential inspiration for the name of the Barbaric Isle ur-usurper, Bradamiro, which scrambled comes out ‘bramidor’ or brayer.39 The island ‘savages’ attack without warning, and with such fury that one woman – among the passengers who happened to beach – failed to gain the ship in time and the ‘monsters or bestial men’ (‘monstruos u hombres bestiales’) practised all manner of lust (‘ejercitaron todos géneros de lujuria’) on every manageable part of her body (‘y en todas las partes de su cuerpo que podía’). The crew abandon the woman in fear for themselves, hoist sail, and beat a retreat, naming that land the Isle of Satyrs (‘la Isla de los Sátiros’). In the same vein, Miguel Sánchez’s contemporary play La isla bárbara (The Barbaric Isle) relies on the plausibility of a barbarian tyrant ruler of an island in the North Sea.40 There is no evident relation with Persiles to judge by the plot and character names other than the title and the general idea, nor can we be sure it was written or performed before Persiles was published. Nevertheless Miguel Sánchez was known to Cervantes because he reserves a word of praise for him in the Viaje del Parnaso. Neither the New World nor northern Europe exhausts real-world analogues of the Barbaric Isle, and another is indeed presented by the novel itself in Book 3. As the pilgrim-heroes approach Toledo, they come upon two students from the University of Salamanca beguiling an

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audience in a village square with the artfully made up tale of their captivity in North African dungeons, a dizzyingly meta-literary parody of the Matter of Barbary designed to coax alms out of (apparently) gullible villagers (Persiles 527–40). The episode draws on a tried-and-true folk motif (itinerant players con country folk) that Cervantes was evidently fond of, since he revisited it more than once – notably in theatrical farces such as La cueva de Salamanca (The Cave of Salamanca) and El retablo de las maravillas (The Wonder-Show). The echoes of the Barbaric Isle in their telling may well have largely escaped the notice of scholars because the students are con artists and the story is invented. But there was nothing false about the ongoing drama of thousands of Spanish and Christian captives in North African mazmorras (dungeons) awaiting ransom or slavery, nor – as every student of Cervantes knows – was there anything fictional about the author’s own five-year captivity (1575–80) in Algiers.41 The problem of Christian captives in Algiers remained acute as ever in 1616, and Cervantes’ impatience with Habsburg dithering on the Mediterranean front – together with the dynasty’s habit of squandering attention and resources on the old family fiefdom of Flanders – surfaces overtly already in his first Algerian-captivity play (El trato de Argel, ca. 1581), perhaps Cervantes’ earliest extant dramatic work.42 The mark of the Barbaric Isle on the Salamanca students’ literary ruse is evident not only in the shared lexicon of corsarios (‘pirates’), bajeles (‘ships’), captivity in mazmorras (‘dungeons’), or the trade in humans for ransom in the name of a religious law. It is also conspicuously underscored by the name Cervantes and his contemporaries most commonly used for today’s Maghrib, namely Barbary (in Spanish, Berbería) in deference to its Berber inhabitants. And Christian captivity in Barbary, though given a comic twist in the impostors’ tale, becomes through shared language in Persiles a contemporary real-world ‘barbaric’ antipodes in the far South that matches the novelistic one in the far North.43 To heighten the meta-literary paradox, we need only notice that the only historically grounded rather than invented mazmorras (dungeons) in this novel – the Algerian ones – turn out to be framed in a fraudulent story by students wanting to make a quick buck. No single proposed historical parallel or source corresponds fully to the attributes Cervantes lends his Barbarians, because the sources tend to duplicate only one or a few of the constituent elements of the Barbaric Isle (trade in humans, captivity, gold and pearls for currency, primitive rafts, bows and arrows, animal skins, and so on). Even the Barbaric Law describes not merely human sacrifice or cannibalism but

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ritual cannibalism as a test for elective monarchy. Persiles scholarship has taught us that the Barbaric Isle could have drawn on numerous New World and northern European sources, and as we have seen, the text itself points us to yet another in Muslim Barbary. We noted that the Barbaric Isle’s Law recalls Christian and pagan, contemporary and historical, sacred and profane, symbolic and literal cases of ritual cannibalism, trafficking in women, messianism, and conquest. What might these partially related historical parallels and sources have in common, and what literary payoff might there be for the decidedly composite character of Cervantes’ Barbaric Isle? Bearing in mind its seemingly deliberate liminality, resisting the urge to pin it down to a single source enables us to read it as a symbolic world that gestures toward barbaric potentials in all human societies: that is, as a template for a widespread anthropological, psychological, and ethical phenomenon – even a faculty of mind like the Kantian perception of cause and effect – rather than (or only as) a historical, economic, or technical problem fixed in a given time and place. By evoking many real-world manifestations, the Barbaric Isle emerges as a kind of narrative heuristic for the conditions in which barbarism may arise anywhere. One discursive model for reading the Barbaric Isle as a narrative meditation on a barbarism understood in broadly political and ethical terms is the state of nature trope central to social contractarian thought. From Vitoria’s tenure at the University of Salamanca in the 1530s and 1540s to the publication of Francisco Suárez’s De legibus (On Laws) in 1612, Spanish jurists and theologians became pre-eminent in Europe for reflection on political philosophy, and particularly for a vigorous strain of contractarian thought. Quentin Skinner has observed that the foundations were laid by Vitoria for international law (associated with Grotius) and by Suárez for both the defence of absolutism (associated with Hobbes) and the promotion of liberal, whiggish constitutionalism (associated with Locke).44 The Inca Garcilaso’s account of Pedro Serrano, a kind of proto–Robinson Crusoe borrowed from his Comentarios reales (The Royal Commentaries, 1609) on the history of pre-conquest Inca Peru, became a favourite example for the English social contractarians. We need not assume that Cervantes took a particular interest in these texts or issues directly, as he could have been informed about them casually through literary academies or conversation. The point here is to remember, as we consider the Barbaric Isle’s possible senses and implications for early readers, that many generic and discursive models might have gone into its imagining.

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There are two critical senses in which Persiles and social contractarianism could be said to cross paths. First, both Persiles and the social contractarians bring home the exotic, barbaric cultural worlds of the New World chronicles and juridical debates and internalize them as a conjectural story or history of European ‘civilization’ – what society was like historically or would be like actually without the rule of law – symbolized by the state of nature.45 Second, both Persiles and the social contractarians make consent a fundamental theme. Through the sixteenth century, debates raged across confessional lines about whether there were conditions under which the authority of the ruler could be legitimately challenged and revoked and whether the consent to be ruled was to be regarded as tacit or in continual need of legitimation by appeal to popular sovereignty.46 Nevertheless, consent – tacit or otherwise – was assumed by most commentators to be the minimal condition for political legitimacy. Its importance is suggested in Persiles by the centrality of mutual consent to the princely protagonists’ exemplary handling of their crisis in Rome, where – as we shall see – it emerges as the crucial prior step to marriage and (tacitly) to political succession. The tacit connection between a mutually consenting marriage and exemplary political rule is made explicit in the Isle of Fishers episode, in which – as discussed in chapter 4 – Auristela offers a lesson in royal justice by overturning paternal and ecclesiastical fiat and undoing two arranged betrothals. Understood as a narrative exploration of conditions for the orderly transmission of authority, the protagonists’ movement in Persiles toward political rule would appear itself to ritualize the assumed ideal conditions for civil society contrasted with a state of nature represented by the Barbaric Isle. In this context the Barbaric Isle’s proximity to Europe may be read not only as an aspect of the inner, ethical, or even political reality of Europe, but of all civil society made starkly visible. Persiles’ Barbaric Isle would thus function as a novelistic equivalent for Juan de Mariana’s influential parable of the state of nature, described in De rege (On the King, 1599) and later by Hobbes and Locke – that is, as the founding or originary moment for civil society prior to the establishment of a social contract. Mariana phrases the need for such a compact in the language of barbarism and the law, the very terms yoked so tenuously on Persiles’ Barbaric Isle: There is now nothing better nor more to be valued than the man corrected and called to moderation by the force of discipline, subject to laws and, above all, to a superior power, against whose will he is impotent. What

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indeed would there be more cruel and barbarian than [a man] if he were not held back by the prescriptions of law and the judgments of the courts? Would there even be wild beasts who gave rise to so much harm? Injustice is extraordinarily violent when armed. (Nada hay ahora mejor ni mas apreciable que el hombre corregido y llamado á la moderacion por la fuerza de la disciplina, sujeto por las leyes, y sobre todo, por un poder superior, contra cuya acción es impotente. ¿Qué empero habría más cruel ni bárbaro que él sino le detuvieran las prescripciones del derecho y los fallos de los tribunales? ¿Habría acaso fieras que causasen tanto estrago? Es violentísima la injusticia cuando armada.)47

The result of the social contractarian strain of political reflection represented in Spain by Mariana was a current of thought prepared to meditate not only on the barbarism of others, but chiefly on Europe’s own latent barbarism figured either as the tyrant or the mob and the measures required to head it off. This disposition to turn the critical gaze inward and find barbarism in the ethical heart of civil society is pursued one step further in Persiles, since, as we shall see, it focuses in its second, Southern half on the actual, rather than the hypothetically historical or potential barbarism at the core of ‘civilization.’48 Taking a cue from the example of the Barbaric Isle itself, abstracting from the untidy particulars of historical cases, also makes it possible for us to reconsider another discursive common ground in the sixteenth century: the hard-fought, widely documented, in many ways remarkable just-war debate about barbarism and the nature of humanity that took place in Spanish universities and royal councils and on the printed page. The New World is thereby seen to bear on the Barbaric Isle through the commentary and polemic it provoked about barbarism, rather than (or mainly) as a convenient geographic placeholder for it. Therefore, rather than focus on the Barbaric Isle as an allegory for the New World or even for Habsburg imperialism, which has been done very well, I dwell next on rhetorical aspects of the just-war debate that shed light on the novel’s journey from the Barbaric Isle to Rome. Attention to the just-war debates will help us to define a vocabulary recognizable to Cervantes’ contemporaries, to test it against the novel’s own terms, and especially to grasp early modern implications of the expression Barbaric Law that are lost to us. The relevant sense of law as it was commonly used in sixteenthcentury Spain is the meaning routinely assigned to what is now called jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. For the moment, the practice

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of the law, the exercise of justice (discussed especially in chapter 4), and the minute description of civil and canon law codes are less salient than this theoretical or philosophical reflection on the law. For a standard, we can take the great jurist Francisco de Vitoria, who discussed the relevant nuances of the law in De Indis (On the Indies, 1532), his landmark lectures on just war in the New World. Vitoria, in part following Aristotle and especially Aquinas, makes plain the much broader scope of what was understood by the law in Cervantes’ lifetime than is common now.49 It came to embrace divine law (what we might call the laws of nature or creation, the Decalogue, Church tradition, and the sacraments); human or civil or positive law (whose aim was justice, or what we might now call civil and criminal law, but also administration, especially selfgovernment, and, in a word, politics); and the law of nature (or reason, said to be inscribed in the heart of all humans at the Creation), the natural capacity of all humans – irrespective of their religious or ethnic affiliations – to distinguish right from wrong and organize their affairs. St Paul had used the phrase ‘the law inscribed in the heart’ (‘legis scriptum in cordibus suis,’ Rom. 2.15) to describe Gentiles who are conscientious, though bereft of the Mosaic Law, and to reproach Jews who break the law, though circumcised and outwardly keepers of it. Before Paul, the Stoics had promoted the idea of a natural law binding on all rational men; and for most of Western history, a ‘man of heart’ has meant a man of sense rather than a man of feeling.50 That the phrase ‘inscribed in the heart’ to refer to the law of nature was borrowed from the stock-in-trade of neo-scholastics steeped in Stoic moral philosophy and Paul’s teachings renders it all the more pertinent to Persiles’ Barbaric Law, given Paul’s prominence in Persiles (discussed in chapter 2).51 In ordinary parlance, the scope of what passed for law (and hence barbarism) was ample, larger even than the already wide scope lent it by jurists, as noted above. In the sixteenth century, barbarians were outsiders to the law, whether they came by this status through the workings of nature or fortune. What the path-breaking Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija meant by law – as author we should recall of the first written grammar of a European vernacular (1492)52 – was classical latinity and philology.53 The barbaric outsider in his invective was the scholastic who wrote medieval Latin and not the Latin modelled on Cicero written by the humanist. As students of the Spanish classical theatre know, there was also a law (and therefore a barbarism) for literary taste or gusto. In 1609 the playwright Lope de Vega (in his Arte nuevo or New Art) proudly called himself barbaric for violating the neo-

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Aristotelian ‘laws’ of dramatic unity and for proposing alternative ‘laws’ more suitable to the actual (rather than the prescribed) tastes (‘gusto’) of the theatre-going public.54 And finally, as late as 1647, in a novella sometimes referred to as ‘Estragos que causa el vicio’ (‘The Wages of Vice’), María de Zayas could – tongue in cheek – describe a law of disenchantment (‘desengaño’) about the false promises of erotic love. The barbarians in her narrator’s account were those who, despite knowing better, still believed them.55 The same range of thematic reference to the law – of language, literature, and erotic love – filtered through the prism of ‘barbarism’ is present in Persiles, in the Babel of tongues, the recurrent disquisitions on verisimilitude, and the many episodes exploring turns on love gone awry. In sixteenth-century just-war discourse, the chief criterion for distinguishing barbarians from their superiors was reason – a distinction critical in Persiles. Everywhere one looks – whether Vitoria’s De Indis or the Valladolid debates that, in 1550 and 1551, pitted the indigenist Las Casas against the just-war advocate Sepúlveda – the universally recognized authority for defining the pertinent sense of reason was Aristotle. The relevant passages in The Politics (1252a, 1254a–b) establish the essential difference in reasoning capacities between natural masters (those capable of emitting orders, and therefore of governing others as well as themselves) and natural slaves (those endowed only with reason enough to receive orders, and therefore incapable not only of governing others but of governing themselves). The imperialist Sepúlveda declares all barbarians irrational animals and all Amerindians barbarians and therefore natural slaves incapable of self-government. In the Argumentum apologiae (ca. 1550–1), a closely argued refutation of Sepúlveda’s doctrine prepared for Prince Philip of Spain, Las Casas distinguishes four classes of barbarians – the first of which applied to the cruel (by which he meant, among others, Spanish conquistadors in the New World) independently of their religious or national origin – then denies any Amerindian peoples were natural slaves, and finally defends their capacity (and right) to self-government.56 In De Indis Vitoria summarizes attributes that mark out rational human from irrational animal, thus making the essential distinction for him. But Vitoria also lists other yardsticks for distinguishing barbarians from ‘rational’ humans: evidence of the use of language and especially of writing and literacy; of written legal codes; of liberal arts and mechanical crafts; of systematic agriculture; and of manufactures such as weaving. Again, Christianity was only one among many attributes that

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could separate the rational wheat from the barbaric chaff, but not the fundamental one. And in an indigenist such as Las Casas, we even find an influential writer on the subject who has no qualms about consigning cruel Christians to his first category of barbarism.57 It is important to emphasize that in Las Casas’s Argumentum, the bishop of Chiapas reserves the first among four classes of barbarism for those whose savage behaviour makes them barbaric. To Sepúlveda’s argument (in Democrates alter, 1547) that force is required to liberate New World inhabitants from their state of barbarism, Las Casas replies that even inhabitants of advanced states – such as Greeks and Latins – are barbaric if their behaviour is sufficiently savage or cruel. Moreover, Spaniards, in their treatment of the Indians, ‘have surpassed all other barbarians’ in this sense according to Las Casas.58 Las Casas’s boldly ethical criterion – ultimately derived from Aristotle, much as Sepúlveda’s imperialist argument was – suggests that Cervantes’ imaginative reinterpretation of New World barbarism projected onto Europe was by no means anomalous, much less unique or somehow impossible to conceive by the standards of the age.59 The multiple valences of our heroes’ status as pilgrims (‘peregrinos’) – traveller, foreigner, and wandering votary – are indirectly glossed by one such ethical canon for winnowing fully human from barbarian, the first of the just titles Francisco de Vitoria discusses for war in De Indis (3.1). The Salamanca jurist invokes the ius peregrinandi, the right of foreigners to travel and trade without impediment, the denial of which Vitoria regards as a just title for war: ‘Amongst all nations it is considered inhuman to treat strangers and travellers badly without some special cause, humane and dutiful to behave hospitably to strangers.’60 Vitoria’s proposition is pertinent to both the Barbaric Isle’s treatment of outsiders and the reception that Periandro and Auristela receive – as guests – in Rome. The connection is reinforced by the suggestion of pilgrimage in the Latin peregrinandi, which, like the Spanish peregrino, embraces pilgrim, foreigner, and traveller all at once in its semantic field. The combination of spiritual and material criteria for barbarism in these sources roughly contemporary with Persiles helps us appreciate the novel’s representation of a paradigmatic (as well as historical) barbarism, a paradigm rooted notably in various kinds of ethical discourse. The full range of features associated with barbarism in the early seventeenth century crops up in many guises in the novel, from the irrationality of a lawless law that deprives Persiles’ Barbarians of their capacity to govern themselves (hence the easy slide into civil war) to the

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evocation of a primitive material culture that takes what it needs from the natural environment largely untransformed (animal skins for dress, caves for abodes, and pearls and unminted coins for currency). We observed that there was precedent – and Las Casas was merely the most conspicuous example of it – for Cervantes’ reimagining of barbarism as an ethical rather than an ethnic or even (primarily) a religious problem – especially, as we shall see, at home among Christians. What this survey of contemporary views of barbarism should make clear is that Persiles’ reference to a Barbaric Law in its opening episodes was almost certainly understood by the reasonably informed reader of 1617 as a contradiction in terms, a self-evident paradox in the root sense of an assertion that challenges commonly held opinion. Bearing this in mind helps us to recognize the full paradoxographic force of the novel’s Catholic South and its Rome. In the last chapter of Persiles, the news comes that the Barbaric Isle is reconstituting itself once again (Persiles 679), right there where we are discovering that Catholic Rome is itself no New Jerusalem. The Westward Course of Empire Turned Back A study of epic journeys, negotiations of barbarian otherness, and paradoxical inversions of expectation should give some account of the novelistic geography that leads us to Rome, what it is, and what it might mean. Persiles’ settings are more than cursory backdrops for travel understood as an initiatory epic ordeal (religious pilgrimage, road of life, and spiritual transformation) whose gantlet must be run before a return home. As we shall see, geography is one of the multiple means by which the novel points to the Gothic and Barbarian North as a parable for its Catholic South – as an allegorical expression of its dark side, as an incarnation through representative characters of its highest principles, and even as a source of ethical regeneration from which it may have something to learn. In the following pages I explore how the novel’s sometimes arcane geography enables Cervantes to keep his characters within a Catholic world once they are off the North Atlantic Barbaric Isle, and yet respect historical verisimilitude. Perhaps the most interesting example of this historical resonance for arcane (often archaic) place names is the imperial significance of Persiles’ birthplace of Tile (Thule). In the light of important subtexts such as Vergil’s Georgics, Seneca’s Medea, and contemporary New World chronicle, the protagonists’ journey from Thule to Rome may be read as a reversal of the

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translatio imperii topos by which dynastic propagandists in Spain, France, and England promoted conquest. The novel’s geography invites both historical and allegorical readings.61 To begin with, it is important to note that it never abandons Europe and that the main action takes place in the years 1557–9 and around 1606 (for reasons discussed in chapter 2) – the recent past as measured by the novel’s year of publication (1617) and well within Cervantes’ lifetime (1547–1616). Persiles – whose mother tongue is Norwegian – is said to hail from Thyle or Thule (the Latin and Greek names for Iceland, spelled by Cervantes in Spanish as ‘Tile’) and Sigismunda from the nearby island of Frislanda (Friesland). The Barbaric Isle is somewhere in the neighbourhood, close enough to Norway and Thule that characters such as the Italian Rutilio (coming from Norway) or Persiles and Sigismunda themselves (setting out from Thule) could land there following a few days’ sail. Many readers have seen a decisive geographic (and narrative) break between a barbaric, pagan, dark, and romance or mythic first half of the novel (the ocean-going and island-hopping from the Barbaric Isle to Lisbon in Books 1 and 2) and a ‘civilized,’ Christian, luminous, and novelistic or realistic second half (the land-trekking from Portugal to Rome in Books 3 and 4).62 But the novel’s Barbarian and Gothic North and its Catholic South are implicated in each other from the beginning and throughout, forming a dense weave of foreshadowings and recapitulations. Virtually all but the framing episodes and the main plot of the Northern half are told by and about metropolitan Europeans who, through one or another twist of fate, wind up on the Barbaric Isle or the Isle of Hermits: Spanish (Antonio), Italian (Rutilio), Portuguese (Sousa), and French (Renato and Eusebia) characters, from the lands through which the Northern protagonists will make their way in the Southern half (an exception is Transila and Mauricio’s Hibernian episode). Hence most of the wonders and barbarisms narrated in the North actually are about and take place in the Catholic South. In the South the counterpoint is provided chiefly by the Northern protagonists themselves with their exemplary caritas (‘charity’), and Southern subplot characters originally from the Catholic North (such as the Polish Ortel Banedre and the Scottish Ruperta), set against the exotic, marvellous, and barbaric deeds that take place in the South. The life stories of the Spaniard Antonio, the Italian Rutilio, and the Portuguese Sosa told in Book 1 and of the French Renato and Eusebia told at the end of Book 2 closely resemble (in characterization, inci-

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dent, and location) the kinds of stories narrated in Portugal, Spain, and France in Book 3. They are crisis stories, centred on watershed moments that play one or another variation on the ‘labour’ or ordeal of the protagonists. In Book 2 this rhythm is interrupted by Periandro’s flashback narrative at Policarpo’s court on the Northern isle bearing the king’s name, which also gives rise to its own incident in the narrative here and now. The narrative pattern here – action at a court in the present, framing retrospective tales – resembles that governing the Barbaric Isle and Rome, which open and close the book. Toward the end of Book 2 the protagonists once again take a back seat to hear out a life story – Renato and Eusebia’s (which, geographically and politically, locates us in yet another bastion of the Catholic world, France) – about past events bearing on present situations. Through that sequence of secondary stories (Antonio’s, Rutilio’s, Sosa’s) narrated in Books 1 and 2 we thus move out from one centre – Spain – to Italy and Portugal. Much of Italy and all of Portugal was under Spanish Habsburg dominion when the novel was published in 1617, though not in the novel’s interregnum of 1557–9 (the Portuguese inheritance was not made good by Philip II till 1581). The series of secondary stories then leads us North to Hibernia and hence to France. The Golandia interlude prepares us for the emergence, still in Book 1, of Transila, of her reunion and recognition scene with her father, the sage Mauricio, and her betrothed, Ladislao. Mauricio and Transila share their story about yet another North Sea island homeland, called Hibernia – apparently also Catholic, although Mauricio merely identifies himself that way (Persiles 205) – near to and bearing the Latin name of, but not identical to, Ireland in this novel. And France of course was the Spanish Habsburgs’ chief rival, wracked by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants in the second half of the sixteenth century, and yet historically the Church’s ‘favoured daughter.’ Throughout, characters (and readers) remain squarely within the Catholic world, whether we take 1617 or the novel’s own primary dates of 1557–9 and 1606 as our reference. This picture is further reinforced by the main action, because Cervantes has arranged its geography so that, once the pilgrims are off the Barbaric Isle, we are always in Catholic lands. First of all, the Gothic homelands of our protagonists, Thule and Friesland – though alleged by the narrator in Book 4 to be ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ (‘adonde la verdadera fe católica no está en el punto tan perfecto como se requiere,’ Persiles 651) – defer nevertheless to the religious authority of Rome. The pilgrimage to Rome arranged by Persiles’

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mother implies as much: it is not presented as a transgression (for instance, of a State religion other than Catholicism), but as an end run around the elder brother’s betrothal rights to Sigismunda. Following escape from the Barbaric Isle and still in Book 1, the first island we meet – Golandia, not much more than an inn on a rock – is said to be Catholic (Persiles 207). So too are Policarpo’s Isle (Persiles 304) – the kingdom of (ostensible) virtue where the pilgrims spend much of Book 2 – the Isle of Fishers (Persiles 347) where Auristela rearranges a marriage against parental authority, and the Isle of Hermits (Persiles 396–7). Even the Northern characters introduced in the Southern Books 3 and 4 are from traditionally or then officially Catholic countries (Ortel from Poland, Ruperta from Scotland). Sigismunda’s birth name fits the pattern described. Designating her royal title as crown princess of Friesland, it recalls the name of three successive Sigismunds who ruled Poland from 1506 to 1632. To many of Cervantes’ contemporaries, the name would thus have evoked an at once exotic and familiar place, a remote northern European kingdom that – unlike Muscovy or Russia – was staunchly Catholic. We see this impulse at work a little later in Calderón’s play La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1636), whose starcrossed prince Segismundo begins life as a barbaric captive of his fearful father, the astrologer-king Basilio of Poland, and who – by dint of hard-won lessons in self-restraint and charity – wins back his royal birthright. It becomes apparent that Cervantes created a novelistic space in which it would be possible to cross great – moreover paradigmatic – distances, endure extremes of climate, and negotiate differences of language and ethnicity and yet remain within the Catholic orbit. The partially invented or disguised places in the novel’s North can thus be seen as modelled by allusion or analogy more on the actual, historical world – as literary mirrors of contemporary European geography and polities, or as made-up realms lent historical European associations – than they are fantastic never-never lands that turn their back on history. By the time the pilgrim-heroes set foot in Portugal at the beginning of Book 3 – the novel’s midpoint – characters and readers are caught up in the narrative present. Book 3 straddles Portugal, Spain, France, and northern Italy (the Western Empire, historically) and therefore recapitulates the earlier movement north of Antonio (Spain), Rutilio (Italy), Sosa (Portugal) to the Barbaric Isle, and of Renato and Eusebia (France) to the Isle of Hermits. It combines the two major narrative patterns of Books 1 and 2: the adventures of Periandro, Auristela, and

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Northern companions as they happen, together with ‘real-time’ variations on their story told by characters whose paths they cross. Even the story of Scottish Ruperta reported in France gives us a parallel to the Hibernian Mauricio’s and Transila’s, since Scotland here can be considered (for reasons to be explained) a northern outpost of the Catholic world. The main difference between Books 1 and 3 indeed is not the religious or national origin of the characters whose stories are told (all Catholic lands, chiefly Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy). To begin with, there is a geographic difference: the island or maritime settings of the storytellers (though not the stories) in Books 1 and 2 over against the mainland settings of Books 3 and 4. The other relevant distinction between the first and second halves of the novel is that the stories told in the North about secondary characters are set in the narrative past, while the stories of Book 3 are narrated in the present. As such the heroes are witnesses to the stories in the first book in the special sense that they are an attentive audience. They are witnesses in Book 3 in the more usual sense that they are observing the action as it unfolds. Book 4 most resembles Book 2, Rome standing in for Policarpo’s Isle inasmuch as they are both major Catholic courts, political and religious entities of note, and especially insofar as Periandro and Auristela recover their protagonism in ‘real time.’ Ostensibly a redeeming of both the Barbaric Isle (Book 1) and the false utopia of Policarpo’s Isle (Book 2) – kingdoms destroyed in separate conflagrations as a result of their rulers’ unbridled passions – Rome is the scene both of the characters’ apotheosis and the perilous re-enactment of those same Northern island kingdoms. The apparent desire to evoke great distances and yet remain Catholic may well help to explain the liberties used in North Atlantic geography. This is especially true of the recourse to (and sometimes doubling of) arcane, legendary, or historical (especially Greek and Latin) names, alongside the contemporary and invented ones: Thule is used for Iceland (the Greek name for Iceland, as Persiles’ tutor Seráfido explains in Book 4), but a Danea and a Denmark figure separately, as do a Hibernia and an Ireland. Policarpo’s Isle in the neighbourhood of Britain is imaginary, as are the as yet (and perhaps never) to be identified islands of Golandia and the Isle of Hermits in North Atlantic waters. Certainly by the time the novel was published in 1617 and even by the internal novelistic chronology of 1557–9 and 1606, much of the real-world ‘Gothic North’ had gone Protestant, and Ireland was under the English (Anglican) boot. Scotland (Ruperta’s homeland) was

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largely Presbyterian by 1557–9 and yet could still nominally count as Catholic. Historical ally of France and perpetual thorn in England’s side, the Gaelic kingdom was indeed ruled by Catholics – first under Mary of Guise’s regency and then, from 1561, by her daughter Mary Stuart (‘Queen of Scots’). On the other hand, Ireland’s population was then, as it remains today, decidedly Catholic, but the island had effectively lost its political independence in the reign of England’s Henry VIII, who moved from 1534 to 1537 to disestablish the Roman Church, abolish the monasteries, confiscate lands, and establish a Protestant Church of Ireland. Persiles’ religious map appears, then, to follow the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (roughly, ‘in the prince’s land, the prince’s religion’) affirmed for the Holy Roman Empire in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which ended the Schmalkaldic wars between the empire and France.63 That Cervantes was aware of the significance of this accord is made plain by the fact that in Don Quijote (II.54) he has the exiled morisco Ricote take up residence in a village near Augsburg (he uses the Latin form, Augusta), under the (inexact, but telling) impression that in Germany ‘they live with freedom of conscience’ (‘se vive con libertad de conciencia’).64 At Augsburg the German potentates sought to re-establish order and achieve an internal truce in the religious wars by acknowledging the right of each ruler (the princes, the nobility, and the imperial cities) within the empire to choose its State Church. As historians know, the achievement for religious toleration was limited: the ruler professed for all within his dominions, and the choice itself was limited to Catholicism and Lutheranism (Calvinism, Anabaptism, and Islam, for instance, being excluded). Cervantes appears to demonstrate his literary commitment to history (and, in this case at least, verisimilitude) by assigning a State its religion according to the ruler’s confessional preferences, following a novelistic equivalent of the principle decided by the Augsburg Diet within two years of Persiles’ internal chronology (1557–9). Hence, Ruperta comes from Scotland, and yet we meet her in France on a pilgrimage of revenge to the Holy City, where she seeks allies in her quest against her husband’s murderer (Persiles 589) – implicitly honouring the political letter if not the religious spirit of papal authority. Indeed Ruperta’s would-be revenge story – in which she sets out to kill the son of her husband’s murderer and winds up marrying him – bears a remarkable resemblance to a key incident in Mary Stuart’s life: in 1567 Mary lost support for her cause in Scotland because she married the man (Bothwell) believed to have murdered her

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husband (Lord Darnley). By the same unofficial narrative principle of cuius regio, eius religio, Cervantes finds himself obliged to make his Hibernian Catholic, Mauricio (a name probably derived from Fitzmaurice), a native of a shadow State near Ireland – Catholic, but in 1557–9 at the political mercy of the English Crown – bearing Ireland’s Latin name. Among the major characters, Prince Arnaldo and his Danish homeland are the exception to this proposed Augsburg rule. Although Cervantes invents a neighbouring Danea (Latin for Denmark) with which Denmark is at war, he has Arnaldo hail from Denmark. The choice is particularly interesting – and potentially risky, less for reasons of religious than literary orthodoxy (the standard of verisimilitude) – because Denmark had established Lutheranism in the reign of Christian III (1534–59, the closing year of this novel’s internal chronology). In principle Arnaldo – as heir apparent to the Danish throne – could be expected to swear fealty to Denmark’s Lutheran Church. And yet nothing is made of it. Not a word is said about his religious commitments one way or another, nor does he broach Auristela’s Catholicism, even though the princess is said to spend a year in his company. The reason for Arnaldo’s latitude may well lie in his nature: Auristela is his religion. He makes this fact plain enough by wooing her with one of several – two at least, courtly – variations wrung in this novel on Augustine’s renowned trope for a restlessly desiring soul finding peace only in God (Confessions I.1; Persiles 229, 293, 429, 690). Arnaldo thinks he has found it in Auristela, although with Arnaldo as we know by now it can have little to do with the soul. That Cervantes would want not only the physical but also the great spiritual distance travelled to play out entirely within the Catholic realm sheds light on the debate over the novel’s sometimes supposed CounterReformation sympathies. Due recognition of a novelistic geography that carefully skirts the confessionally charged northern core of Europe may lead us to reflect anew on Persiles’ religious allegiances. How much easier, surely, to write a triumphalist novel about Counter-Reformation Rome that followed its ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Gothic characters (portrayed, for instance, as Catholic recusants) from Lutheran Sweden or Germany, Calvinist Holland, or Anglican England to the Catholic South. We can be confident royal (Habsburg) and Church censors would sooner have applauded than questioned such a design. Even the Barbaric Isle – otherwise, at least on the face of it, the dark shadow of the Catholic world’s belief about itself – is not entirely excluded from the papal orbit. Ricla – a Barbarian woman who rescues and marries

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Antonio the Spaniard – is portrayed from the beginning as an exemplary Christian, bears mestizo children (Antonio and Constanza) who take a leading role in the pilgrim party to Rome, and teaches a Catholic Spanish man a lesson or two in the spirit of Christianity (Persiles 158–78).65 Close attention to Persiles’ geography does, as we have seen, suggest that the Christianity (‘less than perfect’ or otherwise) throughout this novel – whether in the Northern maritime settings of Books 1 and 2 or the Southern terra firma realms of Books 3 and 4 – is always Catholic. In chapter 2 I have more to say about Ricla and the kind of Catholicism promoted in this novel, but Cervantes’ geographic choices themselves already suggest that the religious varieties, tensions, and contradictions in the novel are a quarrel en famille. Cervantes’ use of arcane place names, in at least one crucial case, can be taken for evidence that Persiles is holding European imperial messianism up to scrutiny. We should recall first that the Barbaric Isle’s prophetic law of world conquest is presented as a foundation myth of the Barbarian people, projected into the future to herald universal empire. Its explicitly political and military sense suggests a parody of European foundation myths and ideas of a God-given mission to conquer and evangelize the world as Diana de Armas Wilson has proposed.66 In the sixteenth century, many European nations had their fund of folk beliefs that kept alive the hope of a providential return of a saviour-king. In England, the legendary King Arthur was to come back in the form of a crow (a legend discussed by Arnaldo and Mauricio in Book 1, Persiles 246–7). In Portugal the historical Sebastião would return to save the nation, since his death and disappearance without heir in 1578 at the Battle of Alcazarquivir in Morocco paved the way for the Lusitanian kingdom’s absorption by the Spanish Habsburgs from 1581 to 1640 (Sebastião’s death is mentioned prophetically by Soldino in Book 3, Persiles 602–3).67 The royal houses of Europe were keen to make propagandistic use of such popular beliefs, promoting their dynasties by largely made-up associations with the messianic hero. Historical examples of providential myth in the service of empire abound, and the Barbaric prophecy’s messianic imperialism recalls a rich array of contemporary European analogues such as the Habsburg claim to universal monarchy.68 As a result of the defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto (1571) and the Christianization of the Americas, the Habsburgs embraced Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue as their own, suggesting that its prophecy of a divine wonder-child poised to restore prelapsarian bliss and universal harmony had been realized by their House.69 Perhaps the

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most widespread case is the prophecy that heralded world conquest following the recovery of Jerusalem from the (Muslim) Saracens and, in the sixteenth century, from the Ottoman Turks. Throughout Europe these hopes of a crusade to recover the holy places and usher in a new age were revived with the accession of each monarch. A Last World Emperor would resign his imperium directly to God in Jerusalem at Golgotha. In Spain this tradition, influenced by Joachimite ideas and prophesies attributed to St Isidore of Seville, celebrated a Spanish messianic king and world emperor known variously as the Encubierto (‘the Hidden One’), the Murciélago (‘the Bat’), and the New David.70 The beginning of each reign thus aroused eschatological expectations, hopes for a new dispensation of peace and harmony. The Spanish Habsburgs inherited and encouraged this prophetic tradition at least as late as the reign of Philip IV (1622–65).71 Although Charles V was portrayed as the Last World Emperor,72 his son Philip II preferred a more orthodox family myth that sanctified the dynasty: the Habsburgs as custodians of the Blessed Sacrament.73 Philip II is also responsible for a twist in royal iconography close to one of the fundamental sacred subtexts of Persiles, the exodus from Egypt: the monarchs carved on the main facade of his monastery-palace El Escorial (1563–84) are the kings of ancient Israel, leading a chosen people through trials of faith.74 In order to fully grasp the political significance of the novel’s geography it is important to notice the archetypal sense of its main geographic axis. As the protagonists make their way to Rome, they not only travel from the North to the South first by way of islands (in Books 1 and 2) and then by land from Lisbon to Rome (in Books 3 and 4), but they also trace an equally paradigmatic movement from west to east, from the far edge or finis terrae of the classical known world in (Ultima) Thule to the epic, imperial, Catholic, and Latin metropolis of Rome. We already know the novel’s Tile (Thule), Persiles’ homeland, is Gothic and described as ‘less than perfectly Catholic.’ This perception by southern Europeans of what we now might call Scandinavia predated the Reformation. It was owed to the (in historical terms) relatively recent conversion of those northern latitudes to Christianity, making it – as Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas (1570) attests – a kind of New World in Europe. The protagonists’ movement from west to east reverses the imperial mandate to follow the sun, the translatio imperii: the transfer of political, military, and religious authority that, by tradition as is well known, flowed

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from east to west. This authority – in effect, the right to rule the known world or ‘universal monarchy’ as it came to be called – was thought to have passed from Greece to Rome and thereafter from Rome to the sixteenth-century European kingdoms whose dynasties (the Habsburgs, the Valois, and the Tudors) jockeyed for position on the continent and in the New World.75 ‘[Thule’s] far-westerly location held a strong historical significance for the Romans, a people who portrayed their own arrival on the stage of history as a migration from a collapsing East to an unspoiled Italian “Hesperia.”’76 As Werner Goez explains, the decisive moment of the translatio imperii was Charlemagne’s imperial coronation by Pope Leo III in 800, when political pre-eminence was transferred officially from Rome to the Frankish kingdom.77 That moment and its implications resonated through the investiture crises of the Middle Ages (first with the Franks, then the German Ottonians) and down to the mid-sixteenth century, when Spain’s Habsburg Charles I (V of the Empire) caused a stir by ceding the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand of Austria (in 1556) without consulting the Vatican. The Habsburg, Valois, and Bourbon dynasties went so far as to trace their genealogical descent from Aeneas himself through Charlemagne; and continuity between the ancient and modern empires was sealed – according to royal propaganda – by the translation of political and religious pre-eminence from Augustus to Constantine the Great, from Constantine to Charlemagne, and from Charlemagne to the emperor Charles V, the alter Karolus (or other Charles).78 The authority of the principle of translatio, together with the well-documented imperial associations of Thule and Rome, make it plain that Persiles’ main plot journey from Tile (Thule) to Rome registers a movement from margin or periphery to centre, reversing the historic direction of empire, with the protagonism (and ‘gaze’) of the periphery over the centre. We first learn about Tile (Thule) in Rome, and the way we learn about it is manifestly calculated to heighten the imperial sense of the geographic arc traced by the protagonists. Periandro’s mother, Eustoquia, has dispatched his tutor, Seráfido, to find the young prince in Rome before his brother Maximino – in hot pursuit – does. Through a screen of trees by a roadside, Periandro is startled to catch the familiar notes of his mother tongue, Norwegian. He overhears Seráfido explaining to the Italian Rutilio – home again from his stint on the Isle of Hermits, the Barbaric Isle, and Norway – how it was that Persiles (Periandro) and Sigismunda (Auristela) came to undertake the perilous journey to Rome (Persiles 697–700). He describes the Northern Gothic prince’s (and his own) homeland as the most remote limit of

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Norway, an island held to be the last on earth in the direction of the North Pole. In Seráfido’s account, only Sigismunda’s kingdom of Friesland is closer to the pole (correcting the tradition regarding Thule), much as Sigismunda herself is Persiles’ North Star. The name of Persiles’ isle is Thyle, Seráfido says, ‘which Vergil called Thule in those verses in the first book of the Georgics that say “ac tua nautae / numina sola colant: tibi serviat ultima Thule,” for Thule, in Greek, is the same as Thyle in Latin’ (Persiles 698–9). What does Vergil make of Thule? In the proem to the Georgics that Seráfido quotes, the Mantuan addresses by turn his patron Maecenas and the deities governing the themes of his poem (tillage, agriculture, the rearing of cattle, and the keeping of bees). He closes the invocation with an apostrophe to Caesar (Octavian, the emperor Augustus). Looking ahead to the day when Augustus will join the gods on Olympus, the poet wonders what he will oversee once deified and, by cataloguing the kinds of fame and glory to which the young emperor could aspire, expresses his hopes for the promise of the Augustan pax – of prosperity and justice – following decades of civil war. In a word, he captures in song his hopes for a god on earth rather than in heaven. It is in this context that the poet mentions Thule, addressing Roman gods, patron, and emperor and evoking the farthest margins of the empire from its centre as if he himself were – if not a god – a god’s messenger, surveying the world. The poet asks Caesar to bless his own voyage in verse, whether you choose to guard the cities or tend our lands, that the world may welcome you as the giver of increase and lord of the seasons, wreathing your brow with your mother’s myrtle; whether you come as god of the boundless sea and sailors worship you alone, while farthest Thule [‘ultima Thule’] serves you, and Tethys [goddess of the sea] pledges the dowry of her waves to wed her daughter. (urbesne invisere, Caesar, terrarumque velis curam, et te maximus orbis auctorem frugum tempestatumque potentem accipiat, cingens materna tempora myrto; an deus immensi venias maris ac tua nautae numina sola colant, tibi serviat ultima Thule, teque sibi generum Tethys emat omnibus undis).

His fondest hope, besides his patron’s blessing, is that the emperor – though granted dominion of sea and sky – not aspire to rule Tartarus or

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the underworld (‘nec tibi regnandi veniat tam dira cupido’). The ambition is associated in this verse with ‘the lust to rule,’ the monstrous lust to govern or regnare here meaning ‘tyranny’ as the Greeks called lawless rule. Whatever else it does in The Georgics and Persiles, Thule marks the limits of empire. Cervantes had already given voice to this conventional attribute of Thule’s in his early play La destruición [sic] de Numancia (The Destruction of Numantia, ca. 1581), about the Roman consul Scipio Aemilianus’s siege of the Celtiberian city that lends the play its name. In the final speech, Fame promises to immortalize the Numantines’ heroic courage from ‘Tile to Batro’ (Thule to Bactria [today’s Afghanistan]), in one sweeping phrase summing up the scope of the Roman Empire at its height.79 Thule’s standing as a hoary topos for the edge of the (Roman) world makes it all the more interesting that, in Persiles and through Seráfido, Cervantes would embed the reference to it in Vergil’s lines from The Georgics – as if he were inviting us to compare the two. Politically, of course, Cervantes’ Thule does not owe contemporary Rome (the Papal States) allegiance and, indeed, should be read as an inversion of Vergil’s scenario. Thule’s Caesar in Persiles is the Northern Gothic Crown Prince Maximino, but the novel’s sympathies lie with (and the story is about) his upstart brother and – by the novel’s end, successor – Persiles. Persiles in turn looks upon Rome as both an exotic finis terrae and ostensibly (for a Catholic) a spiritual home. And yet in Rome, as we shall see, Persiles (Periandro) and Sigismunda (Auristela) turn the spiritual tables and show themselves to be in possession of the better part of Christianity, giving Romans a lesson in the religion for which they are institutional custodians. Vergil’s verses speak to the temporal and spiritual authority of Caesar to which Thule (the imperial periphery) bows, imagining him deified as a benevolent near-impersonal (natural and sacred) force for good. If Maximino is Persiles’ temporal rival for the imperial laurels of this novel, the pope in Rome is clearly his spiritual rival. The pontiff is mentioned briefly at the very end of Book 4 as Auristela (not Periandro) makes ritual obeisance to him (Persiles 713). And the religious overlordship of the pope is indeed more evident with respect to Auristela than to Periandro or any other character (except Cloelia and two or three clerics), perhaps especially the Romans of this novel. To glance ahead for a moment, Periandro is in Rome above all for Auristela, not for catechism. Auristela imagines herself the nub of Periandro’s wheel of fortune, the centre and circumference of his desires – and the nar-

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rator agrees with her assessment (Persiles 710). Seráfido’s quotation of Vergil therefore emphasizes the reversal operated by Cervantes. The Roman poet naturally takes the view of his patron and ruler, Caesar Augustus, looking out from Rome on his world as far as Thule. Cervantes’ novel takes the view of Farthest Thule looking back at Rome in the person of its royal representative, the prince Persiles, and as we shall see – not so much serving as – conquering the city on the Tiber by his moral example. To fathom the anti-imperial revisionism of the novel’s movement from Thule to Rome – the narrative’s apparent turning of its back on America – it is important to recall that the most recognizable sixteenthcentury locus classicus for Thule was not in the Georgics but in the second choral ode of Seneca’s blood-curdling tragedy Medea. Its author – tutor to the emperor Nero – eclipsed Euripides in the late-sixteenth-century revival of the theatre in Spain, England, and Italy as the model, at least conventionally, for tragedy (Lope de Vega says as much in his poetics in verse, the Arte nuevo of 1609). Beyond the vogue for Seneca’s truculent brand of revenge tragedy, Medea’s crux for Thule became far more widely known than the play itself – or any other locus – because a particularly fortunate phrase in it enjoyed a long, happy afterlife in several widely disseminated histories of the European discovery of America. Seneca’s play endowed Thule with a new sense destined to supplement and even supplant its earlier one as northern limit of the Roman Empire. In order to understand just how this happened and, moreover, to appreciate other striking parallels with Persiles, it helps to recall several of the play’s features. Medea’s action takes place on the day Creon, king of Corinth, has banished Medea, the day too that Jason – the husband she loves to distraction – is to wed Creon’s daughter. The Corinthian chorus sings its second ode following the fateful scene between Creon and Medea, in which the Colchian ‘barbarian’ princess begs to be allowed one last farewell to her two children by Jason. The king smells treachery but relents, distracted by the wedding rites. The ode tells of how Jason and Medea met, of his comrades and his vessel the Argo (mythic first ship to quest on the high seas), of Medea’s sorcery and ‘virile’ strength, of the ‘labours’ required to win the Golden Fleece from its monstrous custodians (with Medea’s artful wiles, without which Argonaut courage would have fallen short), and of the ‘impious’ crimes (deserted father, murdered brother) Medea committed for love of Jason. The chorus is Corinthian and so takes the view of Creon against Medea, wrapping its version of events in a lamentation of the ease with

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which ships now ply the once ‘lawless’ deep first traversed by the Argo, of how old boundaries have been erased and city walls raised in new lands. Where once there was clarity, there is now confusion of peoples: Persians quench their thirst in the Rhine. The Corinthian chorus finally can see no good in this ancient version of globalization, omitting to recognize that risk-taking travel and Greek Jason’s complicity with the ‘wanton’ barbarian Medea won the Golden Fleece for the Argonauts. The ode at such moments appears less anti-navigational (and -imperial) than it is rueful at the price exacted by golden fleeces, an awareness Cervantes certainly shares (if not inherits). In Medea Thule is not only the limit of the lands (as to some extent it was for Vergil), it is the last stand against the loosing of moral restraints. Despite much seafaring, the worst is yet to come: the overturning not only of the natural, but even of the moral and divine order as a result of the kind of hybris represented by Medea’s (and Jason’s) many crimes – especially of course the crime the ode foreshadows. Much as Medea will murder her children to avenge Jason’s desertion, the story writ large predicted by the ode has it that one day human restlessness will push beyond the time-honoured, law-like boundary for wandering at Thule, new worlds will be discovered, and (implied) chaos will follow from these transgressions. A time will come many years hence when Ocean will let loose the bonds of things, when the immensely broad earth shall be revealed and Tethys disclose new worlds and Thule no longer be the limit of the lands. (Venient annis saecula seris, quibus Oceanus vincula rerum laxet et ingens pateat tellus Tethysque novos detegat orbes nec sit terris ultima Thule.)

(II.375–9)

The speech’s spectacular historiographic career was launched by that critical phrase, ‘novos … orbes’ (‘New Worlds’). By the end of the sixteenth century the link between the Senecan speech about Thule and Columbus’s voyages to America had been told and retold countless times to the point of cliché and could be read in chronicles, histories, and ethnographies of the New World. In The Book of Prophecies Columbus cited the passage, shorn of its baleful predictions, as an anticipation of his own voyages.80 Indeed he saw his own move-

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ment beyond Thule as a happy or redeemed fulfillment of the prophecy spoken by Seneca’s Corinthian chorus. Gómara, Acosta, and Herrera discuss it, to name only three historians of the New World whose works went through many printings in Cervantes’ lifetime. Perhaps the most widely read and translated account was José de Acosta’s, in the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (The Natural and Moral History of the Indies), published in 1590.81 Taken as a prophecy for Columbus’s voyages to the New World, Seneca’s reference to Thule could thus have been familiar even to those of Cervantes’ contemporaries who might not have known Medea directly. In that light, Persiles’ trajectory from Thule to Rome symbolically reverses the course of empire from east to west, the translatio imperii whose mantle Renaissance monarchies not only saw themselves as taking up from Rome but also as conveying to America. The upshot of this motif and its history in the context of Persiles is that the novel’s geographic sequence from island-hopping (Barbaric Isle, Golandia, Policarpo’s Isle) to mainland-trekking (from Portugal to Rome), bearing west to east, is itself the mirror image and reversal of the New World exploration, conquest and settlement patterns that began with island-hopping in the Antilles (Hispaniola and Cuba) and culminated in Cortés’s overland march (1519) from the Yucatán to Tenochtitlán (Mexico) – bearing east to west as imperial tradition prescribed. Vergil, Seneca, and – among Cervantes’ contemporaries – Góngora (in the Soledades, whose manuscript began circulating in 1613) took up the anti-navigational (sometimes too anti-imperialist) lamentation topos – known by the Vergilian expression auri sacra fames (‘the hunger for gold,’ Aeneid III.57) – in a way that markedly contrasts with Cervantes’ own revisionism.82 In Persiles the tone and pattern are those of New Comedy: the characters move by wandering through a world of illusion, mistakes, and adventure from initial discord occasioned by a blocking senex figure such as old parents, slave merchants, or a wealthy rival (represented in Persiles by the elder, martial-spirited brother Maximino) to a resolution most commonly figured as marriage.83 Not everything about the imperial urge is foresworn. The commitment to adventure is evident from the handling of Auristela’s doubts in Rome. And yet it is a spirit of adventure and conquest turned toward the familiar – the Old World, Christianity, the nation, the family, the self – reframed as a New World, as exotic and marvellous, and as a privileged location for heroic daring. Cervantes’ epic novel rewrites the script of empire in part, then, not only by rewriting Seneca’s Medea, but also Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneid. The epic that once reserved glory for military conquest

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– the taking of Latium and the founding of an imperial Rome served by Farthest Thule – is superseded by an epic that (comedically) celebrates the conquest of inner Romes through knowledge that can come only by the labours of the title. The reversal of spiritual and temporal priorities in epic is figured geographically by Thule’s displacement of Rome. Rome, and everything it comes to represent in this novel, is itself ripe for a (spiritual) conquest. Rome as Barbaric Isle: Prose Epic as Reverse Ethnography All roads may lead to Rome for the Northern, Gothic protagonists, but there is a Rome for every taste. So mythologized a city exists both in the public imagination and on those seven hills about the Tiber, and the novel’s Rome pays tribute to this reality by operating simultaneously on more than one plane. For Periandro and Auristela, Rome is their North, their finis terrae, and their Ultima Thule in the sense that Rome is the Land’s End of their journey, their antipodes, and their exotic end of the road and object of the quest. On the other hand, the journey is also in principle a spiritual homecoming, a pilgrimage by Catholics to their Holy City. But Persiles pits those ideal expectations – expressed most fully in imagery (e.g., Persiles 320, 644–5, 690–1) – against the force of the actions and characterizations the heroes actually find in Rome. In that contest, the narrative puts the concept of Rome as New Jerusalem and the Christianized imagery of the Chain of Being on trial. The Southern episodes on the high road to Rome prepare the way in Book 3. Moved by the novel’s imagery and the weight of Catholic tradition, many readers have assumed that, once the hero and heroine are off the Barbaric Isle, each small step they take toward Rome is one giant leap for ‘civilization.’ In contrast, Diana de Armas Wilson has noticed how the Barbaric Isle models the patriarchal trafficking in women and related violence that obtains in the Catholic South.84 The insight merits broadening to include other forms of Southern, Catholic barbarism. The rhetorical mark of it is the lexicon of marvel and wonder that saturates the ostensibly familiar South. As the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Northern European protagonists make their way across land from Portugal to Rome’s heart of darkness, they witness episodic cases of barbarism at home in the Catholic South in which wrathful kin (fathers, brothers, uncles), suitors, spurned lovers, and crazed coreligionists strike out blindly and even violently and in which corrupt justice is the political norm. Thus representative Catholic characters and institutions

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consume hearts in (largely) metaphorical variations on the Barbaric Isle’s ritual sacrifice. As the protagonists move away from the Barbaric Isle toward Rome, the motif of the eaten heart begins to take on a symbolic charge, as an emblem for the cruelties and atrocities committed in the name of love. The metaphoric (Eucharistic) sacrifice sometimes said to distinguish European religious belief from literal-minded Amerindian cannibalism by advocates of imperialism (‘just war’) such as Sepúlveda is, through translation into the ethical realm of customary mores, betrayed by flesh-and-blood cruelties no less barbaric (and sometimes even literally equivalent) to the Barbaric Isle’s sacrificial practices. If the counterpoint on the Barbaric Isle to the official Barbaric Law is the Christian custom of the Northern Gothic Periandro and Auristela and the Barbarian Ricla, in the novel’s geography and ethnography as a whole there emerges a paradoxical tension between the Christian law and the barbaric customs of the Catholic South. The theme’s elaboration culminates in Rome, where more than one sort of knot is tied. The novel itself provides an explicit testimony of this tension between law and custom. Mauricio – the Hibernian sage, judiciary astrologer, and rationalist of the novel – describes the ius primae noctae (‘law of the first night’) custom honoured in his homeland of Hibernia and to which his daughter Transila was subjected, in his words the worst of many bad customs (‘una costumbre, entre muchas malas la peor de todas,’ Persiles 215). According to this ‘barbaric custom’ (‘costumbre bárbara,’ Persiles 215), the bride is settled in a richly decorated room on the wedding day, and the groom’s brothers and closest relatives take turns raping her. It is, in the judgment of Mauricio and Transila, a ‘barbaric custom’ (a variation is repeated at Persiles 217), practised nevertheless ‘against ... the laws of virtue’ in what appears to be a Catholic country (the novel’s Hibernia), although all we are told is that Mauricio himself is Catholic (Persiles 213). Transila, heroic bride and self-exile for an act of martial disobedience against her in-laws (she threatens to spear them), refuses to go along with what she too calls her compatriots’ ‘barbaric customs’ (‘bárbaras costumbres,’ Persiles 217). She declares them unworthy of a ‘well-ordered republic’ (‘bien ordenada república’) and accuses her in-laws of dressing up their lust in ‘religious’ tradition ‘with an appearance ... of vain ceremonies’ (‘con apariencia … de ceremonias vanas’), words that echo those used about the Barbaric Law of the North by the Barbarian Ricla (‘vana superstición,’ Persiles 179) and by Transila herself (‘de sus ritos y ceremonias y costumbres, del vano asunto de sus profecías,’ Persiles 218).

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The Transila-Mauricio story about Hibernia is one of several in which the Barbaric Isle can be seen penetrating morally into the novel’s Catholic lands. What makes it especially helpful here is that both Mauricio and Transila come up with the key categories for distinguishing between the Northern and Southern barbarism in the novel. The barbarism in the Catholic heartlands is not sanctioned by Christian law, but it is entrenched as hallowed and sacrosanct custom – as in Hibernia’s legitimized rape by the groom’s male relatives. Much the same judgment Mauricio and Transila pass on their homeland’s ‘barbaric custom’ bears applying to the unchristian behaviours displayed over successive episodes of Book 3: that is, between Lisbon, where Leonor is gratuitously cruel to Sosa in the name of a religious vocation (Persiles 199–205, 437), and Lucca, the setting for the uncle’s arbitrary – and greedy – attempted imposition on Isabel Castrucho of matrimonial gusto by arranged marriage (Persiles 611–24). Along the way we are made witnesses to the imminent violence of Feliciana de la Voz’s father and brother in Badajoz (Spain), because she has borne a child out of wedlock by a man not handpicked by the family patriarch (Persiles 474–7). The excessive and often violent preoccupation with the aristocratic honour code, which made of it a kind of religion – as the narrator calls one key manifestation of it, ‘the twisted sect of the duel’ (‘la intricada se[c]ta del duelo,’ Persiles 513) – is perhaps the pre-eminent expression of barbaric custom among the Catholic characters of the novel. In addition to Feliciana de la Voz’s father and brother in Spain, Christians who profess the religion of honour and, save for one instance, of the duel in particular include Antonio the Spaniard before his exile in the Barbarian North (discussed in chapter 2), Taurisa’s suitors (Persiles 257–9), Renato and Libsomiro in France (Persiles 408–13, 682), and the Danish Prince Arnaldo and French Duke Nemurs in Rome (Persiles 637–41). The very novel makes a point – on the Snowy Isle or Isla Nevada (Persiles 260) – of reminding readers indirectly (the duellers are denied burial on holy ground) that the Church had vehemently and repeatedly condemned duelling.85 Following the lead of Mauricio and Transila we observe time and again across the breadth of the Catholic South the divergence between Christian law and barbaric custom, frequently attributable to the ‘sect of the duel’ (‘se[c]ta del duelo’). And the appropriate response to barbaric custom that has taken on the rootedness of natural and sacred law is also enunciated trenchantly by Mauricio: ‘I observed the customs of

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my homeland, at least those that appeared to align with reason’ (‘Seguí las costumbres de mi patria, a lo menos en cuanto a las que parecían ser niveladas con la razón,’ Persiles 214). Mauricio here is speaking like the just-war jurist Francisco de Vitoria – thus returning us to the sixteenthcentury juridical discourse of barbarism already discussed – who as we saw promoted reason (or natural law) as the basis for an international code of peoples (or ius gentium) that could draw the world together by a consensus that did not depend on shared religion or customs. The categories articulated by Transila and Mauricio enable us to juxtapose a Catholic law of the South in tension with ‘barbaric customs,’ both of which must be brought in line with ‘reason.’ This is another way of saying the novel generates its own internal ‘theory’ – in this case, the dichotomy between law and custom set forth by Mauricio – for the relation between the Barbaric Isle and the subsequent tales, one of the means by which, in Avalle-Arce’s happy phrase, Persiles could be thought of as a novel, an idea of the novel, and the sum of all possible points of view on the novel for its time.86 The honour code and duel are by no means the only Catholic variations on Persiles’ Northern barbarism. Among other characteristic forms of it we should include the homicidal revenge that figures in the tales of Feliciana de la Voz (Persiles 474–6), Domicio (Persiles 578–9), Ruperta (Persiles 586–97), and Hipólita (Persiles 676–89). We should also remember the freedom sacrificed or sold in the name of paternal authority, interest, or hunger in the stories of Rutilio and his dance student (Persiles 185–94); Feliciana de la Voz again; Isabel de Castrucho (Persiles 605–27); and the anonymous and poor father of Perpiñán who nearly gambles his freedom away to feed his family (Persiles 564–7). Yet another expression of Catholic barbarism would be the realized or attempted abduction and captivity that mark the stories of the Roman sorceress and Rutilio (Persiles 185–94) and Felix Flora in France (Persiles 581). There is finally the judicial arbitrariness and venality of the Catholic South: the pilgrim-heroes narrowly escape being framed for murder in Badajoz, Spain (Persiles 465–9), and the protagonists come up against the capricious justice and meretricious trading in legal favours of Rome (Persiles 186, 654, 673). In the story of the Siennese dance master Rutilio – told near the beginning of the novel – the imposition of a father’s will against a daughter’s consent in marriage, judicial rigour, and an ironic reversal of captivity all come into play. Rutilio is jailed in a Roman ‘dungeon-like jail cell’ (‘calabozo,’ Persiles 186) – the same word used to describe the Barbaric Isle’s cave-like dungeon (Persiles 129) – for

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eloping to Rome with his dance student. There the authorities side with the girl’s father, who had arranged her betrothal to another man. To free himself, Rutilio trades Roman captivity in prison for the bondage of marriage to a Roman sorceress. The Catholic world indulges in a number of its own unique forms of barbarism, including a rash of poisonings. The Spanish morisca Cenotia poisons Antonio the younger for spurning her on Policarpo’s Isle (Persiles 335, 337–8); in France, Claricia’s husband Domicio goes mad from a poisoned shirt given him by his scorned relation Lorena (Persiles 578–9); and in Rome the mortified Hipólita has her unnamed Jewish sorceress poison Auristela (Persiles 676–7). Normally, as Diana de Armas Wilson has emphasized, the law of revenge for insubordination or unrequited love is carried out by men against women (in this novel, as well as historically), but in the cases of Cenotia, Lorena, and Hipólita a scorned woman takes revenge against a man into her own hands. The Southern re-enactments of the Barbaric Isle are not only broadly narrative and thematic, they frequently involve giveaway variations on the sacrificial motif of the knife-extracted heart. For instance, the Italian Rutilio stabs the Roman sorceress through the heart (Persiles 188), and one of Taurisa’s duelling suitors metes out the same fate to his rival (Persiles 258). In France, the Spanish-Barbarian Antonio the younger rescues Félix Flora from her would-be abductor Rubertino (Persiles 580–1). Rubertino is a local lord described as ‘harsh and cruel’ (‘de áspera y cruel condición,’ Persiles 580). These characterizations are otherwise reserved for the Northern Barbarians and Periandro’s Gothic warrior-brother Maximino (Persiles 153, 702), making him a FrenchCatholic double for them. The spurned Rubertino, who tries to take by force what he has failed to win legitimately, pays for his arrogance with an arrow through the heart as he attempts to gallop off with Félix in his arms. Antonio thereby pulls off the rescue by opposing one Barbarian motif against two others, abduction (this time by Rubertino’s landlocked Catholic brigands in the role of Northern Barbarian or Southern Islamic Barbary seafaring ‘corsairs’) countered by an arrow piercing a heart.87 There is a kind of poetic justice at work in such a moment. A Barbarian arrow shot by a Spanish-Barbarian mestizo saves a Catholic (French) lady from a barbaric Catholic (French) ‘lord’ (‘caballero’). Henceforth, Felix Flora will call Antonio el bárbaro by the honorific title el cortés (‘the courteous one,’ Persiles 582), recognizing how this Barbarian-mestizo becomes – like his Gothic and Barbarian companions in pil-

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grimage – a living exemplar of virtues the Catholic South sooner preaches than practises. Even before the pilgrims arrive in Rome they are thus given exact, unsentimental glimpses of strange, marvellous, unseen, or unheard-of customs in the Catholic South as strange, as marvellous, and as barbaric (or nearly so) as the remote and wild or ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Gothic and Barbarian North alleged by the narrator in Rome (Persiles 651). The paradox of a narrative structure that makes its endpoint both familiar and strange, this sense of marvel – of the novel’s South and ultimately of Rome as the heroes’ exotic finis terrae – is underscored by characterization, story, and the rhetoric of wonder with which the Southern episodes are described. In Cervantes’ novel, the Barbarian and Gothic characters from invented homelands are presented as if they were historical; on the other hand, the episodes set in the Catholic South – in lands at least ostensibly familiar to the novel’s first readers – are routinely narrated with the lexicon of wonder and marvel normally reserved for chivalric fantasy and New World chronicle. In effect, the narrator never tires of emphasizing just how odd or ‘peregrino’ (recall the ‘peregrina, tan peregrina’ pilgrim near Talavera Spain, Persiles 484), how strange or ‘estraño’ (‘el nuevo y estraño caso’ of Perpiñán at Persiles 566; ‘la estraña historia del conde Domicio’ later in France at Persiles 582), how marvellous or ‘maravilloso’ (‘la maravilla estraña’ and ‘maravilloso silencio’ of Ruperta’s episode in France, Persiles 586 and 593; the ‘maravillas’ of the old pilgrim’s tale of Spain’s Marian devotions, Persiles 488; the ‘maravillas’ of the inn within a day’s journey from Rome, Persiles 630), and – by association – just how barbaric the characters and stories are in Catholic lands. The epithets are invoked insistently already from Feliciana de la Voz’s episode in Badajoz, Spain, near the beginning of Book 3, described as ‘this novelty the likes of which [the pilgrims] had never seen’ (‘Esta novedad, no vista hasta entonces,’ Persiles 472). To round out the catalogue of Southern marvel, the novel’s Catholic world and especially its Latin South are portrayed as a breeding ground for sorceresses and prophets.88 These include Rutilio’s unnamed Roman seducer (Persiles 186–8), Cenotia (the Spanish morisca ‘hechicera’ or sorceress, Persiles 330), and Auristela’s Roman poisoner (Persiles 677). Two of these episodes rely on commonplace associations of morisca and Jewish women with witchcraft in the period, but in this context it bears noting that Catholic characters (Policarpo, Hipólita)

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fall back on them for their own vengeful purposes. By the same token, the Catholic South is the home ground for oracular sages, who emit marvellous prophecies, and who thereby rival the ancient sage responsible for revealing the Barbaric Isle’s Law (Persiles 137–9). Mauricio the Hibernian Catholic judiciary astrologer (Persiles 238–41) dimly foresees in a dream that Arnaldo’s lustful crew will turn on his ship’s passengers. The Valencian morisco jadraque’s (‘lord’s’ or ‘sacristan’s’) grandfather foretells Philip III’s expulsion of his own people from Spain in 1609 (Persiles 553–4). And Soldino the Spanish hermit-sage (Persiles 601–4) issues riddling, uncanny predictions of good fortune for the protagonists before they depart France and make for Italy. As if it were not enough that the lexicon of marvel is repeatedly applied to the Southern episodes beginning with Feliciana de la Voz’s, there is a Southern echo of the most marvellous – and implausible – event said to take place in the North. The Italian Rutilio, another Catholic captive on the Barbaric Isle, claims that he found himself in Norway thanks to a flying carpet (Persiles 187). The carpet, according to Rutilio, belonged to the Roman sorceress who made his marriage to her a condition for liberation from a Roman dungeon. Moreover, on arrival in Norway, says Rutilio, the sorceress was magically transformed into a she-wolf (Persiles 188). Later, the Hibernian sage Mauricio – impatient with Rutilio’s explanation – declares he must have imagined it under the spell of the sorceress’s wiles or mistaken it for a disease, much as Pliny describes a Sicilian folk belief in werewolves (Persiles 244–6). The reader is left to guess the causal explanation for those wiles. By analogy with the Roman sorceress’s ‘spell’ on Auristela in Book 4 – caused by ‘venenos’ or poisons (Persiles 683) – they could naturally derive from the psychotropic influence of a potion. Or else we could accept Mauricio’s explanation of the transformation as the somatic effect of a disease, which was – as Isabel Lozano Renieblas has pointed out – the most common medical explanation in the late sixteenth century. These are the kinds of rationalist explanations for the sorcerers’ arts that readers of Cervantes recognize from the witch’s tale in El coloquio de los perros (The Dialogue of the Dogs).89 Nevertheless, in France – heart of the novel’s Catholic South – a variation is narrated on Rutilio’s fantastic story. Claricia is thrown from a turret by her crazed husband Domicio and, when her skirts flare out to break the fall, it looks to all the world as if she has flown to the ground (Persiles 573) – a perception no less firm for them than the Italian Rutilio’s belief that he flew to Norway on a carpet. The narrator of Claricia’s story even mimes Mauricio’s rationalist (and neo-

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Aristotelian) response to Rutilio’s and is quick to point out that such apparent ‘miracles’ have their possible explanations. Rutilio’s story of the flying carpet and she-wolf is perhaps the most cited evidence for the novel’s indulgence in romance fantasy, a claim often embracing the whole of its Barbarian and Gothic North or first half of the novel.90 One response to this way of thinking about Rutilio’s tale was provided by E.C. Riley, who suggested that such a reading of the events reported by particular characters – however fantastic – is to confuse a character (Rutilio) with the author and the reality of belief in such marvels by some of Cervantes’ contemporaries with belief in them by all.91 It also overlooks the straightforward explanations for Rutilio’s story given by the arch-rationalist of the novel as noted, the judiciary astrologer and sage Mauricio. There is yet another way of reading Rutilio’s tale that does not depend on accepting the novel’s marvels at face value, trading the narrative’s possible subtlety for its certain naïveté. The Roman witch’s lycanthropic metamorphosis begs to be interpreted metaphorically as an ethical manifestation of the sorceress’s and perhaps Rutilio’s lustful character – an approach actually authorized by the Roman historian Livy, impeccable auctoritas by neo-Aristotelian standards. Livy’s example is especially pertinent insofar as Rutilio and the witch are both Italian and engage in a small-scale reversal of the main-plot story by travelling from Rome to the North. In Book 1 of his history of Rome, Livy narrates the well-known Roman foundation story of the she-wolf (‘lupa’) who suckled the exposed infants Remus and Romulus (I.iv.6–7). Nevertheless, he also reports the view of skeptics who believe that lupa refers not to a fabulous she-wolf, but to the meretricious wife of Faustulus, the shepherd who discovered the boys – lupine in the more scurrilous sense of prostitute or courtesan (hence the term lupanar for brothel) (I.iv.7–8). The bearing of Livy’s Roman she-wolf tale on Rutilio’s may be less interesting for our purposes than the fact that Livy also provides – without favouring – this less fantastic (and flattering) explanation for the origin story of Rome. Neo-Aristotelians who would take historical authorities for their gold standard of fictional verisimilitude (discussed in the introduction), as a warrant against authorial indulgence of fantasy, may overlook the occasions when historians (such as Livy) themselves report tall tales – even if hedged – as history. Moreover, in Livy Cervantes’ neo-Aristotelian readers could find a metaphorical model (and literary lesson) for rationally interpreting fictional flights of

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fancy in general – in Livy’s (and Persiles’) case, not only as the misguided belief or delirium of this or that character (rather than the narrator or author), but also as a symbolic expression of a character’s nature. Finally, if we are willing to follow this perhaps subliminal evocation of Livy in Rutilio’s story of the lustful Roman sorceress as she-wolf, the novel indirectly reminds us that at the vanishing point of Rome’s own mist-shrouded, legendary past there stands not only a fratricide, but also a lustful meretrix – preparing the Rome-bound Northern heroes for the wilful Roman courtesan Hipólita. Having braved the sometimes incredible marvels and barbaric rigours of Spain, France, and northern Italy, the pilgrim-heroes (and we as readers) may well wonder what is in store for them in Rome. Is Rome indeed the pinnacle of Christianity and ‘civilization,’ ‘heaven on Earth,’ or ‘New Jerusalem’? As readers we must ask ourselves, Do we choose to emphasize the idea of Rome – as many commentators have – or its reality, in the straightforward sense of what actually happens there once the protagonists arrive? Is Cervantes’ Rome primarily to be understood as tribute to a promise, a place, an institution – such as the Church, with its clergy, catechism, and sacraments – or as a Christian ethos or code of conduct betrayed by what in fact takes place in Rome? Finally, do the heroes ever manage to put the Barbaric Isle behind them? No sooner have the pilgrims crossed into Rome’s countryside than they are met not with a vision of the Holy City but with a nightmare (Persiles 637). Welcomed by a locus amoenus of grass, rivulets, and fountains, the pilgrims are startled to find a small painted portrait of Auristela hanging from the branch of a willow tree. Looking this way and that for an explanation, wherever they turn are reminders of death – the pastoral menace of et in Arcadia ego and the Barbaric Isle’s two faces of bucolic idyll and primitive savagery. Much as Rutilio’s first sight of the Barbaric Isle was a Barbarian hanging from a tree, upon entering Rome’s Campagna Croriano notices blood everywhere. Thus the character spared a revenge murder in France by the power of his own erotic spell over Ruperta (Persiles 594–5) discovers the tracks of blood spilled by the duelling Danish Prince Arnaldo and the French Duke Nemurs. Arnaldo and Nemurs act the parts of Christian Bradamiros – archBarbarians – in this scene. Like Persiles’ brother Maximino (Persiles 701), Nemurs knows Auristela only through her portrait, which was commissioned among others to help the duke hunt for a bride. They find Nemurs dressed as a ‘strapping pilgrim’ (‘un gallardo peregrino,’ Persiles 638), stretched out on the ground with his hands near his heart.

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The whole of him is drenched in blood and his eyes caked shut with it. While the pilgrim-heroes wipe his face, the half-delirious duke cries out as if to defy his rival (uselessly, for Arnaldo is nursing his wounds out of sight and earshot), You’d have done better … if you’d aimed just a little higher and pierced the middle of my heart, for there you would surely find a more vivid and truer portrait than the one you obliged me to remove from my chest and hang upon the tree so it wouldn’t serve me as a sacred relic and shield in battle. (Bien hubieras hecho … si hubieras alzado un poco más la mano y dádome en mitad del corazón, que allí si que hallaras el retrato más vivo y más verdadero que el que me hiciste quitar del pecho y colgar en el árbol, porque no me sirviese de reliquias y de escudo en nuestra batalla.) (Persiles 638)

This tableau, in a nutshell, is yet another Catholic re-enactment of the Barbaric Isle, now on the outskirts of Rome. There is the foiled attempt to extract another’s heart, in the name of love, for possession (never more apt a word) of a woman who is never consulted and in fact wants neither (Persiles 651). In this, the scene resembles the story of Taurisa and her Christian ‘caballero’ suitors (Persiles 257–60), in which a woman’s love is treated as if it need only be worked out between men. Moreover the woman is regarded as equivalent to her portrait, especially for Nemurs – another bloody-minded literalist like Bradamiro, more attuned to surfaces than depths. For his part, Arnaldo’s love for Auristela is later described by the narrator as the (it is understood, sexual) urge to ‘enjoy’ (‘gozar’) her beauty (Persiles 712). The idolatry of human beauty (infatuation with portraits, portraits as talismanic relics) goes hand in hand with ‘the law’ of the honour duel that is one of the Catholic South’s customary (and for the Church, outlawed) forms of barbarism in this novel (Persiles 260).92 That the blood-stained duellers are both dressed as pilgrims is, more than an irony, a grotesque mockery of pilgrimage as a Christian ‘labour’ in tribute to an ideal. The first of many examples of narrative counterpoint between an ideal and an earthly Rome arises in the final book when an unnamed pilgrim recites a Petrarchan sonnet about Rome, ‘alma ciudad’ (‘city of the soul’), just as the protagonists are moved by the sight of the city to

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kneel. As in Sosa’s and Rutilio’s sonnets and Feliciana de la Voz’s hymn in Spain (Persiles 196, 242, and 477–83), the ideal is expressed in verse: There is no part of you that may not serve as an example of holiness, as if you were built on the model of the city of God. (No hay parte en ti que no sirva de ejemplo de santidad, así como trazada de la ciudad de Dios al gran modelo.)

(Persiles 645)

This heartfelt declaration has sometimes been taken for the novel’s last word about Rome. But even here – at the very beginning of the Rome episode – we know the pilgrim can believe it only because he has been spared the bloody fiasco of Arnaldo and Nemurs. More to the point, the verses are placed not at the end as a summing up of the Rome narrative but as an opening salvo. As such they can be read as an invitation to examine rather than to suspend judgment about Rome’s putative exemplarity, an invitation issued almost immediately when the narrator reports the circulation of an anonymous poem that indulges maliciously anti-Roman invective.93 Indeed, the ideal, the hope, and the promise of Rome the novelistic Promised Land – what Rome should be, as expressed in creeds, or Auristela’s pious imagination, or the narrator’s reference to the city as the heroes’ ‘culmination of their desire’ (‘fin de su deseo,’ Persiles 637) – are juxtaposed in what follows with what Rome prosaically is, lending an unintended irony to the poetpilgrim’s verse, ‘There is no part of you that may not serve as an example’ (‘No hay parte en ti que no sirva de ejemplo’). The prompt to distinguish between an ideal and an earthly Rome is there already in the poet-pilgrim’s sonnet reference to the Augustinian ‘city of God.’ David’s Psalm 86 – ‘Glorious things are said of you O city of God’ (‘gloriosa dicta sunt in te civitas Dei’) – praises Zion (Jerusalem) as the community of believers everywhere. In the psalmist’s song the bishop of Hippo found his theme to justify the ways of God against pagans quick to blame Christianity for the Visigothic King Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, and to reassure Christians shaken in their faith by the disaster. Rome, said Augustine, had not been punished for her new religion but for her persistent moral decay. His second answer to the devastation was a tale of two cities, a parable designed to divorce the city of God from the increasingly uncertain fate of Rome: the one is a terrestrial city of worldly men devoted to earthly affairs and joys; the

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other, a divine city of the past, present, and future worshippers of the one true God. When an earthly city practises virtue – legislates and judges wisely, benefits the Church – these good actions take place within the city of God (City of God V.15–19, and especially 24). The Church, on the other hand, may have its terrestrial interests, and its members can fall into self-interest and self-gratification – slipping from one city into the other. The heavenly city has been created by love of God or caritas, the terrestrial city by love of self or cupiditas (City of God XIV.13 and 28). All humans are born in the earthly city and can aspire to the city of God. Pre-Christian pagans (such as the Sibyl) and the ancient Hebrews gave it members, just as many existing Church members do not belong to the city of God. Only by a symbolic extension to heavenly and earthly souls, to pre-Christian as well as righteous Christian men, does Augustine occasionally identify the Church with the city of God – a scruple overlooked when theologians draw from Augustine a doctrine of the theocratic State.94 In Persiles a superb example of this very counterpoint between an ideal Rome and an all-too-earthly one is provided by the catechism Auristela receives in Rome (Periandro is mentioned only at the end of the recital, as if an afterthought; Persiles 656–8). On the face of it, the catechism would appear to be a clear-cut instance of something Rome might have to teach the protagonists. Earlier we drew on the stipulations of the Barbaric Law to define barbarism. As with barbarism, so with Christianity: a kind of Christian law – the lessons taught Auristela in Rome by clerics called penitentiaries – is set forth in Book 4. One way to catch the contrapuntal music of the novel’s Rome is to notice how their presentation departs from standard contemporary recitals of doctrine (Astete’s or Ripalda’s widely disseminated sixteenth-century catechisms, for instance). In Persiles the lessons are not called a creed, a systematic statement of belief; instead they are described as an account of the chief ‘mysteries of our faith’ (‘misterios de nuestra fe,’ Persiles 657). And in a novel so overtly preoccupied with verisimilitude, wonder, and miracle, such words are charged. Rather than gloss over Auristela’s catechism (she is said to be catechized at Persiles 658) as a more or less self-evident celebration of Church tradition and papal authority I would suggest that it merits scrutiny as the novel’s idiosyncratically Catholic answer to the Barbaric Law. The lessons are a blend of eschatological history (from the fall of Lucifer to the Judgment Day), dogmatic instruction, and gingerly phrased nods to Church and pope. One might expect that, within the

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penitentiaries’ teachings, the most potentially orthodox or even Counter-Reformation elements would be their lessons on dogma, the emphasis on right belief. And yet a shift in emphasis from right belief to right practice – from orthodoxy to orthopraxy – can already be detected in the continual contrast Persiles dramatizes between, on the one hand, the truths of law and ‘mysteries of faith’ and, on the other, their actual incarnation in the everyday practice or ethos of the novel’s believers. Persiles’ attention to ethical practice is built into the very account of the catechism, in the penitentiaries’ loving attention to the Incarnation and in the peculiar slant given the mysteries of the faith. It is there too in the difference between what is said and what is omitted. Rather than a full recital of the seven sacraments as we might expect from a catechism sometimes taken for evidence of the novel’s CounterReformation credentials, only one sacrament is identified outright (confession, called ‘penance’ here). What is so striking about the articles of faith is their broadly ethical formulation, the emphasis on translation into right behaviour. In the penitentiaries’ version of the ‘sacred and loving mystery of the Incarnation’ they explain that the Son of God became ‘man’ (‘hombre’) so that he could pay the infinite debt of ‘guilt’ or ‘original sin’ (‘culpa’) for mankind that man, as a finite being, could not. And yet the ‘deep mystery’ of the Trinity is that God too must be completed by man, because God ‘by himself is incapable of suffering’ (‘en sí solo, era incapaz de padecer’). God is said to need to be humanized so he can share in the burden, to enact passion in the root sense of suffering, wherein lies the ‘infinite … reward’ (‘caudal … infinito’). This reading of the Incarnation as a model for the practice of fellow-feeling acquires an edge in view of the behaviour that characterizes the novel’s Romans, as we shall see. Something of the sort takes place in the description of the sacrament of confession. The term used is ‘penitencia,’ which – unlike confession – could (and can) mean the sacrament itself of penance, the penance imposed for absolution, or repentance. As the lexicographer Covarrubias defines it (1611), ‘penance is regarded both as a virtue and as a sacrament’ (‘la penitencia se considera como virtud o como sacramento’).95 This choice opens up the sacrament so that it embraces not only the ritual of confession but also the broader disposition to take responsibility for sins – the ‘virtue’ of repentance, in Covarrubias’s sense – described by the same penitentiary as ‘the path to heaven, usually closed by sin’ (‘la senda del cielo, que suele cerrar el pecado’).

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Independently of their dogmatic import, the ethical translations just discussed – of the Incarnation and penance into fellow-feeling and repentance – can be seen to function novelistically like thematic templates. They are available to be read as a moral standard honoured or betrayed by the characters, whether ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Northern Goths or native Romans. They may in this light operate as a measure of not only the extent to which Rome differs from the Barbaric Isle, but also the degree to which it lives by the principles it professes to teach others. As such it bears asking how well Periandro and Auristela actually need to learn these lessons and whether they are not lost on Catholic Romans. In Rome the dominant force is Hipólita, a beautiful and wealthy courtesan (a so-called dama del vicio or lady of vice, Persiles 667) associated with the values of art and sensuality. Not surprisingly, Hipólita hails from Ferrara (Persiles 665), an archetypal Italian Renaissance court ruled by the Este dynasty, whose members were renowned patrons of chivalric epic poetry and of Torquato Tasso in particular. And, again appropriately, Hipólita’s chambers are compared to the gardens of Boiardo’s Falerina (Persiles 671), a sorceress from the Orlando innamorato. Hipólita’s virtue is sensuality, and her taste in art cannot be faulted. The Roman palace she makes her home is lavishly stocked with the best Greek paintings and sculpture (Apelles, Zeuxis, and others), cheek by jowl with Raphaels and Michelangelos. The narrator celebrates the display in a rhetorical flourish about the power of art to memorialize the magnificence of princes past and to defeat time, but contrasts it with Hipólita’s ethical vacuity (a contrast between ‘magnificencia’ and ‘[ser] buena’ made explicit at Persiles 684). The splendour of her chambers is likened to three legendary gardens (the Hesperides, the sorceress Falerina’s as mentioned, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon), the sequence and what we already know of her character suggesting more obvious gardens – the garden of delights and the snake in the Garden of Eden. Hipólita soon shapes up as a Southern Catholic female double of the Barbarian Bradamiro, a courtly dominatrix used to having her way with men. When Hipólita falls for Periandro, hoping for impossible gifts (‘dádivas imposibles’) and carefully devised pleasures (‘concertados gustos,’ Persiles 667), she lures him to her palace on the pretext of showing him her superb collection of art. The scheme is concocted ‘with no thought whatsoever for Periandro’s desires, rather only for Hipolita’s’ (‘no sobre la voluntad de Periandro, sino en la de Hipólita,’

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Persiles 667; and, again, with a variation at 672). Unimpressed by her trappings, Periandro fails to respond according to Hipólita’s script for him and she throws herself at him. As Periandro dodges her, Hipólita grabs his pilgrim’s cloak and, pulling his doublet open, catches sight of his diamond-encrusted cross. The diamond cross makes a radiant contrast to the exquisite art of Hipólita’s palace. Periandro and Hipólita are indeed mutually dazzled: he is ‘dazed, astonished, and bewildered’ (‘asombrado, atónito y confuso,’ Persiles 671) by her classical and Renaissance objects, distinguished by their pagan and neo-pagan aesthetics. She is blinded and confused by the sight and significance of his cross (‘así deslumbró la vista a Hipólita como el entendimiento,’ Persiles 672). The Roman Hipólita, at home in the city glorified as the source and crucible of the faith, is thus portrayed as more pagan than the halfpagan Gothic Periandro. While Persiles beats a hasty retreat, Hipólita in her frustration completes the variation on the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife – she is called ‘the new Egyptian [woman]’ (‘la nueva egipcia,’ Persiles 672) to drive home the point – and falsely denounces him to the Roman authorities as her attacker and thief. As happens so often in fiction, Hipólita’s name is also her destiny. In early seventeenth-century Spain, Rome was reputed to be not only the archetypal model for universal empire and seat of the Church, but also the international capital of prostitution.96 Roman courtesans moreover were fond, as is well-known, of adopting classical names.97 Why Hipólita is given this classical name and not another we can only begin to answer by noticing that the mythic Hippolyta was an Amazon queen and that references to her and the Amazons were commonplace in the Renaissance. An Ippolita and her Amazons crop up, for instance, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (25.32 and 27.52), which Cervantes of course knew well.98 The mythic Hippolyta’s defeat was the ninth labour of Hercules, whom Eurystheus sent to obtain Hippolyta’s girdle for his daughter; Hercules killed Hippolyta and won the girdle. The Amazons for their part were a classical Greek stand-in, like the Persians and the Scythians, for the archetypal barbarian Other. In Herodotus (9.27), the Athenians invoke their defeat of the Amazons at Thermodon as grounds to warrant the honour of leading the Pan-Hellenic forces against the Persians.99 For this reason both Amazons and Persians are represented on the western metope of the Parthenon doing battle with the Greeks. In Herodotus the Amazons are associated with the Scythians, Greece’s northern barbarians, much as the Germans were Rome’s.100 And Cervantes signals his awareness of the connection between Scythians and

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Amazons in the story of the Spanish moriscos from Valencia (Book 3), where the narrator remarks that nature distributes gifts such as beauty equally among all peoples, whether morisco women, the ladies of Toledo, or ‘Barbarian women from Scythia’ (‘bárbaras de Citia,’ Persiles 545). In that passing allusion, the novel not only establishes the links among barbarians, Scythians, and Amazons – and therefore of Hipólita (despite her apparent refinement) with the Barbaric Isle – but also the status of moriscos as the great internal barbarian of Philip III’s Spain. Hercules in turn was celebrated as the arch-civilizer, worshipped in ancient Greece as the protector of people and the guardian of cities.101 In the Rodrigo Cycle legends, in chronicles, and in histories, Hercules figures as a founder-hero of Spain, keeper of a magic cave in Toledo, and speaker of an oracle promising destruction for Spain by the monarch (the last Visigothic king, Rodrigo) who should break the seal of the cave.102 Because several of Hercules’ most celebrated labours and other adventures were said to take place in or near Spain and legend counts him among its civilizers, the Olympian strongman came to be regarded in royal iconography as a patron of the Spanish monarchy.103 Associated variously with strength, immortality, legitimate succession, and conquest of discord, Hercules was also remembered as the hero of the crossroads – the bivio or the forking road of virtue and vice – who knew to choose virtue over the vice of sensuality. As a hero of selfmastery and a personification of virtue celebrated for treading the narrow path, he was sometimes regarded as a prefiguration of Christ. Persiles’ birth name, his ‘defeat’ of Hipólita (which includes his Christian pardon of the Roman courtesan’s false testimony), and the title of the novel – The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda – all proclaim this heroic pedigree,104 with a twist or two to remind us this is an epic entertainment (‘libro … de entretenimiento,’ in Cervantes’ words).105 One superbly comic twist is that Periandro exits Hipólita’s palace sans hat, sans pilgrim’s staff, and sans belt (Persiles 672), so that in the details – if not in the implications – Periandro (Persiles) is Hippolyta stripped of his girdle to Hipólita’s Hercules. More importantly, Hercules’ labours belong to both Persiles and Sigismunda. And Hercules’ choice at the bivio is redefined as reconciling pleasure with virtue rather than foregoing one for the other, the gusto Persiles and Sigismunda express for each other and the virtuous respect for the law. A version of this principle is enunciated when Arnaldo is paired off in the final pages of the novel (Persiles 712–13): ‘[I]n elevated marriages, indeed in all marriages, it is meet that the inclinations of children be reconciled with the prefer-

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ences of parents’ (‘en los casamientos graves, y en todos, es justo se ajuste la voluntad de los hijos con la de los padres’). The law in this case is represented by the older brother Maximino’s entitlement as first-born to Sigismunda, along with Sigismunda’s provisional vow of chastity. As the eldest son and rival of Persiles, Maximino is a figure for competing rights (and pleasures) and the obligation to find some way to harmonize them, the guise that this-worldly grace typically assumes in this novel. With the evocation of the Amazons, Hipólita embodies two forms of archetypal otherness, the Amazons to patriarchal classical Athens and the Egyptians to Old Testament Hebrews. Hipólita’s acting the part of Potiphar’s wife casts Persiles as the Hebrew Joseph and Rome as the pharaoh’s court. It is often said that Western civilization has been constructed on those two pillars: in a word, Athens and Jerusalem. So Persiles places at the heart of Rome, as new Athens and new Jerusalem, a series of paradigmatic others: Hippolyta the Amazon (who doubles intertextually as the Egyptian Potiphar’s wife, as we have seen) and her sidekicks, the unnamed Jewish sorceress (Persiles 688) and Pirro the ruffianesque thug from Calabria (Persiles 667–8). But Hipólita is counterpointed even to the ideals officially representing Rome, or at least the Roman Church, as spelled out in the penitentiaries’ catechism already discussed. Certainly there is little to be gained by seeking Christian fellow-feeling in a character such as Hipólita so determined to impose her ‘pleasure’ (‘gusto’). But following her false testimony against Periandro before the Roman governor, Hipólita does appear to regret her rashness – throwing herself on the mercy of the court (and Periandro) and confessing her lie in the name of love. If Hipólita left it at that, she could reasonably be read as passionate, impulsive, misguided, and wrong, but sympathetic in her way and even exemplary by the standard of ‘penitencia’ understood in Covarrubias’s sense of ‘virtud.’ She does after all admit the truth and seems prepared to make up for bearing false witness. The narrator reports her reasons – love made her do it – with a kind of verbal indulgent shrug, saying, ‘Love … harms those it loves’ (‘[el] amor … hace mal al que quiere,’ Persiles 674). Almost immediately, however, it becomes apparent that Hipólita is a caricature of the repentant Mary Magdalene, her repentance short-lived and her glib excuses about the follies of amorous passion an illustration of the barbarities committed – or forgiven – in the name of love in this novel. Midway home from the governor’s court where she was pardoned

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for false testimony against (and forgiven by) Periandro, Hipólita relapses into her old ways – forsaking the penitentiaries’ high road to salvation or contrition (‘más confusa que arrepentida volvió Hipólita a su casa,’ Persiles 676). The Roman Amazon does not repent – she regroups. Plotting her revenge, Hipólita schemes to have Auristela poisoned that she may be robbed of her looks and Periandro lose heart, desert her, and fall into Hipólita’s arms – judging the hero by her own character. Hipólita thus keeps bad novelistic company. Unwittingly, by so proceeding she imitates the Spanish morisca sorceress Cenotia, who had poisoned Antonio the younger on Policarpo’s Isle in Book 2 because he scorned her advances (Persiles 335–7, 352–3). The main difference in Rome is that poisoning is done by hired hands (Persiles 677). Periandro’s ‘rejection’ (‘desdenes,’ Persiles 676) only inflames Hipólita’s desires all the more, as they had Cenotia’s. In this natural reflex of hers, Hipólita is merely confirming an earlier judgment by the narrator who said of ladies of vice (‘damas del vicio’) that they may have regrets but know no remorse (‘se arrepient[e]n sin arrepentirse,’ Persiles 667). Hipólita conceives the plot against Auristela as the test of a hunch, since the two heroes remain under the cover of their sibling alibi. Unlike her male ‘barbarian’ counterparts – Bradamiro and Arnaldo, for example – Hipólita actually does see past appearances and intuits the protagonists’ relationship correctly (Persiles 676). It is nevertheless telling that what she should notice about Periandro’s richly encrusted cross is that it gives away his wealth and exalted station (Persiles 676) rather than what it means for a sincere Christian. The interplay between Hipólita and Periandro’s cross throughout is an emblem of the conspicuous inefficacy of the Church in Rome. What the cross represents does not so much as give Hipólita moral pause. She has raised an idol to her whims and worships it with impunity. Hipólita is not only an anti-Auristela, but an anti-catechism – the actual pagan Rome that belies the ideal, Catholic Rome expressed in the penitentiaries’ teachings, Catholic in name only.106 The Gothic Northerners in Rome may be less than perfectly versed in the Catholic law, but unlike the novel’s Romans, they actually practise it. So that we do not imagine that Hipólita and company are exceptions to the Roman rule, we should consider how justice is done in Rome – remembering that Augustine made wise legislation and the exercise of justice an attribute of the city of God. Having fled Hipólita’s clutches and thanks to the vengeful courtesan’s open-window histrionics, Periandro is seized on the street by the pope’s Swiss guards citing thievery.

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With their ‘dudosa potestad’ (‘dubious authority,’ Persiles 673) the mercenaries arrest Periandro, rob him of his diamond-studded cross, and rough him up indecently (‘le santiguaron con poca decencia,’ with a play on ‘santiguar’ as ‘to make the sign of the cross’). According to the narrator, this is the usual treatment reserved for ‘new delinquents,’ even when their guilt is unproved (‘aunque no se les averigüe el delito,’ Persiles 673). Justice here is quick, and scattershot. Periandro’s Roman runin with the workings of cockeyed justice revisits a more serious incident in Book 3’s Badajoz (Spain). Despite Spain’s contemporary reputation for peace and holiness (noted by Auristela, Persiles 459), the pilgrims there are nearly railroaded for murdering Diego de Parraces and spared imprisonment and likely execution only because by chance an anonymous innkeeper steps up with a note in the victim’s hand that incriminates a relation (Persiles 465–9). Once again in Rome, there is the arbitrary judgment by appearances, the misreading of evidence, and the brutal violation of civil law and Catholic ideals. Ironically (to say the least) this occurs in Rome as the guards take hold of Periandro’s cross, since Periandro’s trouble has come of acting the picture of virtue throughout. He evades further pummelling for equally arbitrary reasons. Seeing himself ‘crucified without his [diamond] cross’ (‘puesto en cruz sin su cruz,’ Persiles 673), Periandro speaks to the mercenaries (called justicias or justices) in their native tongue (German), explains he is no thief and that the cross belongs to him, and finally begs to be taken before the governor so that he may clear his name. Hearing their own language softens the guards, but the coup de grâce is the ‘payoff’ (‘dineros’) Periandro throws in to sweeten the deal. With that, the guards dismiss Hipólita and lead Periandro to the governor. No wide-eyed greenhorn, Periandro has discovered that the agents of Roman justice are unabashedly on the take. But this discovery would come as no surprise to Periandro, because a little earlier in Rome we learn of a spectacular case of justice suborned. It is – to heighten the counterpoint – sandwiched between the narrator’s preliminary description of Auristela as she turns her thoughts to salvation and the actual recital of the catechism. At that very moment a letter is delivered by a Spaniard into Periandro’s hands, though addressed to Antonio el bárbaro (the younger). The missive (Persiles 652–5) is from Bartolomé de la Mancha, the pilgrims’ erstwhile baggage boy. Captive in a Roman jail, he and his girlfriend, the Castilian vixen Luisa la Talaverana, have been sentenced to hang. Bartolomé begs his former masters for help winning a pardon, or at least a commutation to

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Spain where they might hope for a Hail Mary. Bartolomé’s letter can hold its own next to the Panzas’ side-splitting ones in Don Quijote: pathetic, grotesque, deadpan, punning, and mocking in its juxtapositions of the courtly and the low-life, in its pseudo-elegance crossed with vulgarity. Bartolomé is responsible for cudgelling one of Luisa’s angry soldier-boyfriends to death. She in turn knifes her husband Ortel Banedre (the Pole) to rescue Bartolomé from his trouncing, Ortel’s femme fatale. While most human trafficking and killing in the novel are indeed done by men, as Diana de Armas Wilson has argued to emphasize the novel’s feminist credentials, there is no dearth of female lust and aggression and even murderousness in Persiles. Rosamunda, Cenotia, Hipólita, and very nearly Ruperta belong to Luisa’s sisterhood in this respect. The wide range of female portrayals in this novel itself may merit interpreting as a tribute to the humanity of women, in its refusal to idealize (or demonize) them or to indulge in a gender equivalent of primitivist sentimentality. These incidents draw attention to the lustfully passionate and homicidal Catholics flourishing under the pope’s nose. If the BartoloméOrtel-Luisa triangle is the downstairs version of the Arnaldo-Nemurs cockfighting over Auristela, Luisa is a downmarket calque of Hipólita. Since Hipólita never pays for her crimes, it only stands to reason that neither should Luisa and Bartolomé. In their case, however, it appears for the moment that some kind of rough justice will be done, after all, in Rome. Bartolomé’s letter supplies the relevant thumbnail sketch of Roman captivity and justice. Tormented by bedbugs, the rogues’ only prayer is that Italian judges are no less given to bribes than their fellow Spanish ones in the Catholic heartlands. Indeed, they may well outdo them, since ‘the judges of this land do not fall short of those in Spain’ (‘los jueces desta tierra no desdicen nada de los de España,’ Persiles 654). What he means by this is the clincher: ‘They are all courteous and fond of giving and receiving their just due and, when no party has the justices’ ear, they are not above showing mercy’ (‘todos son corteses y amigos de dar y recebir cosas justas y que, cuando no hay parte que solicite la justicia, no dejan de llegarse a la misericordia,’ Persiles 654). The portrait is made complete with a protest against the army of solicitors, procuradores, and scribes who have fleeced them (‘nos tienen ya en cueros,’ Persiles 655), from whom he prays God will deliver them in his infinite goodness (Persiles 666). This is the picture of Roman justice supplied by Bartolomé’s letter. The letter in effect introduces, by preceding, the penitentiaries’ catechism (Persiles 651–2, 656–8). Its placement

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acts the part of a tacit commentary on the narrator’s free indirect description of Auristela’s pious thoughts about Rome, as a place where the ‘true Catholic faith’ is brought to its point of perfection and where her own might be purified in its godly home (‘en su verdadera oficina,’ Persiles 651–2). If we are tempted to dismiss the letter’s account of meretricious Roman justice as Bartolomé’s skewed perception, the narrator sets us straight in the ensuing paragraph (Persiles 666–8). The pilgrim cohort mobilizes for one of its own and does what is needed to win the prisoners’ release: pull strings and grease the machinery of the Roman judicial system. Croriano is to talk to the French ambassador, a relative and friend, at least to delay the sentence. Ruperta will take the matter into her own hands and plead the case. In the meantime, ‘favours and bribes’ (‘favor y dádivas’) work their usual magic, levelling mountains and clearing paths (Persiles 655–6). Within six days – the same length of time that the Spaniard Antonio found himself adrift on the choppy Northern seas before rescue by the Barbarian Ricla (Persiles 168) – the two hustlers are back on the street. The episode points up New Jerusalem’s corruption, but it also casts a slant light on the otherwise exemplary heroes. They are not above throwing their weight around to free a former servant (and his unsavoury companion), even when – as in this case – laws have been broken and the characters not falsely charged. In this light, the venality in Rome appears even worse than it does in Badajoz (Spain). In Badajoz, justice is sloppy and capricious, but at least in principle it is concerned to bring a murderer to account. In the Holy City, the ante has been upped and the moral stakes raised – especially in the novel’s overarching contest matching up barbarism against the law, the Barbaric Isle against Rome. It is a rare occasion that sees our moral exemplars tip the workings of the law, all the more so to protect actual murderers. Their utter blitheness about the overt corruption that obtains in Rome – which appears to contaminate even them – can itself be taken for a verdict handed down on the city where they are supposed to be making their Catholicism perfect, whole, and pure. Their frank participation in ‘the game’ makes a strong contrast to their usual behaviour and brings them down a notch or two morally – humanizing an otherwise, to some, intolerable exemplarity. But more damningly it raises serious questions about Rome, the Church, and religious instruction as forces for moral rectitude. Rome’s definitive consecration as a Barbaric Isle in Christian disguise

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takes place in the final pages, when the news comes that the roughhewn (Persiles 702, 704) and potentially dangerous Maximino is closing in on the heroes in Rome. Hipólita – in another fit of repentance – offers to safeguard Periandro and Auristela in Naples and lavish 100,000 ducats on them. Hipólita’s apparent conversion is not explained as having to do with justice or virtue or catechism, even at this late hour, but appears to stem rather from the transforming power of her erotic attraction to Periandro (‘la rica y enamorada Hipólita,’ Persiles 708). Like the conversion of an initially vengeful Ruperta in France (Persiles 594–5) – Ruperta is herself described as ‘repentant’ (‘arrepentida’) – the moment highlights the potentially benign, uplifting, and even apotheosic power of eros in this novel. Nevertheless, no good deed goes unpunished in unregenerate Rome. Hipólita’s accomplice and henchman, Pirro, is outraged by the favours suddenly showered on Periandro. Overcome by greed and jealous fury, the rogue runs a sword in the prince’s right shoulder, slicing through to his left one (Persiles 709), Pirro’s – and Rome’s – answer to the Barbaric Isle sacrifice. In the imagery used to describe the effect of his anger, consuming him like a fire (‘ardiendo que si … de fuego,’ Persiles 709), Pirro – a pyromaniac of the passions, whose dominant vice is greed rather than lust – is the reincarnation and cautionary reminder of unleashed passions that led to the conflagration of the Northern Isles (the Barbaric Isle and Policarpo’s; Persiles 156–7, 172, 392). Like Hipólita, Pirro too flourishes with impunity in a Rome where such passions look perfectly at home – in blithe defiance of the Church, the pontiff, and the penitentiaries’ catechism. Although the catechism has been taught to Auristela and Periandro, as we shall see they are the two characters in Rome least in need of it. Persiles’ world-weary view of a Rome marked more by arbitrariness, venality, and violence than exemplarity caps a long tradition in which religious reformers attacked Roman corruption and greedy, lustful, and simoniacal cardinals, bishops, and priests.107 We are familiar with Lutheran animadversions against Rome, but there was also a vigorous Spanish Erasmist literature (for example, Alfonso de Valdés’s Diálogo de las cosas ocurridas en Roma and Beltrán de Guevara’s Memorial) that came into its own following the Sack of 1527. It struck just this note of recrimination, echoing The City of God following Alaric’s Sack of 410.108 In the Diálogo de las cosas ocurridas en Roma (Dialogue on the Events in Rome) Alfonso de Valdés wondered, ‘Where is there to be found more vice, more variety of vice, more public display of it, and less punishment of it

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than in that Roman court?’ (‘Dónde se hallaron más vicios, ni aun tantos, ni tan públicos, ni tan sin castigo como en aquella corte romana?’).109 This vision of Rome continued to find expression even when Catholic reform went on the defensive later in the sixteenth century following the Council of Trent, the Index of 1559, and the resultant hardening of confessional lines. It appears in the full light of day in Mateo Alemán’s picaresque classic, Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), the greatest Spanish ‘bestseller’ till the first part of Don Quijote (1605). Alemán’s notorious description of the beggar society in Rome, with its elaborate ordinances regulating the exploitation of Christian charity – a caricature of the religious orders – is one more expression of a jaundiced contemporary view of the Holy City that coexisted with the idealized one.110 Are we, then, to conclude that there is no difference between the Barbaric Law of Persiles’ North and the Catholic law of its South? Barbaric Isle reflexes are everywhere in the Catholic South, but their laws are not presented as interchangeable. One typical inflection distinguishing Northern and Southern barbarism is that in the North it is collective and institutionalized; in the South, widespread but personal. Another way to capture the difference is to notice that in the North barbarism is built into the law; in the mould of Mauricio’s comment about his own homeland, it is the difference between the Barbaric Law (and occasional Christian customs) of the Barbarian North and the Christian law (and frequently barbaric customs) of the Catholic South. In Christian lands, the commonplace barbarism follows from a failure of the Catholic law of the land, as well as the failure of a particular conception of Catholicism that emphasizes ritual and belief over charitable behaviour. Even Persiles’ catechism rewrites the Catholic law of dogma and the sacraments to emphasize the higher spirit of compassion (in the guise of the mystery of the Incarnation) and repentance. Southern barbarism is also the failure of institutions charged with upholding the law, such as the Church and (as we shall see in chapter 4) the monarchy – a failure to promote a Christian ethos, an actual Christian virtue alongside a Catholic belief and ceremonial. Catholic law as currently preached in Rome has notably failed to encourage Mauricio’s ‘reason’ in Romans or the kinds of ‘customs’ Transila at least would deem worthy, as we saw, of a ‘well-ordered republic.’ Persiles’ Romans act as if impervious to the radiant presence of the Holy See, an ideal Rome strangely inoperative in the light of the claims often made for the text’s Counter-Reformation allegiances. While in the North the

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‘barbaric custom’ is the law, in the South, myriad ‘barbaric customs’ (notably but not limited to the honour code) supersede canon and civil law, becoming an alternative law – the actual rather than the putative official law of the land. In that respect, the Northern heroes never altogether succeed in putting the Barbaric Isle behind them. The Rome they meet with is not the ideal Rome of the faithful. Instead it offers prodigal displays of barbarism, counterpointed ironically (need it be said) with catechism. And readers are provided with a vivid (and entertaining) demonstration of the ethical folly of overstating the importance of right (dogmatic) belief or ritual practice over right behaviour. Persiles thereby elaborates a kind of reverse ethnography where the ‘civilized’ gaze preferentially trained on Northern (Gothic) Europe, the East Indies, or the New World in this period (as Tasso does in his recommendation for legitimate locations of the marvellous, as discussed in the introduction) is redirected from the Gothic and Barbarian periphery toward metropolitan Europe, in step with the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Northern European protagonists who make their way through Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy, all the way to Rome. Rome is at once the denial and the culmination of that same novelistic ethnography – according to the model of St Augustine, both earthly city and city of God. Roma (Rome) Conquered by Amor (Love) Rome is indeed where lessons in ‘civilization’ (including Catholicism) are given and received, and yet it is our ‘less than perfectly Catholic,’ Northern Gothic protagonists who, expecting to receive lessons in Catholicism, give them instead. The geographic arc that we have already traced from Thule to Rome is complemented by a personal one: the testing and transformation of the protagonists, an inner journey represented – among other ways – by the onomastic movement from the alias Periandro to his birth name Persiles, and from the alias Auristela to her birth name Sigismunda. It is a recovery as well as an achievement, a becoming of who they are marked by repossession of a name (and corresponding royal titles). Yet another way of putting this movement is from private person – the everyman of Periandro’s name – to estate and public role as spouses and royal heirs. This outer journey in turn is represented – among other means – by the fortunate political transitions of two peoples (Tile’s and Frislanda’s in Book 4), which redeem and are shadowed by the disastrous political transitions

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of another two (the Barbaric Isle’s in Book 1, the Isle of Policarpo’s in Book 2). What might Rome have to learn from these Northern Goths? Persiles’ Rome offers not only a disguised Barbaric Isle, but also an anti-sacrificial way out, another script to live by. The agents and models of this alternative ideal are Periandro and Auristela, an ideal emerging from the pilgrimage of (conjugal) love and forged by an ordeal of initiation that crowns the heroes’ ‘labours.’ The first sign of it comes in the town of Acuapendente, where Periandro begins to breathe the air of Rome – ‘Now the breezes of Rome waft in our faces’ (‘Ya los aires de Roma nos dan en el rostro,’ Persiles 628) – and to savour the thought of his longawaited prize. He asks Auristela whether she still wants to marry: ‘[Y]ou would do well to examine your thoughts and, scrutinizing your will, see whether you stand as firm in your intentions now as in the beginning’ (‘[S]erá bien que des una vuelta a tus pensamientos y, escudriñando tu voluntad, mires si estás en la entereza primera,’ Persiles 628). Her spontaneous answer in this scene could only reassure Periandro. She looks at him in amazement and declares, ‘All my life I have been steadfast in my resolve, Oh Persiles, and it has now been two years since I surrendered it to you, not because I was forced, but of my own free will’ (‘Sola una voluntad, ¡oh Persiles!, he tenido en toda mi vida, y ésa habrá dos años que te la entregué, no forzada, sino de mi libre albedrío,’ Persiles 628). Any jubilation we might read into the prince would turn out to be premature. Auristela has yet to fulfill her vow to complete her instruction in the faith and, still casting his pall over the whole journey, is the rival who set it into motion in the first place – Periandro’s brother Maximino with his first-born’s right to the princess. Periandro is yet to endure two severe labours of love before he is rewarded with Auristela’s hand, each a test of what this novel appears to promote as heroic virtue. The first arises from the anonymous Roman sorceress’s poison, administered under Hipólita’s orders as we know. Its immediate effect is to rob Auristela of her unearthly beauty (Persiles 684–5). But its saving grace is that it begins to weed out the suitors, without recourse to bloody banqueting halls or messy duels. The trial tests Auristela much as the suitors’ siege of Odysseus’s homestead tests Penelope’s resolve and ingenuity. Here the winner is decided less by tactical resourcefulness and fighting prowess than he is by loyalty to Auristela as she dramatically loses her looks before his eyes. The uneasy relationship with courtly values in the Rome book is brought to a head in the narrator’s description of Auristela’s deterioration. He resorts to a

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Petrarchan blason turned gangrenous, with the effect of time’s arrow accelerated – as if wishing to emphasize the distance travelled from a courtly carpe diem to a conjugal love spiritualized along Pauline lines. Just two hours into Auristela’s illness, ‘the red roses of her cheeks already looked bruised, green the crimson of her lips and topaz the pearls of her teeth’ (‘ya se le parecían cárdenas las encarnadas rosas de sus mejillas, verde el carmín de sus labios y topacios las perlas de sus dientes,’ Persiles 684). The first of the suitors to go is the duke of Nemurs. Knowing what we do already about the duke, we cannot be surprised to learn that he is wedded to the visible, and that ‘the love in his heart was inspired by Auristela’s beauty’ (‘el amor que tenía en el pecho se había engendrado de la hermosura de Auristela,’ Persiles 685). As it fades away, so does his love for her. It is well known that in the sixteenth century, conjugal love was vigorously championed as never before by Protestant and Catholic reformers eager to counter the earlier prestige of monastic celibacy.111 Persiles contributes to this reappraisal by invoking its rootedness in the soul. As the narrator says, love ‘must have sunk many roots in the soul to draw the strength needed to go to the edge of the grave with the beloved’ (‘muchas raíces ha de haber echado en el alma para tener fuerzas de llegar hasta el margen de la sepultura con la cosa amada’). The test of conjugal love, then, is a test of soul (‘alma’) rather than of heart or of appearance – the latter two figured by the portrait that the duke of Nemurs claimed to have inscribed in his heart when the pilgrims found him blood-spattered at the entrance to Rome. The duke bides his time discreetly for fifteen days and then makes his excuses – telling ones for this novel. This duke, a man virtually defined by his Bradamiro-like arrogance and reckless affirmation of his own ‘gusto’ (Persiles 567), claims his mother has arranged a match for him – not the father or, in his case, the French king, as would have been customary among the nobility. We are not told whether the excuse is genuine, but even as a lie its use at all would underscore the vital importance, indeed the controlling power, of mothers in this novel. Arnaldo for his part is inclined to follow the duke – birds of a feather – but ‘love and his generous heart’ (‘el amor y su generoso pecho,’ Persiles 687) persuade him to hold out for the nonce. The scene is the occasion for more than one kind of miracle. Death is ugly, says the narrator, and to love ‘ugly things’ (‘las cosas feas,’ Persiles 687) appears supernatural and ‘merits being considered a miracle’ (‘[es] digna de tenerse por milagro’). In Periandro’s case at Auristela’s

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Roman bedside, it is the miracle of loyalty, like so many virtues in this novel as astonishing a marvel as flying carpets, sorcery, and uncanny prophecies: ‘Only Periandro, only he stands firm, only his love abides, only he with courageous heart holds out against adverse fortune and death itself, which threatened Auristela’ (‘Sólo Periandro era el solo, sólo el firme, sólo el enamorado, sólo aquel que con intrépido pecho se oponía a la contraria fortuna y a la misma muerte, que en la de Auristela le amenazaba,’ Persiles 686). The explanation given for Periandro’s unmovable devotion is that he ‘does not look on her as she was, in her sick bed, but rather as she was in his soul, where he had her portrait fixed’ (‘no la miraba en el lecho que yacía, sino en el alma, donde la tenía retratada,’ Persiles 685). And he remains the human Rock of Gibraltar steadfast in this loyalty, even when Auristela’s gradual disfigurement leaves her unrecognizable save for her voice. By now the contrast between Periandro’s soulful portrait of Auristela and the generalized idolatry of visible portraits (or portraits as images inscribed in the heart) has become a pattern. It is set against the idolatry of flesh-and-blood beauty on the Barbaric Isle and the Southern Catholic idolatry of iconic images such as Auristela’s likeness, fought over in Rome by Arnaldo and Nemurs and coveted by the Roman governor. An emblematic moment of this counterpoint takes shape when, Periandro, as a kind of self-appointed judge – like Auristela on the Isle of Fishers (Persiles 342–7) – settles the ongoing fight over her portrait. What begins with the duel between Arnaldo and Nemurs, which we have already discussed, segues into a bidding war, and concludes with the Roman governor’s throwing his hat in the ring. Periandro determines that Auristela should keep her portrait for herself, ‘because it is more hers than anyone’s’ (‘pues es más suyo que de otro alguno,’ Persiles 683), implying the principle that Auristela – like her portrait, over whose possession men have fought – belongs to no one but herself. This verdict of Periandro’s anticipates the second ordeal or ‘labour’ of love to come, which will put Periandro’s admirable convictions severely to the test. The second and greatest ‘labour’ of love follows Auristela’s recovery. Hipólita – fearing for Periandro, faltering in lockstep with Auristela – orders the effects of the poison reversed (Persiles 689). Auristela meanwhile has been preparing herself for a good Catholic death, as she has been taught to do in Rome (‘lo que en Roma le habían enseñado’). The narrator sketches a kind of ars moriendi in miniature, in which Auristela sets her soul on the high road of the sacraments, puts herself in God’s

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hands, and shakes off the mortal coil of kingdoms, pleasures, and other rewards of rank. Now attributing her restored health to heaven, and carried away by exaltation, Auristela summons Periandro and announces she no longer wishes to marry. Her answer devastates him (he is ‘desengañado’ [‘disillusioned’], ‘desdeñado’ [‘spurned’], shocked into a despondent silence; Persiles 693), coming at the least expected and propitious moment imaginable, just as it seemed that no more contretemps could stand between them. Following the two-year journey, the abductions, shipwrecks, separations, near-death experiences, and the elder brother’s rights to Sigismunda – with all the external roadblocks cleared – the novel’s principal generic models for the love theme (whether New Comedy or the Greek adventure novel) would prepare both characters and readers for an untroubled happy ending in marriage. Indeed to this point there has been no internally generated conflict to test their love’s mettle, to illustrate what they are prepared to do if foiled, as in so many of the parallel stories in which spurned lovers turn violently on their beloveds. No longer: Auristela’s erstwhile ‘one intention’ or ‘sola voluntad’ (i.e., to marry Periandro) is now divided. What can we say makes Periandro a hero according to the evidence of the Rome book? Certainly he is not presented as the embodiment of perfection. We noticed that in Book 1 he is prone to attacks of jealousy; in Book 2 he is given to boasting and reveals a streak of longwindedness. Like Auristela, Periandro has no qualms about practising a courtly version of Odyssean guile and deception, dissimulating in a pinch, particularly with respect to his royal identity and alias while on the road to Rome. Nevertheless, among the male characters Periandro is the novel’s chief counter-example of barbarism. By the standard of his Barbarian and Christian rivals, we could say that Periandro’s virtue in Rome is to honour Auristela’s apparent change of heart, although it brings his world down around him. In this he gives a lesson to so many Barbarian and Southern Catholic characters unable to take no for an answer. The key to his self-restraint is perhaps best summed up in the little disquisition on love that Antonio the Spanish-Barbarian delivers to Auristela: ‘[N]ot all loves are rash and impudent; nor do all lovers set their pleasure’s sights solely on [sexually] enjoying their beloveds but rather with the faculties of their soul’ (‘[N]o todos los amores son precipitados ni atrevidos, ni todos los amantes han puesto la mira de su gusto en gozar a sus amadas sino con las potencias de su alma,’ Persiles 695). In the spirit of Antonio’s remark, Periandro is an exemplary hero because he

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acts as if love were a gift and not an entitlement – the exact reverse of the norm in this novel’s world, much as Amor (love) reverses Roma (Rome).112 It appears as if Persiles’ lesson in love following two years of ordeal were that that Roma (Amor) – the seemingly endless, not always rewarded labours of love – is the relevant destination. And though heartbroken and confused, Persiles summons the self-possession to respect Auristela’s preferences, unlike so many novelistic barbarians thus redeemed. Periandro’s exemplarity toward Auristela in this crucial moment may be endowed with an illuminating literary pedigree not yet, so far as I know, recognized by Persiles scholarship. Once we readers have made it to the Rome of Book 4, Periandro has evoked any number of classical and biblical namesakes and models. As we saw, he takes after Hercules in the title of the novel, in his defeat of the Amazon Hipólita, and in his virtuous self-control. He takes after the biblical Joseph falsely accused by Hipólita in the role of Potiphar’s wife. And he takes after Aeneas in the epic journey to Rome, an identification made explicit in Book 2 as he and Auristela (Sigismunda) sail away from Policarpo’s Isle consumed by fire in the image of Dido’s funeral pyre (Persiles 394). The novel’s early editors, Schevill and Bonilla, noticed the resemblance in the hero’s birth name to Aquiles, and a long line of chivalric characters such as Amadís’s Sarquiles, Granfiles, and Gastiles, whose names echo the Homeric warrior’s closing syllables.113 However, for a number of significant details in Periandro’s upbringing and his handling of Auristela’s change of mind, another romance hero bears remembering, especially since his name so closely resembles our hero’s birth name, Persiles: namely, the Grail hero and knight of the Arthurian Round Table, Perceval, introduced by Chrétien de Troyes in Le Conte de Graal (ca. 1080) and destined for a long afterlife in verse and prose romance and ballads.114 In Chrétien de Troyes’s account, Perceval is the youngest of three sons, his brothers have died in combat, and his father has died of grief. To shield him from the same fate, Perceval’s mother raises him in a remote Welsh forest, in the dark about knighthood and even his name. One spring morning he meets five knights and, dazzled by their armour glinting in the sunlight, discovers his destiny. He is a natural knight, but untutored in chivalry. To fulfill his destiny he must master the challenges of knighthood: physical (the handling of horses, the wielding of arms), amorous (he must learn not to confuse rape with the proper wooing of women), and spiritual (good judgment). He learns the first in the castle of Gornemant de Gohort. The second is more gradual, and

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follows from the example and precept of his fellow knights at King Arthur’s court. The spiritual quest may be the greatest challenge of all. Gornemant had warned Perceval against speaking out of turn. And when Perceval later visits the Fisher King’s castle, he misjudges Gornemant’s advice and fails to ask why his host is bedridden, why the lance in the castle procession bleeds, and whom the Grail serves. Had Perceval asked the proper questions, the Fisher King would have been healed. His failure to do so brings disaster to the king and his kingdom. Perceval’s chief initial shortcoming then is to ask the appropriate questions, a failure Perceval must learn to overcome in his quest. Persiles can be seen to rework the story of Perceval as it does Hercules’, Joseph’s, and Aeneas’s, maintaining thematic continuity while turning the narrative inside out. First of all, there are the striking parallels in the representation of the heroes’ respective families. Broadly speaking, like Persiles, Perceval is the youngest son, his older brothers are associated with combat, he is apparently fatherless, and his mother has a decisive hand in shaping a fate that is different from that of his siblings. Whereas Perceval’s mother fails to head off her son’s knightly vocation, Persiles’ mother succeeds in enabling the triumph of two knightly attributes (courtly love and good judgment) over the third (dexterity in arms, represented by his elder brother Maximino). Persiles is – unlike so many of his narrative rivals – already a master of courtly love, of the proper (respectful) wooing of his lady (Sigismunda). Above all, Persiles reveals himself well-versed in the kind of good judgment largely absent in his rivals, from the Barbaric Isle to Rome. While Perceval needs to learn to ask the right questions, Persiles is presented as exemplary – as the Rome book demonstrates – because, unlike his many novelistic doubles, he already knows to ask (and honour the answer to) the fundamental question they have failed to put to those they claim to love: what do you want? This interlude in Rome is disconcerting because it strains against the generic expectations of a prose epic patterned after the Greek adventure novel. It is not just that the sorting of external obstacles does not lead triumphantly to wedded bliss. It is also that the obstacle is now internalized, through a representation of the inner workings of a character’s mind that is not supposed to happen in romance fiction. Mary Gaylord relates the anticlimactic ending – marked by what she characterizes as Sigismunda’s resignation – to a larger pattern that governs Persiles and all of Cervantes’ work, including Don Quijote.115 If romance is distinguished by the quest to fulfill an ideal order and the novel by the

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quest’s failure or hollowness, then this ending reflects a sensibility very much like the one that produced Don Quijote: a pattern distinguished not by the tension between romance idealism and novelistic realism but by the urge to explore the ways in which they imply, test, and turn into one another. Cesáreo Bandera sees Auristela’s doubts as capricious and compares her to Marcela in Don Quijote (I.11–15), in Auristela’s case a kind of horror vacui and emblem for what he thinks of as the lack of obstacles between two characters who are cut from the same cloth.116 Bandera has done Persiles scholarship the great service of noticing just how unexpected and significant this scene should be to its readers, given the weight of generic tradition. I will argue, however, that Auristela’s role in this Roman drama deserves to be regarded as ambivalent rather than capricious. Commentators on Don Quijote’s Marcela – the self-possessed shepherdess who chooses the liberty and exile of the pastoral and mountain solitudes over matrimony – have come to recognize that the hermeneutic difficulties revolve precisely on lending weight to a female character’s reasons,117 an example that merits following in Auristela’s case as well. After all the heroes have endured, Auristela’s reasons for vacillating between marriage and the nunnery are telling. She declares, ‘I would like now … to go to heaven’ (‘Querría agora … irme al cielo,’ Persiles 691), wanting no more ‘worries’ (‘cuidados’) and ‘delays’ (‘rodeos’), no more toil and no more trouble. These are not terribly orthodox reasons for a vocation, especially when it is figured so ambiguously (going straight to heaven) as a kind of cross (or confusion) between death and mystical detachment. Much less do these reasons reveal a clear-headed understanding of the nature of Christianity or the demands of a religious vow. In effect Auristela cites what a St Teresa, for example, would have regarded as the wrong reasons for a vocation understood as another form of active, giving life, a spiritualized chivalric adventure, or, in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s case, as a commitment to the rigorous discipline of intellectual and artistic creation liberated from the tyranny of the reproductive cycle. In other words, Auristela does not present her decision as an affirmation. Instead it comes across as an attempt to escape from a life of vicissitudes and adversity, as a refusal of human adventure with its trials and disappointments. There are ample reasons to take Auristela’s piety seriously, as we have seen, but the justifications she cites in this euphoric moment following a near-death experience are not the best case for it. For example, as she begs Periandro to release her from her obligation to him (the word she

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had given, several times confirmed, to marry), she argues that ‘to reach so great a good as heaven, everything on earth must be given up, even parents and spouses’ (‘para alcanzar tan gran bien como es el cielo, todo cuanto hay en la tierra se ha de dejar, hasta los padres y los esposos,’ Persiles 691). But this is only a partial reading of Gospel teachings, the one that lends itself to ascetic denials of human love and that pits heaven (‘cielo’) against life on earth (‘tierra’). Auristela’s own example illustrates the perils of a conspicuous piety, contemptuous of the world, that can lead to the most cruel, uncharitable actions in the name of God. As she thrashes out her indecision before an astonished Constanza and Antonio the younger, she gradually reveals the less savoury profile of a piety riddled with contradictions and even occasionally marked by selfishness. On the one hand, although Auristela confesses Periandro’s companionship would not bar the way to heaven (‘no me ha de estorbar de ir al cielo,’ Persiles 693), she would – wanting shortcuts once again – reach it sooner without his company (‘iré más presto sin ella’). On the other hand, she is prepared to say, ‘Yes, I owe myself more than I owe anyone else’ (‘Sí, que más me debo yo a mí que no a otro’) – a startling admission of selfishness taken for godliness. It is one thing for her to claim that only in knowing and seeing God is there the highest glory. It is quite another – bordering on rationalization – for her to declare that all means to that end are good and even saintly (‘todos los medios que para este fin se encaminan son los buenos, son los santos,’ Persiles 691). And it is a travesty for her to suggest that among these saintly means are charity, honesty, and virginity (‘la caridad, [de] la honestidad y [el de] la virginidad’). Auristela’s is an odd rewriting of the three theological virtues – which leaves out faith and hope – but it is also a misreading of the single canonic Christian virtue she has cited (charity), since what is evident to judge by what follows is that Auristela is proposing to pit two of them – ‘honestidad’ (‘honesty’) and ‘virginidad’ (‘virginity’) – against charity toward Periandro. Amidst Auristela’s putative conversion to the service of God the heroine touches bottom in indirect imitation of the barbaric Christian prince Arnaldo. In a stupendously callous remark to Periandro she is led by her exaltation to treat Periandro’s devotion to her as if it were equivalent to Nemurs’s and Arnaldo’s and therefore love for him a matter of beauty and estate. Auristela throws Periandro a sop for his dejection by proposing to broker his marriage to a younger sister ‘as beautiful as I’ (‘tan hermosa como yo,’ Persiles 692), who would moreover inherit her kingdom. Stupefied, Periandro stands there stone-

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faced, silently choked up, preparing to rush out of the room. He imagines that Auristela despises him because she had to know that ‘if [Auristela] did not agree to be his wife, he had nothing left to live for in the world’ (‘bien debía saber que en dejando ella de ser su esposa, él no tenía para qué vivir en el mundo’). The young prince removes himself to the pastoral bitter solitudes of the Roman campagna and pours out his love sorrows, wondering about the rectitude of Auristela and whether she could not have kept a discrete silence rather than become his ‘homicida’ or murderer (Persiles 697). In her otherwise well-intentioned impulse, the pious and virginal Auristela demonstrates that she is not above barbaric lapses of her own.118 She acts rashly on an urge she thinks of as virtuous and that harms the person she has many times claimed to love best. The lapse is most like its Northern Barbarian and Southern barbaric models less when she expresses an interest in the nunnery or doubts about marriage to Periandro, than when she suggests to him that marrying her younger sister Eusebia – pretty and titled – will do just as nicely. That is, Auristela betrays her own better self and principles by treating her sister and herself as if they were interchangeable spare parts – her sister, especially, like a pawn to be traded with only the half-hearted excuse of dynastic politics to dignify it. This is Auristela’s own personal and momentary surrender to the sensibility that leads the Barbaric Isle to institutionalize its traffic in alluring girls – a habit imitated by Christians such as Prince Arnaldo and the duke of Nemurs, who preen themselves on their titles and lose interest in Auristela as her looks slip away. Indeed, earlier in Rome, Arnaldo thinks himself irresistible to Auristela because he has a kingdom to pledge (Persiles 651). For this reason it can come as no surprise that Arnaldo happily accepts the same offer of Eusebia’s hand that Auristela had tried to foist on Periandro (Persiles 712). What then is it fair to say that finally makes Auristela a heroine? In the overall scheme, it might appear that Auristela is exemplary because she does in the end marry Periandro, as if acceding to the man’s wishes were her virtuous duty. But her second thoughts are not only for Periandro – who, devastated, makes a mad dash to the door – but for herself. That Auristela genuinely loves Periandro as he loves her had been confirmed explicitly earlier in the voyage. Periandro nearly loses his life twice in the novel, both times in the Catholic South, indeed the second and last time in the very final pages set in Rome. Seeing him nearly die for the first time from wounds inflicted by the ‘furiously insane’ (‘loco furioso’) Domicio in France, Auristela rediscovers the strength (and

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nature) of her feelings for him. She describes them by drawing on the ancient emblem of matrimony, the green ivy wrapped about a sturdy tree (‘¡Ay de mí, otra vez sola, y en tierra ajena, bien así como verde yedra a quien ha faltado su verdadero arrimo!’ Persiles 577). These sentiments are – like Periandro’s – seconded by fits of jealousy, provoked for instance by Sinforosa on Policarpo’s Isle in Book 2 (Persiles 289) and by Hipólita in Rome (Persiles 678). Even when she is pushing him away, Auristela speaks of Periandro as her family, teacher, and guardian angel – recognizing his embodiment of several kinds of love for her (Persiles 691). Moreover, in Rome following the scene in which she breaks with Periandro, Antonio and Constanza enter her chambers to find her like a person who has just shaken off a bad dream (‘halláronla como persona que acababa de despertar de un pesado sueño,’ Persiles 693). Unlike Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad or sensuality (discussed in chapter 3), one might call it her dream of Virginidad or virginity (indeed, Castidad or chastity is her role in Periandro’s Book 2 epic dream). The narrator’s language now appears to suggest that Auristela has snapped out of what in her circumstance was shaping up as an inhuman dream of transcendence prepared to break callously, and even trample on, all human bonds in the name of God. Everything that follows reinforces the sense that Auristela at this moment is rediscovering her sentiments for Periandro, respecting a part of herself that she had nearly sacrificed on the altar of her misguided idea of a monastic vow – the self that all along and more than once had reaffirmed her love of him. ‘I have done wrong’ (‘Mal hecho,’ Persiles 693), she declares. ‘For him I live, for him I breathe, for him I move and by him I am sustained’ (‘por él vivo, por él respiro, por él me muevo y por él me sustento,’ Persiles 694). In the terms of the Rome book and particularly its catechism, Auristela becomes heroic and an exemplary Christian not when she announces her desire to become a bride of Christ, but when she begins to have serious doubts and second thoughts about it. There is a kind of comic paradox in this Northern, Gothic, ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ character’s redeeming the Roman Hipólita by embodying (rather than merely reciting) the two sacramental principles taught by the Roman penitentiaries: fellow-feeling (‘en sí solo era incapaz de padecer,’ the penitentiary’s gloss on the principle of the Incarnation) and repentance (‘penitencia’ in the catechism, the sacrament and virtue evoked insistently by the thematic keyword of ‘arrepentimiento’ in the Rome book), in her case the compassion to notice the effect of her rejection on a

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crestfallen Periandro followed by a change of heart. The narrative draws our attention to this thematic counterpoint with the Roman Hipólita’s selfishness and backsliding when Auristela orders a search party for the dispirited Periandro. Twice in the same speech the narrator ascribes Auristela’s change of mind to repentance (‘arrepentimiento’): ‘Auristela, repenting for having revealed her thoughts to Periandro, happily sought him out, because she thought that in her hands and in her repentance lay the power to direct Periandro’s will wherever she liked’ (‘Auristela, arrepentida de haber declarado su pensamiento a Periandro, volvió a buscarle alegre, por pensar que en su mano y en su arrepentimiento estaba el volver a la parte que quisiese la voluntad de Periandro,’ Persiles 710). What makes this Northern, Gothic, less than perfectly Catholic ethical victory over Rome bittersweet is that Auristela goes into the marriage of two minds, casting a shadow on what is otherwise narrated as a sincerely happy outcome. The triumph of these Northern exemplars over the sacrificial law of the Barbaric Isle and the barbaric customs of Catholic Rome does not yield a novelistic world in which happy endings come without a price. In this case Auristela must give up one future for another. Sincerely divided between her love for Persiles and her inclination to the religious life (‘desapareciéronse en un punto así las esperanzas de guardar su integridad y buen propósito como de alcanzar por más llano camino la compañía de su querido Persiles,’ Persiles 708), she implicitly assents to the choice least likely to cause suffering to another. When Auristela (now Sigismunda) does finally marry with Maximino’s blessing, it is not that she does so unflinchingly or by sacrificing a genuine preference for the monastic life. Within that space of indecision and ambivalence – in which one or another gusto (‘pleasure’ or ‘preference’) must be given up – Auristela (Sigismunda) chooses to forego an institutional godliness for a personal one by tacitly lending herself to Maximino’s consecration of their union. Unlike the conclusions of Heliodorus’s and Lope’s novels, in Persiles the final obstacle is not external – adverse fortune in Heliodorus, parental authority in Lope (albeit a misreading of the parents by the protagonists), or in Persiles itself the elder brother’s rights, as appears to be the case initially. Ultimately it emerges as the divided self, represented by Auristela’s (Sigismunda’s) uncertainty over whether to marry Periandro (Persiles) or take the veil. We readers have been primed to assume that a marriage would take place once the external obstacles were cleared. These expectations were historically reinforced by New Comedy conventions and,

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for many of Cervantes’ early readers, by the example of Heliodorus and Lope. And yet as we have seen, Persiles recognizes in the most poignant way possible that other obstacles within may well assert themselves, not always predictable, stable, or easily negotiated. What are represented as Periandro’s sincere question and Auristela’s unresolved misgivings can be taken for an emblem of Cervantes’ reimagining of ‘civilization’ (law, humanity, reason, and courtly refinement in sixteenth-century terms) in the guise of an ethical commitment to respecting radical otherness, even when the whole juggernaut of the past – in this case, the machinery of a hugely complex novel – has gone into preparing the comic resolution in marriage. Periandro is indeed the counter-example to the model of love articulated by the Barbaric Law, in part because he fully honours the principle of consent in love, deferring to Auristela’s preferences even when they thwart his. The condition of mutual, freely given consent for legitimate matrimony is a well-documented feature of the canon law tradition.119 The contrast – not only with the Northern Barbaric Law, but also with the barbaric custom of so many Southern Catholic episodes in which love is imposed without consent – underlines the distance between principle and practice. Auristela, for her part, is a chiastic double for Rome’s Hipólita: compassion and repentance contrasted with imperious self-gratification and recidivism. As such, Auristela becomes a kind of living Roman catechism, the Northern, Gothic, less than perfectly Catholic character who incarnates the penitentiaries’ principles rather than merely parroting them. A shining city on a hill of example, Periandro and Auristela thus may be said to show how ‘civilization’ is done, realizing what the novel’s Rome promises and fails to deliver. Unlike Persiles’ epic models, the imperial centre (Rome) in this epic entertainment is both exotic finis terrae (in customs) and home (in religious law) for the protagonists. The source of paradox in Don Quijote is located largely within the burlesque hero’s ingenious imagination, and the author mines paradoxical gold from the veins of folly and lucidity there. In Persiles Cervantes locates paradox squarely within the public realm, in the confusion of custom and law, foreign country and religious homeland, earthly and heavenly Rome. Rome is not granted a monopoly on good, nor is the Barbaric Isle granted one on evil. In the Rome book, the narrator opens a chapter with an image that captures – as well as any one figure probably can – the city’s dual status in this novel: as heavenly New Jerusalem and Barbaric Isle in disguise, as ideal and material, as ‘Amor’ and ‘Roma.’ Following the Ariostesque device

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of wrapping an exordium round a pearl of wisdom, the narrator declares, ‘Good and evil would appear to lie so close to one another that they are like two concurrent lines, which – although they arise from distant and different beginnings – converge on one and the same point’ (‘Parece que el bien y el mal distan tan poco el uno del otro que son como dos líneas concurrentes, que, aunque parten de apartados y diferentes principios, acaban en un punto,’ Persiles 697). In the novel’s Rome we discover that unlike such barbaric Romans as Hipólita, Pirro, and the unnamed governor, the Northern Goth protagonists ostensibly in need of Catholic instruction are among the characters who best embody a Rome seen as if through a looking glass. The relevant destiny is no longer Rome (Roma), but Love (Amor) – conjugal and charitable at once. And as the final book ties matrimonial and literary knots at the point where the lines of good and evil converge, the vision of the Holy City is altered by discovery of humanity on the margins and barbarism in the heartlands of Christianity.

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2 Christian Spirituality: The Law of Love

A prose epic that rivals Heliodorus’s Ethiopica overtly and Vergil’s Aeneid by association could only be expected to feature pious heroes. Any scruples about the decidedly pagan spirituality in Heliodorus’s novel did not keep Christian moralists from championing it over chivalric and even pastoral fictions as a superior model for profane literature in the sixteenth century.1 Chaste protagonists and a firm commitment to verisimilitude made it the darling of critics, who might agree about nothing more than the danger to public order of chivalric and pastoral fictions they saw as incitements to lust and indulgers of lies. And if the reading public would not be weaned from a taste for stories that did not wear their didactic heart on their book-sleeves, it might at least be induced to read those that did not shamelessly revel in illicit love or flout the most elementary norms of plausibility. Learned commentators had reasons of their own for embracing Heliodorus, keen as they were to anoint a classical model for long prose fictions that would meet their equally fastidious requirements for verisimilitude, unity of plot judiciously modulated with episodic variety, moral edification, and philosophical substance.2 The prestige conferred by religious and literary authorities, along with the success of vernacular translations of Heliodorus in all the major European languages, ensured that many writers would rise to the challenge and try their hand at a Greek adventure novel. The model had been both Christianized and naturalized on Spanish soil by the time Lope de Vega published his prose epic turn, El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Homeland, 1604).3 Lope’s characters find plenty of hair-raising adventure without straying for long from Spanish shores, and their travels in Spain involve visits to major shrines such as

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Montserrat and Guadalupe. There are pilgrimages, prayers, Eucharist plays, and a Moroccan conversion narrative, but they are handled casually, as part of the incidental background of misadventure in love; the conversion narrative, for instance, is soon abandoned once Lope’s Spanish protagonists have returned to Spain. The Eucharist plays closing four of the novel’s five books give dramatic relief from and allegorical weight to the narrative love story, but the journeys to Montserrat and Guadalupe are recounted more in the spirit of high adventure than solemn ritual, and there is no attempt – other than conventional praise for the Virgin – to portray a genuine religious vocation.4 As a result, although the religious theme in El peregrino is omnipresent, it comes off like scene-painting in the service of a courtship plot stretched onto an epic canvas, an effect that will not surprise admirers of the greatest single reviver of New Comedy theatrical plots on the Spanish stage. By treating religion less as a problem to be explored than as a fact of life to be taken for granted, Lope did not depart substantially from the major texts of the prose and verse epic tradition. This is not to deny, of course, that great scholarly traditions of commentary on The Ethiopica, The Aeneid, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) have traced rich cross-currents of religious and philosophical import, tension, and nuance in them.5 The point of such a preliminary contrast with Persiles is more limited: to highlight both a potential epic genealogy of its religious theme and to anticipate some of the means by which Cervantes’ prose epic takes stock of that legacy. In the models cited, religious instruction is not an integral part of the main action or characterization of the protagonists, and narrative interest is not centred on juxtaposing a religious orthodoxy with competing conceptions of it, as we shall see is the case in Persiles. For example, Heliodorus’s heroine Chariclea, Ethiopian by birth, is raised as a priestess of Apollo at Delphi. In the final pages of the novel, the heroes, Theagenes and Chariclea, are crowned monarchs of Ethiopia and ordained as high priest and priestess of the solar and lunar cults – the State religion of Heliodorus’s Ethiopia. Although as Alberto Navarro González has observed, Heliodorus lends more prominence than Cervantes to the protagonism of priests and the description of temples and rites, neither Greek nor Ethiopian religious practice or belief is described beyond the merest anecdotal detail, and the royal conversions themselves are politically motivated by the demands of succession.6 There is no quest for instruction in the faith, one of the

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explicit motivations (alongside the pilgrimage of love) offered for Persiles’ protagonists. Nor especially can we find in The Ethiopica the paradox of a sacred place itself – in Persiles’ case, Rome – in need of spiritual enlightenment by the lights of its own tradition. At the end of Heliodorus’s novel a religious practice, human sacrifice, does become the focus of a debate. But it is an Ethiopian rather than a Greek religious ritual and moreover less an actual, historical Ethiopian practice than it was a Hellenistic (and Heliodorus’s literary) idea of what peoples on the African margins of the Greek-speaking world allowed to pass for religion. Despite Margaret Doody’s hopeful praise for Heliodorus’s cosmopolitanism, the suppression of that ritual following the accession of the Greek-educated if Ethiopian-born princess (together with her new husband, the Thessalian aristocrat Theagenes) seems rather to smack of Greek parochialism, as the natural outcome of Hellenic political and religious stewardship.7 Indeed even this doctrinal shift is presented by the gymnosophists or Ethiopian priests as a fait accompli, handed down by the gods. The Ethiopian King Hidaspes (Chariclea’s birth-father) resists initially, but only in the name of tradition and not reason or principle. In Vergil’s Aeneid and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, too, religion is presented more as a duty to be honoured and even as a legacy to be imposed than it is conceived as itself a primary locus of contention. Aeneas is bearer of the penates (the Phrygian hearth or household gods) to Rome. They are the only purely Trojan relics to survive the geographic and ethnic crossing called for by Aeneas’s divinely appointed epic destiny, as the Trojan host make their way from their Anatolian birthplace in the eastern Mediterranean to what will be their new home in Italy. The joining of (Ionian) Greek Trojans with Italian Latins to found the Roman gens involves giving up everything – homeland, language, customs, even ethnos – except the household gods, and the chief religious dilemma is about whether Aeneas fulfills his destiny with greater or lesser single-mindedness. For its part, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata dramatizes the myriad struggles between various kinds of temptation (pre-eminently the passions of ire and lust) and the Christian faith in the course of the final year (1099) of the first crusade to reconquer Jerusalem from the Saracens. The struggles are portrayed with lyrical intensity, psychological insight, and an acute moral sensibility, but in the end Tasso provides a Christian version of Vergil’s epic assumption.8 Christians may wrestle with various temptations in the secondary episodes, but there appears to be little room for searching questions

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about the holiness of holy war. Although Tasso’s epic makes keenly present the great human cost of the crusade and can portray Muslim characters (the martial maid Clorinda, the sultan Solimano) with sympathy, the choice of the main epic action and its triumphant conclusion in the retaking of Jerusalem leaves finally unchallenged the assumption that Christianity is to be imposed on the infidel, if necessary by force of arms.9 Scholarship on Persiles has tended in the past thirty years either to abandon the religious theme altogether for others now seen as more enticing, or to regard it as central yet settled.10 Américo Castro in El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925) and Marcel Bataillon in Erasme et l’Espagne (1937) still ranged freely across Cervantes’ corpus to demonstrate that its religiosity could not be easily pigeonholed.11 The fact that their examples were culled from all of Cervantes’ works, including the three novels, the novellas, and the plays, implicitly makes the point of continuity. From the 1940s a trend set in pitting an ecumenical, sometimes critical, and even skeptical Erasmist Don Quijote against a more conformist, dogmatic, narrowly conservative, or even militantly CounterReformation Persiles.12 The reflex often overlaps with a preference for aligning Don Quijote generically with the novel and periodically with the Renaissance, while Persiles is aligned generically with romance and periodically with the Baroque, although both novels were published within twelve years of each other. For many readers, therefore, few matters would appear to be so clear-cut as the religious allegiances of Persiles. Its chaste heroes Persiles and Sigismunda travel as pilgrims to Rome, ostensibly for instruction in the faith, and readers more than once are treated to creeds and paeans to Rome’s status as seat of the Catholic Church. If the previous chapter on barbarism and the following one on eros highlight the human comedy of Cervantes’ pilgrim epic, in this chapter there will be no doubting its divine comedy. And yet the novel offers reasons to revisit the nature of that divinity. Counter-Reformation readings of Persiles’ religiosity must come to terms with evidence of trouble in paradise: a pilgrimage to Rome that turns out in part a pretext for circumventing an elder brother’s (Maximino’s) rights to Sigismunda’s hand, marriages not officiated by a priest, catechism that conspicuously omits reference to most sacraments, and conventual vows that are the occasion for the ritual public humiliation of a good man (Sosa, el enamorado portugués or the lovelorn Portuguese man). Cervantes’ protagonists are Catholic, but ‘less than perfectly’ so, according to the narrator (Persiles

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651), and their quest is not to impose on others a given tradition but in part to instruct themselves in it. Along the way, the epic drama of religion in Persiles shapes up not only as the usual tensions between Christian brothers and infidel others, or between Christianity and the passions, or even among rival visions of Christianity. It is also, I will argue, the ambiguous relation between Christian law and Christian caritas, the assumption that there is only one Catholic orthodoxy, and the presumption that Christianity is to be imposed upon others who have everything to learn and nothing to teach about what it means to be Christian. In what follows, religion in Persiles is seen as more of a problem and a question than it is a foreordained answer, a subject fit for epic less as a battle cry than as itself the field of battle, among and especially within Christians. The broader claim is that Persiles deserves to be regarded as an important literary chapter in that history of spiritual reform that worked itself out within the Church’s institutional structures, was grounded in the Pauline epistles and the Gospels, and yet remained at odds with the orthodoxy defined by the Council of Trent (1545–63) in response to the Protestant challenge. A brief excursus on the religious terminology employed here will prepare the ground for the main argument. If there were any doubt that Spain too had undergone its own religious reform in the sixteenth century, Marcel Bataillon’s magisterial study of 1937, Erasme et l’Espagne, should have put it to rest. Panoramic and detailed at once, its many virtues – magnificent documentation and subtle exposition, among them – may have become its liabilities in due course, as impatient readers lost sight of the trees for the forest. As Bataillon himself and admirers such as Eugenio Asensio were to rue in time, Bataillon’s rare talent for both the scholarly monument and the epoch-making slogan shattered one academic orthodoxy – Spain was singularly immune to the Reformation – only to anoint another in its place – Erasmism was Spain’s Reformation. Repetition of the felicitous catchphrase sometimes came to substitute for deep acquaintance with the kaleidoscopic mosaic of sixteenth-century Spanish religiosity generously served up by the study. Bataillon’s scholarly landmark so thoroughly reshaped the way we think about religion in early modern Spain that Erasmus and Erasmism became a convenient shorthand for any kind of religious belief or practice that did not fit narrow canonic norms, including many that predated, were unrelated to, and would indeed have been repudiated by Erasmus. Such uses of Bataillon tend to obscure a full view of the rich flowering of heterodox and non-con-

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formist spirituality in sixteenth-century Spain and may deprive us of a key he provided for understanding Erasmus’s phenomenal reception in Spain, as in effect well-prepared ground. What perhaps needed rectifying was not Erasme et l’Espagne but a certain kind of reading of it. In later years Bataillon himself, Eugenio Asensio, José Nieto, and others were to counter this misreading by drawing attention to parallel currents of religiosity in Spain, including medieval roots shared with Erasmus.13 Outstanding among these were the powerful, autochthonous tradition of biblical scholarship undertaken by Spanish Jews, conversos, and Old Christians from the fifteenth century, culminating in the great Complutense Polyglot Bible of 1514–17; another was Franciscan spirituality (which may have made itself felt in Cervantes’ own life, since he became a Franciscan tertiary in his last years); and yet others were the successive waves of religious renovation that travelled from and to Italy (for example, Joachim of Fiore’s apocalyptic mysticism; Lorenzo Valla’s humanist Bible scholarship, attack on scholasticism, and criticism of monastic vows; and Juan de Valdés’s reform circle in sixteenth-century Naples).14 Jiménez de Cisneros’s pastoral reforms of the monastic orders anticipated Erasmus’s and Luther’s calls for the Church to reform its own.15 And in the middle of the sixteenth century there followed the missionary activity of the revolutionary Juan de Avila, the first Jesuits, and the efflorescence of Spain’s native heterodoxy, iluminismo.16 Even such a brief overview of religious cross-currents in sixteenth-century Spain may serve to remind us that whatever reform-minded elements we may recognize in Persiles could have many more textual, historical, and ideological affinities and sources than Erasmus or his followers. In order to remain alive to the text’s own peculiar contributions to this complex reality, I hew closely to the religious authorities (chiefly St Paul), terms (especially charity), and forms (the emphasis on Christian virtue or the ethical over the sacramental or dogmatic) it favours more or less explicitly. On the other hand, to speak of a Pauline bias in Persiles may be true to the text, but it does not convey the risks involved in celebrating, defending, or even expressing associated views, because St Paul and his Epistles never directly came under fire. Therefore whenever there is coincidence of views and it is pertinent to highlight the institutional, political, or social ramifications of a given belief – especially potential conflicts with Inquisitorial Indexes and Tridentine directives – I sometimes relate textual evidence to the broader phenomenon of Erasmism. The occasional use of Erasmism as a shorthand for Catholic reform movements

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targeted by Inquisitorial Indexes and Trent may thereby draw attention to possible contextual implications of Persiles’ religious idiosyncrasies. But it does not assume that their presence depends directly on or is shaped only by reading of Erasmus or by affiliation with an Erasmist movement. The term Counter-Reformation itself would not have been recognizable to Cervantes’ contemporaries, since it was coined later by Protestant historians who thought of the pope’s Church as corrupt, incapable of reforming itself, and bent on rooting out a reform movement it could regard only as a heresy.17 The bias is built into the very term, which portrays a Church reactive to Protestant challenges and indeed often reactionary. What the Counter-Reformation label fails to acknowledge or account for is Church (moral, administrative, or dogmatic) reform that antedates Luther’s posting of the ninety-five theses against papal indulgences in 1517, parallels Protestant reforms, and unfolds according to a logic other than reaction. Historians of religion have long since recognized this problem, and their revaluation of the issue bears considering by Cervantes scholarship when it addresses the religious dimension of Persiles. John O’Malley has recently traced the changing historiographic fortunes of the terms Catholic Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Tridentine Age, and Confessional Catholicism, and has proposed one of his own, Early Modern Catholicism. Each solution reflects a point of view and an aspect of an untidy historical reality. Catholic Reform, for instance, anticipated Martin Luther; emphasized charity, spirituality, and pastoral reform; took shape in devotional movements, missions, new religious orders, and a renewed papacy; and has lasted to the present. Despite the later coinage and Protestant bias of the Counter-Reformation label, historians now tend to agree that the characterization fairly designates specifically anti-Protestant policies such as the Inquisitorial Indexes of prohibited and expurgated books (notably in Spain, the Valdés Index of 1559) and the proceedings and determinations of the Council of Trent (1545–63), a gathering of prelates whose mission was indeed to respond to Protestant challenges in moral and administrative reform and dogma. Where Persiles is concerned, this ongoing historiographic re-examination of the phenomena and terminology associated with the Counter-Reformation might prompt us to reflect carefully on the implications of the vocabulary we use to describe and evaluate the religious aspect of the novel. In this light, it is worth asking when it is that the overt expression of an article of faith is specifically Counter-Reformation, and when is it more broadly Catholic, Christian,

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or even spiritual. One precise benchmark for the Council of Trent’s specific contributions to the definition of a Catholic orthodoxy would be its catechism of 1564 (also called Pius IV’s or the Tridentine Creed),18 a litmus test of authorized belief that lends the relevant terms (Tridentine, Counter-Reformation) the requisite pointedness. There is more than historical or scholarly precision at stake here; the religious wars that wracked Europe in this period (at least to the peace of Westphalia in 1648) remind us that, for many, the distinctions were matters of life and death, and so exact definition recovers an urgency felt keenly then, and now largely lost. What, then, may we legitimately ascribe to the Council of Trent? Among other measures, the Tridentine Council asserted the validity of both Scripture and unwritten traditions as sources of truth, the sole right of the Church to interpret the Bible, and the authority of the text of the (Latin) Vulgate.19 Also affirmed were justification by works as well as by faith,20 the necessity to salvation of all seven sacraments,21 and the Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation.22 The Council, finally, confirmed the Church’s traditional teachings on purgatory, the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics and images, and indulgences.23 We may take a preliminary measure of why such precise benchmarks might be important by noticing that even where Persiles appears to be at its most overtly Counter-Reformation or Tridentine – in Cloelia’s and Ricla’s professions of faith in Book 1 (Persiles 171, 176–7) and the penitentiaries’ catechism in Book 4 (Persiles 657–8) – the statements can be seen by the standards just outlined as Catholic rather than specifically Tridentine.24 Unlike Pope Pius IV’s Creed of 1564 or other post-Tridentine catechisms (such as Astete’s or Ripalda’s in Spain), we do not find the renewed insistence on the value of each of the seven sacraments by turn, or mention of key Tridentine litmus tests such as the veneration of the saints or of sacred images, the existence of purgatory, the power of indulgences, or the reaffirmation of clerical celibacy and the monastic life. One of the ironies of the history of Counter-Reformation interpretations of Persiles is that the case for its Tridentine credentials on strictly doctrinal grounds has not been argued systematically. Religious readings of the novel have examined it for evidence of its (Christian, Catholic, Counter-Reformation, or Tridentine) orthodox or heterodox allegiances, and the categories have remained largely sacrosanct even when the interpretations generated by them acknowledge ambiguities that escape such critical straitjacketing.25 A symptom of this method-

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ological slant is the habit of limiting evidence considered to doctrinaire statements, on the model of the precept or creed, isolated from their narrative contexts like messages in a time capsule. To give a couple of quick illustrations, the Roman catechism in Persiles’ Book 4 is, understandably, often adduced for the idea that Persiles promotes the CounterReformation and even that Cervantes took a militantly orthodox turn in his last years. Nevertheless, the catechism is a slender foundation on which to build so large a claim. The Roman penitentiary who explains the ‘mysteries of our faith’ is a cleric, and we would expect him to teach the sacraments, respect for the Church’s ‘stability and steadfastness’ (‘estabilidad y firmeza,’ Persiles 658), and recognition of the ‘power’ (‘poder’ rather than faith, hope, or charity) of the pope as ‘vicar of God on Earth’ (‘visorrey de Dios en la tierra,’ Persiles 658). Are we to interpret such narrative moments as the novel’s (or the author’s) last word on religion or as an example of verisimilitude in character? Similarly, the heroine Auristela (Sigismunda) is presented as the standard-bearer for piety in this novel. She takes her vow of chastity to heart and cherishes her faith in a more or less orthodox fashion, although she recognizes that the journey to Rome was originally undertaken to evade Persiles’ brother Maximino (Persiles 658–9). The pilgrimage to Rome is certifiably also a religious one for the heroine; more than once she weighs professing conventual vows, and in the last few pages of the novel the princess engages in a ritual gesture of submission to the pontiff – who makes just this fleeting appearance, like an effigy – by kissing his feet, which she takes to fulfill her vow (‘habiendo besado los pies al Pontífice, sosegó su espíritu y cumplió su voto,’ Persiles 713). And yet for Periandro – though in many ways, an exemplary Christian – the pilgrimage to Rome is about marriage to Auristela (his Roma is conjugal Amor; Persiles 658). There is never a question of a monastic vocation with him, and he listens with curiosity to the penitentiary’s catechism but is nowhere in sight when Auristela has her brief audience with the pope. To question whether the Roman penitentiary or Auristela should speak for the whole of a complex novel, much less the author himself, is not merely to make an academic point about the obligation to distinguish between an authorial and a narrative voice and – within the narrative – among many often conflicting voices. It is also to recognize that otherwise we risk flattening a narrative texture in which Cervantes has woven many contrapuntal strands – the antiphonal chorus of voices reduced to one voice, the declarative statements truncated

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or lifted out of frequently ironic contexts. Redoubled attention to point of view, especially where historically charged and disciplined issues such as religious doctrine are concerned, helps keep alive our attention to Cervantes’ characteristic experiments in polyphony, even when they diverge from the novelist’s familiar strategies – such as outright burlesque parody – for it. As it impoverishes the debate over the novel’s religious theme to restrict its terms to a vocabulary developed to enforce conformity with a narrow orthodoxy sometimes at odds with the Gospel itself, so I expand the range of evidence brought to bear on the issue by favouring conceptual categories offered up by the text. In order to remain alert to the text’s idiosyncrasies and avoid prematurely foreclosing the very issue under investigation, I am careful to adhere throughout to the keywords or references to religion (e.g., charity, St Paul) that recur in the novel. Since Persiles is a novel and not a sermon or theological tract, I explore these conceptual categories by tracking the way characterization, action, image, and intertextuality bear on them. Form is seen to enact theme in Persiles, thereby constituting a kind of incarnational poetics in which idea and argument are translated into character, speech, description, and plot. If we thereby reassert the primacy of the literary context that Cervantes chose as his medium for reflecting on religion, we may discover that the story, like the young pilgrim hero Persiles and heroine Sigismunda, is itself on a journey of discovery about what it means to be Catholic. By responding fully to the subtlety of Cervantes’ engagement with religious questions in Persiles, we may also come to appreciate anew the existence of more than one orthodoxy – indeed the rich and hotly contested variety of religious sentiment that obtained – in a period and place too often dismissed as monolothically Counter-Reformation. Persiles and Pauline Christianity The Southern, metropolitan, and sacramental Catholicism held up as the model for the Northern Goth characters whose Catholicism is described by the narrator variously as twisted (‘torcidas ceremonias,’ Persiles 434), less than perfect (‘no está en el punto tan perfecto como se requiere,’ Persiles 651), dark (‘oscuramente se platicaba,’ Persiles 656), or – in the prince’s servant Serafido’s words – flawed (‘la fe católica, que en aquellas partes setentrionales andaba algo de quiebra,’ Persiles 703), is time and again exposed for its own blindness and

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cruelty. The fact, alternately damning to the Catholic South’s righteousness and in a strict theological sense inevitable because a Christian – being human – will be flawed, is confirmed by the prominence the novel accords St Paul in its final pages. There in the shadow of his Roman basilica we witness the crowning marriage of Persiles and Sigismunda and the death and burial of Persiles’ elder brother and rival (in love and politics), Maximino. It is as if Cervantes were placing the marriage and also his book under Paul’s patronage, in pointed contrast to the Church’s Apostle Peter. He underscores this point by having Maximino bless the union of Persiles and Sigismunda without officiation by a priest or publication of banns, in violation of the Council of Trent’s strictures. To disregard the four closely spaced references to St Paul in Rome (Persiles 707, 711, 712, 713) or hastily explain away the noncanonical marriage of the protagonists is to miss an opportunity to learn something about the novel’s sui generis religious sensibility. Indeed, of the many marriages joined in the novel (for instance, Antonio and Ricla’s in I.6, Leonor and Sosa’s in I.10, Renato and Eusebia’s in II.19, Rosanio and Feliciana de la Voz’s in III.2–5, Ortel Banedre and Luisa la Talaverana’s in III.6, Tozuelo and Clementa Cobeña’s in III.8, Agustina de Aragón and Contarino de Arbolánchez’s in III.12, and Ruperta and Croriano’s in III.17), only one – Leonor and Sosa’s abortive wedding – is shown taking place in the canonically prescribed manner, and it is exemplary for its cruelty. For a Spanish reader in 1617, the act of lending St Paul such prominence could not have been more charged. Paul in this period was to reform across the confessional fault-line as Aristotle was to the just-war debates over the legitimacy of conquest in the New World. Opponents might draw diametrically opposed conclusions from their readings of the Apostle (as of the Philosopher), but for Catholic and Protestant alike, St Paul’s Epistles became a touchstone, an indispensable authority. Because aspects of his teachings were taken up by Erasmists within the Church and by Lutherans without, the Apostle’s reputation fell afoul of ecclesiastical hardliners bent on imposing and preserving Church tradition, privileges, and hegemony in the face of Protestant schismatics and more or less radical challenges from within, Erasmism constituting merely the most benign and conciliatory of such movements.26 The ‘hawkish’ drift was marked by a renewed emphasis on the sacraments, the veneration of images, the priority of the Latin Vulgate over the original scriptural languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and koine Greek) and the contemporary vernaculars, and the mediation of spiri-

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tual life by Church authorities. This gradual marginalization of the Church ‘doves’ quickened in the wake of changes associated with the broad-based movement called variously as we noted the Counter- or Catholic-Reformation, for our purposes datable from 1564, the year that Philip II promulgated the Canons of the Council of Trent as law of the land.27 Paul was not only associated with converts on account of his dramatic vision and fall on the Road to Damascus – partly explaining the devotion of Jewish conversos – and remembered for his leading role as proselytizer among Gentiles, for which he has sometimes been credited with inventing Christianity.28 He was also linked with an emphasis on the spiritual, on inner religion or grace over law, on humility, self-examination, and the priority of compassionate over ritually sanctioned behaviour, and finally on paradox, folly, and visions. As Marcel Bataillon’s Erasme et l’Espagne has taught us to recognize, a devotion to Paul in sixteenth-century Spain almost certainly implied sympathy with Erasmus.29 As is well known, Erasmus himself promoted pacifism and a simple piety in consonance with the Gospel and reason, attacked scholasticism, and questioned the prestige of the monastic over matrimonial life. He is especially remembered for denouncing clerical hypocrisy and a view of religion too beholden to what he regarded as empty ceremonial.30 For these reasons, in 1617 Persiles’ emphatic sponsorship of St Paul could not have been mistaken for a routine genuflection to the Church orthodoxy. The Pauline references thereby constitute a kind of thematic knot that ties text and context together in this chapter. While not exactly heterodox, their explicitness, reiteration, and boldness under the circumstances bear attending to. That Cervantes should have chosen to close his valedictory labour on such a note prompts a question: is there a Pauline sensibility to be traced through the novel? Perhaps the most fruitful connection with St Paul in the context of Persiles is his doctrine of caritas or ‘charity,’ defined by the conviction that ‘the one who loves another has fulfilled the law’ (Romans 13.8) and by his summing up of the commandments ‘in this word, “Love your neighbour as yourself”’ (Romans 13.9). Erasmus, following Paul, never ceased pressing the centrality of caritas – by tradition the foremost among the three theological virtues, in the absence of which the remaining two, faith and hope, both the Apostle and his Dutch humanist champion regarded as dead letters. In his Enchiridion milites christiani (Handbook for the Christian Soldier), Erasmus particularly insists that the sacraments should not be used to excuse Christians

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from the obligation of caritas, a commitment to which Erasmus – like Paul – knew would make the rare genuine Christian look like a fool in the eyes of others.31 Indeed, for sincere Christians there was no escape from this fate: human imperfection would make them fools in the eyes of God and love of neighbour fools in the eyes of cynical fellow mortals.32 In Persiles the principle is announced most conspicuously in the narrative and geographic middle of the novel as the party of pilgrims sails into Lisbon harbour, and Antonio declares to Ricla and company that they are approaching lands where ‘you will see the Catholic ceremonies by which [God] is served and will observe Christian charity at its finest’ (‘verás juntamente las católicas ceremonias con que se sirve [Dios] y notarás cómo la caridad cristiana está en su punto,’ Persiles 432).33 The latter half of the statement will soon enough be revealed a pleasant, nostalgic fantasy of Antonio’s – charity in the Catholic South being honoured mainly in the breach, as demonstrated spectacularly by the story of Leonor and Sosa set in Lisbon itself. But the speech serves its purpose. It directs alert readers to a kind of alternative catechism worked out implicitly in the text, a formulation of the relationship between caritas and sacrament that Antonio captures in one breath and that Cervantes holds up to the narrative light, turning it this way and that to reveal its variegated facets. The reaffirmation of caritas stands alongside Trent’s institutionally defensive catechism – Pius IV’s Creed of 1564, centred on Church tradition, authority, sacramental ritual, and dogma – as a reminder of a much older Christian orthodoxy, functioning in the novel like a kind of textual conscience. I draw attention to the Pauline tradition’s far more venerable pedigree because Trent’s orthodoxy on Persiles’ publication in 1617 was, in historical terms, born yesterday. Paul’s ghost hovers over the text in other ways as well. What we have been sketching is the projection of his doctrine in Persiles and in sixteenth-century Spain. And yet Paul made himself felt not only for a theology – the religion of love – that has always challenged institutional orthodoxy (Catholic or Protestant), but also for the narrative shape of his life. In the Second Letter to the Corinthians (11.23–7) Paul speaks of his ‘labours’ in terms reminiscent of the Greek novel of adventure: Are they ministers of Christ [he asks of his critics]? I am talking like a madman – I am a better one: with far more labours, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was

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beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.

The echo in letter and spirit of Paul’s ‘labours’ is evident in the novel’s full title, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda. The passage suggests a heroic conception of Christianity, affirmed in Cervantes’ novel by the Roman penitentiary when he calls the story of Christ ‘the labours of his life’ (‘los trabajos de su vida,’ Persiles 657) as he instructs Auristela in the mysteries of the faith.34 What is more, there is a geographic parallel in Paul’s voyage from Caesarea to Rome, where he appeared before the emperor to defend himself against the charge he had violated Jewish law by preaching Jesus’ news in the temple at Jerusalem.35 Because the storms, shipwreck, mutiny, and eastern Mediterranean geography of Paul’s voyage (especially Acts 27–8) coincide with the structure, tone, and geography of the ancient Greek novel, the Acts of the Apostles are sometimes regarded as a variation on the same narrative phenomenon, emerging in roughly the same period and speaking to the same audience.36 Many roads, then, could lead to Paul: besides his reincarnation in Erasmism, there were his Epistles, Luke’s Acts, and the Greek novel whose culmination was Cervantes’ avowed model by Heliodorus, The Ethiopica, as newly translated into Spanish and published in 1554 and 1587. Here and in chapter 4 I pursue this theme by examining three stories that work out a variation on the theologically and iconographically wellestablished polarities of caritas-law (sacrament) and caritas-cruelty.37 The variation is typically worked out in these stories by reversing the main-plot relationship between the Barbarian or less than perfectly Catholic North and the apparently Catholic South, including Rome. They merit being called Pauline counter-narratives insofar as they brush against the grain of the main-plot drive to St Peter’s (and the pope’s) Rome. It is a relationship characterized, among other ways, by the Exodus motif of bondage (of Israel in Egypt) and liberation (from Egypt into the Promised Land) that punctuates the narrator’s comment on the Northern pilgrims as they sight Lisbon: ‘[I]t seemed to them that they had already arrived at the promised land’ (‘les pareció que ya

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habían llegado a la tierra de promisión,’ Persiles 431–2). The Exodus motif is sounded yet again on Policarpo’s Isle, when Clodio declares in his mash note to Auristela that he would liberate her from the Egypt of another unwanted suitor’s attentions and lead her to the Promised Land of Spain, France, or Italy (Persiles 318). Exodus is one of several links between Persiles and Erasmus’s Enchiridion. In the opening paragraph of Erasmus’s handbook for the Christian soldier, the author addresses a friend who had requested a guide to the Christian life, wondering how he might escape from the Egypt of the court with its vices and allurements and follow Moses on the road to virtue. In Persiles the motif is a recurring promise, voiced by several characters, broken all the way to Rome. What I am calling Pauline counter-narratives involve stories about Southern Catholics – Antonio, Sosa, and Renato – for whom the Catholic South is their private Egypt or bondage and the Barbarian North their flight to the Promised Land, where they find conversion (Antonio), a sympathetic ear (Sosa), or refuge (Renato) – even if, as always in this novel, it amounts to a temporary or partial deliverance. We set out on our particular path to the Promised Land by dwelling on the terms and imagery offered up by the text for the relevant issues and then look closely at the story of Antonio and Ricla as an exemplary tale of the relationship between law and spirit (in sixteenthcentury terms, sacrament and caritas). Pagan Europe We begin by recalling that in John of Patmos’s Revelation, source of the New Jerusalem imagery invoked frequently to characterize Persiles’ Rome, the original Whore of Babylon is Rome – by tradition erbfeind of Jerusalem. And that pagan, imperial Rome, enemy of Jew and Christian alike, erupts occasionally like a poorly repressed bad conscience in Cervantes’ novel as when a Roman passerby catches sight of the ‘sin par’ beauty of Auristela and ‘la gallarda’ Constanza – sparkling like stars in the night – and declares, ‘I’ll wager the goddess Venus, as in times past, is returning to this city to view the relics of her beloved Aeneas’ (‘Yo apostaré que la diosa Venus, como en los tiempos pasados, vuelve a esta ciudad a ver las reliquias de su querido Eneas,’ Persiles 647). This is an instance of the smiling face of the pagan Venus alive and at loose in the Catholic South. The tragic face – the chaotic force of wilful lust – is represented by Luisa la talaverana, whom Ortel calls ‘la diosa Venus’ (Persiles 498), a Spanish barmaid who wreaks havoc in the lives of the men

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– namely, Ortel and Bartolomé – who worship her. Ortel, like Sosa with Leonor, tries to win her through the father – in Ortel’s case, by making a great show of money and pearls obtained in the Portuguese East Indies (Persiles 494–5, 499). Rome’s pantheon, tutelary deities, and saintly ‘relics’ owe as much in such comments to its pre-Christian, pagan, and imperial past as to its at least nominally Christian present. Conventionally hyperbolic though they are, comments of this kind are made thematically functional by fitting into a larger pattern of imagery and action that insistently highlights the Catholic South’s religious and more broadly cultural syncretism. Elsewhere too Cervantes delights in drawing attention to the vestigial paganism of the apparently Catholic South. Immediately following the resolution of Feliciana de la Voz’s story, the pilgrim cortège arrives in Talavera, where ‘the great feast day of la Monda’ (‘la gran fiesta de la Monda,’ Persiles 483) is being celebrated. The narrator then supplies this ethnological comment on the local festival: ‘[It] derives its origin from long before the birth of Christ, “reduced” by Christians to such proper limits and bounds that, if it was once celebrated by pagans to honour the goddess Venus, now it is held to honour and praise the Virgin of the Virgins’ (‘trae su origen de muchos años antes que Cristo naciese, reducida por los cristianos a tan buen punto y término que, si entonces se celebraba en honra de la diosa Venus por la gentilidad, ahora se celebra en honra y alabanza de la Virgen de las vírgines [sic],’ Persiles 483–4). This comment about the festival of Monda reveals a clarity about survival of the pre-Christian ‘pagan’ in sixteenth-century European folk practice38 that calls to mind ethnographic descriptions of New World religious syncretism, such as the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe’s absorption of the attributes and powers of Tonantzin, the Mexica goddess of fertility.39 The prominence of Guadalupe monastery in Feliciana’s story and the subsequent glancingly narrated pit stop in Trujillo where the pilgrims are guests of Francisco Pizarro have recalled to more than one reader the eponymous conquistador of Peru, although there were Pizarros in Trujillo at the time of the novel’s chronology (1557–9). Nevertheless, taken together with the narrator’s reference to the lexicon of conquest and conversion – remember the town was ‘reducida por los cristianos’ – these features of the episode would appear to represent central Spain as a cultural palimpsest with a history and a current religious reality not unlike that of the New World or, to hold to the terms of the novel, the less than perfectly Catholic North. As if to drive the point home,

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six leagues from Talavera the travellers come upon a vagabond pilgrim who counts herself among the many who use pilgrimage to disguise their ‘laziness’ (‘ociosidad,’ Persiles 488). She is grotesquely and virtuosically rendered with a burlesque blason worthy of Quevedo’s picaresque Buscón (Persiles 486–8). Bearing rosary beads as fat as Montesinos’s in Don Quijote’s dream-vision, she lustily regales them with the tale of her freeloading ways as an itinerant beggar making the rounds of religious feasts. More interesting for our purposes than the old pilgrim’s tricksterish incarnation and denunciation of the false pilgrim’s abuse of religious practice – not in itself an attack on pilgrimages per se40 – is the reassertion of the pagan theme. Stringing together the names of popular devotions – el Sagrario, el Niño de la Guardia, Santa Verónica de Jaén – like the hypertrophied beads on her rosary, the ‘passing strange pilgrim’ (‘peregrina tan peregrina,’ with a play on the adjective pilgrim meaning ‘strange or foreign’) caps her ‘relación’ with a description of the celebration of Nuestra Señora de la Cabeza that takes place on the last Sunday in April, three leagues from Andújar in the heart of the Sierra Morena: ‘Such is it, I have heard tell, that not even the erstwhile pagan feast days, which that of Talavera’s Monda imitates, have outdone it nor could they outdo it’ (‘Tal es, según he oído decir, que ni las pasadas fiestas de la gentilidad, a quien imita la de la Monda de Talavera, no le han hecho ni le pueden hacer ventaja,’ Persiles 487). In that phrase – ‘[the feast] of Monda of Talavera imitates that of [the pagans]’ (‘a [la gentilidad] imita la [fiesta] de la Monda de Talavera’) – a Southern pilgrim exposes the pagan exoticism of the Catholic South to Northern pilgrims seeking religious illumination (for the time being, this is their alibi) where Christianity is not supposed to be twisted, dark, or flawed. Indeed she marvels at a pagan exuberance that outdoes ‘la gentilidad’ themselves. At such moments, even Spain resembles Antonio de Torquemada’s belatedly Christianized, hence pagan folklore–rich northern Europe as described in the Jardín de flores curiosas (1570), one of Cervantes’ plausible sources for the geography and customs of his novel’s Gothic North. One discursive context for Cervantes’ essay in novelistic ethnography is Erasmist interest in folklore and popular culture, in which Torquemada shared.41 In view of the reference to Venus and the implied pantagruelian revelry, another pertinent context is Tridentine scandal over the debauchery that often accompanied religious celebrations.42 Cervantes locates Torquemada’s superficially Christianized North in the

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Catholic South and suggests that everywhere, but especially outside the cities and among the large majority of unlettered, the Christianity practised frequently remained a thinly veiled paganism not essentially different from Northern ‘Gothic’ European or, for that matter, New World atavistic beliefs and rituals. Jesuits preaching popular missions from the sixteenth century, evangelizing ordinary people, sometimes referred to the Spanish and Italian countryside as ‘their Indies,’ owing to what they perceived as the religious ignorance of the population.43 That Catholic and Protestant reformers found themselves responding to local religious beliefs and practices with a similar mix of impatience, aversion, and horror points in part to the shared caste-based sensibilities of elites that cut across confessional divisions on doctrinal matters.44 Max Weber provided one model for understanding the broader dimensions of religious reform in his account of a modernity marked by increasing social discipline through the generalization of an urban (bureaucratic and mercantilist) sensibility. His account has been adapted by early modern religious historians who argue that confessionalization – the effort by Catholic and Protestant Churches and States alike to ensure and enforce correct belief and behaviour – led to social disciplining and economic modernization.45 Another model is described by Norbert Elias as the civilizing process, the early modern absolutist State-sponsored diffusion of a courtly code centred on decorous self-control that converted the old, rough-edged landed warrior nobility into a preening, refined, slightly constipated urban aristocracy mindful of table manners and body fluids.46 In this novelistic context, however, perhaps the most pointed implication of the pseudo-ethnography is not antiquarian or historical or even sociological, but thematic. Following the episode of Feliciana de la Voz, it underscores the Catholic South’s primitivism, its Northernness, its urgent need for re-Christianization along Pauline lines, a bias represented in this novel most fully and frequently – to heighten the paradox – by Northern Barbarian or Gothic characters. The starkest illustration of the contrapuntal or paradoxical impulse to stand the North-South hierarchy on its head invokes and reverses the Exodus motif sounded by the speech announcing landfall in Lisbon. In Rome, Hipólita’s failed seduction of Periandro leads her to assault and then falsely accuse him of robbing her. As Periandro beats a hasty retreat, Hipólita seizes his diamond-studded cross and pilgrim’s cloak, a sequence of events that leads to Periandro’s ‘abandoning his pilgrim’s cloak to the new Egyptian [woman]’ (‘dejando la esclavina en poder de la nueva egipcia,’ Persiles 672). Re-enacting a similar assault on Antonio

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el bárbaro by Rosamunda in the North characterized by the same biblical image (Persiles 256), Hipólita becomes by analogy the wife of Potiphar, an Egyptian officer in the service of the pharaoh, and Periandro the Hebrew Joseph. Rome, by the same allusive magic, is Old Testament Egypt and the North – represented metonymically by Periandro – the Promised Land. The textual echo between Rosamunda (in Book 2, set in the North) and Hipólita (in Book 4, set in Rome) moreover serves to remind readers that there is more than one Egypt and more than one Promised Land here. We will, in what follows, have further occasion to notice as we already have how often the novel resorts to mapping mythic, epic, or sacred landscapes and narratives onto ordinary human interaction, emphasizing the ethical dimension of the Christian legacy over the metaphysical and doctrinal one – or, to be more precise, infusing the ethical with the power and suggestiveness of the metaphysical and the doctrinal, with their allure and prestige and capacity to compel loving attention. Persiles’ tendency to draw attention to this-worldly implications of transcendence finds rhetorical expression even in Auristela’s own oftquoted gloss on the Chain of Being. Frequently taken to authorize celebration of the Church, catechism, or an ascetic or otherworldly interpretation of the novel’s evocation of transcendence, the full statement clearly situates heaven and hell in ‘esta vida’ or this life: ‘In this life desires are countless and they link up to one another and forge a chain, which may reach heaven or else plunge into hell’ (‘En esta vida, los deseos son infinitos, y unos se encadenan de otros y se eslabonan, y van formando una cadena que tal vez llega al cielo y tal se sume en el infierno,’ Persiles 690). It will become apparent that the religious impulse in Persiles is less to settle ultimate questions of metaphysical reality or even dogmatic belief than to explore how belief itself or what characters think they believe, even if a misreading of official teachings, conditions behaviour. In a word – and in the spirit of Auristela’s observation – Persiles shows how heaven and hell; the divine, the earthly, and the demonic; near-death and resurrection; the bondage of Egypt and the liberation of the Promised Land are what characters are to each other. Law and Grace among the Barbarians The first of the Pauline counter-narratives, the story of Antonio (the Spanish castaway) and Ricla (the Northern Barbarian), is introduced

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through a daring rescue of the protagonists by Antonio’s and Ricla’s son Antonio el bárbaro. The Barbarian ceremony described in chapter 1 is disrupted by the warrior Bradamiro intent on having Periandro dressed as a maiden for himself. By so arrogantly flouting Barbarian tradition, Bradamiro succeeds in unleashing pent-up feuds. Arrows shower down from every quarter, and fighting breaks out among the warriors. Soon the chaos is made the occasion for a settling of scores and a wanton, taboo-shattering bloodbath (‘son showing no respect for father, nor brother for brother’ [‘sin respetar el hijo al padre, ni el hermano al hermano’], Persiles 156). Bradamiro’s allies set fire to a wood in the estate belonging to his killer, the Barbarian governor, and the conflagration rapidly consumes the island (Persiles 156–7, 172). Stepping out of the darkness and through the blaze, a Castilian-speaking Barbarian approaches Periandro and offers to lead him – addressed as ‘beautiful maiden’ (‘hermosa doncella’) because he remains in his cross-dressed disguise – and companions out of danger and into safety ‘if heaven helps me’ (‘si los cielos me ayudan,’ Persiles 157). In the rescue’s juxtaposition of human initiative and heavenly invocation we are treated to an initial version of the relationship between natural and supernatural agency in the enactment of caritas that will be put through its paces in what follows. In ways large and small we can detect the will to rewrite epic. Cervantes had already thrown down the gauntlet by felling Bradamiro with an arrow through the tongue, a Northern Barbarian’s fate to match that of the Greek Antinous – the first of Penelope’s upstart suitors struck down by Odysseus’s mighty arm with an arrow said to pierce his chin and throat (Odyssey XXII). Behind Antonio el bárbaro’s rescue is the long shadow of Aeneas’s spectacular plunge into the flames of Troy (Aeneid II), from which he saved his father Anchises. Carlos Romero suggests that Cervantes might have remembered a similar scene in Heliodorus.47 However, since Heliodorus’s version contains no spectacular rescue, Vergil’s account is perhaps a closer model. The most telling parallel is the image of Aeneas’s escape from the burning city, bearing his aged father Anchises on his shoulders, an act so memorable it became an iconographic staple for painters through the ages.48 The corresponding action in Persiles is described so: Cloelia’s age and Auristela’s youth did not permit them to keep pace with their guide; and, realizing this, the strapping and strong Barbarian took

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Cloelia in his arms and slung her across his shoulders, while Periandro did much the same with Auristela. (Los muchos años de Cloelia y los pocos de Auristela no permitían que al paso de su guía tendiesen el suyo; viendo lo cual el bárbaro, robusto y de fuerzas, asió de Cloelia y se la echó al hombro, y Periandro hizo lo mismo de Auristela.) (Persiles 157)

Cervantes proves fond of variations on this iconic tableau in Persiles. Earlier, Periandro dressed bewitchingly as a girl is hoisted by the Barbarians on their shoulders as soon as he sets foot on their Isle (Persiles 150). When the pilgrim party later lands on the island of Golandia, Periandro will wade ashore with Auristela on his and the two Antonios’ shoulders (Persiles 208). Further on still, Taurisa is borne ashore by her two Christian duellers (Persiles 257), echoing the very moment when Periandro had first seen Transila (the Hibernian ‘doncella intérprete’ or ‘interpreter-maiden’) brought on Barbarian shoulders to meet Arnaldo’s ship – one more Barbaric Isle motif echoed by Christian characters. The motif – like the theme of barbarism itself – penetrates into France when Antonio the younger raises Félix Flora on his shoulders ‘like a new Europa’ (‘como a otra nueva Europa,’ Persiles 582), to rescue rather than buy or sell, abduct, or fight a duel over her without the lady’s consent. The mythological allusion makes Antonio Zeus, of course, but also the raper (rather than rescuer) of a maid – which he is not. And so he and the allusion stand as one more example of Cervantes’ playfully irreverent way with the literary tradition in this novel. On the Barbaric Isle, the author boldly prepares the ground for the religious and ethnic inversions to follow by engaging in a sequence of literary ones: in lieu of an ancient, sun-kissed Mediterranean city, the dark, cold, barren wastes of a northern European island; in lieu of a foreign invasion, a civil war; and in lieu of the Trojan hero-founder of imperial Rome dutifully rescuing his father, the cross-dressed epic hero and heroine led by a Spanish-Barbarian mestizo who materializes out of the inky blackness to come to the aid of strangers. As the main plot reimagines the Trojan Aeneas’s imperial quest to found Rome, so the same revisionary spirit makes itself known once again and often in the subplots as a reassertion – sometimes through epic allusion – of a Christian empire of the spirit.

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Antonio el bárbaro leads Periandro and Auristela into a cave, onto an open field, and finally into another cave, by a twisting, tortuous path suggestive of a labyrinth. At the heart of the labyrinth lurks not the degenerate monster or minotaur of legend, but a composite of another sort: the interracial couple, Antonio and Ricla, parents of Antonio el bárbaro – who is thereby revealed as a half-breed, deriving his name from his father and his epithet from his mother – and his sister Constanza. The urge to break down categorical barriers, miscegenate, and contaminate the pure through crossbreeding spills over into the description of the setting, the cave-like abode where Antonio and Ricla make their life together. Like the synthesis of law and grace unmediated by churchly institution they come to represent, their shelter too is described as a synthesis of the art-nature topos, ‘made by nature as if [human] industry and art had constructed it’ (‘fabricado de la naturaleza como si la industria y el arte le hubieran compuesto,’ Persiles 172). Periandro describes Antonio as a ‘human angel’ (‘May heaven reward you, oh human angel or whoever you may be!, for the good you have done us’ [‘El cielo te pague, ¡oh ángel humano, o quienquiera que seas!, el bien que nos has hecho’], Persiles 158), a particularly apt bit of oxymoronic hyperbole for its doubly hybrid connotation. The Greek root of angel means ‘mediator,’ and whether the pagan Hermes or the Judeo-Christian Gabriel, the angel draws together otherwise disparate worlds. Antonio is a mediator in his very person, an angel whose divinity consists in bridging peoples and languages, and, for the protagonists, life and an otherwise likely death. Forcione has stressed the impersonal, supernatural aspect of the references to fortune, heaven, and Ricla’s angelic condition.49 To draw attention to the hybrid implication is not to cancel the divine but to reintroduce the human factor that characterizes the moment as it does the entire story of Antonio and Ricla. In its emphasis on the symbiosis between spirit and law, and earth and heaven, their story is governed by what could be called an incarnational poetics, in the sense that it repeatedly underscores the importance of human agency, which, by right action, becomes invested with divinity. Perhaps the most powerful explicit expression of this conviction is to be found in the lessons recited by the penitentiary who instructs Auristela in Rome. What stands out about Persiles’ longest official statement of orthodox belief is its insistence on Jesus’ humanity: first by reference to ‘the sacred and loving mystery of the Incarnation’ (‘misterio sagrado y amoroso de la Encarnación’) and then by its gloss emphasizing that God became human flesh because as God ‘he was incapable of suffer-

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ing’ (‘era incapaz de padecer,’ Persiles 657). To imitate Christ then is to imitate that ‘amoroso’ commitment to living in this world rather than subordinating this one to the next. Moreover, at least in part what it means to live in this world is distinguished by a quality that humans, unlike God or gods, possess, a divine insufficiency that Christ’s marked hybrid character overcomes: the capacity to suffer, to endure, to share in the other’s burden (‘padecer’), the root meaning of the Passion. A striking avatar of the principle of charity in the novel is the officially uncatechized Northern Barbarian woman, Ricla. Thematically and structurally, moreover, the idyll of Antonio and Ricla can be read as a moving representation of the interaction between law (sacrament) and caritas. Antonio’s role in informally converting Ricla is evident, given the lesson in Catholic theology with which she closes her story (Persiles 176–7). Yet, Antonio’s own story, as William Childers too has recognized, bears the stamp of a conversion narrative: the teacher is also student. Antonio’s account of his life can be likened structurally to a confession on the model of ‘once I was a sinner, now I am saved.’ It is a conversion not away from Christianity but back toward it, moreover a spiritualized form of it that Ricla teaches by example. It is also a story of conversion from arms to love, youth to middle age (Antonio had met Ricla when he was thirty-five and she fifteen; fifteen years have elapsed when he tells his story), and epic to romance or novel. As one would expect, then, it is characterized by a before and after, a turning point or inflection, and structurally by a narrative cleavage. The first part of Antonio’s tale describes his impetuous youth before he meets Ricla. Born in Spain to middling nobility of means, Antonio shows little interest in wine or women (‘Venus was always cold in me’ [‘en mí siempre estuvo Venus fría’], Persiles 161), follows his star, leaves his homeland and fights under Charles V’s banners in Germany. Antonio’s youth is also marked by personal violence. Returning home with honour and wealth to visit his parents, he is caught up in a ‘pendencia de honor’ (‘affair of honour’) with a visiting ‘segundón’ (‘second-born’) like Persiles himself. They cross swords over formulas of address during a village festival in Antonio’s hometown (Quintanar de la Orden) in Spain (Persiles 162–6). Having dealt the offending nobleman two gashes in the head for failing to address him as an equal (his exile is measured by the difference between the deferential ‘Vuestra Merced’ and the familiar ‘vos’), Antonio is obliged to flee first to Aragón and Germany, then back home to be provisioned with money and jewels by his parents before setting out for Lisbon, from which port

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he embarks for England.50 This trajectory will be reversed in Book 3, where the party of pilgrims sails from the North Atlantic waters near England to Lisbon. Heading north on an English ship, Antonio quarrels with a sailor ‘about a matter of little importance’ (‘sobre una cosa de poca importancia,’ Persiles 167) and slaps him in the face. This provokes the wrath of the crew, who spare his life but set him adrift on a lifeboat that eventually lands him on the Barbaric Isle. Antonio’s past and present then recapitulate two main-plot lives. His before and after correspond to the split in values between Maximino the warrior (arms) and Persiles the lover – the lover of Sigismunda and of literature, signified by three references the young hero makes to the soldier-poet Garcilaso de la Vega (Persiles 153, 385, 503–5), a hybrid himself of the arms-letters topos. The other doubling is of the Barbarian Bradamiro in his impetuousness, arrogance, and ready recourse to violence, together with the dramatic consequences that ensue. It is a pattern common to the Catholic South in this novel, a Southern variation on Bradamiro and the Barbaric Isle, a South replete with situations prone to degenerate into bloody fights because characters are easily triggered by affronts real or imagined – the cases of Ortel and his anonymous adversary in Lisbon, or Feliciana’s father and brother in Extremadura, to name only examples from the first two Southern Catholic countries traversed by the protagonists. Antonio’s and the Catholic South’s equivalent of the North’s barbarism is the religion of honour that coexists with and rivals sacramental Catholicism. It is described in just these terms – indeed, as a sect with its own travesty of scholastic logic – when the pilgrim cortège arrives in Antonio’s hometown to discover his old enemy dead, after having reconciled with Antonio’s father ‘on account of the fact that, with countless proofs born of the twisted sect of the duel, it was determined that Antonio had not dishonored him’ (‘a causa que, con infinitas pruebas, nacidas de la intricada se[c]ta del duelo, se había averiguado que no fue afrenta la que Antonio le hizo,’ Persiles 513). Although there is a personal transformation involved in Antonio’s journey, one that I am calling a conversion, to describe it as an expiatory pilgrimage as Forcione does may place undue stress on his personal responsibility, since Antonio’s is one of many such cases involving honour in this novel. It may also draw attention away from the implied indictment of a society that has raised an idol to reputation above truth and life.51 The honour code, after all, imposed something like a double bind. In rising to the challenge, Antonio does not merely

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defend his sense of self. Had he chosen not to respond to the public affront – to turn the other cheek – he would have risked permanent disgrace, a fate frequently likened to social death (by shunning). Indeed, in Book 2 Renato and Eusebia, condemned by Renato’s defeat in a duel although Renato is in the right, are described – in their eremitic exile – as living statues (Persiles 409). Further incidental evidence for reading Antonio’s story as a conversion narrative is provided by its likely source. Following other scholars, Avalle-Arce long ago suggested plausibly that the narrative kernel of Antonio’s story – a duel fought over modes of address – is owed to Juan Huarte de San Juan or else to a common folkloric source.52 There is more of interest in the comparison than the anecdotal parallel. Huarte tells his version of it in the context of a discussion of honour and introduces it to illustrate an unusual point about it which he calls its ‘second birth’ or ‘nacimiento segundo.’ This is his gloss: Of the second birth that men are to undergo besides their natural one, there is manifest evidence in Holy Writ, where Christ our redeemer upbraids Nicodemus because, being a doctor of the law, he did not know it was necessary for man to be born anew that he may have another better self and parents more honourable than his natural ones. And, so, as long as a man does not undertake some heroic deed, he is called, by this measure, son of nothing [‘hijo de nada’], although on account of his forbears he enjoy the title of a gentleman [literally ‘son of something’] [‘tenga nombre de hijodalgo’].53

The passage implicitly establishes the conventional typological distinction between the old law of Judaism and the new law of Christianity. A key Pauline theme, scriptural typology opposed the covenant of grace invisibly inscribed in the heart to the covenant of the law marked since Abraham by the visible mutilation of circumcision as an offering to God. The quotation lends this subtext a personal and epic cast by suggesting that Christians are obliged through heroic deeds to make a new identity for themselves, to be born anew with more honourable parents, realizing a Christian family romance by becoming self-made in the spirit. Those readers familiar with Huarte will not be surprised by its meritocratic thrust nor its subversive implications for a caste-based society.54 In the context of our discussion of Antonio, however, it suggests a way to explain what one commentator has described as the ‘enigma’ of Antonio’s character:55 how did the

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young, hot-tempered, Mercutio-like Antonio of the anecdote metamorphose into the measured, serene, generous Antonio who tells his story in the Barbarian North? One possibility already hinted at is the mellowing of age: he washed up in the North when he was thirty-five, on the threshold of middle age; it is now fifteen years later, Ricla’s age when he met her. He is old enough to be her father, a fact that could be used to explain the avuncularity in a relationship marked from the beginning, according to their accounts, by a familiar affection rather than the sexual violence frequently breaking out elsewhere in the novel. On the other hand, toward the end of Book 1 (Persiles I.22) we meet Policarpo, an old man, moreover a man who at least initially appears a wise statesman, yet whose maturity is no guarantee of equanimity or sexual self-control. Huarte’s passage points to another solution, in general terms a variation on the conversion narrative I see in Ricla’s implied tutelary relationship to Antonio. To adopt Huarte’s terms, it invites us to ask by what Christian and heroic agency did Antonio become born again, in the wild and savage Boreal lands. It is especially important for the purposes of my argument that we notice how this Huartian frame recapitulates the inversion I am suggesting Cervantes achieves through characterization and narrative: it is the Christian who must be born anew in virtue of deeds accomplished and character altered, and not merely, as in our example, the Northern Barbarian Ricla through Antonio’s teaching of the Church-sanctioned sacraments. Moreover, it is a conversion of one kind of honour, the aristocratic, Old Christian, caste-based sort that in this novel operates as the Catholic South’s special form of barbarism, into another ultimately both Stoic and Christian defined by personal virtue rather than reputation. The two narrative breaks between Antonio’s youth and present and between Antonio’s tale and Ricla’s demonstrate how time and again form enacts theme in Persiles, becoming itself an illustration of the incarnational poetics I have been describing. The two parts of Antonio’s story recounting the period of his life before and after meeting Ricla are divided by the sound of sobs from the next room, which interrupt his narrative. Auristela and Periandro rush in to find Auristela’s old nursemaid Cloelia in her death agony. Cloelia’s death is marked by the first profession of Catholic faith in the novel by which Cloelia insistently declares her belief in Jesus Christ and the Holy Roman Catholic Church. It is important to remember that she had saved Auristela’s life on the Barbaric Isle when, dressed as a boy ‘without speaking a word,

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meek as a lamb’ (‘sin hablar palabra, como un manso cordero,’ Persiles 152), Auristela was about to suffer the usual fate of foreign males under the Barbarian knife. In that early scene Cloelia gathers all her courage and speaks up, calling a halt to the ceremony, risking her own life, and saving Auristela’s by exposing the cross-dressed disguise that violates the conditions of the Barbaric Law for the ritually correct sacrifice (Persiles 153–5). She thereby anticipates Ricla’s own risk-taking role in saving Antonio’s life and is a counter-example to the evasive (and calamitous) silence that perverts the story of Leonor and Sosa, as we shall see in chapter 4. As such she is an exemplar of a Catholicism in the North that melds creed and heroic caritas, marked by the adroit use of the language and cultural code of oppressors – in this case, the stipulations of the Barbaric Law – turned against them. Moreover she appears on the very first page of the novel much as Hipólita the barbaric Catholic in Rome will figure in the final several pages. Cloelia’s death and her witness of faith in Christ are followed by report of the calcination of the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 170–2), which functions as an implicit commentary on Antonio’s conversion narrative. Cloelia’s death, to be sure, has its own narrative integrity; but sandwiched as it is between the first and second part of Antonio’s confessionlike tale, it can be read as an analogue for the death of Antonio’s former self. This implication is underscored by the account of the burning island, whose previous association with wrath and revenge (‘incitados de la venganza y cólera,’ Persiles 156) recalls Antonio’s scorched-earth youth governed by just these attributes, which lead to the affair of honour that impels him into exile (Persiles 161–8). When Antonio resumes his story, it is not now about his Spanish past or former self and its attendant idolatry of honour, but about his first encounter with Ricla, who comes to signify as well as enable the inauguration of his new self and life. The juxtaposition of Cloelia’s profession of faith in Christ with Antonio’s story in this manner serves to underscore the possibility of being born again in this life, of shedding an old skin and refashioning the sacred and profane self through intimacy with a flesh-and-blood being who is, moreover, as foreign a foreigner as can be imagined in this context. The second narrative break in Antonio’s story – occasioned by yet another report on the fiery destruction, but also perhaps a symbolic purgation or regeneration, of the Barbaric Isle and most of its inhabitants (Persiles 175) – again illustrates the enactment of theme by form. This time Ricla offers to pick up the thread of the tale where Antonio

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left off so he does not tire out himself or the others, trading responsibility for their joint story. Antonio responds, ‘It will be my pleasure … for it will give me precisely that to hear how you tell it’ (‘Soy contento … porque me le dará muy grande el ver cómo las relatas,’ Persiles 176). Diana de Armas Wilson convincingly emphasizes Ricla’s protagonism, along with Transila’s in Book 2, as examples of female characters in Persiles who tell their own stories, name and affirm their own desires and rights, make their own valuations, and in a word take responsibility for their lives.56 The tone and occasion, however, are altogether different. Transila, moved by the memory of a foiled rape that her wouldbe husband’s male relatives threatened on her wedding night – the customary ius primae noctis observed in her homeland, Hibernia – stands up and, ‘taking the words right out of her father’s mouth, she said those found in the following chapter’ (‘quitándole a su padre las palabras de la boca, dijo las del siguiente capítulo,’ Persiles 216). Ricla does indeed speak up for herself, but in her speech, as in Antonio’s, the affirmation of the self does not take the form of a subjectivity opposed to others. Instead, as in Antonio’s, it generously acknowledges the place of another in the formation of that self and those desires, the other as helping constitute the new self. Antonio had recognized her spontaneous, heroic generosity. She notes that they taught each other their respective languages and that she had learned from him ‘the Catholic Christian law’ (‘la ley católica cristiana,’ Persiles 176). Structurally the alternating monologic rhythm mimes the principle of charity understood as a love of neighbour that constitutes a mystic body: completion and this-worldly salvation are achieved through mutual recognition and mutual conversion, of language and spirit in his case, of language and law in hers. This is how Cervantes translates into characterization and narrative the Edenic motifs of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, and how he also manages to suggest that literary, and perhaps also flesh-and-blood, character is a function in part of what another character is capable of recognizing and eliciting. In Antonio’s tutelary relationship to Ricla, he represents the Church unofficially as vicar of the law dispensing catechism and the baptismal sacrament, much as the creed he teaches Ricla insists on the pope’s virtual and representational character as vicar of Christ on Earth. Antonio by analogy is a substitute in extremis for all that the pope stands for, the unordained end of the line in the salvific chain of command. In symbol and deed, on the other hand, Ricla does not rep-

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resent, she is Christ. To Antonio, Ricla is ‘sooner an angel from heaven than a Barbarian of this earth’ (‘antes ángel del cielo que bárbara de la tierra,’ Persiles 174) and ‘meek as a lamb’ (‘mansa como una cordera,’ Persiles 175). The image links her with John’s figuring of Christ as the Lamb of God (John 1.29) and with Auristela on the Barbaric Isle described in the same terms, as she is about to be sacrificed. In the metaphorical economy of the novel, it also links her with Periandro’s description of Ricla’s son Antonio el bárbaro as a ‘human angel’ (‘ángel humano’) and with Periandro’s later comment describing Rome conventionally to Auristela as ‘heaven on earth’ (‘el cielo de la tierra,’ Persiles 320). In this imagery we are offered an alternative soteriology, illustrations of what I have been calling an incarnational poetics, confirmed in deed by Ricla’s role in saving Antonio materially and spiritually. Much ink has been spilled over the lesson of Catholicism that Antonio teaches his common-law Barbarian wife, but Ricla herself has not been sufficiently recognized for the lesson she teaches her Spanish husband Antonio. In the symbolic exchange of this narrative, what Antonio teaches Ricla is not Catholicism, but its law (catechism, especially official doctrine on the sacraments); on the other hand, Ricla too teaches him Catholicism – not its law, but its spirit. As Antonio takes Ricla from grace to law, so Ricla takes Antonio from law to grace. Antonio’s is the rock-solid Petrine emphasis on cultic right ritual and dogma, Ricla’s the Pauline ethical demand for internalization of the law as right behaviour toward others viewed as extensions of oneself and God – the Pauline corpus mysticum (‘mystic body’), in which the faithful make up the limbs and Christ the head. In this respect, the Barbarian North Christianizes the Catholic South just as surely as the Catholic South Christianizes the Barbarian North, and Antonio undergoes a conversion no less tangible than Ricla’s. Only, in Antonio’s case, he is not turning away from his native Christianity but rediscovering it anew incarnated in her. From the first, Ricla is portrayed as the living embodiment of charity. As if a sardonic counterpoint to Antonio and other quarrelsome Catholics, on at least two occasions Ricla is associated explicitly with charity and compassion (Persiles 158, 177). Her son comments to his father as they shepherd Periandro, Auristela, and their companions to safety, ‘Let us make, sir, as I have said, for our hovel, so my mother and sister may show and exercise their charity by tending lovingly to our exhausted and fearful guests’ (‘Vamos, señor, como tengo dicho, a

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nuestro rancho, para que la caridad de mi madre y de mi hermana se muestre y ejercite en acariciar a estos mis cansados y temerosos huéspedes,’ Persiles 158). And the identification with charity and compassion in deed is constant, above all when Ricla transgresses the very Barbaric Law of her own people by coming to the aid of a stranger, a good Samaritan who saves (and loves) ‘a neighbour’ (Persiles 175). Ricla is prefigured by the image of the talking wolf that Antonio – in his delirium, following six days and nights adrift on the high seas and a nightmare about wolves ripping him to pieces – imagines warning him away from the shore (Persiles 169–70). In the first canticle of Dante’s Commedia, the poet is, like Antonio, thirty-five, in the middle of the road of life and in a dark wood, when he meets with a she-wolf. The she-wolf drives him back into the night and into the hands of his maestro and guide on the journey of salvation, the poet Vergil (Inferno I.49–111). Might Cervantes be tipping his hat to Dante, maestro if not guide in Christian epic? For Forcione again the wolf represents the bottom of the cycle of fall and redemption, the animal realm of sin, before the expiatory, redemptive turn up toward the divine and heavenly.57 This is a fine reading of the structure of imagery in this episode. But the structure of characterization and event suggests a different explanation for Antonio’s transformation, one that restores Ricla to the picture and, through her, female, Barbarian (outsider), human, and embodied agency. I regard the talking wolf as a figure for Ricla, because it is not simply a wolf but a humanized wolf whose speech is cautionary and benevolent – making a stark contrast to the unquenchable desire, bottomless hunger, and ravenous lust of Dante’s wolf.58 Ricla too is the sheep in wolf’s clothing, a potential threat who instead rescues Antonio, not only from thirst and starvation, but also from his former self (more Vergil than she-wolf to Antonio’s Dante). Ricla’s transformative effect is suggested by the watery lustration of Antonio’s six days and nights at sea – the period of creation in Genesis – which are characterized as a protracted death (Persiles 168). The problem of human agency and of the divine in the face of a sublimely overwhelming nature is represented even in small narrative patches. For instance, Antonio on his high-seas ordeal is described alternately rowing madly and putting away his oars and commending himself to God, sending up promises and prayer under duress (Persiles 168–9). As if to illustrate the alchemical principle that salvation can be found in filth, the characters in this novel never altogether escape the beastly, hell, darkness, and evil, nor are they ever altogether alienated

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from the godly, heaven, light, and good, most often associated with generosity, forgiveness, and succour. The modest example just cited does duty for many others in which characters find themselves constantly challenged to negotiate striving and resignation, the animal and the divine. In this light, the novel offers no real hope for single, definitive falls and redemptions, impersonal cycles, or conclusive expiatory journeys, either in the secondary episodes or in the overarching main plot. Ricla is a lesson in more than one kind of love. Once cold to Venus, Antonio’s sexual self is awakened by the sight of this Northern Aphrodite on whom he first lays eyes emerging not from a conch shell but picking her way along the shore in search of shellfish. Frightened by him, she drops her catch; he in turn takes her in his arms and, without their saying a word, leads her into his cave and sets her gently on the ground: ‘I kissed her hands, caressed her face with mine, and made every sort of gesture and sign I knew to show myself gentle and loving with her’ (‘beséle las manos, halaguéle el rostro con las mías, y hice todas las señales y demostraciones que pude para mostrarme blando y amoroso con ella,’ Persiles 174). The mere presence of Ricla in the Barbarian North generates a kind of Christian oasis, of heaven on earth, that translates even into small details. After meeting (and rescue by) Ricla, Antonio notices a change in the landscape. Once ‘theater … of my misfortune’ (‘teatro … de mis desgracias,’ Persiles 173) – cold, barren, and hostile – it appears suddenly altered, yielding to a Golden Age bloom of labourless abundance: ‘I found walnuts and hazelnuts and some wild pears’ (‘hallé nueces y avellanas y algunas peras silvestres,’ Persiles 175). The earthly paradise imagery (‘The grass was high, because the abundant water that flowed from the crags kept them evergreen’ [‘Estaba crecida la yerba, porque las muchas aguas que de las peñas salían las tenían en perpetua verdura’], Persiles 172) is anticipated in the break between the first and second part of Antonio’s narrative, and as such is associated with both Cloelia’s death and the account of Ricla that follows. The same tokens of Golden Age simplicity recur in the pastoral oases of Renato and Eusebia’s hermitage (Book 2) and the hermit-sage Soldino’s cave (Book 3). They had made an earlier appearance, with a valence obviously modified by context, in the sacrificial setting of the Barbaric Isle (Book 1): the ‘haphazardly strewn nuts’ (‘frutas secas sin concierto ni policía’) laid out when Periandro debuted as a maiden during his search-and-rescue operation for Auristela (Persiles 151). Don Quijote’s well-known rhetorical set-piece on the Golden Age (Don

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Quijote I.11) helps bring home the significance of the association of this encounter with Golden Age imagery. The Golden Age, in the knight’s retelling of Hesiod’s account, was a primordial age of plenty, peace, harmony, shared property, grace, and cornucopian abundance; justice was firm, not tyrannical, untroubled by patronage and self-interest; love was expressed simply, and damsels and decency walked alone unhampered and unthreatened by impudence and lust, compared to the amorous plague of the current Iron Age. Indeed, what is striking about the encounter of Antonio and Ricla – even the affectionate, patting gestures with which they come to know each other (‘I caressed her face’ [‘halaguéle el rostro’]) – is the absence of sexual violence otherwise so commonplace in this novel. Antonio and Ricla are unable to marry canonically, yet – like Antonio’s improvised baptism – their union is presented as legitimate, as a perfect marriage of sacred and profane love. They avail themselves of common-law right, and she bears him children for God without guilt. ‘I call this gentleman my husband, because before he came to know me altogether, he declared himself [my husband] in the manner that he says is used among true Christians’ (‘Llamo esposo a este señor, porque, antes que me conociese del todo, me dio palabra de serlo, al modo que él dice que se usa entre verdaderos cristianos,’ Persiles 176). They are represented as magnificent Christians and live their Christianity – including their marriage – without need of churches or priests. The Spanish-Barbarian couple will eventually accompany Auristela and Periandro in their pilgrimage and settle in Antonio’s village in Castile (Quintanar de la Orden). There they will join a community of Catholics, live their Christianity openly, and bring their example of law renewed by spirit as do Periandro and Auristela in Rome, whose marriage is not sanctified canonically either. To this end Ricla hoards gold and pearls, ‘awaiting the blessed day when we are released from this prison and taken where, freely and surely and without worry, we may join the flock of Christ, whom I adore on the cross that you see there’ (‘esperando el día que ha de ser tan dichoso que nos saque desta prisión y nos lleve adonde, con libertad y certeza, y sin escrúpulo, seamos unos de los del rebaño de Cristo, en quien adoro en aquella cruz que allí veis,’ Persiles 178). Ricla neglects to mention the spiritual gold she and her family have been stockpiling, the suggestion in their example that a perfect Christianity is possible outside Christian society, devoid of hieratic mediation – indeed on the margins of both Northern Barbarian and Southern Catholic polities.

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Ricla also cannot possibly anticipate that there will be no miraculous transformation through reintegration into Spanish society. The unregenerate South will greet them (in Book 3) with the murder of a local count – in pilgrim garb on his way to Rome – who is shot while attempting to mediate a row that breaks out between local villagers and troops quartered nearby. Although initially neither ‘the concern and prudence of the captains’ (‘la solicitud y la prudencia de los capitanes,’ Persiles 518) nor ‘the Christian diligence’ (‘la diligencia cristiana’) of the priests is described as settling the flare-up, ultimately ‘the prudence of the captains’ saves the day. As is usually the case in this novel, a limited solution – in this instance, a stalemate – heads off greater disaster. Interestingly, at least in this encounter in the putatively Catholic, law-abiding South the narrative rewards the captains’ prudence over official, priestmediated ‘Christian diligence,’ another way of saying arms over letters. Cervantes tests the limits of plausibility by having this count revealed as the heir of Antonio’s erstwhile enemy, whose dying wish is to marry Constanza and leave her his title and fortune as a tribute to her compassion and beauty. This symbolic reconciliation of the two families under the circumstances, in effect through a blood sacrifice, underscores the heroic exceptionalism – the foreignness – of Christian virtue in the Catholic South and hence the real perils there for the Northern pilgrims. The South not only remains defiantly unredeemed by Christ’s sacrifice and the example of Antonio returned from his personal quest, it also appears to be intent on or unable to avert perpetrating ongoing sacrifices of the lamb. Even the manner of the count’s death – a bullet in his back that bores through his chest (‘le habían pasado por las espaldas el pecho,’ Persiles 517–18) – suggests a Southern Catholic, technologically updated re-enactment of the Barbaric Isle’s sacrificial practice. Antonio’s idyll in the North, isolated on an island with a ravishingly beautiful maiden for many years before returning home, may suggest to some readers the epic subtext of Odysseus’s sojourn on Calypso’s isle. If so, Cervantes’ rethinking is substantial: in Antonio’s story, there is no loss of identity or forgetting of who they are. Neither altogether renounces the past as they learn their spouse’s language and undergo a spiritual transformation. Calypso’s divine promise of eternal youth, immortality, and pleasure is displaced in this novel toward specifically human possibilities of transcendence; in this particular case, sexual relations issuing in a family. Ricla is thereby cast in the roles of both Calypso and Penelope, anticipating Auristela’s own commitment to immortality by human companionship and succession announced in the final sen-

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tence of the novel: ‘[Auristela, now Queen Sigismunda] lived in companionship with her husband Persiles until great-grandchildren lengthened her days, because she saw them in her long and happy posterity’ (‘vivió en compañía de su esposo Persiles hasta que bisnietos le alargaron los días, pues los vio en su larga y feliz posteridad,’ Persiles 713–14). Not only does the story then offer an alternative to ascetic Christian renunciation of the bodily and rewrite Genesis’s association of generation with transgression and punishment. It also provides a narrative alternative to the implied choice in Homeric epic between Calypso and Penelope, between the immortal stasis of a life free of the vexations and corruptions of mortality (grief, infirmity, aging, and death) and the mortal stasis of a story-filled, middle-aged domesticity. Just as Cervantes recasts The Aeneid by making the amorous digression the main-plot epic adventure, and Dido therefore co-protagonist rather than dangerous distraction (discussed in chapter 3), so too we could claim that Cervantes recasts The Odyssey by imagining a conjugal domesticity that is also an adventure, since there is no abandonment of a Penelope or Calypso as Antonio and Ricla make their way back to Spain together. In Antonio’s and Ricla’s coming together we have then a figure in narrative and characterization for the coming together of law and grace, flesh and spirit, body and soul, sacred and profane love, sacrament and caritas – one might also add, St Peter and St Paul. The will to coincidentia oppositorum is pointedly distilled in the breaking of bread offered by Ricla in their first encounter, appropriately condensing sexual and Eucharistic connotations and yet retaining an integrity of its own as a token of generosity. Once she had overcome her fear on their first encounter, in Antonio’s telling she laughed and hugged him, and, ‘withdrawing a kind of bread from her bosom … she placed it in my mouth’ (‘sacando del seno una manera de pan … me lo puso en la boca,’ Persiles 174) and urged him to eat (he later learned). She then took him by the hand to a creek where she encouraged him to drink. Structurally her gesture offering bread and water parallels her account of his teaching her the Eucharist and baptism. He baptized her in the same stream she had taken him to drink, ‘although not with the ceremonies he has told me are customary in his homeland; he explained his faith to me as he knows best, and I found a place for it in my soul and in my heart’ (‘aunque no con las ceremonias que él me ha dicho que en su tierra se acostumbran; declaróme su fe como él la sabe, la cual yo asenté en mi alma y en mi corazón,’ Persiles 176). If we dwell on the evocation of the cave where they take refuge and make a home for them-

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selves – with its womb-like and sexual associations, confirmed by Ricla’s mention of the children that followed from their union expressed through an elegant circumlocution for the sexual act (‘my many comings and goings from this place’ [‘mis muchas entradas y salidas en este lugar’] ‘gave him enough [pleasure] that this girl and boy were born to me and my husband’ [‘le dieron bastante para que de mí y de mi esposo naciesen esta muchacha y este niño’]), we may be inclined to recall that this sexual sense of the cave enjoys an epic pedigree. Juno, in Book 4 of The Aeneid, arranges for a storm to break out while Dido and Aeneas are abroad hunting, so they will take shelter in a cave and consummate their clandestine marriage. Encouraged by the ‘comings and goings’ of Aeneas and Dido, as re-enacted by Antonio and Ricla, we might even be prepared to remember that pan (‘bread’) is Golden-Age slang for the female sex organ and comer (‘to eat,’ then as now) for copulation.59 The giving of bread would suggest Ricla’s sexual offering of herself, an offering indeed consummated. On the other hand, the tone of their relationship could not be more removed from the hint of obscenity implied by this usage. Their relationship is sexual, but affectionate, in stark contrast to so many episodes in Persiles where the erotic imposes itself violently. We could then yield to the temptation of pushing the reading in the opposite direction and spiritualizing away all sexual association by identifying the bread symbolically with the bread of the Eucharist and the related Gospel linking of Christ with the bread of life. Much as Antonio baptizes Ricla in the nearby stream, Ricla in breaking bread with him virtually administers Antonio the sacrament of the Eucharist. This possibility would reinforce other associations of Ricla with Christ – as novelistic ‘meek lamb’ (‘mansa cordera’) – and hence with the pattern of inversions to which I have been drawing attention. We might recall the Exodus typology that crops up elsewhere in Persiles (discussed in chapter 4) and that I have suggested should be applied to not only the main plot movement toward Rome, but also to those movements from the Catholic South to the Barbarian North. The flight from Egypt to the Promised Land is celebrated with a Passover feast that includes unleavened bread, although the bread here is merely described by what it is not (of wheat). To recapitulate then: in the erotic context, the bread is sex; in the Catholic context, the Eucharist; and in the typological context of Exodus, it is the Passover meal of the exile who has come home. Ultimately the reverberative power of this simple gesture eludes reification. Ricla offers Antonio bodily sustenance or nourishment, he

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returns the favour with a lesson on the Eucharist in her account of the creed – a telling juxtaposition of letter and spirit with the Catholic symbol for spiritual sustenance incarnated. Yet this is to suggest that her gesture falls short, is somehow incomplete, needing sacramental legitimacy to fulfill it. In providing this foreigner the bodily means of survival, Ricla is not only a living emblem of generosity. She is also violating social rules – the Barbaric Law that called for foreign men to be sacrificed – and in so doing upholding the value of principle over tribal affiliation, helping a fellow traveller in need, independently of origin. It is the triumph of principle over conformity and loyalty to kith and kin, the imperative at the heart of all great ethical traditions and foil to the vengefulness that possesses honour-bound Catholic Southerners such as Antonio in his earlier life. It is a value not lost on Antonio the day following their first encounter when – awaiting her return – he is assaulted by fears that she would reveal my whereabouts and hand me over to the Barbarians, who I imagined were everywhere on the island, but I was relieved of this fear by the sight of her later in the day, radiant as the sun, meek as a lamb, and not accompanied by Barbarians who might capture me but loaded with supplies that would sustain me. (que me había de descubrir y entregarme a los bárbaros, de quien imaginé estar llena esta isla, pero sacóme deste temor el verla volver algo entrado el día, bella como el sol, mansa como una cordera, no acompañada de bárbaros que me prendiesen, sino cargada de bastimentos que me sustentasen.) (Persiles 175)

The bread, like the representation of sexual love, is complete in its material and spiritual dimensions, though devoid of sacramental sanction. As Antonio does not live by bread alone, neither does he by spirit or sacrament. And in her life- rather than death-dealing gesture, Ricla reverses the cruelties of her compatriot Barbarians (this episode immediately follows the averted sacrificial ritual) and teaches a Catholic a lesson in how caritas might embrace both the spirit (soul) and the letter (flesh) of the law. Pauline charity and more broadly modern, reformed piety are frequently associated with an inner, immaterial, or spiritual Christianity opposed to an exterior, material, and sensory Christianity – the ‘splendour of the cult’ with its veneration of images and its worship centred

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upon ritual and sacrament.60 Ricla’s case suggests why our ordinary religious categories may well fail us. Her piety manifests as material sustenance, a bias that links her with the Jesus of the parable of the loaves and fishes (John 6), in his feeding of the multitudes and implicit understanding of the miracle not as divine wonder-working but as the meeting of a need. Ricla exemplifies one kind of religious materialism centred on seeking and nourishing the divine in fellow human beings, in place of another kind centred on seeking the divine on an entirely other plane – elsewhere or in another time, past or to come – through ritual, icon, and hieratic mediation. Moreover, in contrast to a patristic tradition that sanctioned only contempt for the body, Ricla’s understanding of this spirituality includes the material in the specifically bodily and sexual sense, as when she declares, ‘I surrendered my body to him, not thinking that by doing so I would offend anyone’ (‘entreguéle mi cuerpo, no pensando que en ello ofendía a nadie,’ Persiles 177). We might be inclined to attribute this to the Aristotelian tradition that subordinated woman identified with materia to man identified with alma, and indeed in the very same speech Ricla credits Antonio with turning her ‘alma rústica’ into one that is ‘discreta y cristiana.’ But as we have seen, action, imagery, and characterization tell another, fuller story, one that associates Ricla with both the body and the spirit in a sense that complements and is implicitly contrasted with Antonio’s unofficial – and incomplete – representation of the sacramental law. And so if it is true that Antonio converts Ricla by teaching her a lesson in Christian law, it is no less true that Ricla converts Antonio by teaching him a lesson in Christian spirit. Thus two religious conversions take place – in Antonio’s case back toward his original Catholicism renewed by the grace of Ricla la bárbara’s example. The spiritual protagonism of not only a Barbarian but a woman in a terrain guarded zealously, as is well known, by the doctores de la ley (‘doctors of the law’ or ‘theologians’) lends relief and point to the portrait of Ricla. The inquisitorial shadow of the doctores reluctant to accept the authority of espirituales (the socalled spiritual – frequently women – inclined to an interior piety, and liable to authorize themselves by invoking direct experience of God as superior to theological knowledge) makes of Ricla something rather more than an insipid perfecta casada (‘perfect wife’) or docile buen salvaje (‘noble savage’).61 To borrow the symbolic geography of the novel, Ricla is Antonio’s Blessed Isle. In their story, Cervantes takes pains to set the scene so that amidst the Northern darkness and desolation of

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climate and custom, he carves out a heaven on earth of light and generosity. Once again, grace and redemption are individualized and made operative as right action rather than hypostatized in a given ethnic, religious, or political (especially institutional) space invested with an a priori sacred privilege. In Antonio el bárbaro’s heroic rescue of the strangers we can see to what extent he is his Barbarian mother’s son, and in his impetuous and murderous rejection of Cenotia’s advances on Policarpo’s Island in Book 3, his Spanish father’s – tacitly reversing ordinary expectations. Antonio el bárbaro is described as hot-tempered, impulsive, and prone to violence (for example, Persiles 335). The characterization is a trap set for those unsuspecting readers and characters disposed to ascribe this evidence of barbarism to his Barbarian mother and heritage, a habit underlined by his epithet (that is, Antonio the barbarian). And yet in his touchiness, short temper, and violence the son takes after his Spanish father Antonio before he had met Ricla. That is, he resembles the Antonio who washed up in the North after a fight with another nobleman over modes of address – he used the familiar ‘vos’ for the ceremonial ‘Vuestra Merced’ – and who thereafter was tossed from a ship for brawling. In contrast, Antonio’s Barbarian mother Ricla is represented from the first as ‘meek as a lamb’ (‘mansa como una cordera,’ Persiles 175), an image that links her, as we saw, with Auristela as well as with Christ. The counterpoint between Antonio and Ricla is a neat little illustration of Cervantes’ taste for paradox in this novel so often denied its own paradoxographic experiments, in the wake of Don Quijote. In particular, it puts on display Cervantes’ characteristic use of paradox to detonate representations of Barbarians and Spaniards that brush too complacently with the contemporary grain of doxa (‘common opinion’). At the same time, no attention is called to it, and the facts are presented so unobtrusively that it becomes a test of the characters’ (and perhaps also the reader’s) susceptibility to appearances. Ricla’s hospitality toward a stranger (Antonio) bears contrasting with Hipólita’s hostility (to Auristela and, once spurned, to Periandro) in Rome. Hipólita’s role reverses the typological movement otherwise suggested by the relationship between the Barbarian and Gothic Northern and the Catholic Southern half, for instance Auristela’s choice of marriage over the convent in Rome (Book 4) as a redemption of Leonor’s homicidal choice of the convent over marriage with Sosa in Lisbon (Book 1). The novel begins with salvation on the Barbaric Isle in Ricla’s gesture of hospitality and ends with the fall in Rome in Hipólita’s viola-

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tion of the hospitality and charity owed pilgrims. Ricla on the Barbaric Isle is all inner grace and outer barbarism (animal skins, bare cave for dwelling); Hipólita in Rome is all inner corruption (jealousy, lust, and treachery) and outer refinement (courtly dress, palatial dwelling), as we saw in chapter 1. The exemplary Christianity of the Barbarian Ricla and the archetypal barbarism of the apparently ‘civilized’ Roman Hipólita establish a chiastic and paradoxical relation. Much as on the Barbaric Isle the counterpoint to the official Barbaric Law is the Christian custom of Ricla, in the novelistic geography and ethnography as a whole there emerges a paradoxical tension between Catholic law and the barbaric customs of the South. It reminds us that in Persiles there are no definitive chronological or spatially determined redemptions. The Northern idyll of the Spanish castaway Antonio and the Barbarian woman, Ricla, rewrites a conventional script for colonialism, which says that strangers meet, one side wins, and the other side loses. Sometimes, as with Ricla and Antonio and historical cases such as Gonzalo Guerrero (a castaway from Cortés’s party who met and married a Mayan woman, went over to the other side, became a cacique, and waged war against fellow Spaniards), strangers meet, they are taken by and romance, marry, and convert one another.62 The sixteenth-century proliferation of chronicles of real or feigned castaways has given rise to a generic label, the género de naufragios or relato de naufragios (‘the shipwreck narrative’ or ‘genre’).63 If the argument can be made that the historical and generic subtext for the character of Antonio is the earlysixteenth-century Spanish castaway Gonzalo Guerrero, and the genre of náufrago chronicles centred on European castaways like him, there is reason to identify Ricla ‘mansa como una cordera’ with the primitivist fantasy of the noble savage.64 The Dominican friar and bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destruycción [sic] de las Indias (Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies) was prepared around 1545 as a report to Crown Prince Philip II and to the Council of the Indies. It was published in 1552, translated into every major European language, and reprinted and read widely. It became the basis of the anti-Spanish ‘Black Legend,’ which portrayed the Spanish as inherently and uniquely cruel. Although no doubt against Las Casas’s intentions, his claims were used especially by Protestants and other enemies of the Habsburg Crown as anti-Spanish propaganda. Las Casas’s polemical tract against the Conquest is responsible for one of the more influential periodic revivals of the noble savage archetype. It makes its spectral appearance in the opening pages of the diatribe, worth quoting at

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some length for its many affinities with the temper and even detail of the characters and world Cervantes conjures in the castaway’s story: Upon these meek lambs, endowed by their Maker and Creator with the aforementioned qualities, the Spanish first descended on them like wolves and tigers and most cruel lions that had gone hungry for days. (En estas ovejas mansas, y de las calidades susodichas por su Hacedor y Criador así dotadas, entraron los españoles desde luego que las conocieron como lobos e tigres y leones cruelísimos de muchos días hambrientos.)

And a little further along: All these far-flung and countless peoples God created on the whole most simple, without malice nor duplicity, extremely obedient and faithful to their natural lords and to the Christians whom they serve; more humble, more patient, more peaceful and quiet, without discord nor unrest, not belligerent, nor quarrelsome, without rancors, without hate, without the lust for revenge there is in the world. (Todas estas universas e infinitas gentes a toto genero crió Dios los más simples, sin maldades ni dobleces, obedientísimas y fidelísimas a sus señores naturales e a los cristianos a quien sirven; más humildes, más pacientes, más pacíficas e quietas, sin rencillas ni bollicios, no rijosos, no querulosos, sin rancores, sin odios, sin desear venganzas, que hay en el mundo.)65

He proceeds to describe them as no less materially impoverished than the desert fathers, free of pride, ambition, and covetousness, and moreover, very capable and docile with respect to all good doctrine, extremely apt to receive our holy catholic faith and endowed with virtuous customs, and [the peoples] with the least impediments [for receiving the faith] than any God has created on earth (muy capaces e dóciles para toda buena doctrina, aptísimos para recebir nuestra sancta fe católica e ser dotados de virtuosas costumbres, e las que menos impedimentos tienen para esto que Dios crió en el mundo).

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The point of comparing Las Casas and Cervantes is not to make the Dominican a straw man. The difference in their handling of the primitivist archetype is certainly not owed to a difference in sympathy. Cervantes’ portrait of Ricla is manifestly positive, and Las Casas was one of the great sixteenth-century champions of the indigenist cause. The life Antonio and Ricla make together in mutual respect, and their adaptability to both Northern Barbarian and Southern Catholic social norms, are an implied repudiation of imperialist arguments that invoked starkly essentialist views of cultural difference modelled on the difference between humans and animals. And yet Cervantes’ impulse very clearly is to individualize and differentiate Ricla from her original community, to endow her with agency and a destiny not exclusively defined and determined by her heritage, indeed to set her against it. Ricla is Ricla first, and then a ‘meek lamb’ (‘mansa cordera‘) to Cervantes’ Antonio. In Las Casas’s text the Amerindians are ‘ovejas mansas,’ a flock of sheep first and last, not primarily distinguished as peoples or by languages or geographic location, to say nothing of proper names. Persiles not only individualizes Ricla and the noble savage but also makes the tutelary relationship reversible. Antonio’s story dwells as much on what a Spanish man may have occasion to learn from a Barbarian woman as on what she may need to learn from him. As such, it can be seen as dealing a blow to determinisms of an ethnic order that issued not only from the imperialist discourse (as in Sepúlveda’s Democrates secundus) but also from the primitivist discourse of a Las Casas or a Montaigne (in Des cannibales [On Cannibals]). In Las Casas or Montaigne – anticipated in this reflex by the well-known example of Tacitus in Germania – the hierarchical relation between Europeans and Indians is inverted in order to mark the moral inferiority of the former, but the essentialist distinction between them is maintained. That is, even though the Amerindians are represented as morally superior (but only morally), they continue to figure as inherently different from Europeans and as fundamentally collective and not individualized identities. To do otherwise runs counter to Las Casas’s interests and purposes, no doubt in part because his objectives and audiences were far from those of Cervantes. The demands and possibilities and expectations of storytelling are evidently quite removed from political polemic. But the contrast remains useful because many readers are not prepared to recognize that Cervantes was no less prone in Persiles than in Don Quijote to displace a myth, archetype, or stereotype in a direction that emphasizes the idiosyncratically individual over the generically ethnic or abstractly

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allegorical or doctrinaire. Avalle-Arce, for instance, proposes that in the coupling of Ricla and Antonio there is a conjoining of Northern myth and Southern history, because Ricla belongs to an imagined Barbarian North and Antonio to a historical Catholic South, that is, to a place with a recognizable name.66 The identification of the North with myth and romance and the South with history and novelistic realism remains suggestive, even if not entirely persuasive. It may not persuade to the extent we regard the novel’s Antonio, Spain, and the Catholic South as figments of Cervantes’ imagination, no less than are Ricla and the novel’s Barbaric Isle and Gothic North. Ricla is not characterized as belonging to another plane of reality from Antonio, somehow supernatural or abstractly allegorical, like the representation of divinity or of ghostly apparitions of ancestors in classical epic or the characters tending to allegorical personification in early imitations of Heliodorus such as Jerónimo de Contreras’s Selva de aventuras (1565 and especially its revised version of 1582) or late echoes such as Baltasar Gracián’s Criticón (1651–7).67 On the other hand, Avalle-Arce’s terms are suggestive, because together Antonio and Ricla would appear to inhabit, as equals, a third narrative space that poaches on both myth68 and history (as Wardropper suggested in relation to Don Quijote),69 the space of novelistic fiction where myth is historicized and history is made mythical. One figure for that third space – which Cervantes’ contemporaries called poetry or fábula (as discussed in the introduction) – could be the crossing of Antonio and Ricla in their mestizo offspring Antonio el bárbaro and Constanza.70 That is, in such a reading they would be seen as emblems for the cross-breeding of myth and history that generates Persiles and even the novel as such, if we assume Avalle-Arce’s terms. Ricla’s realistic displacement of both Christ’s incarnation and the primitivist topos of the noble savage could on its own be taken to exemplify the well-known thesis advanced by Auerbach that it is from the Christian incarnation and the Gospel narratives – with their deliberate confusion of the sublime and the humble, their reversal of the rich and the poor – that Western realistic literature as we know it emerges.71 And yet this perhaps concedes too much to the dichotomy of Northern myth and Southern history. In the passages we quoted from Las Casas we see how myth intrudes even in historical – albeit polemical – discourse in the form of primitivist archetypes. Should we choose to deny Las Casas’s polemical tract the status of history, we must still acknowledge that he is writing about historical flesh-and-blood beings

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by drawing on a mythic category. Surely this habit – by no means peculiar to Las Casas – was not lost on Cervantes. History shares with myth (and fiction) its reliance on narrative structures. They overlap in the assumption still widespread in the sixteenth century that history offers a pageant and procession of moral and political examples (edifying lessons, heroic models) to be imitated. Myth (and fiction) moreover can generate history by inspiring, guiding, and justifying.72 We see it in Las Casas’s invocation of the noble savage to defend historical Amerindians, but there are other ready examples. The historical role of the chivalric book Amadís de Gaula (1508), said to have helped shape New World chronicles and in some cases to have moved and informed participation in the Conquest itself, is a commonplace one.73 As the school of Annales historians and students of mentalités remind us, myth and history coincide in yet other ways.74 What humans believe happened and what they imagine could be are as operative a force in the making of history as what actually did take place. Even now, to the extent historiography distances itself from anecdotal chronicling of event and aspires to causal analysis of the past, it takes on the etiological function of myth as explanatory story. Old World Barbarism: The Honour Code Rather than pit the Barbarian and Gothic North against the Catholic South, we might take a cue from Cervantes’ design, his deliberate weaving together of the two geographic and cultural spaces through the pilgrimage of Northern Barbarians and Goths to the South and the flights of Catholic Southerners (Antonio, Rutilio, Sosa, and Renato) to the North. One possible effect of framing stories set in and told by Southerners in the North about the South is to emphasize those qualities – the exotic marvels and barbaric cruelty – that the South shares with the North. Although the pattern is not typically interpreted this way, it strikes me as reading less against the grain – given the nature of the stories told in the North about the South and the representation of the South in Books 3 and 4 – than to insist on a clear-cut distinction between the barbaric, pagan North and the ‘civilized,’ Catholic South. Conceived in this light, the North functions not as geography and ethopoeia of myth but as commentary on the South, as its inner reality exteriorized or made visible and expressive framed by the darkness, cold, and institutionalized savagery of the North. That is, the Barbarian North embodies the intangibly ethical reality of the Catholic South

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stripped of the visible tokens of ‘civilization,’ the relative wealth, political organization, and ritual obeisance to the Church’s teachings that could distract an observer from noting the savage commitment to a narrowly conceived sense of honour. The frame of the Barbaric Isle becomes then a kind of visible manifestation of barbaric tendencies rampant in the South despite Catholic law. In the novelistic South the counterpoint is offered by the Northern protagonists, with their exemplary charity. Northern Barbarism is thereby shown to be at home even where the conditions for ‘civilization’ are apparently more propitious. The transition from dark and cold to light and heat, from islands to terra firma, from wolf-skins to courtly fashion, from gold and pearls to coinage (which takes place already on Policarpo’s Isle in Book 2, Persiles 434), from arrows to bullets, from caves75 to palaces and temples, and from a barren, nomadic existence to magnificent cities is liable to dazzle the reader and therefore to divert attention from the persistent ostinato of the cruel and sometimes murderous preoccupation with honour, selfish interest, and imperious self-gratification that remains the keynote in the Catholic South all the way to Rome. Indeed, the increasing material, political, and religious refinement merely serves to heighten the impression of ethical depravity. The contrapuntal effect is only reinforced by the presence of Northern Barbarian and Gothic characters in the South who are also associated with the highest spiritual values, including Good Samaritanism and forgiveness. New Jerusalem is, after all, not a place but an apocalyptic vision; Christ’s way points North as well as South. The pattern established by Ricla of the officially uncatechized Barbarian (or less than perfectly Catholic Goth) who teaches caritas by example or precept extends to the whole pilgrim cohort as they make their way through Southern lands, in their long march on a Rome never in greater need of conquest, albeit a spiritual one. In Spain Constanza forgives Agustina her alleged role – as it turns out, a false accusation – in the death of Quintanar de la Orden’s count and hands over ‘a container of candied fruit’ (‘una caja de conserva’) to allay her hunger as Agustina, yet one more cross-dressed girl, is led off to the galleys (Persiles 544). In the inn at Perpignan a father of ‘five or six’ children is about to gamble his liberty away (six months on his majesty’s galley) through a crap shoot – a bizarre recruitment strategy that resembles a State-sponsored lottery system – in the vain hope of a windfall (twentyfive escudos to the winner) that will enable him to feed his family. He

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loses the gamble and is, despite the protestations of his desperate wife and children, about to surrender his liberty (or his family’s money). The pilgrims intervene, upon observing yet another Southern barbaric marvel – ‘the new and strange case’ (‘el nuevo y estraño caso,’ Persiles 566) – and persuade the king’s agents to free the husband and father before he is carted off to the galleys or his family is obliged to ransom him. And in still another gesture of Northern Barbarian charity overturning Southern barbaric cruelty, Constanza – the treasurer of the group – ‘more Christian than Barbarian, as her brother Antonio saw it, gave to the poor losers 50 gold escudos, with which they redeemed themselves, and, with that, they went on their way as happy as they were free’ (‘más cristiana que bárbara, con parecer de su hermano Antonio, dio a los pobres perdidos, con que se cobraron, cincuenta escudos de oro y, así, se volvieron tan contentos como libres,’ Persiles 567). In securing this Catholic Southerner’s freedom from bondage, delivering him from the Egypt of galley slavery in the king’s fleet, and paying the family the money they need, Constanza’s act itself stands for the Promised Land. To round out this catalogue of Northern exemplarity, we should recall that Auristela’s bedside companions and witnesses in her Roman crisis over whether to marry Periandro or commit herself to a nunnery are Antonio el bárbaro and Constanza. Constanza had already proved herself a good reader of character (Persiles 584) and guesses at Auristela’s troubles and disguise; Antonio reminds Auristela that life’s trabajos (‘labours’) are also its teachers, the magistra vitae topos. Both thereby become advisers to Auristela, returning the favour, since she had previously counselled them – notably Constanza against prematurely taking a vow herself in the throes of emotion over the count’s death. As if to commemorate this variation on caritas as succour and wise counsel, Sigismunda (Auristela come into her queenly status) in the final moments of the novel ‘gave the diamond cross [to Constanza] and accompanied her until leaving her married to her brother-in-law the count’ (‘dio la cruz de diamantes [to Constanza] y la acompañó hasta dejarla casada con el conde su cuñado,’ Persiles 713). To the end, Constanza is constant and, with the gift of the diamond-studded cross, the narrative makes her the symbolic cross- and Christ-bearer of the novel. There is a danger for Cervantes and for us in turning these Northern Barbarian and Gothic characters into plaster saints, although it is a risk perhaps worth taking in the interest of reversing a habitual emphasis on their ‘less than perfect’ Catholicism and need for instruction in Rome. And yet the portrait is more complicated than this would suggest. That

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conversion and the Christian life are never altogether complete and fulfilled rather than a constant struggle in the service of an impossible ideal is brought home by Antonio father and son’s behaviour on Policarpo’s Isle. Antonio el bárbaro becomes the object of an interesting role reversal: twice, by Rosamunda and then by the sorceress Cenotia on Policarpo’s Isle, he is sexually importuned by older women who throw themselves at him abjectly and offer themselves as love slaves (e.g., Persiles 333). Cenotia also tries to buy him as if he were a barbarian ‘natural slave,’ which reverses the usual pattern in this novel of men trafficking in women, a pattern Diana de Armas Wilson has emphasized.76 Antonio, for his part, is shaken like a virtuous maiden besieged (‘como si fuera la más retirada doncella del mundo,’ Persiles 334), becoming a mirror double at this moment for Auristela in similar straits. Much as Auristela is likened to Daphne hounded by Arnaldo’s Apollo (Persiles 228), Antonio is described as an Apollo chased by Rosamunda’s Daphne (Persiles 255). As the desperately smitten Cenotia pleads with Antonio, Clodio – the inveterate gossip brazen enough to make a bid for Auristela’s heart right under Periandro’s nose – walks in by chance and is shot through the tongue with the arrow meant for Cenotia (Persiles 335). This manner of death associates him with two other would-be usurpers, Bradamiro on the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 155) and The Odyssey’s Antinous. The elder Antonio advises the younger that the perils of unwanted seduction are not headed off by use of arms against those who love him, but by fleeing the encounters altogether (‘los peligros semejantes no se remedian con las armas ni con esperar los encuentros, sino con huir de ellos,’ Persiles 336). The advice is followed, in effect, by Periandro in Rome when he slips out after Hipólita’s assault because, as the narrator has it, ‘the victory in such battles lies more in flight than in lingering’ (‘el vencimiento de tales batallas consiste más en el huir que en el esperar,’ Persiles 672). Tellingly, Antonio el bárbaro decides that henceforth he will try not to appear Barbarian ‘for cruelty or lust but for meekness’ (‘por riguroso, ni lascivo, [sino] por manso’), in other words by imitating his Barbarian mother rather than his Spanish father (Persiles 336). The irony of Antonio the elder’s position is underlined when the spurned Cenotia avenges herself by poisoning Antonio el bárbaro (Persiles 335, 337), yet again a foreshadowing of Rome in Hipólita’s arranged poisoning of Auristela. It provokes the elder Antonio ‘with Spanish fury and blind reasoning’ (‘con cólera española y discurso ciego,’ Persiles 352) to threaten to kill Cenotia unless she restores his

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son’s health. Whether we think the elder Antonio’s barbarism well- or ill-applied here, it casts an ironic light on the advice he gives to his son following the incident, notably his discussion of ‘the Catholic … law’ (‘la ley … católica,’ Persiles 354): ‘[I]t teaches that we are not obliged to punish those who offend us, but rather to counsel them to mend their ways’ (‘[E]nseña que no estamos obligados a castigar a los que nos ofenden sino a aconsejarlos la enmienda de sus delitos’). The advice, it should be noted, anticipates Periandro’s to Ortel Banedre in Spain. There is irony not only in Antonio’s, perhaps necessarily, selective observance of the law in his youth or even now as an adult, but also – given the complexity of the situation described – in the great gulf that yawns between moral precept and right action when life subjects characters and flesh-and-blood human beings to its frequently conflicting moral demands. As Antonio returns from his Northern quest full of wise counsel and a renewed appreciation for the ethical dimension of Catholicism, there is no hint of magical transformations to accompany his reintegration into society. Much like Antonio’s hometown of Quintanar (where a deadly fight breaks out soon after the homecoming) or Rome (the scene of Hipólita’s short-lived repentance), Policarpo’s Isle is indifferent to example and precept. The foregoing only provokes a greater desire for blood in Cenotia, who proceeds in cahoots with Policarpo and Sinforosa to plot her revenge on Antonio and find a way to keep Auristela on the island against her will (Persiles 364–5). Indeed, throughout the novel and especially in the South the real rival to Catholic orthodoxy – however defined – is not a Christian counterorthodoxy or even a heterodoxy, but the religion of honour. So long as it prevails, genuinely Christian virtue must remain the exceptional and even heroic act that it typically is in this novel. The Gothic and Barbarian Northerners are not only the idiot savants of caritas – who teach solely by example – but are also represented, long before official catechism in Rome, as conscious preachers of the principle to Catholics in the South. The most fully articulated position is Periandro’s speech in Spain to the Pole Ortel Banedre, by which he dissuades him from avenging himself on his unfaithful wife Luisa (Persiles 500–2). The speech is a model portrait of the Christian prince at work, as if Periandro were being made to illustrate the terms in which Erasmus or Ribadeneyra described the paradigm – particularly the value placed on discretion, self-control, and prudence, the chief princely virtue in the tradition of the espejo (‘mirror’).77 It is a case study in moral casuistry, as Periandro works through the various arguments against the

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recourse to violent revenge. At such moments Periandro recalls the better legacy of his namesake King Periander of Corinth, a dictator who by tradition was also regarded as one of the seven sages of antiquity. What is particularly fascinating about it is that, like Cloelia on the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 152–4) and Pizarro and Orellana’s handling of Feliciana de la Voz’s impasse in Guadalupe (Persiles 475–6), Periandro’s rhetorical strategy is to speak the language understood by the disputants. In this instance, as in Feliciana’s case, it is the code of honour that governs Ortel’s passions. Although Periandro does remind Ortel that murder is a mortal sin that no amount of honour can absolve (Persiles 502), not only does he not invoke Christian charity (in this context, clemency), he explicitly rejects it as improbable. Instead he defuses the explosive by appealing directly to the religion of honour, the Barbaric Law of the ‘civilized’ South, pointing out, as do Pizarro and Orellana in Guadalupe, that avenging her infidelity would only ‘make your dishonor more public’ (‘hacer más público vuestro agravio,’ Persiles 501). Even in this he is true to Pauline theology, since the genuine Christian in Paul’s view places the highest ethical demands on himself rather than on others.78 Although he prefers ‘mercy’ (‘misericordia‘) to ‘justicia’ or ‘rigour’ and says ‘it would be more charitable to forgive her, take her in, suffer her, and guide her’ (‘sería mayor caridad perdonarla, recogerla, sufrirla y aconsejarla,’ Persiles 502), Periandro acknowledges that such abnegation might be asking too much of ‘patience’ (‘la paciencia’) and ‘reason’ (‘discreción’). And since he does not expect Ortel to forgive his wife, he suggests instead that the greatest punishment he can give her is to abandon her, citing another reminder of Roman paganism as precedent (as he notes) in ‘the law of repudiation’ (‘la ley del repudio’). Ortel is not only moved to abandon his plans for revenge, but the terms he uses to thank Periandro recapitulate the novel’s tendency to find heaven on earth in exemplary behaviour, including speech. Describing him as wise beyond his years and praising his ‘discreción,’ he declares, ‘[A]n angel has moved your tongue, with which you have softened my resolve, for now I will do nothing but return to my homeland, to give thanks to heaven for the favor you have done me’ (‘un ángel te ha movido la lengua, con la cual has ablandado mi voluntad, pues ya no es otra la que tengo si no es la de volverme a mi tierra, a dar gracias al cielo por la merced que me has hecho,’ Persiles 502–3). Ortel is introduced falling off his horse. As if to reinforce the evocation of the espejo (‘mirror’) tradition, Ortel asks Periandro to help him back on his stal-

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lion – an image rich in iconographic associations with kingly self-control (in Book 2 Periandro spectacularly breaks in King Cratilo’s horse). The gesture reverses – literally and symbolically – the uncontrolled ‘anger’ (‘cólera’) that had ruled Ortel before he met Periandro. In yet one more narrative irony suggestive of the earthly limits to redemption – the sort of irony frequent in Persiles that helps avert the temptation of wishful thinking – Ortel is shown permanently cured of his desire for revenge but not of his obsession with his wife Luisa, which ultimately proves fatal for him (Persiles 653). Even though something like a law of inverse proportion governs the interaction of charity and catechism in this novel, it should also be made clear that it does not fall into the sentimental primitivist trap of ascribing all virtue to its Barbarian and Gothic Northern exemplars – a habit that sometimes diminishes Las Casas’s well-intentioned representations of Amerindians. Ortel’s story – the occasion for Periandro’s defence of clemency – is also a story about Ortel as beneficiary of it, a lesson evidently he had not taken to heart. The messengers of grace are more often than not Northerners, but in Lisbon fifteen years earlier Ortel was pardoned by the mother of a violent young man he had killed in a dark back-alley altercation that erupted when the masked young man pushed him aside. Taking cover in a nearby house that, as it happened, belonged to the young man’s mother, Ortel was astonished by ‘the courageous and peerless Christian spirit … of Doña Guiomar de Sosa’ (‘valeroso y nunca visto ánimo cristiano … de doña Guiomar de Sosa,’ Persiles 494) who concealed him as justices of the peace combed the neighbourhood in search of suspects and who arranged for his escape and for a maid to slip him 100 gold escudos (Persiles 493). The mother had seen it coming, owing to the ‘arrogant manner’ (‘arrogante proceder,’ Persiles 492) of her son; indeed she was convinced her rash son would have killed Ortel had the Pole not pre-empted him. Although Doña Guiomar had given her word to shelter Ortel before learning of her son’s death, she decided not only that she must keep her word, but that ‘one death is hardly set right by another, all the more so when the harm is not done from malice’ (‘mal se remedia una muerte con otra, y más cuando las injurias no proceden de malicia,’ Persiles 493). The story is an instance at once of the impetuous, violently honour-bound Catholic South we know from Antonio’s account of his youth and of the heroically rare incarnation of Christian virtues associated with Paul and perhaps especially with the Virgin of Feliciana’s hymn in Book 3 – exemplified by Guiomar’s turning the other cheek rather than exacting revenge for the death of her son. More-

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over, by upholding the value of principle – aiding a stranger in need – over blood ties, Doña Guiomar becomes a double for Ricla, yet one more parallelism between Books 1 and 3, between the novel’s Barbarian North and its Catholic South. However, Doña Guiomar is very much the Southern exception that proves the rule. The count near Antonio’s hometown in Spain is another and, as we saw, he is shot through the heart. Otherwise there is enough of a pattern to suggest a deliberate effort to undercut the allegorical force of the Catholic South’s and Rome’s symbolism, reinforced by Catholic presumption and by the association of Rome and the South with New Jerusalem and the ascending scale of the Chain of Being. Religious and Literary Paradox Before I close this discussion, I would like to return to an aspect of Northern Christianity announced in the beginning. Pauline charity and paradox come together most provocatively in the reference to the ‘less than perfect’ Catholicism of the protagonists’ homelands (Persiles 651). The paradoxical tradition championed and developed by Paul, Nicholas of Cusa, and Erasmus enables us to understand how this description might itself count as a prime example of paradox. This alleged insufficiency motivates Periandro and Auristela’s pilgrimage to Rome for instruction in the faith – itself an alibi for their attempt to evade Maximino’s betrothal rights to her, that is, for the pilgrimage of love. And yet the weight of the whole tradition of Christian humanism stood behind the conviction that the aspiration to perfection in principle was itself folly, because there can be no perfect Christian. Indeed it is not just a heretical folly, but also a kind of lunacy. In the Pauline (and, following him, the Erasmist) formulation, Christians are fools for Christ, in the eyes of God and non-believers alike. Here is Marcel Bataillon’s account of Erasmus’s position: We must be conscious of the antagonism: the teachings of Christ are folly according to the world. This ‘so lucid folly’ is the one we must embrace. It is useless, for this purpose, to act the part of cynical philosophers, thundering against the errors of the world disparaging and barking at everything. On the contrary, we must become everything to everyone, as St Paul counsels, humanizing ourselves ‘according to the sundry qualities and differences of all in order to win them all for Christ.’ Preaching must preach

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more than anything by example. It must be indulgent of weakness and unwavering about the truth.79

The perfect Christian makes his peace with his imperfection, with his and others’ weaknesses and shortcomings and those of life, a pact with frailty understood as an inducement to compassion and not to cynical backsliding. In Persiles our ‘less than perfectly’ Catholic protagonists demonstrate the perfection of their imperfection on several occasions, indeed their possession of the better part of Christianity represented by the values associated with Paul – which include the open recognition, alien to the Catholic South, that they might have something to learn from others about their religion. Furthermore, the most outstanding examples of Christian spirituality in the novel – such as Ricla and Antonio in the North, their children Constanza and Antonio, and the heroes themselves – flourish at the margins of the Church. They are not identified with places, institutions, or creeds but rather with Christian virtues and behaviours – that is, with Christian ethics rather than doctrine, an ethics that most frequently takes the form of Pauline charity. The pilgrimage re-enacts Ricla’s movement from grace to law; few other Southerners manage Antonio’s movement from law to grace. Which is the more ‘imperfect’ Catholicism? This, I would suggest, is the force of their example: less a hortatory or utopian expectation that human nature or society will be transformed root and branch than a standing rebuke to the Southern (Christian, Catholic, Spanish, and Roman) presumption of superiority, of having everything to teach and nothing to learn from the world – a collective delusion with well-known consequences for Europe (the religious wars) and Europe’s far-flung colonies. The Gothic Northerners give their final lesson in Rome, as if in exchange for the lesson in catechism offered Auristela. Periandro pardons Hipólita her assault and false witnessing (Persiles 675). And neither Periandro nor Auristela moves to avenge Hipólita’s poisoning of Auristela (Persiles 676–7, 684–90), which itself follows the Roman courtesan’s short-lived stab at repentance. Rome answers with Pirro el calabrés’s murderously jealous attack on Persiles (Persiles 709). There is relatively hard evidence with implications for the representation of a Pauline counter-orthodox spirituality in the novel. It takes the form of the novel’s internal chronology. Although there have been many intricate arguments offered for one or another set of dates, some of them dependent on over-speculative fixing of external referents that Cervantes often left vague, few have attempted to make sense of this

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clustering around the transition between Charles V’s reign and that of Philip II. This fact is crucial, insofar as the novel is roughly contemporary with but pointedly not set near the time of its publication and especially inasmuch as the discussions over its religious allegiances would seem to depend on determining its relationship to a very definite and recent historical event, the convening of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the publication of its decrees by Philip II in 1564. If we take seriously the general drift of the indications for internal chronology, it becomes evident that Cervantes chose to set his pilgrim novel in a time prior to the closing of the Council of Trent. Scholars interested in this issue tend to propose dates skewed toward the final years of Charles V’s reign (anywhere from 1557 to 1575, but especially 1557 to 1560).80 There are many more or less definite references to historical events (one in prophetic mode) that yield variations on this range, especially Ortel’s in Book 3 to Philip III’s re-establishment of the court in Madrid (in 1606). By common consent, the least ambiguous reference is the announcement on the Isle of Hermits (in Book 2) of Charles V’s recent death. Renato there receives annual visits from his servants, and on the last such they bring the news. Since Charles V breathed his last on 21 September 1558, the protagonists’ voyage from the North to Rome is declared repeatedly to last two years, and the Isle of Hermits represents the midpoint of the trajectory, the most plausible internal chronology suggests a two-year time span that embraces the period from 1557 to 1559. Since the drift of dates is not entirely consistent, unless Ortel’s comment about the court’s return to Madrid (in 1606) is explained away as a misprint for Philip II’s decision to fix his court there in 1561 (as Carlos Romero does), perhaps more telling is the echoing silence about Philip II. In contrast, there are two mentions of Philip III, the one just noted by Ortel in Book 3 and the other a prophetic anticipation of his expulsion of the moriscos in 1609. Otherwise we find three strategically placed invocations of Charles V, in Books 1, 2, and 3; in Books 1 and 3 Antonio and Soldino, respectively, mention serving him, and in Book 2 there is the announcement of his death. There is not a single mention of Philip II, unless Romero is right about the Philip III misprint. The narrative thus appears to reserve its overt praise of royalty for Charles V, to remain either neutral about or associate Philip III with the expulsion of the moriscos, and to erase Philip II. How to explain this silencing, given that Philip II’s reign (1556–98) was the longest of the three (Charles V’s dates are 1516–56, Philip III’s

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1598–1621) and corresponded most closely with Cervantes’ own lifetime (1547–1616)? If we consider the prominence lent Pauline values in this novel and we register the changes wrought in the early years of Philip II’s rule, the answer is not hard to come by. As J.H. Elliott tells it, ‘these were the years in which Renaissance Spain, wide open to European humanist influences, was effectively transformed into the semiclosed Spain of the Counter-Reformation.’ 81 On 7 September 1558 a pragmatic was issued forbidding the import of foreign books and ordering that all books printed in Spain be licensed by the Council of Castile; the following year another pragmatic restricted the foreign universities where Spaniards could pursue their studies. In 1558 Protestant cells were discovered in several Castilian cities, and in 1559 the Inquisition moved swiftly in the Valladolid autos-da-fe to smother what some – above all, a rabid Charles V from his retreat at Yuste – feared was the tip of a Protestant iceberg.82 Valdés’s Index of 1559 banned the Enchiridion of Erasmus and many other books associated with Christian humanism or mysticism, including the works of such Spanish Dominicans as Meneses, Carranza, and Fray Luis de Granada, the Jesuit San Francisco de Borja, and San Juan de Avila. It was in part the revenge of the doctors of the law against the ‘espirituales,’ who emphasized the ethics of caritas and the value of spiritual experience over doctrine. The work of the Council of Trent was done in 1563. Although Ortega no doubt overreached the mark when he spoke of this period as inaugurating Spain’s ‘Tibetanizing’ (‘tibetización’ or ‘isolation’) – after all, Valdés’s Spanish Index of 1559 was preceded or immediately succeeded by equally harsh Indexes in Paris, Louvain, Venice, Milan, and Rome – the measures did ensure that Spain would be largely cut off from the non-Catholic half of Europe, increasingly its most vital half.83 Moreover, the transition to a harsher religious climate in Spain was matched by equally severe transitions, amounting to a new world order of dogmatic rigidity and heightened confessionalization, elsewhere in Europe. In 1559 alone, England broke again with Rome (crowned in 1558, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism following her step-sister Mary’s five-year Catholic interlude), the Reformation Parliament opened in Scotland, and the Calvinist Henri II died ushering in a half-century of religious wars in France.84 Persiles’ chronology thereby erases not only Philip II but also the quarantining of the country’s intellectual life through ideologically sanitizing measures. Cervantes could look with hindsight and calibrate the seismic shift of a political and religious transition in Spanish (and European) history that may account for his recurring interest in representing political

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transitions in this novel (on the Barbaric Isle, Policarpo’s Island, and Tile-Frislanda). Even Ortel’s mention of the court’s return to Madrid from Valladolid in 1606 (after a five-year hiatus) makes historical sense in this light, although strictly speaking it violates the two-year chronology established in Book 2. This date (1606) – like 1557–9 – was an important transitional moment, not only because the court moved permanently back to Madrid but also because retrospectively it would mark the point early in Philip III’s reign (two years after a momentous peace treaty was signed with England and three years before the expulsion of the moriscos) when there was most reason to hope for a softening of Philip II’s hard-line policies. Cervantes’ theoretical commitment to the principle of verisimilitude allows us to make sense of two facts ordinarily addressed separately: internal chronology and a religious sensibility that, on close examination, owes little or nothing to Trent or the Counter-Reformation – so little that the novel does not even bother to refute or repudiate it. Indeed it helps to explain the cavalier representation of one non-canonical marriage after another, since custom-law unions were the norm before Trent. The ecumenical and specifically Pauline (and perhaps also Christian humanist or Franciscan) slant is therefore not only thrown into relief, it acquires a stark significance. It becomes in this reading a necessary complement to the author’s commitment to verisimilitude, so linking the religious theme with the literary one. In other words, once Cervantes had chosen his least ambiguous, earliest time period, he was to some extent obliged to make the novel’s Catholicism pre-Tridentine in order to avoid violating the text’s chronology. He could thereby indulge a nonconformist spirituality and do so in the name of another – literary – orthodoxy, namely verisimilitude. It is difficult then to imagine a bolder – and more cleverly disguised – gesture on Cervantes’ part than to publish a Christian epic in 1617 written as if Trent had never happened. And in order to do so plausibly and also safely, he was obliged to set it partly in the early years of Philip II’s reign – the twilight years of Erasmism – just as the storm clouds of the Catholic reaction to Protestant schism were lowering on the horizon. He imagined a historical space and time in which his own variation on Christian humanism could conceivably have flourished, if in the margins of both Northern and Southern society – it is not the Barbarian or Gothic North that is exemplary but these particular Northern black sheep. It is a Christian humanism, moreover, embodied most fully by unofficially or less than perfectly catechized Barbarian and Gothic

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Northerners. An era had come to a close, and Cervantes’ epic novel can be taken in part as a tribute less to the realities of Charles V’s Spain or to the emperor himself than to the universalist ideals and hopes associated with his reign, a promise of what could have been before it was systematically stamped out. It is important to remember that such Pauline Catholic reform currents as Erasmism did not renounce the sacraments, Church tradition, or ecclesiastical authority. Instead they sought to subordinate them to the invisible Church inscribed in the heart and manifest as love for neighbour. They set out to accomplish this by reorienting the real work of salvation toward living well in this world with fellow travellers to the grave rather than focusing exclusively on the next, through what they regarded as excessive devotion to ritual and ascetic renunciation. Moreover, as the discussion of the internal chronology suggests, in Persiles there is a sidestepping of rather than a direct confrontation with Trent. Hence I do not detect evidence in Persiles of the repudiation of catechism and the sacraments – indeed, in Antonio’s and Ricla’s story we have an illustration of the renewal of law by spirit, though removed from mediation by Church authorities. Instead what emerges is the perception that, where virtue is concerned, the sacraments are not intrinsically evil but insufficient unless they direct attention to the ethical demands of the Christian message. The verdict, moreover, is rendered where one might least expect it, in the catechism that the penitentiaries offer Auristela in Rome: ‘They exaggerated the force and efficacy of the sacraments and pointed out the second timber of our shipwreck[ed lives], which is penance, without which there is no opening the way to heaven, closed as a rule by sin’ (‘Exageráronle la fuerza y eficacia de los sacramentos y señalaron con el dedo la segunda tabla de nuestro naufragio, que es la penitencia, sin la cual no hay abrir la senda del cielo, que suele cerrar el pecado,’ Persiles 657). The penitentiaries are said to exaggerate the force and efficacy of the sacraments. The term evokes sixteenth-century disputes over their material and even spiritual efficacy, here questioned implicitly by the ambiguous use of exagerar. At the same time, penance is singled out as the high road to heaven (we saw the centrality of penance to the Rome episode in chapter 1). The irony does not depend on quibbling about the ambiguity of exagerar (the praise may be real or fulsome). It depends rather on the pressure brought to bear on the ambiguity by the cumulative weight of evidence presented in this study for a measure of skepticism about the role of sacraments in the Christian life. Such a conclusion

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about the relationship between charity and sacrament will not surprise readers with their eyes open to the ways of the world. But in 1617 it took no small courage to suggest it, and in particular to do so by drawing attention to a Pauline counter-orthodoxy, signalled blatantly in the text by reiterated reference to St Paul, and more diffusely by investing characters outside or on the ‘less than perfect’ margins of the Church’s institutional reach with Pauline virtues. To be sure, it is a Christian, even a Catholic, orthodoxy, but it is manifestly not Trent’s. Had this Christian and Catholic orthodoxy prevailed, there might never have been the need for a Reformation.

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3 Epic Recast: The Dream Life of the New Hero

A hero moved principally by or for love would raise no eyebrows in novelistic romance or indeed the modern realistic novel in its guises of courtship (Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch) or adultery (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, La Regenta) narratives. Students of medieval epic and romance have conventionally associated Carolingian epic (chansons de geste such as the Chanson de Roland) with war, Arthurian verse and prose romances (including the learned Italian tradition of the chivalric epic or romanzo) with courtly love and adventures.1 Yet in classical and chivalric epic there is a pronounced tension between heroic and erotic values, and we should expect to find that fact somehow reflected in Cervantes’ prose epic. Vergil’s Aeneid and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata resolve the tension in favour of the heroic (public, martial duty), though not without backsliding, regret, and enormous sympathy for what is sacrificed along the way. In chivalric epic such as Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the tension is resolved in favour of the courtly value of love. The price, according to chivalric epic’s early detractors, was licentious morality, indulgence of magic (a violation of the cardinal rule of verisimilitude), and episodic digressiveness.2 If Persiles were easily pigeonholed as a romance or a novel, the love plot that governs the action would be unexceptionable. And yet the context in which Cervantes launched his final work points to a startling incongruity between Persiles’ overtly epic ambition, title, reference, and diction, and the laborious triumph of love celebrated in its pages. By context I mean, as outlined in the introduction, the immediate literary evidence of sixteenth-century learned commentary on Heliodorus’s Ethiopica that promoted it as the model for a new kind of epic. Bearing this original epic affiliation in mind has particularly interesting impli-

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cations for the novel’s portrait of the hero. Indeed it may enable us to recover a degree of complexity in our response to a character who can otherwise seem one-dimensional. Ruth El-Saffar regarded Periandro as a higher stage in the evolution of Cervantes’ heroes because – like Don Quijote’s Basilio – he renounces force as a means of attaining his beloved, a renunciation that she associated with the feminine.3 Diana de Armas Wilson subsequently explored the relation between Periandro and Auristela as an expression of the Renaissance Neoplatonic recovery of androgyny, with its more favourable view of women and human love.4 By attending to the epic genealogy as I propose here, we may add another dimension to, and indeed sharpen, our appreciation of Persiles’ revaluation of the feminine and conjugal love. How does Persiles reconcile the traditional epic antagonism between war and love? In this chapter I read the portrayal of Periandro as a challenge to a specifically epic tendency to subordinate love to conquest, to link women with love as a distraction from public duty, and finally to associate women with the forces opposed to the progress of history. For this purpose, I begin by considering parallels in narrative structure with The Aeneid and The Odyssey, especially in Persiles’ Book 2. I then examine Periandro’s dream episode of Sensualidad (Sensuality) in that same book as an especially rich source of insight into the virtues associated with Cervantes’ hero. I review the presence of dream in representative prose and verse epics in order to grasp its range of functions, prompted in part by the commemoration of this very dream in a painting that Persiles’ protagonists commission to record the outstanding feats of their journey. For this reason, I take up each facet of the dream episode by turn as a measure of the characteristics that define Cervantes’ new kind of epic hero. The dream is seen as bringing to light, helping to make manifest, heroic attributes normally suppressed in the epic tradition. This revaluation of the epic code not only finds a way to lend the erotic a heroic dimension, it also associates profane literature – through its evocation of key verses by Garcilaso and Vergil – with the oracular force of a higher truth. Garcilaso’s soldier-poet ideal, the courtly fusion of Mars and Venus, is thus assimilated in idiosyncratic ways to an epic ideal.5 Although Cervantes’ hero is portrayed as entirely capable of martial virtues, the warrior in the novel is his elder brother Maximino. Maximino could be described as a champion of the traditional warrior ethic of the classical epic hero, ‘occupied with the war he was always waging against his enemies’ (‘anduvo ocupado en la guerra que siempre tenía con sus enemigos,’ Persiles 703). As such Maximino is, in part, an incar-

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nation of the conventional conception of epic that subordinated love to war. Indeed his preoccupation with war becomes the occasion for Persiles’ enthrallment to Sigismunda. While Maximino is abroad, Sigismunda is brought to Thule to be spared the wars embroiling her own homeland of Frislanda, and her presence at court leads Persiles to fall madly for her. Armed with his own peculiar virtues, Persiles will eventually triumph over his warrior brother, and his victory over the first-born Maximino is one measure of Cervantes’ reinvention of epic in Persiles. As we shall see, in Persiles conjugal love is raised to heroic status as the primary destiny of the epic protagonist. And yet although love is portrayed heroically, the traditional epic qualities of martial valour, athletic prowess, and commitment to public duty are nevertheless recognized as meriting a place within this new hero’s character and this new epic’s narrative. On this score, as on others, reconciliation rather than repudiation of opposites appears to be Persiles’ overriding impulse. Given the stakes and difficulties involved – the weight of epic tradition, the very distinctive demands of public service and private love – the novel finds that elusive resolution chiefly in narrative and thematic paradox. The challenge Cervantes set himself for his prose epic is itself epic: how to make a hero credibly heroic – and, notably, fit to govern a kingdom – whose first priority is love? To begin to answer this question, it helps to step back and consider the broader issue of the epic legacy to a writer of Cervantes’ generation. David Quint has proposed in Epic and Empire that there is a political meaning inherent in epic forms.6 He writes of what he calls the epics of victors and the epics of the defeated. The epics that tell the story of the victors are formally teleological and unified on the model of Vergil’s Aeneid (and, in the sixteenth century, Tasso’s Gerusalemme); the epics that tell the story of the vanquished are formally digressive or episodic on the model of Lucan’s Pharsalia (and, in the sixteenth century, Ercilla’s La Araucana). If the poet tells the story of the victors – ultimately the triumph of Augustus and the principate in The Aeneid – history will be given a linear, inevitable cast. If the poet adopts the viewpoint of the vanquished – ultimately the old oligarchic Roman republic in the Pharsalia – history will be represented as a series of contingent factors that could have turned out differently. In Quint’s account, ‘To the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering. Put another way, the victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience a contingency that they are powerless

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to shape to their own ends.’7 The victor’s epic, in Quint’s view, is characterized by a dominant main plot and a single hero identified with a centralized empire whose objective is conquest and consolidation, a plot structure and characterization in which historical outcomes flow from the victor’s own power or agency. This narrative template entails a set of ideological commitments, which assure the victory of West over East, centre over periphery, unity over diversity (of all sorts, but especially ethnic or national), order over chaos, permanence over flux, man over woman, reason masking power over persuasion, and Olympian gods and especially Apollo over monster gods. Loser epics reverse the narrative and ideological polarities outlined and formally opt for digressions, the ‘random or circular wanderings’ that Quint associates with the incorporation of romance into epic poetry. Quint’s suggestive framework for epic may be turned to our own immediate purpose: to illuminate Heliodorus’s sixteenth-century vogue among crucial literary commentators and especially Cervantes’ corresponding desire to imitate and compete with the Ethiopica. In the light of Quint’s repertory and characterization, the Heliodoran model for prose epic enables its imitators to rival the verse epic tradition formally, provide readers with the pleasures of romanzo, and surpass both by making a bid for a broader readership through the choice of prose over verse. That is, Heliodoran prose epic can formally match ‘winner’ epic’s teleological, unified, and dominant main plot, yet thematically and ideologically renew it by pursuing a telos normally associated with the structurally digressive epic romanzo favoured by readers: no longer primarily conquest, politics, and religion, but love. The plots, themes, and academic reception of the Greek novel suggest it was possible to write a formally unified epic whose politics are not imperialistic. But its profile must be sought outside the verse epic tradition, in the sixteenth-century theorists and narrative imitators of Heliodorus such as Cervantes with Persiles. We shall see that Cervantes makes the most of the opportunity, turning epic themes on their head while retaining epic unity. The self-conscious use of epic narrative and allusion to spin a tale in which love is ascendant over the Iliadic and Vergilian priority of arms may be detected already in Heliodorus’s own novel. It is evident in the narrative translation of New Comedy love plots, the heroic representation of courtship by ordeal, and the multiple, well-attested allusions to Homeric epic (especially The Odyssey). A strange, older style of speech thereby comes alive again through Heliodorus’s imaginative and erudite reinterpretation. With Heliodorus, as with his own imitator and

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imaginative re-interpreter Cervantes, the medium will also be the message. The choice of prose over verse for long fictions would mark the triumph of a rhetoric (influenced by Herodotus’s historiography) more suited to an increasingly literate and urban rather than overwhelmingly oral audience. Indeed, within Cervantes’ lifetime the consolidation of prose over verse narrative would be definitive in Europe. As suggested in the introduction, the sixteenth-century commentators (Amyot, Scaliger, Tasso, and El Pinciano, to name only leading figures) promoted and justified the link between Heliodorus’s kind of adventure fiction and verse epic.8 Moreover, El Pinciano’s appraisal of Heliodorus’s novel as a prose epic worthy of comparison with The Odyssey and The Aeneid in his Philosophía antigua poética (1596) authorized, perhaps even encouraged, Cervantes’ leapfrogging of Heliodorus.9 Once aided and abetted in this direction by the theorists and Heliodorus’s example, an author could set himself no greater challenge than to recast the model epic par excellence. If for Greek-speaking Heliodorus the favoured epic model was The Odyssey, for Cervantes it would be the medieval and Renaissance arch-epic, Vergil’s Aeneid. The Roman destiny of the protagonists, the menacing delay in Scinta (Policarpo’s Isle), and Sinforosa’s impossible and ultimately desperate Didolike love for the hero all point in the direction of Vergil.10 As if to confirm the Vergilian subtext, the historian-narrator of Persiles resorts to a comparison between the queen of Carthage and princess Sinforosa ‘like another Dido deceived’ (‘como si fuera otra engañada y nueva Dido,’ Persiles 394). Cervantes bests Heliodorus in ways promised but not spelled out in his challenge to the Hellenistic author.11 Cervantes departs from Heliodorus and Lope de Vega – his contemporary Spanish rival in prose epic – by making more emphatic the challenge to the high epic tradition, by more overtly claiming an epic status for Persiles despite this challenge, and by more fully bringing epic into the fold of his novel as a repertory of intertextual opportunities for the construction of his ‘entertainment’ (‘libro … de entretenimiento’).12 And yet I would suggest that it is precisely because the overall narrative drive and significant allusion highlight Persiles’ deep engagement with Vergil that its thematic and ideological departures become that much more telling and interesting. In Vergil the imperial, military destiny is opposed to sexual indulgence, associated with Dido. In the Persiles allusion to Vergil quoted earlier, Auristela and Periandro together on Policarpo’s Isle stand in for Aeneas as he sails away from Dido (Sinforosa here) and

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Carthage. That evocation and fundamental alteration of Vergil’s narrative structure, characterization, and ideological template sum up as well as any detail can the homage and the challenge that Cervantes’ epic offers to Vergil’s. If the reversal of love and arms present in Heliodorus is heightened in Persiles with verse epic reminiscences that underscore the author’s declared ambition to overgo the most celebrated prose epic of his time, Book 2 is certainly the most overtly epic of the novel’s four books. And close attention to its epic structure, characterization, incident, and reference will help us calibrate the nature and degree of the novel’s broader emulation of epic paradigms. We saw one example of explicit epic reference in which King Policarpo and his daughter, Princess Sinforosa, are both modelled on Vergil’s Dido. The epic allusions are thickest on the ground in this book as well. For instance, on Policarpo’s Isle Periandro (Persiles) participates in athletic games said to be patterned after the Olympics (Persiles 266–71). The funeral games held in The Iliad (Book XXIII, for Achilles’ companion Patroclus) and The Aeneid (Book V, for Aeneas’s father Anchises) are here, instead, the anniversary games for Policarpo’s election as monarch of an ostensible republic of virtue. Perhaps the most striking evidence that Cervantes – encouraged by commentary on Heliodorus – was keen to raise the epic bar of his Greek novel is to be found in narrative structure. In The Ethiopica there is no exact equivalent to the retrospective narrative of Odysseus at the court of the Phaeacians (Books IX–XII of twenty-four) or of Aeneas at Dido’s court in Carthage (Books II–III of twelve). Secondary characters perform that function in place of the hero Theagenes: notably Cnemon, the protagonists’ Athenian guardian, and Calasiris, the pious and mendacious priest from Memphis charged by Chariclea’s mother to find the heroine. Calasiris’s long retrospective narrative runs from Books 2 to 5 of The Ethiopica’s ten and brings the story up to date, much as Periandro’s does over the course of Persiles’ Book 2. Persiles restores that epic hero’s narrative feat, absent in The Ethiopica, by having Periandro (Persiles) – in this sense a new Odysseus and a new Aeneas – hold court with his own long retrospective narrative at Policarpo’s Isle, which takes up virtually all of Book 2 (of four). This narrative evocation of epic in Book 2 is seconded by a thematic one. If Persiles’ homestead is Thule, his spiritual home – and epic destiny – is, ostensibly, Rome. Scinta emerges as one of the novel’s false Romes, a way station where the promise of an ideal commonwealth that introduces the erstwhile philosopher-king Policarpo’s island kingdom

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(Persiles 265–6) is counterpointed to the betrayal of that promise by the king’s criminal susceptibility to lust. In this light Policarpo’s Isle represents one of the novel’s illusory homes, where the apparently ideal realization of philosophical (Platonic) and Christian virtue is brought to the same fiery end (Persiles 392) as the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 156–7, 172). It stands in relation to the novel’s Rome as Calypso’s Isle (Book V), the island of Scheria (Book VI), and the court of the Phaeacians (Books IX–XII) stand in relation to the Odyssey’s Ithaca; and as Crete (Book III), Carthage (Books II–IV), and Sicily (Book V) stand in relation to The Aeneid’s Rome. That is, Policarpo’s Isle is to Persiles’ Rome as a parody, mirage or illusion of, and a distraction from, the ultimate epic destiny and goal. Persiles’ comic turn on this epic pattern (and teleology), as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, is that Rome proves a false Rome or mirage of itself, insofar as the unseemly, terrestrial Rome we are shown falls well short of the ideal Rome represented by conjugal and charitable love. In The Odyssey and especially The Aeneid, the false homes, idylls, or digressions function not only as narrative but also as thematic counterpoint to the larger epic scheme. We know Odysseus and Aeneas are tested warriors. The way stations are therefore a natural refuge for the alternative or anti-epic value of eros. This is especially evident in Book IV of The Aeneid, where Dido’s Carthage threatens to sidetrack the epic’s thrust toward war and conquest. Since Periandro fights no war in Book 2, we are left to ponder what counter-value his own way station or idyll could possibly fulfill in the larger scheme of a prose epic whose main thrust is toward conjugal love and matrimony. If the main action repudiates the predominantly martial objectives of Homeric (Iliadic) and Vergilian epic, Persiles’ Book 2 idyll enables the author to demonstrate that it is not for want of martial prowess that his epic hero strikes out on the alternative (and traditionally anti-epic) path of love. Persiles may renounce that historical epic role, but it is not because he is unfit to flourish in it. Part of the burden therefore of Persiles’ Book 2 idyll is to establish the hero’s credentials as an epic hero, to prove Persiles is no (merely) moony dreamer. It therefore makes abundantly clear that he is capable of the physical dexterity, martial valour, and all-around resourcefulness normally associated with epic heroes such as Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Tasso’s Goffreddo, Rinaldo, and Tancredo. The epic motif of the anniversary games is turned to account, for instance, to demonstrate that the hero is a superb athlete. In The Iliad Achilles organizes and sets out the prizes for but does not participate in the funeral games com-

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memorating his fallen comrade Patroclus (Book XXIII). In The Odyssey the corresponding games are held in Scheria, at the court of the Phaeacians, to fete Odysseus’s presence. Nevertheless, although Odysseus is challenged by the young athletes, he characteristically talks his way out of actually taking part (Book VIII). Like Achilles, Vergil’s Aeneas organizes and sets out the prizes for but does not compete in the funeral games held on Sicily (Book V) in memory of his father Anchises. Young enough to stand a chance but more importantly in novelistic need of proving his heroic credentials, Periandro (Persiles) surpasses Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas by personally triumphing at Policarpo’s anniversary games (Persiles 266–71). Other ordeals in Book 2 make the same epic point about the hero. Periandro spectacularly breaks in a wild, savage horse (called a barbaric horse or ‘bárbaro caballo’ at Persiles 403, 414–16) owned by the Northern monarch Cratilo much as Heliodorus’s Theagenes wins public support against his sacrifice by stopping a bull on the rampage at the Ethiopian capital of Meroe (Ethiopica Book 10). The image of the indomitable horse mastered is itself an emblem of kingly self-control of the passions that makes a telling contrast with Policarpo’s runaway lust, despite the rhetorical and institutional appeal of his rulership to the status of ideal commonwealth in this novel. In the same Book 2, Periandro organizes and (made captain by acclamation) leads two daring rescue missions in search of Auristela and the fishermen’s wives, abducted by corsairs in Northern waters (Persiles 358–63, 366–71, 387–91, 397–403, 417–19). On the high Northern seas he makes such a show of magnanimity toward a defenceless King Leopoldio of Danea that Leopoldio is moved to humble himself before Periandro (Persiles 371). Periandro’s reputation for courtesy and liberality is sealed by Princess Sulpicia, who will even credit him with her rescue from mutinous crew members (Persiles 376–8, 402–3). The imagery, rhetoric, and anecdote of Book 2, together with the broader narrative frame of the novel, thus anoint Periandro the consummate epic hero and ideal monarch, exemplar of heroic and kingly virtues, long before his brother Maximino’s death in Rome makes the succession official. The novel’s reversal of epic presents the relevant epic choice as not only between arms or war and love, but also between the right and wrong kinds of love. Persiles comes closest to The Odyssey in making the epic endpoint a version of conjugal domesticity; it comes closest to The Aeneid in relating matrimony to larger political and religious goals and destinies. The tragic cost of conquest in The Aeneid (tempered by marriage to

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Lavinia and the settling of a new [Roman] political order in Italy) is given a comic twist and ending in Persiles (tempered by the elder brother Maximino’s sacrifice in Rome), which takes place in tandem with a reevaluation of the place of eros (and literature) in the heroic life. Moreover, the gendered opposition between Jupiter and Juno that frequently overlaps with reason and passion (or emotion) in The Aeneid is abandoned. Juno, Dido, Amata, Camilla, and Juturna are typical of women in Vergil’s epic, often figured as suffering victims opposed to the progress of history. In Persiles, unruly passion is more often associated with male characters, even with – in the case of Policarpo – a king initially presented as a guarantor of ideal laws and customs (Persiles 265–6, 393–5). We cannot therefore speak baldly of a mere inversion of the relative status of arms and love in Cervantes’ prose epic. The novel’s as well as the protagonist’s renunciation of the elder brother’s priorities is not of heroism and especially not of action, but a renunciation of war as the defining attitude and chief mission of the exemplary king (Maximino’s characterization at Persiles 703). Odysseus and Aeneas reject an ignoble ease and retirement, individual satisfaction being subordinated to the public good with its harsh commitments. In Odysseus’s case the public good is his family and homestead in Ithaca, the need to reimpose order there. In Aeneas’s, the hero rejects personal happiness with Dido in Carthage for the sake of his son Iulus’s, the dynasty’s, and Rome’s destiny (Aeneid Book IV). Persiles is delayed not by love (as Aeneas is), and not entirely by war. There is no simple, neat overturning of epic structure, especially since Persiles’ epic destiny of love is also crowned by political succession and religious enlightenment. Persiles is delayed in his epic destiny to marry Sigismunda – or his life is even directly threatened – by dynastic law (his brother’s rights by primogeniture to the princess, which sets the story in motion), Northern Barbarians (in Book 1), corsairs (Book 2), the murderous assault by a madman in France (Book 3), and the final near-fatal attack of Pirro, the furiously jealous thug in Rome (Book 4). The usual epic distraction of eros is indulged mainly by such rivals as Bradamiro, Policarpo, Arnaldo, and Nemurs, and their examples suggest that the wrong kind of erotic love in this novel takes the particular form of wilful (non-consenting) lust. But the hero’s characterization is made less one-dimensional and, for some readers, intolerably exemplary inasmuch as these novelistic menaces are also figured as a potential within him. This potential is revealed in Book 2 by his dream of Sensualidad (Sensuality). Perhaps the most powerful reminiscence of epic in Book 2, the dream is presented

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as arising out of the hero’s own nature. Because the epic concerns of love, politics, and literature are pointedly brought to a head in this dream episode, it draws the lion’s share of attention in the pages that follow. Dream and Epic Epic tradition demands that a hero undergo the ordeal of a descent to the underworld, where a prophecy is delivered (Odysseus in Book XI of The Odyssey, Aeneas in Book VI of The Aeneid). The same tradition expects him to weather the temptation of lust as a distraction from public duty – often embodied by a beautiful sorceress, frequently on a magical island endowed with the attributes of an earthly or garden paradise (Calypso and her isle in The Odyssey, Dido and Carthage in The Aeneid, Alcina and her enchanted isle in Ariosto’s Orlando, Armida and her island in Tasso’s Gerusalemme).13 In Persiles these two epic motifs appear together within the hero’s dream. Periandro’s dream episode falls into three parts (Persiles 379–86). The first depicts his arrival with crew members on an island described as an earthly or garden paradise, whose landscape has been transformed into a shimmering display of precious jewels. The shores are lined with gold and pearls, the meadows dotted with emeralds, and the streams are meandering diamond rivulets that resemble ‘crystal serpents’ (‘sierpes de cristal’). The trees, finally, are laden with rubies and rose- and topazcoloured pippins, the pears said to exude an amber perfume and to be coloured like the setting sun. The landscape is a Banquet of the Five Senses – its appeal to all five enumerated by turn – serving up the best fruits of each of the four seasons simultaneously. The second part of Periandro’s dream is a vision of Sensualidad personified as a beautiful woman riding in triumph drawn by twelve ‘lascivious’ (‘lascivos’) apes in harness. And the third and final part of the dream is an allegory of Pudicia (Modesty), Continencia (Continence), and Castidad (Chastity), the last of which has disguised herself as Auristela. The hero Periandro thus dreams an adventure on a magical island that includes an allegorical pageant of vices and virtues and an oneiric visitation by his beloved Auristela, abducted at the time by corsairs. Pinpointing potential sources for the iconography of Persiles’ Sensualidad has vexed scholars because it is both familiar and strange. Alban Forcione finds that behind the ensuing allegory of Sensualidad lies the court masque tradition of jousting vices and virtues.14 Carlos Romero,

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for his part, is reminded of the triumphs in Torquemada’s Coloquios, whose subjects are Fortune, Death, Time, and Cruelty.15 Another possibility is the likely paradigm for both these precursors, namely Petrarch’s Trionfi (‘Triumphs’). Petrarch imagined verse processions of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity, each successive figure in turn defeated by the next in a sequence leading from the temporal or mortal to the atemporal or eternal. The themes and sequence of Love to Chastity appear at first sight to be strikingly close to the movement from Persiles’ Sensualidad to Castidad disguised as Auristela in Periandro’s dream. But the subsequent larger-scale movement of the novel diverges significantly from Petrarch’s poem inasmuch as the triumph it ultimately celebrates is of love over chastity, the particular embodiment over the general abstraction, and the mortal over the eternal in Periandro and Auristela’s marriage.16 There is probably no need to insist on any one literary source for a tradition that was a commonplace experience of civic and religious life. Petrarch and Cervantes would have had occasion to witness abundant examples of allegorical triumph imagery in dramatic processions, whether on the occasion of royal entries, tournaments, funeral cortèges, carnival parades, mystery plays, or Corpus Christi celebrations.17 Such processions could have suggested the visual narrative pattern as well as its moral and allegorical character.18 Forcione’s reading of the sequence as an evocation of jousting vices and virtues in masques19 is seconded by Persiles’ historian-narrator in Lisbon, who glosses the dream episode in a collection of canvases by an unnamed ‘famous painter’ (‘famoso pintor’) as ‘the pleasant island where in his dreams Periandro saw the two squadrons of virtues and vices’ (‘la agradable isla donde vio en sueños Periandro los dos escuadrones de virtudes y vicios,’ Persiles 438). What is curious about the presentation of these ‘vices’ and ‘virtues’ is that they stage their entrance into Periandro’s dream as three brief and orderly processions, presented more like a triptych or series of tableaux vivants than a joust or battle. More interesting still, there is some ambiguity not in the conventional iconography of vice and virtue but in Cervantes’ framing of it that prompts the question of which is the vice and which the virtue: Sensualidad (Sensuality) or Castidad (Chastity)? Persiles generates moral ambiguity around what might appear to be transparent allegorical imagery by means of narrative context. For this reason it bears recalling just where and why Periandro recites his dream episode. At the request of Sinforosa, King Policarpo’s daughter, Periandro engages in a long retrospective narrative in Book 2 that highlights

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the adventures that led him to land on their island of Scinta. Among the heroic feats highlighted in his tale is the very dream of Sensualidad. As he gets underway, Periandro does not identify the dream as such until he is finished telling his story (Persiles 380). Several of his listeners are so moved by his description that they take it for waking experience. Constanza, for instance, asks, ‘So, Lord Periandro, you were sleeping?’ (‘¿Luego, señor Periandro, dormíades?’ Persiles 386). Alban Forcione presents this dream episode persuasively as a key example of Cervantes’ deliberate challenge to the neo-Aristotelian tradition’s commitment to plot unity and verisimilitude of action.20 However, what also compels attention is the untroubled assumption that the dreamed feat is to be recounted alongside the waking ones as one of the protagonists’ heroic deeds. Periandro never takes the dream for wakefulness, but he does not lend the distinction importance, and the prominence he gives the dream episode in his retrospective tale suggests a kind of pride in it. The hero makes the value of his dream-life for himself plain enough when he declares that ‘everything I value is dreamed’ (‘todos mis bienes son soñados,’ Persiles 386). Nor is Periandro alone in prizing his dreamed adventure as a magistra vitae comparable – in virtue of its capacity to instruct – to waking adventures, experience being a teacher in keeping here with the peregrinatio vitae (the ‘pilgrimage of life’) topos.21 The dream episode is commemorated as an epic deed among others in a painting commissioned in Lisbon to record the protagonists’ labours, as noted earlier (Persiles 438).22 It is important to remember that the dream so commemorated is an erotic dream, and that it is presented as if it were worthy of being sung, painted, and otherwise memorialized as a constituent part of the heroic life. For this reason there is a potential paradox built into Periandro’s premonitory dream of Sensualidad, which is less likely to arise in classical and Renaissance epics that accepted the conventional antagonism of arms and love. The dream serves therefore as a measure of Persiles’ dependence on and distance from both verse and prose epic models. Hence the importance for our argument about the subtext and function of dream in Persiles to review its presence in Vergil’s Aeneid, the epic prototype. In the initial six books of the Aeneid, the Trojan hero is beset by a series of prophetic dreams that recall him to his destiny, that is, his duty to pursue the voyage to Latium and to found the settlement that would eventually become Rome. Notably he is reproached for his dallying in Carthage. Dreams come by many names in The Aeneid (somnium, simulacrum, insomnium, formido, etc.), but those crucial to the plot fall into

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three basic categories: prophetic visions, false dreams, and nightmares.23 In the early books the dream is chiefly a vehicle through which fate is voiced. It is a fate usually delivered by a dead near and dear one, who tells the truth about a crime and foresees the consequences, mobilizing the dreamer to action. The peculiar fate revealed in this kind of dream involves movement through space and the founding of new civilizations in distant lands, either Dido to leave Tyre and found Carthage or more often Aeneas to abandon Troy, Crete, and Carthage for the future Rome. This is the nature of the dreams in Books 1 (Sychaeus appears to Dido, I.353–9), II (Hector appears to Aeneas, II.270–97), III (the Phrygian hearth gods appear and speak to Aeneas in his sleep, urging him to abandon Crete for Hesperia as Cassandra and Creusa foretold, III.148–71), IV (Aeneas’s father is said to admonish him in his sleep, IV.352–3), and VIII (Tiberinus reassures Aeneas, VIII.31–65). Related to these are visions that come in a wakeful state, but that otherwise share the salient features of dreams outlined earlier: in Book II, Aeneas’s wife Creusa appears to the hero (II.772–94); in Book IV Mercury appears to Aeneas and reproaches him for dallying in Carthage (IV.556–70); and in Book VII, King Latinus’s oracle anticipates Aeneas’s coming to Latium (VII.96–101). At first sight the hearth gods, along with Mercury and Tiberinus, would not appear to fit in the ‘near and dear’ category. But the former represent ancestral spirits, Mercury (and the entire Olympian system through Jupiter) is linked to Aeneas by the genealogy worked out in Book VII (and alluded to throughout the text), and Tiberinus’s speech (VIII.36–65) is designed to legitimize Aeneas’s incipient invasion of Latium by redefining it as a coming home, thereby linking past and future. The prophecy will be realized because it is a coming home to ancestral origins, to the authentic home of his hearth gods. Thus, one can trace a gradual shift in the sequence of prophetic visions from immediate family to more remote ancestral and ultimately divine sponsorship of destiny. All can be said to make claims on Aeneas as blood relations; it is understood that he in turn must and – as his epithet, pius, promises – will honour his filial obligations. These dreams and visions function as true prophecies in this text and therefore issue from the gate of horn in the Homeric account of dreams, given by Penelope in The Odyssey and restated at the end of Book VI in The Aeneid. There is a corresponding awareness of the false or misleading dream, issuing from the gate of ivory in Homer. False dreams invariably work here to thwart the fulfillment of destiny, to reverse fate, if

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only temporarily. They are not always represented as dreams per se, in which case the prestige of the dream or vision is invoked to manipulate a reversal of destiny. Such are the dreams in Books V (Iris in disguise sent by Juno recalls a dream and most particularly the fame – already established in Book III.182–7 – of Cassandra, V.636–7; Somnus in Rhorbas’s guise afflicts Palinurus with sleep and bad dreams in order to distract him from his duty, V.840–1), VII (Allecto is disguised as an old woman, a priestess for Juno, when she appears to wheedle Turnus to resist Aeneas, VII.415–34, with references to falsa formidine in VII.442 and 453) and X (Juno cross-dresses as Aeneas – described as if she were a dream or shade of the hero – in order to draw Turnus away from the thick of battle and thereby postpone his inevitable end, X.633–42). The adoption of disguises in all four instances underscores the duplicity. Among the various kinds of dream appearing up to the end of Book VI, the reproachful vision is the most insistent (Books I, II, III, IV). From Book VI on, Aeneas seems to need no prodding, fully owning up to and no longer playing a role in postponing his ordained mission to lay the groundwork for the future Rome. Even Tiberinus’s prophecy at the beginning of Book VII – the last belonging to the category of prophetic visions – is the only one of its type not to be framed as a warning but rather as a reassurance. Finally there is the nightmare, and its chief instance is structurally an inversion – even a parody – of the prophecies visited on Aeneas. Either because Dido is abandoned mercilessly to an undeserved fate, or because in Epicurean fashion she disregards the everyday workings of the gods, the Carthaginian queen never finds her own life illuminated by dream. Instead she is prey to frightening – but undefined – nightmares following Aeneas’s arrival (Book IV.9). Clearly this functions in the narrative as an inauspicious omen alerting the reader or auditor to an unhappy end, to the extent even inexplicit dreams function as mantic signposts in this text. It also foreshadows the nightmare developed later in the same book (Book IV.465–73). Overwhelmed by Aeneas’s preparations for departure, Dido dreams she is hunted down by Aeneas and that, deserted, she seeks out her fellow Tyrians in desolate lands. She chooses to take this as a sign of her madness and resolves to die. Here, as with the prophetic and misleading dreams, the nightmare triggers action and therefore functions as an integral part of plot and character development. Hence, the inversion of the narrative truth (Aeneas is escaping not hunting her, and it was she who neglected her

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people following Aeneas’s arrival), which heightens the bizarre unreality of the dream and conveys Dido’s slipping grasp on reality as she is overcome by grief. It is also perhaps to be understood as a parody of the prophetic visions urging Aeneas to assume leadership (Dido has no followers) and explore distant lands (she does not seek, but is sought). We have seen that The Aeneid takes the power of the vision or dream seriously, whether it works for good or ill – for or against fate, in the text’s terms. And yet although The Aeneid’s characters are powerless to change their fate, they must work to achieve it. In Book VII King Latinus’s oracle envisions Aeneas’s coming and betrothal to Lavinia. Once the news is broadcast, this prophecy, like the others, induces resistance rather than assent. Its narrative function is to heighten suspense by enabling the reader to follow Latin movements against the expected (announced) arrival of the Trojans. In doing so, however, it brings home a larger metaphysical truth that informs the whole treatment of the dream in this epic: the prophecy in The Aeneid is never selffulfilling. Prophecies demand enormous effort and attention if they are to be realized against tremendous odds. Vergil’s characters may be powerless to change their fate, but the text softens the apparent determinism by making them responsible for acknowledging and realizing theirs. Although the prose epic writers Heliodorus and Lope promote the ideal romance and New Comedy centrality of love just as Persiles does, neither novelist lends his protagonists a full-fledged monitory dream quite like Periandro’s.24 In Book 1 of Heliodorus’s Ethiopica, the captain of the brigands, Thyamis, has an obscure dream, whose interpretation he slants so that it suits his desire to possess the heroine Chariclea for himself. In the morning he gathers the booty and asks his comrades to be given the maiden as part of his share; he praises her virtues and apparent high standing and wishes to marry her. At the end of Book 2 the oracle pronounces some verses whose meaning leaves everyone confused, and whose sense will be revealed fully only at the end of the novel when Sisimitres prohibits human sacrifice, now distasteful to the gods. Hidaspes confirms the ruling and approves Theagenes and Chariclea’s marriage and crowns them high priests. With that, Chariclea will solve the enigma revealed to her by the gods in Book 2. In Book 5, Calasiris is startled by a dream encounter with Odysseus, who reproaches him for having failed to pay him a visit on the isle of Cephalene. At the end of the same book, the dead soldier’s mother revives her son’s corpse with magic arts, in order to ask if another son had joined the Egyptian forces. Chariclea and Calasiris observe the ghastly ceremony and overhear the

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prophecy from the lips of the dead man. He predicts his mother will die by ‘a blade’ (‘un hierro’ in Mena’s 1587 Spanish translation) on account of her infamous sorcery, and that the labours of the enamoured maiden and a priest will end well. The witch attempts to kill the travellers when she discovers them eavesdropping, but she stabs herself with a lance and dies. In Book 8, the two chaste lover-protagonists, jailed yet again by the murderously jealous Arsace (a prototype for Persiles’ Hipólita), have dreams that they interpret as good auguries, portents of a change of fortune. At the end of Book 9, the defeated Egyptian (and Persian) king turns over the war booty to Hidaspes, king of Ethiopia. Theagenes and Chariclea are among the prizes and they are to be sacrificed to the gods; and yet they are reluctant to inform the king that he is the girl’s birth father until Queen Persina is present. That night Hidaspes has strange presentments in dreams, which he rejects out of hand because Theagenes and Chariclea declare themselves siblings in them. Near the beginning of Book 10 Hidaspes orders messengers to Meroe, the Ethiopian capital, to announce the victory over the combined EgyptianPersian forces and to prepare great sacrifices to the gods. In that final book, before Hidaspes and Persina participate in the reunion and recognition scene with their daughter Chariclea, Persina is visited by a dream in which she imagines herself giving birth to a girl who suddenly grows up to become a beautiful maiden. This will turn out to be a quite straightforward description of the fate of her own long-lost daughter, the heroine, but she will interpret it instead as the military victory won at such a great price over the Egyptians and Persians. Neither of Heliodorus’s protagonists – Theagenes or Chariclea – is given a dream or vision, unlike the heroes of both The Aeneid and Persiles. Lope de Vega limits the presence of the oneiric to a single ghostly visitation in El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Homeland, 1604). In Book 5, the final book, Pánfilo wanders through the wilderness till he is too weary to go on, avoiding cities and highways in Spain because he is wanted for a murder he did not commit.25 Seeking a place to sleep, he is unable – as a result of his rough appearance – to find lodgings anywhere except in a derelict building abandoned because it is reputedly haunted by ghosts. Something like a vivid nightmare, or a visitation from spectres or poltergeists, drives him out, but nothing more is made of it. Neither auguries nor prophecies of any kind are communicated to him through this bizarre event (nor indeed through any other in the novel), which Lope explains away by piling up authorities on abodeinfesting spirits and then cheerfully dropping the matter. Like

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Heliodorus, Lope feels no need to lend his prose epic heroes a prophetic dream or vision of note, much less a dream episode as extensive or richly suggestive as Periandro’s. Thus, the association of a major dream with the hero, a dream moreover that manifests defining aspects of the hero’s character and, by inference, of the ideal hero’s attributes, is a feature of Persiles that would appear to align it more closely with classical, verse epic than with the immediate prose epic precursors of Heliodorus and Lope. Another is the dream’s epic function as vehicle for the expression of a hero’s fate. As we saw in The Aeneid, the dreams – whether they come to Aeneas or to other characters – frequently bear on the epic hero’s (his dynasty’s, and Rome’s) destiny, in particular on the obligation to renounce personal pleasures (Dido especially) for the sake of a public mission of conquest and the founding of a new home for the Trojan wanderers, in Rome. The counter-epic or novelistic thrust of Persiles is evident not in the dream’s function – which follows the epic pattern – but in the reversal of The Aeneid’s promotion of arms and empire over love. In view, therefore, of Persiles’ prose epic credentials, the journey to Rome, the overwhelmingly epic reminiscences of its Book 2, and the explicit recollections, particularly of The Aeneid, Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad may be read as a recasting of Aeneas’s premonitory visions. Unlike Aeneas’s prophetic dreams, Periandro’s is not presented as an external apparition or as divine but as internally generated. Auristela, then abducted, comes to him in a dream, but also as the figure of Chastity disguised. That is, the artifice is underscored in contrast to Aeneas’s visitations from wife, father, and others in which the supernatural is freely given play. By introducing Auristela into the dream and by making the figures of Continencia (Continence) and Pudicia (Modesty) insist on the heroes’ Roman destiny (‘we [will not] leave [Auristela’s] side until she brings her labours and pilgrimages to a happy end in the soul city of Rome’ [‘(no) dejaremos (a Auristela) hasta que con dichoso fin le dé a sus trabajos y peregrinaciones en la alma ciudad de Roma’], Persiles 385), Cervantes also implicitly contrasts through this dream the personal, sentimental, and sexual nature of Periandro’s fate with Aeneas’s public, political, and military one. Whereas Aeneas must forego love in the name of conquest (though not marriage to Lavinia in the name of a new social and political order), Periandro must forego both war (his brother Maximino’s mission) and immediate gratification of lust, for peaceful succession and eventual consummation in marriage to his beloved Auristela. Much as Periandro’s Roman destiny is private

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and not public in contrast to the Trojan’s, his premonitory dream is centred on his obligations to himself and to Auristela (and implicitly to Maximino) rather than to Rome – in this context, the Church, since even in Rome they do not marry in the canonically prescribed manner (as discussed in chapter 2). The Roman destiny remembered in Periandro’s dream is a personal one arising from a combination of past experiences and especially of embodied hopes and fears (desires and conscience, gusto and ley), rather than a public destiny imposed by an impersonal or supernatural force.26 Hence Periandro does not set out for Italy to found a historical, political, or imperial Rome. The Rome he founds is figured – in a speech by Continence and Modesty – as an inner Rome, a personal state of this-worldly transcendence or transformation, articulated obliquely by the topos of ‘the soul city of Rome’ (‘la alma ciudad de Roma’) used by Continencia to refer to the city in Periandro’s dream.27 A final important difference from The Aeneid is that Periandro’s Roman destiny is both Christianized and eroticized. Two such often antagonistic forces as Christianity and eros meet in the newly prestigious ideal of companionate marriage, which we take up next. The Epic Hero and Sensuality We have noted that Persiles’ dream episode suggests that its new kind of epic hero’s destiny is love rather than arms, reversing the usual epic priority. This reversal is achieved in part by the iconography of Sensualidad (Persiles 383–5), which revises a patristic account of human sexuality that situated it largely within the moral economy of vices and virtues. This moral economy was rooted – as Diana de Armas Wilson has pointed out – in the medieval topos, attributed to Prudentius, that postulated a psychomachia or bellum intestinum (‘inner war’) between good and evil.28 The topos is hinted at by the historian-narrator’s gloss of the painted dream episode in Persiles as ‘the two squadrons of vices and virtues’ (‘los dos escuadrones de virtudes y vicios,’ Persiles 438). The gloss gives us a conventional reading of Sensualidad’s iconography suggestive of the likeliest starting point for Cervantes’ allegory, and that, as such, enables us to calibrate the extent of his departures. Nevertheless, I would argue that the historian-narrator’s gloss is incomplete as an interpretation of the dream episode, because Cervantes does not call forth the topical neo-medieval allegorical battle between Lujuria (Lust) and Castidad (Chastity), whose types and attributes were well established in Gothic sculpture and painting. Nor does

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he resort to variations on this allegorical battle imagined to take place, for instance, between Lust and Reason, as in a print by Baccio Bandinelli (1545).29 The influence of Neoplatonic humanism on this episode is to be found I would suggest in its substitution of the figure and attributes of the Neoplatonic vulgar Venus for the iconography of Lust. This shift away from Lujuria is implied already by the choice of name, Sensualidad. It is also suggested by the striking iconographic motif of the triumphal chariot on which Sensualidad rides into Periandro’s lucid dream. More important for our purposes is that Venus served the Neoplatonists in their efforts to carry out a conceptual revaluation of voluptas – sensuality in its fullest sense – that cast it potentially as a virtue.30 For example, in his commentaries on Plato and Plotinus, Marsilio Ficino would defend the thesis of the two Venuses introduced in Plato’s Symposium. The celestial Venus, in Ficino’s account, inhabits the super-lunar sphere and is immaterial and atemporal. The vulgar Venus instead inhabits the sphere that lies between the empyrean and the earth. She is, as such, identified not with Lust but with the particularized and materialized image of cosmic beauty, with the regenerative forces of procreation, and finally with the faculties of imagination and memory. This Neoplatonic revaluation of the vulgar Venus and the values and functions associated with her became so widespread that her attributes spilled over into representations of the celestial type. We see this in the Venus pudica, exemplified by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a common variation on the Venus archetype so-called because of the gesture covering her breasts and sex.31 The contrast between conventional Lujuria and Persiles’ Sensualidad is made evident – among other ways – by an ambivalence in her presentation wholly missing from the kinds of contemporary portrayals of Lujuria found, for instance, in Ripa’s widely read Iconologia (1593).32 Sensualidad’s voice and accompanying music are represented in simultaneously attractive and repellent terms, and her oleander crown and black staff could bear equally contrary senses. As with the ‘music, now happy and now sad’ (‘música, ya alegre y ya triste’) of Sensualidad’s maidens, her voice is described as ‘both irate and tender’ (‘entre airada y suave’). Sensualidad’s crown of yellow-bitter oleander (‘amarillas y amargas adelfas’) reminds us that in Don Quijote’s Marcela episode (Don Quijote I.11–15) the student-shepherd Grisóstomo’s mourning friends wear garland crowns of cypress wreathed with bitter oleander (‘amarga adelfa’). As is well known, cypress is widely planted in cemeteries round

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the Mediterranean and has long been associated with death and – evergreen that it is – with eternal life. But how do we make sense of the bitter oleander in Periandro’s dream? Carlos Romero has suggested that Sensualidad’s crown of oleander could metaphorically stand for the seductiveness of evil – poisonous oleander tricked out as a harmless rose – given the resemblance between the flowers.33 No less an authority than Apuleius might agree. In The Golden Ass, the hero Lucius – having rubbed himself with a magic ointment and changed into an ass – is told he would be restored to human shape if only he could find and eat a rose, and nearly loses his life by confusing deadly oleander with tantalizing roses. The same source, however, provided at least one contemporary authority with evidence of oleander’s essentially amoral condition, indeed its function as a moral mirror or test of sorts of character. Citing the Golden Ass, the lexicographer Covarrubias explains in his 1611 Tesoro (‘dictionary’) entry for ‘adelfa’ (‘oleander’) that it is selectively poisonous, even healthy for the animal associated with nobility or monarchy: ‘It is worth pondering that while it kills asses it is good, healthy fodder for horses. Snake-bite victims will find its flowers cooked in wine very beneficial’ (‘Cosa de ponderar, que a los asnos mata y a los cavallos es saludable y buen pasto. Al hombre mordido de serpiente venenosa cozidas sus rosas en vino, es de gran provecho’).34 Oleander’s status as a test of character or station mirrors Sensualidad’s own status as an embodiment of moral neutrality rather than transparent evil, as a kind of amoral force that must be harnessed rather than stamped out or freely indulged. We see this potentially positive aspect of Sensualidad again in the black staff (‘bastón negro’) that bears the shield inscribed with her name (‘Venía arrimada a un bastón negro, y en él fija una tablachina o escudo, donde venían estas letras: sensualidad’). In particular it points to an association with governorship or authority. Covarrubias, again, defines bastón as ‘the insignia of army generals, comparable to the short staffs or small sceptres of the emperors, both of which represented supreme authority’ (‘es insignia de los generales del exército, como los bastones cortos, o bastoncillos eran de los emperadores, que los unos y los otros sinificavan suprema potestad’). Diana de Armas Wilson has emphasized the ‘bastón’s’ phallic sense,35 but the manifest content of this prince’s dream of sensuality may be yet more surprising and provocative, since it runs counter to expectations about the putatively obvious tension between kingly self-control and sensuality.

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And yet we are left to wonder why Cervantes would not simply call Sensualidad Venus, as Camões does the goddess of his epic hero’s digression.36 One plausible explanation is the richness of association of the concept of sensuality itself. It crops up in technical accounts of the workings of the soul (the root sense of psychology), in the contexts of reflections on both human generation and artistic creation. We need look no further to illustrate this point than Leone Ebreo’s Diálogos de amor (Dialogues of Love), famously recommended by the narrator’s ‘friend’ in the prologue to Don Quijote as the authority on love. First appearing in Italian in 1535, the dialogues were translated into Spanish by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and published in 1590.37 In Ebreo’s treatise on love we are offered an explicit – and what is particularly useful in this context, entirely conventional – description of the relationship among lust, sensuality, reason, and continence within the scheme of the soul’s parts and functions. It is especially germane to us here since it glosses the meaning of sensualidad in the course of a discussion about the uses (and abuses) of pleasure: The excessive desire of these things that give pleasure and their indulgence is called lust [luxuria], that is true carnal lust or else indulgence in gluttony or great delicacies or otherwise improper voluptuousness … And when reason in some way resists vice, even if it is defeated by it, in those instances the vice-ridden are called incontinent. But those who abandon reason altogether, without attempting to oppose the vicious habit by any means, are called immoderate. And as this extreme of lust is where pleasurable things are concerned a vice that corresponds to avarice, and where material things are concerned greed, so I consider that at the other extreme of the vice of superfluous abstinence is what we call prodigality in material things, for in one lies the path to the destruction of one’s estate, something not proper to honest living, while the other abandons the pleasure necessary to the sustenance of life and the preservation of health. The middle of these two extremes is a great virtue, which we call continence. And when, under the stimulation of sensuality, reason takes the day with virtue, it is called moderation. And when sensuality ceases altogether to stimulate virtuous reason, which consists in moderate restraint where the pleasurable things are concerned without neglecting the necessary ones and yet without indulging in the superfluous, then some call this virtue fortitude; and they say that the truly strong are those who conquer themselves, because the pleasurable has more force in human nature than the

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useful [or edifying], since it is that with which she preserves her being. Therefore, he who can moderate this excess truly can be called a victor over the most powerful innate enemy. (El excesso dessear destas cosas que dan delectación propia y el conversar en ellas, se llama luxuria, la cual es verdadera lujuria carnal, o de la gula o de otras demasiadas delicadezas o indebidas molicias … Y cuando la razón en alguna manera resiste al vicio, aunque dél sea vencida, entonces los tales viciosos se llaman incontinentes. Pero los que dexan la razón del todo, sin procurar contradezir en parte alguna al hábito vicioso, se llaman destemplados. Y assí como este estremo de la luxuria es en las cosas deleytables vicio que corresponde a la avaricia, y a la codicia en las cosas útiles, assí estimo yo ser el otro estremo de la superflua abstinencia vicio que corresponde a la prodigalidad en las cosas útiles, porque el uno es camino para destruyr la hazienda, cosa no conveniente al honesto vivir, y el otro dexa el deleyte necesario al sustento de la vida y a la conservación de la salud. El medio destos dos estremos es grandíssima virtud, y llámase continencia. Y cuando, estimulando la sensualidad, vence la razón con la virtud, se llama templança. Y cuando la sensualidad cessa del todo de dar estímulos a la virtuosa razón, que lo uno y lo otro consiste en contenerse templadamente en las cosas deleytables sin faltar de las necessarias y sin tomar de lo superfluo, entonces llaman algunos a esta virtud fortaleza; y dizen que el verdadero fuerte es el que a sí propio se vence, porque lo deleytable tiene más fuerça en la naturaleza humana que lo útil, por ser aquello con que ella conserva su ser. Por tanto, el que puede moderar este excesso, con verdad puede llamarse vencedor del más poderoso e intrínseco enemigo.)38

As we can see from this passage, Leone Ebreo frankly acknowledges the pragmatic use of pleasure (‘lo deleytable’) to sustain life and preserve health and nature itself. Moreover, he describes his own version of the mini-drama staged in the soul with terms that clearly distinguish his narrative psychomaquia from Prudentius’s well-worn combat between lust and chastity. The references to the Aristotelian ‘middle of these two extremes’ (‘[e]l medio destos dos estremos’) and the neo-Stoic ‘the truly strong person is he who conquers himself’ (‘el verdadero fuerte es el que a sí propio se vence’) provide clues as to how this evolution might have taken place. The relevant moral vocabulary invokes not sin and grace but extremes and moderation. The theological discourse of morality is thus stripped away to reveal a classical, naturalistic frame-

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work. In this light it does appear significant that Cervantes adopts the name of Sensualidad for his dream episode personification, since ‘sensualidad’ is associated in Ebreo’s Diálogos with a conventional description of human nature that does not frame pleasure exclusively in terms of the language of virtue and vice. In Periandro’s dream it would appear then that the patristic scheme of Vices and Virtues is partially displaced by another more complex one that identifies the old Lust with a newly revalorized concept of earthly love based on the iconography of Venus. One may perceive in Persiles’ Sensualidad the faint memory of a divinity, the vulgar Venus, understood as an amoral force that can take the form of a voluptas necessary to the world, as Ebreo has it. Neither divine nor earthly love is presented in Periandro’s dream as wholly unproblematic, nor as a love for all seasons. There is a suggestion that either state is potentially virtuous, so long as extremes are avoided. With Persiles’ Sensualidad, the suggestion is figured by the ‘lascivious’ (‘lascivos’) simians in harness to the chariot. With the representation of a kind of celestial Venus in the third tableau of Periandro’s dream – Chastity disguised as his beloved Auristela – the suggestion is figured by her companion Continencia (Continence), the virtue glossed by Hebreo not as synonymous with chastity necessarily but as ‘in the middle of these two extremes’ (‘el medio destos dos estremos’), namely lust and abstinence. Hence both Sensualidad and Castidad call for moderation, the pleasurable being necessary in Leone Ebreo’s account to guarantee generation. Periandro’s dream episode would appear thus to coincide with Aristotle’s understanding of ethics (worked out in the Nicomachean Ethics), echoed explicitly by Ebreo, that real virtue lies in the middle of two extremes. Sensualidad’s portrayal carries the same dual charge of promise (of renewal) and menace (of death) as the divine archetype of the Great Mother. Avatars of the Great Mother divinity include the Anatolian Cybele (worshipped in second-century Rome as ‘nostra domina’ or ‘our lady’), the Egyptian Isis, the Phoenician Astarte, and the Greek Persephone, who are said to emerge from the underworld – their domain – to regulate the seasons.39 Cybele’s acolyte priests were self-mutilating eunuchs regarded as the goddess’s sons and lovers. Her spring festival commemorated the death, burial, and resurrection of her beloved Attis, which cycle heralded the renewal of the season. The Great Mother’s association with birth and death accounts for the ambivalence of her attributes everywhere, as mistress of both creation and destruction, as the nurturing and the devouring mother-lover. The imprint of the

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Great Mother deities, telluric goddesses linked to the earth and the changing seasons and responsible for the womb and the tomb, may be found in Sensualidad’s own ambivalent attributes and the clear sense that she is at home in the bowels of the earth (the ‘peña’ or ‘hill-cave’40 from which she emerges; Persiles 383). The allusion to the Medusa in Periandro’s petrified response to Sensualidad (Persiles 384) reinforces the Great Mother connection, since the Gorgon or her attributes separately were frequently associated with this chthonian archetype.41 Sensualidad’s vividly described relation to the bosom of the earth, from which she rides forth in her triumphal chariot, also enables Persiles to reframe the epic relation to the supernatural. As a deity who emerges triumphant from the ground, Sensualidad reverses the conventional epic Descent to the Underworld imagery by bringing the underworld to the hero – albeit, rationalized by the dream framework. That is, the palimpsest of epic motifs – the prophetic and monitory divine revelation, the island or earthly paradise, the beguiling enchantress (Sensualidad), and the descent to the underworld – is internalized and naturalized as elements of the hero’s character, as part and parcel of his own nature. By wrapping such epic marvels in a dream, Cervantes could indulge a taste for and explore the literary possibilities of the marvellous, and yet remain well within the bounds of verisimilitude. What is more important to our purposes, those epic marvels are not presented as dangers out there in the world, associated with evil and projected onto female figures such as Dido in Vergil’s Aeneid, Alcina in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, or Armida and Clorinda in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. It is useful to recall here that, not unlike Sensualidad on her island reminiscent of an earthly paradise, Ariosto’s Alcina is the sorceress who captivates the English paladin Astolfo and then Ruggiero on her magical island (VI.35–VIII.16). Tasso’s Armida, sorceress-daughter of the ruler of Damascus, ensnares Christian champions (V.60–6), takes Rinaldo to the Fortunate Isles (XIV.50–71), seduces him (XVI.17–27), and then also tempts him by impersonating a demon (XVIII.30–4). Tasso’s Clorinda, finally, is the pagan warrior with whom Tancred falls in love (I.47–8), whom Tancred begs to love or slay him (III.21–8), by whose sight Tancred is entranced (VI.26–7), whom Tancred accidentally kills in a duel (XII.51–65), and who last appears in Tancred’s dream of her in heaven warning him off from sensual vanity (XII.91–3). In Persiles by contrast the most striking female embodiment of erotic seduction is portrayed as a manifestation of the hero’s own inner nature, as a generative as well as a destructive force, which he must learn to negotiate.

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Moreover, the other potential temptress of his dream, Chastity disguised as his beloved Auristela, is confirmed prophetically not as the distraction from his Roman destiny but as its ultimate fulfillment. Persiles’ recasting of the Vergilian dream features Sensualidad’s reproach to honour her, as we shall see, much as in The Aeneid Mars reproaches Aeneas. Hence Persiles’ monitory dream evokes Venus – Aeneas’s mother – rather than Mars or even the Venus armata (Armed Venus) of The Aeneid. In Sensualidad’s staff there is a vestigial reminder of the Venus armata, but its authority stands behind consummation rather than abstention. The dream would appear to confirm that chastity in Persiles is this new epic’s digression – the two-year vow or the interlude – corresponding to the epic isles of love in The Odyssey, Ariosto’s Orlando, Tasso’s Gerusalemme, or Camões’s Lusíadas. Even the Christian is subordinated, along with the martial, to the priority of the erotic. We can see that in the main plot inversion of text and pretext or alibi, the pilgrimage for instruction in the faith as a cover for the pilgrimage of love. Like Chastity disguising herself as Auristela, the main plot pilgrim story about believers seeking catechism is a disguise for a chaste elopement (Persiles 701–4). Because Auristela’s vow of chastity itself is provisional (conditional on arrival in Rome, instruction in the faith, and resolution of Maximino’s prior claim to her hand), chastity even in the interlude of Periandro’s dream is not presented as an absolute or permanent value in Persiles. The vow therefore appears to represent less the value of chastity per se – since it is provisional – than it does respect for the elder brother’s rights, the law of primogeniture. In contrast to Auristela – who is both a pilgrim of love and an exemplar of orthodox Catholic piety – Rome for Periandro is about legitimate union with Auristela, somehow to be achieved against the claims of his elder brother (Persiles 658). This respect for the brother’s rights, however, does not extend to self-denial, nor does it preclude self-interested evasion and even duplicity – a testing of the limits of the law to accommodate the protagonists’ gusto for each other. That is, chastity rather than eros can be seen to emerge in Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad as this new epic’s idyll, narrative labyrinth, or episodic digression from main-plot destiny. What was apparently secondary in epic (the erotic) is now central, a variation on the interchangeability of plot unity and variety in Persiles modelled by the novel’s relationship to the epic tradition. The potentially redeeming status of eros in Persiles is confirmed explicitly in Ruperta’s episode in Book 3 (Persiles 590–8). Determined to exact revenge on her husband’s murderer by killing his son Croriano,

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Ruperta is described as the very portrait of anger. Her whole life has become consumed with this one mission, and the pursuit of her quarry leads from her Scottish homeland to a French roadside inn. And yet in the long-awaited moment, just as she is about to taste sweet revenge, Ruperta finds herself disarmed by Croriano’s beauty. She steals into his room while he is out, lets him fall asleep, and dagger in hand makes the mistake of raising the lantern to his face. As if re-enacting in reverse the Cupid and Psyche42 story told in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Ruperta once bent on vengeance is suddenly bewitched by the sight of this Cupid (the narrator’s name for him; Persiles 594) as he dozes in the lamplight. Unlike the novelistic moments examined in chapter 2, it is eros rather than caritas that transforms the urge to bloody sacrifice of the son of her husband’s murderer, cutting short the looming revenge-tragedy cycle. This is how the narrator sums up Croriano’s effect, Eros to Ruperta’s Psyche and male Gorgon to her hapless gaze: [S]he found he had the same effect on her as the shield of Medusa, for he turned her to marble; she found him so handsome that the sight of him made her drop the knife and consider the enormity of what she was about to do. She saw that Croriano’s beauty, much as the sun does to the fog, drove away the shadows of the death she wanted to inflict on him and, in an instant, she chose him, not as the victim of a cruel sacrifice, but rather as a sacred burnt offering on the altar of her pleasure.’ ([H]alló en él la propiedad del escudo de Medusa, que la convirtió en mármol: halló tanta hermosura, que fue bastante a hacerle caer el cuchillo de la mano y a que diese lugar la consideración del inorme caso que cometer quería. Vio que la belleza de Croriano, como hace el sol a la niebla, ahuyentaba las sombras de la muerte que darle quería y, en un instante, no le escogió para víctima del cruel sacrificio, sino para holocausto santo de su gusto.) (Persiles 594)

The salvific power of eros in Ruperta’s tale stands in contrast to the bad eros of the Barbaric Isle and its Law (discussed in chapter 1), a contrast that highlights eros’s condition as a neutral, amoral force in Persiles, neither inherently good nor evil. Ruperta and Croriano’s counterexample demonstrates that eros in Persiles may well act even as a force for the law (and the ethical good), heading off homicidal vengeance. Ruperta’s episode makes clear that it is not so much erotic love that is framed as idolatrous (or vicious) in this novel but the non-consenting

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expression of it paradigmatically represented by the Barbaric Isle and repeated with variations in the Catholic South. And indeed Sensualidad’s amorality is not presented as a recommendation of indulgence any more than Chastity can be said to be a permanent or absolute value in this novel. The two episodes immediately preceding Periandro’s dream suggest the wages of sensuality unbridled. The first involves the ship captain Sulpicia, and serves as an apt illustration of the excesses of desire run amok, manifest first by the crew members’ drunkenness and then by their rampaging lust. Sulpicia and the avenging maidens under her command successfully thwart the would-be rapists, with gruesome results: the crew are subdued in a bloodbath.43 Sandwiched between Sulpicia’s story and Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad is the hero’s own vivid description of the ‘náufragos’ (‘sea serpents’), monstrous sea creatures unleashed on largely helpless humans at sea – two of whom are swept off a ship’s deck in the maelstrom that results from the ‘náufragos’’ attack. The ‘náufragos’ lend themselves to a reading as images of a harsh, cruelly indifferent, and even sublime nature, but their placement between Sulpicia’s story and Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad also suggests – by association – the elemental and potentially savage in human nature. On the other hand, in the context of the novel as a whole, the moral ambivalence of Castidad is brought home by Leonor’s Book 3 choice of chastity over marriage to Sosa, which leads to Sosa’s and Leonor’s death (Persiles 199–205, 437). In the same vein, the heroine Auristela’s initial choice of chastity over marriage to Periandro in Rome threatens to be homicidal (the term used at Persiles 697). By tracking the thematic recurrence of eros and chastity across episodes (including Ruperta’s, Leonor’s, and Auristela’s in Rome) and gauging consequence, we thus find that the novel provides evidence for the same kind of neutrality to their moral implications that I am proposing is built into the iconography of Periandro’s dream. In this sense we can say that the dream episode figures in condensed form Persiles’ broader commitment to a reconceived view of the old polarization of Lust (Vice) and Chastity (Virtue). As epic divinity, Sensualidad naturally bears news to Periandro in the guise of a warning. Rendering Periandro and companions speechless by astonishment, indeed petrified ‘as if [they] were mute statues made of solid rock’ (‘como si fuéra[n] estatuas sin voz, de dura piedra formados,’ Persiles 384), Sensualidad tells him, ‘It will cost you, noble youth, to be my enemy; if not your life, then at least your pleasure’ (‘Costarte ha, generoso mancebo, el ser mi enemigo, si no la vida, a lo menos el

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gusto,’ Persiles 381). Despite the teasing, equivocating, and oracular formulation, there is the unmistakeable hint of grave danger in not honouring her. The suggestion of the Medusa’s terror in Sensualidad – in the petrification of the onlookers – anticipates the Medusa subtext we saw in Ruperta’s episode. In Ruperta’s episode, too, Sensualidad’s keyword ‘gusto’ rounds off the climactic passage: ‘[I]n an instant, she chose him, not as the victim of a cruel sacrifice, but rather as a sacred burnt offering on the altar of her pleasure’ (‘en un instante, no le escogió para víctima del cruel sacrificio, sino para holocausto santo de su gusto,’ Persiles 594). Ruperta’s episode exemplifies how erotic ‘gusto’ – and therefore Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad – may bear not only a destructive but also a redemptive valence in this novel, much like the mythological subtext of Medusa herself (the incarnation at once of petrifying ugliness and petrifying beauty). And indeed it is in Rome that we confirm Periandro will not actually sacrifice his sensual gusto, but merely postpone it, and that his vocation is to realize his gusto (for dreams, for narrative digression, for Auristela) within the bounds of the law. In this light too we may read the petrified silence of Periandro and his companions before Sensualidad as the emblematically appropriate and respectful fear owed a goddess. This reading of Sensualidad’s warning less as a threat than as a reminder of a duty is illuminated by Alciato’s emblem XI, entitled In silentium (In Silence, first published in 1531). In Alciato’s emblem the Egyptian god Harpocrates is glossed as a symbol of the silence and discretion with which the gods should be venerated. The emblem illustrates a widely known visual and even proverbial topos about the meaning of silence.44 The ambivalent attributes of Sensualidad and the sometimes redemptive power of gusto in this novel suggest that Periandro in his own dream episode may be keeping a respectful silence so that the goddess – the Neoplatonic vulgar Venus as sensuality – can remind him of what he owes her, an obligation he will fulfill in Rome. Periandro’s heroic destiny after all is erotic. Yet already in this episode Periandro affirms his gusto in the unorthodox telling of his dream episode as if it were indistinguishable from waking reality. He therefore intimates what we might regard as a secret complicity with a goddess who would otherwise appear just to threaten him. As he explains it, ‘the pleasure in what [he] dreamed’ (‘el gusto de lo que soñé,’ Persiles 386) made him do it. In the passage cited, Leone Ebreo notes the difficulty of moderating excesses and declares that the truly strong person is ‘he who conquers himself’ (‘el que a sí propio se vence’). This cross between the Aristotelian golden mean and

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the Stoic ideal of conquest of self bears relating to the conceptual frame of Persiles, insofar as the novel explores the analogous tension between extremes in the epic conception of heroism and in neo-Aristotelian precepts for narrative propriety. Conquest of self in this novel means, as we have seen so far, respect for the elder brother’s rights but not submission to his genealogical priority. Conquest of self also means negotiating the need for and pleasure in both unity and variety of narrative. Through the keyword of gusto – invoked by Sensualidad (Persiles 384) and by Periandro (Persiles 386) himself – the episode invites us to notice the distinct, but analogous, challenges of ley (‘law’) and gusto (‘pleasure’) in Periandro’s handling of his sexual desire for Auristela and in the telling of his tale. On the one hand, there is the law of primogeniture by which his brother Maximino enjoys priority in dynastic matrimony to the princess and the gusto Persiles is trying to find some legitimate way to satisfy by eloping to Rome with Sigismunda. On the other hand, there are the neo-Aristotelian laws of verisimilitude and unity that Mauricio and Arnaldo invoke to criticize Periandro’s dream narrative as a fantasy irrelevant to his retrospective tale, set against his self-professed gusto or pleasure in the recounting of it. Thus, the sexual and the literary can be seen to model one another in an episode that artfully tests the limits of each potential form of excess: stifling subordination to law (of primogeniture in dynastic matrimony, of unity and verisimilitude in literature) and the perils of both sexual and narrative gusto or desire run amok. Persiles’ characterization thus suggests how it might be possible to reconcile both erotic and literary gusto and ley in an Iron Age of lust and repression, of puerile fantasy and narrow academic precept.45 There is another way to establish Sensualidad’s richness of association, not only as a figure who slips the bonds merely of Lujuria (Lust) and who emphasizes the valuable in the eros, but who also assumes a role in the making of art. Eros and literature came together in the contemporary understanding of the parts of the soul. In accordance with Plato (The Republic and Timaeus) and Aristotle (Metaphysics), the soul was divided into the rational (governing intellection and reasoning), the sensitive (governing the senses, memory, estimation, and imagination), and the vegetative (the unconscious and involuntary aspects of growth, secretion, nutrition, and reproduction) parts. The imagination – located within the middle or sensitive part of the soul – was said to give form to beauty such that it would be perceptible to human beings. Most importantly for our purposes, this sensitive soul was often simply called sensuality.46 Because sensuality was understood not only in the

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limited sense of the sexual but also in the broader (and still conventional) sense of the faculty responsible for fabricating imagery (artistic and oneiric), Periandro’s dream of Sensualidad enables Cervantes to associate his epic hero with the art-making powers of the sensitive soul and to do so by imagining him coming face to face with his own sexual and artistic nature summed up by the word gusto. Sensualidad may thus emerge as both a deity of the hero’s own making, based on (especially sexual) hopes and fears, and as a verisimilar projection or personification of the part of human nature that gives rise to such images of divinity – that is, both the source and the effect of the image-making power. As such, Sensualidad’s name may well evince the process of demythification of the Neoplatonic vulgar Venus turned into a metaphor for the sensitive soul and, as a result, for the faculties of the soul most intimately bound up with artistic creation: memory (mother of the muses) and imagination. In this chapter we have deliberately dwelled on the epic implications of Periandro’s dream episode, to note how the central value of the hero bodied forth there (in epic terms, his fated destiny) is the usually subordinate distraction of love consummated within matrimony – a fate confirmed by the overarching plot movement toward the comic ending in wedded bliss. Since we have considered the epic precursors of the dream episode, we might now wonder how Persiles’ celebration of conjugal love relates to its historical moment. Cervantes’ inversion of conventional epic priorities had its social counterpart in the sixteenthcentury revaluation of marriage as a respectable alternative to monastic celibacy in the Christian’s quest for salvation. Christian humanist, Protestant Reformation, and Tridentine writers might differ about the relative superiority of matrimony and celibacy and about whether matrimony was to be regarded primarily as a civil contract or a sacrament (and, therefore, about whether divorce was lawful). They might also disagree about whether parental arrangement or the mutual consent of spouses should be favoured as the legitimate basis of marriage. They certainly disagreed about whether ceremonial requirements such as the publication of banns, officiation by priests, and the presence of witnesses were sufficient to enhance the sacred aura of matrimony and to head off social problems such as the abandonment of women and children by men who made false promises of marriage in exchange for sexual favours. But scholars are in broad agreement about the sixteenth-century reaffirmation of matrimony across confessional lines.47 They differ mainly about whether the new conception of it should be

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regarded more or less positively. Erasmus’s Colloquys have served as a touchstone for this debate in Cervantes scholarship. Alban Forcione, for instance, has taken the more optimistic view and finds in The Colloquys the representation and defence of a truly companionate ideal of marriage.48 Francisco Márquez, by contrast, has been more apt to note what he sees as the limitations of Erasmus’s conception of marriage: for placing a rational self-interest and even selfishness – about income or comfort – before feeling, for defending sex in the service of procreation, for presenting a spiritual ideal that renounces the sexual pleasure or gratification of the woman especially, and for showing an indifference or hostility toward women as equals to men – that is, as persons whose aptitudes, graces, and appeal are particular rather than generic.49 For our purposes it is worth pointing out that these scholarly contrasts in viewpoint regarding the ideal of matrimony are broadly reflected in Persiles. The more hopeful, even utopian sense of marriage is embodied especially by the protagonists themselves, together with the example of the Spaniard Antonio and the Barbarian Ricla (discussed in chapter 2).50 However, marriage – like other ideological and institutional quick fixes throughout Cervantes’ work – is by no means glorified as a panacea. Persiles also shows its readers the particularly excruciating hell that ‘the yoke’ can become when it binds those unsuited for one another, notably in the fatal love-triangle that involves the spouses Ortel Banedre and Luisa la talaverana and Ortel’s rival (and eventual murderer) Bartolomé el bagajero (Persiles 652–6). Mary Gaylord has argued beautifully that marriage in Persiles – like Rome, like all promised lands figured here as one sort of utopia or another – is not a resting point but merely the beginning of what is understood to be another series of adventures in human time, an argument whose significance has not been duly appreciated.51 If there is a celebration of matrimony in Persiles, it is not only of the non-canonical kind (see chapter 2), it is a celebration of particular marriages. Persiles and Sigismunda themselves, in their little drama of doubt in Rome (discussed in chapter 1), present a picture that involves triumphs and costs – particularly for Sigismunda, who is equally drawn to the religious life. Persiles’ substitute for parental and priestly intervention is by no means a free-for-all, at least for the royal pair of the main plot. For the rustic couple in La Sagra (near Toledo) – Mari Clementa Cobeño and Tozuelo – the pre-Tridentine old style of matrimony, mutual vows and consummation, is gruffly accepted (Persiles 507–9). For the princely heroes, the warrant against the hasty or frivo-

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lous promises of clandestine marriage is the conventional two-year trial of romance, through which Persiles wins Sigismunda’s hand over more impulsive rivals such as Bradamiro, Arnaldo, Nemurs, and Maximino. Alongside Cesáreo Bandera’s suggestion that Persiles’ love for Sigismunda is a romance illusion without internal obstacles of note,52 I would propose that Persiles’ love is tested sufficiently in the crucible of this two-year ordeal. The ordeal’s many trials (the heroic labours of the novel’s title) demonstrate that Persiles – unlike his rivals Arnaldo and Nemurs – seeks a companion and not merely an interchangeable icon or dynastic token in the marriage game. Contrasted with the novelistic norm, the coming together of Antonio and Ricla or of Persiles and Sigismunda is the apparent miracle, whose rightness is sacralized precisely for its distinctiveness. The good marriages – the tried and true (never more aptly stated) marriages – are the very human miracle in this novel, and they are hard-won. As we have seen, Periandro’s epic quest is erotic, and Rome for him is not a martial or even primarily a Christian destiny but a marital one. The opposition is not only between war and love, but also between immediate and deferred sexual gratifications. On account of his characterization as a dyed-in-the-wool warrior, Periandro’s brother Maximino can be said to stand in for the classical and learned Renaissance epic priority of war, much as Periandro does for the romance and novelistic ones of courtship and marriage. And yet what sets Cervantes’ treatment apart even from Heliodorus’s emphasis on the drama of love is the assertion of its epic stature and hence its centrality in the formation of a prince. What also sets it apart – as we shall see in the following pages – is its promotion of the heroic and spiritual value of profane literature. The Epic Hero and Literature A contemporary expression of the relation between heroism and literature was the age-old arms-letters topos,53 and an embodiment of it was to be found in the Renaissance courtier and soldier-poet Garcilaso de la Vega (1500–36).54 According to the evidence of Persiles’ dream episode, epic heroism – as we shall see – is intimately bound up with the appreciation and knowledge of imaginative literature, figured here by references to Garcilaso and, through Garcilaso’s Sonnet X, to Vergil’s Aeneid. Poetry is presented as an oracular power, moreover a vehicle for intellection of others’ minds and wills that defeats a simple-minded

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enthrallment to the surfaces of life, a tendency represented by the Danish Prince Arnaldo in this dream episode and throughout the novel (see, for example, Persiles 637–41). First, some scene-setting. The occasion is the very end of Periandro’s dream narrative, when he relates that moment in the dream – a lucid dream, in which he appears – that snapped him out of it. In his tale he describes an encounter with the personifications of Continencia (Continence), Pudicia (Modesty), and Castidad (Chastity), who has chosen this time to take the disguise of Auristela (Persiles 385). The disguise is crucial, because at the time of the dream Auristela had long since been abducted by pirates and Periandro was frantically involved in a searchand-rescue mission for her. In Periandro’s telling, Continencia and Pudicia reassure him that they will remain at Auristela’s side till she concludes her ‘labours and pilgrimages’ (‘trabajos y peregrinaciones’) in Rome. Moved by the imagined sight of her and what he takes to be the blessed news, this is what Periandro says to his audience: At that moment I was so attentive to such happy news, astonished at such a beautiful sight, and unsure what to make of this new and strange event, owing to its grandeur and its novelty, that I lifted my voice to express with my tongue the glory I felt in my soul, and wanting to say: ‘Oh, my soul’s only consolation! Oh, precious jewels to my good fortune found, sweet and happy in this or any other season!,’ such was the vehemence with which I said it, that I woke myself from the dream and the beautiful vision vanished, and I found myself on my ship with all my men, and not one of them missing. (Entonces yo, a tan felices nuevas atento y de tan hermosa vista admirado, y de tan nuevo y estraño acontecimiento, por su grandeza y por novedad, mal seguro, alcé la voz, para mostrar con la lengua la gloria que en el alma tenía y, queriendo decir: ‘¡Oh únicas consoladoras de mi alma! ¡Oh ricas prendas, por mi bien halladas, dulces y alegres en este y en otro cualquier tiempo … !,’ fue tanto el ahínco que puse en decir esto, que rompí el sueño y la vision hermosa desapareció, y yo me hallé en mi navío con todos los míos, sin que faltase alguno dellos.) (Persiles 385)

In order to appreciate the full force of this seemingly innocuous little speech capping Periandro’s dream narrative, we need to bear in mind that, just as Auristela had been separated from Periandro when the dream was said to take place, she is now present in the audience during

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the telling.55 We need also remember that the royal couple is still travelling under aliases, as siblings, with the alibi of a pilgrimage to Rome. For this reason they must keep their own version of the courtly secreto amoroso (‘love secret’).56 In this novel the secret is not quite the lover’s long-suffering, ennobling silence in tribute to the inaccessible lady love’s honour. The vow of silence (and the sibling alibi secret) is Periandro’s recognition that until he and Auristela arrive in Rome, until she fulfills her own vow to receive instruction in the faith, and – most of all – until his brother Maximino’s rights to her are somehow denied, they cannot act on their love for each other. Finally, it is important to remember that Arnaldo – Periandro’s chief immediate rival for Auristela’s affections – is present too, always a little suspicious of their relation but never altogether able to see through their cover. The dream that Periandro initially passes off as waking reality does express a compelling truth, the truth of the lie being Periandro’s oblique declaration of love for Auristela. He does this by garbling – reversing one adverb of – the first verse of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Sonnet X, which runs: ‘Oh sweet jewels [or valuables] to my misfortune found’ (‘Oh dulces prendas por mi mal halladas’).57 Although the phrase had become lexicalized to the point of cliché, we know that Periandro is an avid reader of Garcilaso because he quotes admiringly and at length from the poet’s First Eclogue as the pilgrim cohort approaches Toledo (Persiles 503–5), Garcilaso’s birthplace. The ‘jewels’ (‘prendas’) invoked in the sonnet – by tradition, a lock of the beloved’s hair – belong to the poetic voice’s beloved, now dead or otherwise gone from his life. Recourse to the rhetorical figures of personification and apostrophe, the excuse of a dream, and especially Garcilaso enable Periandro – slyly, obliquely – to declare his love for Auristela, who is now present, as he recounts his dream and for whom he says what he had wanted to say (‘queriendo decir’) to the dreamed personae. Periandro has thus given a voice to his lover’s – and for the time being, proscribed – passion for his beloved ‘sister,’ absent but not dead and fortunately rather than unfortunately found (‘bien’ not ‘mal hallada’) by the good offices of those allegorical rather than material ‘prendas.’ The dream is an epic deed – we have already mentioned its pictorial commemoration as such in Lisbon (Persiles 438) – and this feat of Odyssean wiliness helps us understand plainly why. Periandro at once keeps and breaks the lover’s seal of silence to which his heroic condition obliges him. Periandro’s learned allusion to Garcilaso would also, in principle, provide other savvy listeners with the means to discover their disguise.

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The most interested of those audience members is, of course, the longsuffering Arnaldo, sometime confidant of Periandro in his hopeless efforts to woo Auristela and desperate to find out what he can of her real intentions. His obtuseness is brought home when Periandro concludes his dream narrative, and the narrator has this to say about Arnaldo: ‘[Arnaldo] considered the passion and persuasiveness with which Periandro told his story, but none of it could shake the suspicion that the now dead slanderer Clodio had implanted in his soul that Auristela and Periandro were not really siblings’ (‘consideraba los afectos y demostraciones con que Periandro contaba su historia, y de ninguno dellos podía sacar en limpio las sospechas que en su alma había infundido el ya muerto maldiciente Clodio de no ser Auristela y Periandro verdaderos hermanos,’ Persiles 386). As the narrator notes Arnaldo’s ever-present suspicions, it appears that Arnaldo may be on the brink of confirming them. And he would succeed at doing just that if he were able to look past the appearance of Periandro’s tale and see clearly through the Garcilaso reference to Periandro’s sidelong declaration of love to Auristela. But then he turns to Periandro and asks him to pick up the thread of his story, ‘only skip the dreams’ (‘sin repetir sueños,’ Persiles 386), because the princess Sinforosa (daughter of King Policarpo, smitten with Periandro) ‘is waiting for you to explain how it was you first came to this island’ (‘está esperando que llegues a decir de dónde venías la primera vez que a esta isla llegaste’). In other words, he is reminding Periandro to get to the point that had prompted Periandro’s long, retrospective narrative in the first place, missing the very point he (Arnaldo) is most interested in. In this light, Arnaldo’s commitment to narrative directness becomes a kind of caricature of literary neo-Aristotelianism in its prescription of plot unity and verisimilitude, the flesh-and-blood face of literary premises enacted unthinkingly and which result in a kind of blindness. In Book 4 Arnaldo shares with the duke of Nemurs the distinction of fighting over Auristela’s portrait, an instance of the secularized veneration of images that links them both – for their literal-mindedness, their idolatry of appearances – with Bradamiro on the Barbaric Isle, who takes the cross-dressed Periandro for a woman.58 Duped more than once by appearances and his own fondest hopes, Arnaldo will never altogether see through the alibi that Periandro and Auristela are siblings. The Sensualidad episode tells us that if Arnaldo did not cleave with such obstinate insistence to the surfaces of life, if he were a reader of dreams (and especially here of Garcilaso and Vergil) much as he is a luster after por-

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traits (he fights, then bids for Auristela’s in Rome, Persiles 637–44, 660–2, 682–3), he would already have the answer to his doubts about Periandro and Auristela. For good readers of poetry and dream – we can infer from Arnaldo’s bad example – are likely to be canny readers of minds, of both surfaces and depths. They are also liable to recognize when an apparent digression is in fact central to the story that most interests them and an apparent marvel (such as Periandro’s dream adventure) the key to a (in this case, amorous) truth. Garcilaso emerges here as a metonym for the power and virtue of the best kind of profane literature, a role that suits the first poet in the Spanish vernacular to achieve canonic status – thanks to a series of annotated editions – notably El Brocense’s (1574 and 1578) and above all Fernando de Herrera’s in 1580.59 In this episode Cervantes appears to confer on poetry the aura of oracular truth usually reserved in the epic tradition for ancestral, heroic, or divine voices. It is a special kind of knowledge that would have spared Arnaldo the long and decidedly fruitless journey to Rome that awaits him (Persiles 712). The Danish prince thereby becomes a surrogate for readers tested by the narrative, for their willingness and ability to perceive plot unity (or pertinence) where there is apparent digression, and verisimilitude where there is an apparent wonder. Much as Periandro creatively adapts Garcilaso’s ‘precious jewels [valuables], sweet and happy’ (‘ricas prendas, dulces y alegres’) from Sonnet X, Garcilaso himself in that same sonnet paraphrases Dido’s last words spoken on the funeral pyre just before she takes her own life.60 Her eyes on Aeneas’s clothing and arms and their shared bed, Dido apostrophizes, ‘Oh sweet spoils while fate and God allowed it, accept this soul [spirit] and release me from these cares’ (‘dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebat, / accipite hanc animam meque his exsolvite curis,’ Aeneid 4.651–2). Early in the chapter we noticed that the explicit reference to Dido on Policarpo’s Isle casts both Periandro and Auristela as Aeneas. Periandro’s and Garcilaso’s allusion to the Carthaginian queen’s verses in turn casts Periandro in the role of Dido. If Persiles is classical epic and its priorities turned inside out, it stands to reason that even in significant details such as this we should expect to find related inversions such as a cross-gender identification of Periandro with Dido. We could even in a preliminary way say that Periandro is feminized by association. But there may be a more helpful way to formulate Periandro’s verbal association with Dido that acknowledges its implications for the broader

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argument about the nature of Cervantes’ epic: we may think of Periandro as redeeming Dido by serving as the occasion for Cervantes to rewrite her tale. The effect of this rewriting is to re-evaluate epic’s subordination of love to war, a re-evaluation implicit already in Vergil, since Dido is portrayed not only as a lover but as an accomplished ruler. Indeed, one way to turn the Carthaginian queen’s story around would be to recast her part in tribute to women’s potential roles in a new kind of epic. Such an epic would find a way to make her values heroic by integrating public and private duties – conventionally male and female domains – rather than by simply reversing them: in Persiles’ terms, by integrating the competing claims of ley and gusto. It might also find a way to lend her tale a comedic rather than a tragic ending. This is what Persiles achieves in the shared protagonism between Persiles and Sigismunda, but it is to be found even in such details as Periandro’s dream echo of Dido’s last words. Dido’s parting curse on Aeneas and his descendants for his abandonment of her is viewed by the poem as one of the causes of the ancestral enmity between Rome and Carthage. It is famously expressed in a line that bursts the bounds of Vergil’s epic hexameter: ‘May shore clash with shore, waves with waves / I beg, [and] arms with arms; may [the Trojans] be plagued by war and so too may their grandchildren [the Romans]’ (‘litora litoribus contraria, fluctibus undas / imprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotesque,’ Aeneid IV.628–9). The hypermetric line’s formal liberty illustrates the law-shattering effect of a curse echoing down the ages and generations. Dido’s curse is answered indirectly in Periandro’s dream, by Periandro’s comic assumption of Dido’s mantle, and by the Roman destiny that will reconcile heroism with love in the protagonists’ jointly amorous and epic fate. A clear reversal of Dido’s funeral pyre moment is to be seen in the fact that when Periandro addresses his beloved Auristela through those well-worn words of Garcilaso’s and Vergil’s, he is affirming life rather than preparing for (suicidal) death. As if to seal this novelistic lifting of Dido’s curse, the final sentence of Persiles declares, ‘[Auristela, now Queen Sigismunda] lived in companionship with her husband Persiles until her great-grandchildren lengthened her days, because she saw them in her long and happy posterity’ (‘vivió [Auristela] en compañía de su esposo Persiles hasta que bisnietos le alargaron los días, pues los vio en su larga y feliz posteridad,’ Persiles 713–14). The verse epic’s tragic curse on the generations (Dido’s ‘pugnent ipsique nepotesque’) is thus made prose epic’s comic blessing.

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Poetry, represented synecdochically by the first verse of Garcilaso’s Sonnet X and Dido’s last words on the funeral pyre, is thus associated with dream; Periandro, as reader, reciter, and creative emulator, with both poetry and dream. It is no accident that the hero should also be knowledgeable about the world in a way unavailable to those rivals, such as Arnaldo, who are neither readers of poetry nor of dreams. Arnaldo fails to read Periandro’s dream (with its quotation of Garcilaso and Vergil) and therefore to learn what he needs to know about the nature of Periandro and Auristela’s relation, until the end of an arduous and fruitless voyage to Rome. When, at Sinforosa’s request, Periandro tells the story of how he came to land on her father’s island, he narrates his waking and dream adventures as if they were of a piece, to his listeners’ initial confusion. Later, in Book 3 as we saw, the dream of Sensualidad is recorded on the commemorative canvas among his greatest adventures. We are thus presented with an epic hero whose adventures are not only glorified by a historian but who himself participates in the telling and who can, as such, be regarded as hero and historian. Moreover, the hero and the novel’s ‘historian’ both uphold dreams as potentially constitutive of the epic quest on the same footing with waking life. By equating literature (figured as Periandro’s storytelling, conversation, dream, and learned allusion) with the epic deed, by granting the dream-life and the reading of poetry a special status in the well-lived hero’s life, and by making the dream a conspicuous formal feature and theme of his narrative, Cervantes can be seen to transform the objective of the epic quest. The epic that once reserved glory for military victory and territorial conquest – the taking of Latium and the founding of an imperial Rome, in Vergil’s case – is superseded by an epic that sings (in prose, but not prosaically) the conquest of inner Romes, of souls as well as cities, the conquest of self through knowledge that can come only by the trabajos (‘labours’) of the title. In Rome, Maximino catches up with the pair, only to die fortuitously, blessing the union of his rival and Sigismunda (Persiles 711–12) and eliminating the political and sentimental obstacle to their marriage. By rewarding Persiles over the elder, martialspirited brother, the novel stages a reversal of epic priorities. Love is no longer the dangerous diversion from the providential destiny to make war and found an empire, but is itself the providential epic-heroic adventure. And the hero who wins the crown (and the princess), once first and foremost the warrior prepared to subordinate his private gratification to the public good understood as conquest, is now also and preferentially a poet, a lover, and a dreamer.

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4 Christian Politics: Church and State

Persiles’ response to the epic themes of empire, religion, and love is not exhausted by its original, paradoxical reworking of the discourse of barbarism, by its sly affirmation of Pauline spiritual values, or by its celebration of the heroic possibilities of erotic love. Many of its episodes face head on the institutional realities of Church and monarchy, often implicitly calling into question southern European ecclesiastical or Crown practice by the light of professed ideals. In centring the novel on princely protagonists, Cervantes is partly giving us in their trials a picture of the ritual initiation and education of princes, the experiences they should undergo, the knowledge (both natural and revealed) they should master, and the values they must come to uphold to merit such an awesome responsibility. The contrast with Cervantes’ rivals in genre is instructive. Heliodorus’s Ethiopica reserves the political dimension of his novel for the protagonists and the conclusion, when Theagenes and Chariclea marry and succeed to priesthoods and rulership. Lope de Vega’s El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Homeland) strips away the political theme altogether, with protagonists who have no public roles whatsoever. Cervantes – ratcheting up Heliodorus and following epic tradition – dramatizes the centrality of politics in his prose epic by narrating three political transitions at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the novel (the Barbaric Isle’s in Book 1, Policarpo’s Isle in Book 2, and the joint succession by the protagonists to their now united kingdoms of Tile and Frislanda in Book 4). The sequence from disaster in the first two (brought down by unbridled passion) to a provisional sort of redemption in the concluding one highlights the novel’s marked interest in distinguishing good from bad rule. I conclude by proposing that the well-entrenched forma mentis that made typological exegesis and

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poetic practice possible could well have provided Cervantes with a paradigm (or a shaping influence) for linking the novel’s politics with its poetics, reinforcing its Christian theme with the formal embrace of a figural structure as organizing principle for the narrative. The adventure on Policarpo’s Isle models what is at stake for a Christian ideal of politics in Persiles. It opens with the description of an ideal commonwealth (Persiles 265–6), characterized by an elective monarchy whose inhabitants – deaf to special pleading, promises, or bribes – seek out the most virtuous man to lead them. This would-be philosopherking is chosen by common consent for a lifelong term, or until his character fails. The description is put in the mouth of a pirate ship’s captain who knows the novel’s Northern waters well, and is doing his courteous best to amuse his captives (Auristela, Transila, Mauricio, and Ricla, but not Periandro among them). He believes that these institutional arrangements promote virtue in aspirants and office-holders, clipping the wings of ambition, averting greed, and rewarding honesty, and that finally they lead to peace, justice, and compassion for rich and poor alike. In view of the corrupt justice to be displayed in Book 3’s Badajoz (Spain) and Book 4’s Rome we can take it for an implied sardonic commentary on the novel’s Catholic South when the same captain exults that on Policarpo’s Isle ‘the staff of justice is not bent by bribes nor the flesh and blood of kinship’ (‘no agobian la vara de la justicia las dádivas ni la carne y sangre de los parentescos’). Incarnating a kind of Golden Age of distributive justice, Policarpo’s Isle is portrayed as ‘a kingdom where one may live without fear of the insolent and where each enjoys what belongs to him’ (‘reino … donde se vive sin temor de los insolentes y donde cada uno goza lo que es suyo,’ Persiles 265). Periandro will make a name for himself on this apparently blessed Northern island kingdom by excelling in the Olympic-style games organized to commemorate the anniversary of Policarpo’s election, an instance according to the same captain of the island’s enlightened tradition of public entertainments (besides athletic games, the theatre) by which the people are kept amused and distracted from the kind of melancholy that can lead to ‘evil thoughts’ (‘malos pensamientos,’ Persiles 266). If a pirate captain’s praise is not irony enough for this rosy, utopian picture of the just society, the episode’s outcome is irony fit for a king. King Policarpo falls for Auristela and the Princess Sinforosa for Periandro, and together with the sorceress Cenotia they scheme to hold the irresistibly attractive protagonists captive on their island. The plan is

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foiled – and their passion aptly figured – by a fire that breaks out on the palace grounds and consumes the better part of the island (Persiles 392–3). This fate likens the apparent kingdom of virtue and law to the overtly barbarian Barbaric Isle (Persiles 156–7, 172) – itself also an elective monarchy consumed by a fire – which nevertheless unofficially gives rise to an exemplar of Christian virtue in the Barbarian Ricla. As such, Policarpo’s Isle shapes up as not only a disguised recapitulation of the Barbaric Isle, but also as a narrative and ideological template for what happens in Rome. First, like Rome, it can be seen in part as a Barbaric Isle masquerading as a kingdom of law and virtue. Second, the political succession of Persiles and Sigismunda announced in Rome to their respective island kingdoms prompts the question what – if anything – will avert a recurrence of Barbaric (and Policarpo’s) Isles. In the previous chapters we have surveyed the novel’s interest in exploring the tension between law and gusto (‘pleasure’ or ‘preference’) and law and spirit in the discourses of barbarism, Christianity, and eros. The novel’s counterpoint between ideal commonwealths (laws and virtues) and human failings, between the vision of what could be and the sometimes sordid reality of what is, moves this dialectic into the political realm. The contrast between Policarpo the apparently virtuous, Catholic king and Periandro the actually virtuous, ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ (Persiles 651) would-be king is in part the difference between outwardly kept law – a diffusely Platonic ideal of political laws and virtues,1 together with a sacramental (cultic or official) Catholicism – and an internalized caritas or law of love (‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ Romans 13.9) that seeks to reconcile the self’s and ‘the neighbour’s’ gustos. It narrates the second political transition in the novel (the first being the cataclysm on the Barbaric Isle) and the first of a polity that, at least at first sight, melds classical pagan and Christian virtues. As a result, the Policarpo’s Isle episode emerges as a mise-enabîme for the novel’s Catholic world, much as the Barbaric Isle episode and its Law function as templates for the novel as a whole. Concluding at the end of Book 2, the midpoint of the novel, Policarpo’s story brushes against the grain of neat distinctions between Northern (Barbarian, Gothic) and Southern (Catholic) halves of Persiles. What is an apparently hinge or transitional episode between the Barbarian or less than perfectly Catholic Gothic North and the ‘perfectly’ Catholic, Latin South winds up illustrating an altogether different novelistic principle: it becomes clear that all episodes, including Rome’s, are transitional and that the protagonists never completely escape the Barbaric Isle. As

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with the discourses of barbarism, eros, and Christianity, in politics Persiles appears to plump for an ethical imperative. In the absence of actually virtuous monarchs, not ideal institutions, or professions of virtue and faith, or even Christian law is liable to stand up to politically dangerous passions such as Policarpo’s wayward lust. Alongside the generic models for Persiles’ politics of verse and prose epic, it helps to bear in mind the example of Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia or The Education of Cyrus. Xenophon (born ca. 430 BCE) set the classical pattern for the treatise on the ideal education of the prince in this apparently historical account of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia.2 Actually inspired by Spartan institutions and events, The Education of Cyrus combines pseudo-history, a political treatise, a novel of mainly military adventure, and even a love interest in the story of Panthea and Abradatas. For these reasons, though now largely forgotten except by classicists, Xenophon’s novel is given a place of honour in the bloodlines of both the Greek adventure novel and the mirror of princes. The Education of Cyrus’s current reputation (indeed, eclipse) can give us little idea of its popularity in the Renaissance, especially as it was mediated by such widely read imitations as Antonio de Guevara’s Relox de príncipes (The Dial of Princes, 1529).3 According to Northrop Frye, Xenophon’s form of political manual was preferred to Plato’s in the sixteenth century, for it was thought to portray a practicable as compared to an impossible ideal.4 The importance of the mirror or manual for a prince’s ideal education can hardly be exaggerated in the age of absolutism (consider the importance to sixteenth-century political thought of such mirrors as Erasmus’s The Education of a Christian Prince [1516], Machiavelli’s The Prince [1532], Ribadeneyra’s Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano [1595], and Mariana’s De rege et de regis institutione [1599]).5 As institutional (for instance, parliamentary) restraints on monarchy fell away under the onslaught of war-driven centralization and the concentration of powers, moral suasion and the princely education in virtue could appear to be the last hope for justice and the final refuge of the court philosopher. By handling the education of a prince in novelistic form, with its corresponding allowance for love, The Education of Cyrus blazed a trail for later novelists such as Cervantes. Through the medium of political fiction, novelists could explore not only moral character and education as was typical for the mirror genre but also the personal, institutional, and more broadly social and political contexts in which virtuous behaviour is rendered possible, somehow rewarded or pun-

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ished by Church and State – that is, the exploration of character, consequence, and implication to which narrative fiction lends itself particularly well. We have indirect evidence that some of Cervantes’ contemporaries may have seen Persiles in this political light, and potentially as a kind of novelistic cross between the Greek novel and the espejo (‘mirror of princes’). Enrique Suárez de Mendoza published his imitation of Persiles (and Heliodorus) in 1629, calling it Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica (Eustorgio and Clorilene: A Muscovite History or Story). Eustorgio is introduced with a prologue by Fray Enrique de Mendoza, author of El privado christiano (The Christian Favourite), a manual of royal discipline published three years earlier in 1626. In the prologue he describes Suárez de Mendoza’s novel as if it were itself a mirror of princes, claiming that some had given it the subtitle El Príncipe perfecto, y Privado Christiano (The Perfect Prince and the Christian Favourite) and saying of it that ‘it educates princes and guides favourites’ (‘a los Principes enseña, y a los Priuados encamina’).6 Favourites had effectively been handed governorship of the Spanish monarchy from Philip II’s death in 1598. Philip III yielded management of Crown affairs to the duke of Lerma, and Philip IV to the count-duke of Olivares (from 1621), with predictable results: massive corruption, unaccountability, intrigue.7 Arturo Farinelli long ago noted Calderón’s likely reliance on Suárez de Mendoza for his play La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1636).8 Suárez de Mendoza and Calderón develop, and make more explicit, the narrative and dramatic possibilities of politics explored earlier by Cervantes’ novel. The genealogy that runs from Persiles through Eustorgio to La vida es sueño shares with the prose genre of the espejo an interest in the education of princes and favourites, an interest lent particular urgency by the Spanish Habsburgs’ effective abdication of direct responsibility for government following Philip II’s death. In Persiles’ incorporation of espejo themes, its rhetorical evocation of the Platonic ideal commonwealth, and its (direct and indirect) reference to the sordid realities of Habsburg policy, we can detect yet again the encyclopedic – generic, thematic, and historical – ambition of Cervantes’ modern epic. We begin our study of the institutional theme in Persiles with what I have been calling Pauline counter-narratives, pursuing the line of inquiry initiated in chapter 2: narratives heard or directly witnessed by the princely heirs that draw attention to the contrast between Pauline ethics (with their emphasis on charity) and institutional authority (ecclesiastical and monarchical), and do so by sending Southern, Catholic

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characters North in a reversal of the Gothic protagonist pilgrimage South toward Rome. In this light, the stories of Leonor and Sosa in Lisbon and of Renato and Eusebia in France work out variations on the polarities of caritas-cruelty, caritas-law, and law-honour; reverse the mainplot relationship between the Barbarian or ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Gothic North and the putatively exemplary Catholic South (including Rome); and cast a harsh light on the failures of Southern Church and Crown. In contrast to the characters and episodes studied in chapter 2, in this chapter we consider narrative moments that bear explicitly on institutional practices and spaces: Church sacraments and the convent of the Mother of God in Lisbon (the case of Sosa and Leonor); Church law against the duel, together with the French court (the case of Renato and Eusebia); and the role of the miraculous together with the Marian icon of the Hieronymite temple at Guadalupe, Spain (the case of Feliciana). Set and told in the South and centred on a flight from the city into the country, Feliciana’s story recapitulates a number of important themes of Antonio’s (discussed in chapter 2), Sosa’s, and Renato’s narratives and suggests a provisional solution to the conditions that give rise to the crises the previous stories unfold, thereby sparing Feliciana the fate – either death or the need to flee North – of the others. In the second half of the chapter, the argument shifts its emphasis away from the Church and modulates toward an emphasis on monarchy, although in this period in Europe – as in the novel – there was no clear-cut institutional distinction between altar and throne.9 As the chapter unfolds we consider the various political solutions offered up in Persiles: those invented out of whole cloth by Cervantes (Auristela as royal arbiter of justice on the Isle of Fishers), and those historical ones – such as the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609–14 – reimagined by Cervantes in his novelistic context. In particular we will consider what evidence we have for the kinds of monarchs Persiles and Sigismunda will make on accession, since the novel does not require they give up their public roles as heirs-apparent, roles they indeed step into at the close of the book. One of the major symbolic acts of Persiles is to make Auristela co-protagonist not only of the love story, but also in the exercise of justice as the primary duty of Christian monarchs. Cruelty in the Name of Faith The princely protagonists learn of Sosa el enamorado portugués’s (‘the lovelorn Portuguese man’s’) ‘strange story’ (‘estraño suceso’) in North

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Atlantic waters as they all make their escape from the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 199–205). The episodes that take place in the novel’s Catholic South, including Sosa’s among them, are often shaped by a near-ethnographic interest in the titled nobility, with its peculiar customs and often conflictive relation with both royal and ecclesiastical authority. Over the course of this study we have noticed that a characteristic barbarity of the novel’s Catholic South is the murderous preoccupation with honour. Sosa and Leonor’s story highlights another form of Southern barbarity, also associated with the nobility, which issues from a combustible mix of arranged marriage and misguided piety. It bears on the institutional theme because its crisis takes place on holy ground, a convent church in Lisbon, and because it implicates two Church sacraments – matrimony and holy orders – in the young man’s premature death. But it is also relevant to the education of the royal heroes inasmuch as it raises important ethical questions about their futures as Christian monarchs and their quest for religious instruction – implications only heightened by the parallels with their own story. Set in the Catholic South, the story is told by Sosa in the North soon after readers have been introduced to the Barbaric Isle. This narrative juxtaposition of the Barbaric Isle – where hearts of men are extracted in the name of a providentially directed mission to conquer the world – with the sacrifice of Sosa’s ‘heart’ at the altar of Leonor’s piety prompts a question: are we to take what happens in Lisbon for a re-enactment or a redeeming of the Barbaric Isle’s sacrificial practices? Telescoping the tale enables us to outline the major themes and anticipate some of its more poignant ironies. Manuel de Sosa Coitiño, a young, noble soldier-poet from Lisbon, courts his neighbour, the beautiful Leonor Pereira. Leonor’s rich, titled father promises him her hand, but he must wait for two years because she is too young to marry (Persiles 199–200). In the meantime, Sosa departs for North Africa to serve his king as captain-general of a fort in Barbary (the Portuguese held Ceuta and Tangiers in this period). On Sosa’s return, Leonor’s father confirms his original promise, and a date is set for the marriage in Lisbon’s convent of la Madre de Dios (‘the Mother of God,’ Persiles 202). The convent’s name prefigures Feliciana’s hymn to the Virgin in the Marian temple at Guadalupe (Book 3): the Virgin in the hymn stays the sacrificial knife of Abraham (Persiles 482), whereas here the sacrifice is carried out in the Virgin’s sanctuary, defiling it. Lisbon’s high society gathers in the church to celebrate the union of these two paragons of beauty and grace. At the altar, Leonor finally reveals that she had

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already given her hand to Christ. Sosa, shocked and humiliated, sinks to his knees and declares – quoting the Gospel of Luke – ‘Maria chose the best part’ (‘Maria optimam partem elegit,’ Persiles 205). Sosa – having nearly lost his mind, in his words – tells his story on the high seas to the Gothic and Barbarian pilgrims, who lend him a sympathetic ear. Once he finishes the tale, he dies of a broken heart. Scholarly debate about the moral crux of the story has tended to focus on whether Leonor’s choice of holy orders over matrimony is the more laudable one. Alban Forcione reads Sosa’s story as a straightforward exaltation of Christian piety, a celebratory exemplum of a Tridentine orthodoxy he associates with the defence of monasticism.10 To Diana de Armas Wilson, it is a cautionary tale for Auristela, who will wrestle with her own doubts about taking the veil or marrying Periandro in Rome. She regards Leonor’s choice of the convent and Sosa’s death – to be reversed by Auristela in Rome – as an example of a pattern in Cervantes that favours ‘fruitful’ matrimony over celibacy and asceticism.11 Lewis Hutton treats the episode bluntly as a story about piety gone awry, comparing the altar scene to the Abrahamic sacrifice.12 As Wilson notes, a warrant for questioning Leonor’s piety is offered by the narrator in a later moment of the novel. Following their arrival in Lisbon, the pilgrims visit Sosa’s burial plot, read his epitaph, and are informed that Leonor had died a few days after learning what had become of Sosa. The reason for her death is given as ‘either the austerity of [her enclosed life] or regret over the unforeseen incident’ (‘[y]a por la estrecheza de la que hacía siempre, o ya por el sentimiento del no pensado suceso,’ Persiles 437). The statement is equivocal (which is responsible for Leonor’s death: the convent life or Leonor’s regrets over Sosa?), but the equivocation enables the narrator to kill two birds with one rhetorical stone. It may be read at once as a swipe at the perils of the cloister and as a warning about the wages of religious pride, the conspicuous piety that issues in Sosa’s humiliation. In chapter 2 we established the historical significance of references to caritas and Church ceremony, sixteenth-century code words for Catholic reformers who championed ethics, on the one hand, and Tridentine defenders of Church authority who championed the sacraments, doctrine, and ecclesiastical mediation, on the other. The terms are voiced by Antonio at the beginning of Book 3, as we saw. The speech bears restating here for its articulation of keywords – charity and ceremony – and, just as importantly, because Antonio delivers it in the very city that serves as backdrop for Sosa and Leonor’s story. In Lisbon harbour, as

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the great city swings into view, Antonio declares to his Barbarian wife Ricla that she will now have occasion to ‘see the Catholic ceremonies by which [God] is served and will observe Christian charity at its finest’ (‘verás juntamente las católicas ceremonias con que se sirve [Dios] y notarás cómo la caridad cristiana está en su punto,’ Persiles 432). In the light of Sosa and Leonor’s tale and the scholarship about it, Antonio’s formulation might well lead us to ask whether ‘charity’ and ‘ceremonies’ necessarily go hand in hand or whether they are not, depending on how they are understood, liable to work against one another. The episode does indeed cast a heavy shadow over Leonor’s choice. Nowhere in Persiles except in Sosa’s episode is matrimony undertaken canonically according to the Council of Trent’s strictures – which required the advance publication of banns, clerical officiation, the presence of witnesses, and the información de solteros (note the reference to the ‘requisitos’ fulfilled, at Persiles 202) – and yet it turns out tragically. Its abortive displacement by holy orders at the high altar has the effect, moreover, of theatrically playing one sacrament off against the other. It is as if Cervantes were giving narrative form to the epochal disposition agreed at Trent (Session 24, 11 November 1563) that declared matrimony a true sacrament (therefore indissoluble), yet also affirmed (against reform-minded attacks) that it should not be preferred to virginity or celibacy.13 The theatricality of the ceremony is brought home by the terms used to describe it, portrayed as if a high point of the season (Persiles 202–5): the cream of Lisbon society has turned out, the temple is flooded with music, Leonor emerges richly dressed in white and green fabrics studded with fat pearls, and, finally, raised in the middle of a church – like ‘a sort of theatre’ (‘un modo de teatro,’ Persiles 203) – is the stage on which the ceremony is to take place. Twice more Sosa mentions this ‘teatro’: when he climbs onto it, a stairway to his heaven (as he puts it) where he drops to his knees to adore his beloved, and then, again, when – reeling from the blow of his public repudiation – he climbs down from the ‘teatro.’ Given the terrible consequences of this act of ‘teatro’ for both Sosa and Leonor, what we are shown is sooner a charade than a celebration of holiness. And what are we to make of the Church’s at least apparent complicity in this ceremony of humiliation? We are told that the archbishop had licensed use of the basilica for the ceremony (Persiles 202). The prioress and nuns, for their part, actively take part in the ‘teatro,’ stepping up to shear Leonor’s radiantly blonde locks just as she announces her decision at the altar (Persiles 205) – effectively delivering Sosa’s death sen-

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tence in the act of becoming a bride of Christ. Thus, the ritual performance of two sacraments set against one another on holy ground becomes the occasion for one of the most conspicuously cruel acts in the novel, which by itself could imply a degree of skepticism about the ethical utility of the sacraments – however scrupulously fulfilled – as a path to salvation. The greater relative value of monasticism and matrimony may well be a question of less consequence in this context than the fact that a mystic marriage to Christ has become an excuse for the heartless and ultimately fatal public spurning of the suitor, making a neat contrast with Antonio the Spaniard and Ricla the Barbarian’s noncanonic but otherwise exemplary marriage (discussed in chapter 2). For that reason we can speak of a powerful and cautionary association of holy orders and of the sacramental conception of matrimony with death,14 a harsh Cervantine echo of Erasmus’s ‘monacatus non est pietas.’ Lisbon, at least in this moment, is less Antonio’s seat of ceremony and charity than it is the ‘teatro’ where ceremony eclipses charity. And yet it would be slanderous to suggest that the Council of Trent sanctioned such perverse abuse of its directives, since the council sought to sacralize both matrimony 15 and holy orders,16 and nowhere does it condone cruelty to this end. Leonor’s apology to Sosa at the altar tips her hand and draws her into the net of moral responsibility. The hairsplittingly casuistic promise that she would not take ‘another husband on earth’ (‘otro esposo en la tierra,’ Persiles 204) – having given her word to Christ – is glossed by Leonor herself as an ‘an honourable and beneficial deception’ (‘engaño honroso y provechoso’) and a ‘betrayal’ (‘traición,’ Persiles 204). It is a favourite strategy of Cervantes’, to have a character unwittingly indict herself. Sosa initially compares the effect of Leonor’s beauty as she makes her entrance at the high altar to the first rays of dawn. Then he remembers ancient myth (‘antiguas fábulas’) and likens her to ‘the chaste Diana in the woods’ (‘la casta Diana en los bosques,’ Persiles 203), alerting us to a pagan subtext that competes with and eventually overwhelms the Marian attributes of Leonor’s vocation and the convent church. Lurking in the archetypal shadows of Leonor is the cold, chaste huntress Diana of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, scourge of Actaeon, the hapless hunter who pays with his life for a chance glimpse of the goddess. To take a cue from Ruth El-Saffar and other commentators who have emphasized the mythological subtext of Don Quijote’s Marcela and her episode’s allusions to Diana, we can say that Leonor is thereby

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associated with both beauty and death.17 This is the promise and the threat of Leonor. The contrast between Leonor and Marcela in Don Quijote (I.11–15) is instructive, since both episodes rely heavily on Petrarchan tropes for narrative and characterization (Sosa is the courtly lover who adores and serves his beloved, Leonor is the fair and eventually cruel lady whose blonde hair is said to out-dazzle the sun, Persiles 203). The young student-shepherd Grisóstomo, a victim of unrequited love for Marcela, also – like Sosa – dies as a result of it. Marcela has often been described as a kind of Petrarchan love object become subject, the fair but cruel lady who comes alive, speaks for herself, and displays a mastery of philosophical argument and forensic style in her defence of herself against unfair accusation. However, Marcela’s liberation from one worn-out literary convention (the idealization of the beautiful, young lady by the courtly, male lover) is enabled by another literary convention: the development in Spain of pastoral narratives (notably, Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana [1561] and Cervantes’ own La Galatea [1585]) that lent female characters protagonism and the freedom (if only symbolic) from conventional social strictures such as the obligation to marry or take the veil. Although Grisóstomo’s friends accuse Marcela of killing the student-shepherd by rejecting his advances, even they admit that she never gives him the least hint of encouragement. Sosa is not only encouraged by Leonor’s father and her silence, he is also made to face rejection in the most humiliating way imaginable, as part and parcel of the public spectacle of Leonor’s piety. Leonor steps into the apparently heroic and virtuous Catholic conversion narrative of marriage to Christ and Church only to play out all the more completely the Petrarchan role of fair but cruel lady. We know from Grisóstomo’s epitaph that Marcela is never altogether forgiven for choosing her own role, for escaping from the dead-end script of courtly love into the freedom, if also social exile, of pastoral. And yet Leonor seems to embrace her fair but cruel role, at least initially, and to do so in the name of Christianity, a vocation ordinarily taken to be at odds with the courtly heresy of profane love. And yet there is blame to go around in this sad tale. The difficulty with a line of reasoning that makes the Church or Leonor largely responsible for the tragic choice of monasticism over ‘fruitful matrimony’ is that we are given no indication that Leonor wants to marry, or that she is somehow being forced, bamboozled, or misled into a con-

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ventual vow. Indeed, there is no evidence that she and Sosa have – as adults – really even spoken to each other. By focusing on the ideological battle between monasticism and matrimony (that is, between Catholic hardliners and reformers or even between Catholics and Protestants), we risk losing sight of Leonor herself. Michael Nerlich has wondered whether Leonor is old enough to make a reasonably informed decision about a perpetual vow, a long-standing problem for the Church.18 We do know that the father thinks Leonor too young to marry when Sosa initially proposes (Persiles 200), but we are given no further indications about the issue. There is an important sense, however, in which Sosa himself and the father share in responsibility for the tragedy. One of the slippery slopes of the story is presented as the pre-emptive assumption of knowledge of another’s mind and will. Neither Leonor’s father nor, what is more significant here, Sosa himself bothers to find out what Leonor prefers. Sosa chooses to dodge the issue rather than to pay court directly or even to ask the father to discover her preferences. He effectively courts Leonor’s father rather than Leonor herself, speaking to the father about her because he has doubts concerning her interest. Leonor’s father makes promises for her in the void of a silence he expects from both daughter and wife, whose obedience and deference he blithely assumes, as we learn from what he says to Sosa (Persiles 200–2). Sosa and the father misread Leonor’s silence as does Arnaldo Auristela’s, taking not-no for yes (for Arnaldo, see Persiles 237). The suggestion of tragic misreading is anticipated by the reference to the wall dividing their houses, with its Pyramus and Thisbe subtext (Persiles 199). The mother, too, keeps her counsel, since the father takes for granted that she would want what he wants. Leonor herself, gagged by the young noblewoman’s obligation of silence and obedience, reveals her intentions only at the last and least propitious moment. As a result, the chain of misreadings and evasions remains unbroken. The narrative takes pains to diffuse responsibility so that Sosa and Leonor, the mother, and even the father appear to be victims of something larger than themselves – larger even than Trent, Church ceremony, or monasticism. The real culprit of the tragedy may well be the silence that hangs menacingly over the story – Leonor’s duplicitous silence but also the father and Sosa’s. Leonor is silent about her vows. Even worse, as we noted earlier, Sosa and Leonor’s father never solicit her consent to the marriage directly, treating it as if it were to be worked out exclusively between the two men. In effect they lend them-

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selves to a conspiracy of silence about Leonor’s preferences, conditioned by a literary (and, by analogy, a corresponding social) decorum that prescribed roles from which these characters never break free. The story can therefore be read as a case study in the perils of a decorum peculiar to the honour-bound hierarchies, deferences, and concerns typical of the novel’s Catholic South. Indeed, what stands out about this tragedy is that all the characters involved act with the best of intentions and within well-established social rules, especially a code of behaviour associated here with old, titled families. Each character acts the conventional part: Sosa the lovelorn Portuguese man (a national and literary topos, recognized at Persiles 436) and a náufrago de amor (‘castaway of love’); Leonor portrays the discreta, recatada y honrada doncella (‘discrete, modest, and honourable maiden’), her ‘virtue’ (‘honestidad,’ Persiles 201), ‘beauty’ (‘gallardía’), and ‘silence’ (‘silencio’) the ideal qualities for a young woman of station in the late sixteenth century; the father acts the part of the ‘courteous as he was discrete’ (‘cortés como discreto,’ Persiles 201) patriarch; and the mother his shadow – la perfecta casada (‘the perfect wife’) – who seconds his every wish. The pall cast by decorous silence is almost a character in itself. For instance, the day of Sosa’s departure the father consents to let him say farewell to his daughter and wife (Persiles 201). Overwhelmed by the presence of so much beauty, Sosa tries to speak and finds the words stick in his throat – he is so choked up he can do no more than hold his tongue and give (with his ‘silence’) the sign of his ‘befuddlement’ (‘turbación’). The father notices the silence (which is referred to three times here alone), embraces Sosa, and makes light of the tongue-tied farewell as the mark of Sosa’s honourable intentions. We are given an all-around picture of courtesy and discretion, in which silence – in particular Leonor’s and Sosa’s silence – is looked upon by the father as a virtue. And yet events will cast doubt on the ethical value of this conventionally lauded virtue. Indeed, the story ironically pits one desideratum of sixteenth-century literary theory – decorum (Sosa must be lovesick because he is Portuguese and young; Leonor must be silent, obedient, and shut away because she is an honourable maiden) – against another, moral exemplarity.19 The exemplarity of the characters is undermined, even betrayed, by their literary decorum, as if to imply that there are ethical stakes in the breaking of literary (and social) rules of decorum that prescribed narrowly defined codes of behaviour for characters (and readers). Persiles thus shifts the centre of moral discourse from a

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theological emphasis on individual sin and repentance to the social context in which moral behaviour is made more or less possible. Although the association of a blithe, self-righteous cruelty with the sacraments is there to be read in the episode, the causes of the tragic outcome are shown to be multiple and complex: not only what may follow from an exaggerated importance lent to the sacraments in the religious life by Church doctrine and by a consequent misunderstanding of piety, but also what may come of rigidly circumscribed social roles that lead from one disastrous misreading to another. And yet the silence about Leonor’s ‘gusto’ (Persiles 202) is questionable as well on strictly theological grounds. In the context of the house of her father, a titled nobleman, it should come as no surprise that neither Leonor’s father nor even Sosa would take the trouble to sound her out. However, since she exercises her ‘gusto’ in the convent church, we need to remember that in the context of canon law the father and Sosa have failed to honour the principle of mutually given consent in matrimony. Attention to the Tridentine legacy of pre-matrimonial legalities and Church ceremonial can distract us from the fact that Trent also reaffirmed the principle of mutual consent as the essential condition for the sacramental legitimacy of marriage, the cornerstone of the ecclesiastical model of matrimony long-enshrined in canon law, present already in Roman and Visigothic law, and reasserted by the council in its renowned tametsi decree (1563).20 If Trent was about the (for some, tyrannical) extension of the long arm of ecclesiastical centralization, it nevertheless is crucial to remember that a consequence of that control was its renewed defence of spousal choice. Moreover, this commitment to mutual consent was not merely theoretical: it did regularly pit the post-Tridentine Church against parents, especially of the nobility, long-accustomed as they were to arranging their children’s marriages to serve clan interests.21 The Council of Trent went so far as to call arranged marriage itself a form of tyranny. As a result, many a determined youth turned Church representatives and the ecclesiastical courts against parental authority.22 In practice the clergy would often counsel obedience, and parents held powerful trump cards even when ecclesiastical opposition was effective: the risk of disinheritance and of actual violence (revenge killings) or the threat of violence by male kin, especially fathers and brothers against daughters and sisters (as in the Feliciana episode discussed later). Nevertheless, the Church did frequently find itself offering the young sanctuary (sometimes, literally, as a refuge against

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vengeful relatives), and the ecclesiastical courts routinely threw their weight behind marriage choice.23 Given this long-standing source of conflict between the nobility and the Church, in particular between the aristocratic and ecclesiastical models of matrimony, Church complicity with Leonor’s choice can be seen in a different light. Leonor does not speak in the story, is apparently unable to speak for herself, until she is safely in the bosom of the convent church (Persiles 204–5) – as if to suggest the historical role of the Church as a refuge, at least in principle, from unwanted arranged marriages and sometimes even wrathful parents. We can infer from Leonor’s evasive silences leading up to the ceremony that, whatever else the convent is for her, her morally dubious profession is an attempt to escape a loveless match imposed by her father. Under ordinary historical circumstances, Leonor might well have set her heart on another man and perhaps resorted to clandestine marriage, a social problem of great concern to Tridentine delegates because it often led to abandoned women, illegitimate and foundling children, and feuds. The twist here is that Leonor’s personal choice of spouse (against the father’s effectively imposed one) is divine rather than human. In this light, it is particularly interesting that Leonor’s monastic initiation should be presented with the trappings of a wedding ceremony: it evokes the idea, as was conventional, of a nun’s mystic marriage to Christ, and yet Cervantes makes the most of this narrative opportunity to conflate the two sacraments and to create a situation in which Leonor has effectively taken her vow through a clandestine marriage (proscribed by Trent) to the Son of God. Leonor, therefore, eludes one paternal authority (her father’s) by taking cover under another’s (God’s), by setting one sacrament (holy orders) against another (matrimony), and by choosing a divine spouse (Christ) over a human one (Sosa) – all choices that enable her to remain obedient and yet have her own way. The cruelty in the tale, such as it is, therefore, cannot, strictly speaking, be said to issue (alone) from a Tridentine conception of marriage or an institutional preference for monasticism. Trent, as we noted, was not only about the imposition of ceremonial requirements but also about the reaffirmation of mutual consent in matrimony, a principle that undercut potential parental tyrannies. From Leonor’s point of view (for all that she later appears to regret the consequences), the Tridentine Church’s defence of monasticism alongside matrimony may well look like a kind of sanctuary from her father’s unilateral imposition of his will. If there is an ethical way out implied by the story, it would appear to lie in the pre-

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and post-Tridentine legacy that sanctified the principle of freely given consent: without it, neither holy orders nor matrimony seems likely in this context to encourage virtue. Sosa is introduced to readers and the pilgrims by a sonnet he sings on the well-worn Petrarchan topos of the ship of love and life (Persiles 196). The sonnet promises the ship a safe harbour if, holding a steady course in the face of its Scylla and Charybdis and other hidden dangers of the sea, it is guided by ‘pure virtue’ (‘limpia honestidad’), ‘hope’ (‘esperanza’), and ‘constancy’ (‘firmeza’), since – the sonnet says – ‘love is inimical to fickleness’ (‘es enemigo amor de la mudanza’). Sosa’s narrative takes care to belie the promises voiced in the sonnet, for his lady’s ‘virtue’ (‘honestidad’) and his own ‘hope’ (‘esperanza’) and ‘constancy’ (‘firmeza’) turn out to be the rocks on which his ship of love founders. The interplay of sonnet and narrative thematically evokes a commonplace pun in Castilian courtly love poetry: in this case, mar (‘sea’) and amar (‘to love’), which in turn recalls a related pun heard – for instance – on the sixteenth-century Valencian stage: negar (‘to deny’) and anegar (‘to drown’).24 Like so many castaways of courtly love, Sosa has been spared a ‘drowning’ (anegado) in the shipwreck of his sonnet only to be drowned in the sea of love by his lady’s ‘denial’ (negado) of him. But the Petrarchan shipwreck of love may be more than just a hoary poetic trope in view of the episode’s likely sources. Some Cervantes scholars have identified the Sosa of the tale with Manuel de Sousa Coutinho (1555–1632), a Portuguese knight of the Order of Malta and companion in captivity of Cervantes in Algiers. One reason for this identification – apart from the shared name – is that later he and his wife Madalena de Vilhena separated and embraced the monastic life, a turn reminiscent of Leonor’s own preference for the convent. However, the name Cervantes gives to Sosa’s beloved recalls another well-known Manuel de Sousa with an altogether different narrative: the Portuguese captain-general of the island fortress of Diu (Portuguese India), Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, whose wife was Leonor de Sá. Both died on the passage home from the East Indies, as protagonists of one of the most notorious Portuguese shipwrecks (and shipwreck narratives) in sixteenth-century Europe.25 The São João sank off the coast of what is now South Africa in 1552, and the survivors endured a five-month forced march to the mouth of the Maputo River, during which most of the shipwreck survivors succumbed to starvation, disease, and attacks from native populations. Cervantes could have come across the story in mul-

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tiple sources, including a chronicle (Relação da mui notável perda do galeão grande S. João) and a celebrated epic poem by Jerónimo Corte Real (1594) based on the chronicle.26 There are allusions to the shipwreck – which rapidly achieved near-legendary status – in Camões’s Portuguese national epic, Os Lusíadas (1572). If Persiles draws on these strands of chronicle, epic, and Cervantes’ own life, they are freely reworked: the Sosa episode could have borrowed the Barbary location of Sosa’s fort (without the captivity) and the choice of the convent over marriage (only omitting that this followed many years of marriage) from Sousa Coutinho’s life and weaved in Leonor (as Sosa’s beloved rather than wife) and shipwreck (displaced metaphorically to Sosa’s sonnet) from Sousa Sepúlveda’s. It may even have borrowed an important detail from Camões’s epic. In canto 5, Sousa Sepúlveda and Leonor de Sá’s shipwreck narrative is alluded to in stanzas largely given over to Adamastor, the craggy personification of the Cape of Good Hope and prophetic voice of so many other Portuguese shipwrecks in the crossing to India. The cautionary tale is embedded in Adamastor’s etiological story of how he came to be petrified, jilted as he was by a beautiful nymph, just as Sosa was jilted at the altar by Leonor. What do we make of these conflations of authorial, imperial, and epic narratives? Sosa and Leonor’s story provides just enough details (names, locations) to evoke two outposts of the Portuguese empire in this period (North Africa, India) and yet returns shipwreck from the periphery of empire to its centre (by way of Sosa’s Petrarchan sonnet), from the (North and South) African coasts and the Carreira da India to Lisbon. The episode, therefore, locates its ‘barbarity’ not in Sousa Coutinho’s (and Cervantes’) Barbary, or in Sousa Sepúlveda’s Portuguese East Indies and African coast, or, for that matter, in other conventional Barbaries (such as Tasso’s locations for the marvellous, which also included the Gothic North of Europe and the New World as discussed in the introduction), but in metropolitan Portugal: like Persiles as a whole, Sosa’s episode trains its sights on the epic marvels and barbarism at home.27 Sosa survives two years in Barbary only to return to an ostensibly Catholic homeland that will turn out, in important ways, to be even more barbaric than Barbary. In this light it seems significant that, when moved to describe Leonor’s discrete, stand-offish, and elusive persona during courtship, Sosa should say she is ‘withdrawn in the fortress of her prudence (‘retirada en la fortaleza de su prudencia,’ Persiles 200). On the same page Sosa refers to his service for the king at a Barbary ‘fort’ (‘fuerza[s]’). The historical reality of the Barbary fort is played off

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against the metaphorical fortress of Leonor’s prudence, which proves much the deadlier adversary. Sosa also survives captivity on the novel’s Barbaric Isle, only to die of heartbreak upon recounting his tale of love gone badly awry in Lisbon. The shipwreck of history is thus displaced to the would-be shipwreck of love in Sosa’s sonnet, his swan song, and the sonnet for its part to Sosa’s real-world Lisbon: the first was a sixteenthcentury byword for the misfortunes consequent upon empire, the second a topos for the misfortunes of life. Both are turned into metaphors for the shipwrecks, drownings, and cruelties occasioned by the failure of charity in the Catholic heartlands. For Josiah Blackmore, Camões’s Adamastor is an emblem of the perils of empire, the seafaring disasters that undercut a triumphantly heroic narrative of order and reason on the march (or under sail). In Persiles the barbarity is not the supernatural jilting of an Adamastor, but the flesh-and-blood humiliation of a good man at the altar of a church consecrated to the Mother of God. Just as at other moments we have had occasion to notice that Persiles rewrites the scripts of empire by rewriting Vergil and Tasso, here too we find the text rewriting another major poet of empire, Camões. Persiles does so by reversing conventional assumptions and locating the site of barbarism in the Catholic, law-abiding metropolis, where we would expect to find – given Antonio’s panegyric to Lisbon – the seat of courtesy and polity, Catholic ceremony and charity. Sosa’s angelic voice in song at the beginning of the tale is thus succeeded by Leonor’s ominous silence, a perversion of the silence of the discrete and honourable maiden.28 It contrasts with the monastic quality of the ‘marvellous silence’ (‘maravilloso silencio’) Don Quijote remarks upon when entering Don Diego de Miranda’s house (Don Quijote II.18),29 or the ‘maravilloso silencio’ of Croriano’s room as Ruperta steals in to avenge her husband’s death by murdering her enemy’s son, moments before his beauty become a redemptive-erotic vision disarms her (Persiles 592–6). It is also to be distinguished from the reverential silence of Periandro lucidly dreaming himself into the presence of the Great Mother goddess allegory of Sensuality discussed in chapter 3. Instead it is the evasive silence of a secret withheld, a riddling silence that need not account for itself through the open testing of intentions. The gap here is filled, typically (and calamitously) for this novel, by naive hope and wishful thinking. The strategically evasive silences that govern interaction in the first part of Sosa’s story contrast with the heroic or simply opportune speech of Cloelia on the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 152–4), of Pizarro and Orellana

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in Feliciana’s story (to be discussed later), and most significantly of Periandro and Auristela – with whom Leonor and Sosa bear more than one affinity. Sosa and Leonor prefigure Periandro and Auristela’s crisis in Rome in the choice presented between the ascetic and the conjugal life, in the potential threat of arranged marriage (to Persiles’ elder brother, Maximino), and even in the period Sosa spends in North Africa. Sosa’s two-year sojourn in Barbary (Persiles 201) parallels the duration of the heroes’ pilgrimage to Rome and enacts a variation on their own movement from a ‘barbaric’ antipodes to a Catholic metropolis (Sosa’s from Barbary back to Lisbon), where they – like Sosa – also meet with barbaric customs disguised by Catholic law. An important difference between Auristela’s and Leonor’s story is that Auristela more than once confirms her interest in both marriage and the convent, unlike Leonor, who is never directly asked by her father or Sosa. Another difference is that Auristela remains divided about the choice to the end. For his part, Periandro takes the risk – as they enter Rome (Persiles 628) – of broaching with Auristela whether she is still prepared to go forward with the nuptials. Retrospectively, this emerges as a minor feat of courage that Sosa never hazards, since he counts instead on the father’s mediation and overconfident word. The Lucan quote from the Vulgate that makes up Sosa’s final words belongs to the story of Mary and Martha, and Mary’s choice of the contemplative life at Jesus’ feet. In the Gospel it immediately follows the story of the good Samaritan, which Jesus had told in answer to a publican’s question about what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. The overarching ideal movement of the novel from the Barbaric Isle to Rome is denied here in the Catholic South, in Mary’s own temple. It had been reversed already on the Barbaric Isle itself when Ricla acted the part of the Good Northern Barbarian Samaritan to the exiled Spanish Catholic Antonio. Antonio’s conversion by Ricla from Catholic law (of the sacraments, of the creed) and barbaric aristocratic custom (of honour) to grace (of charity, of compassion) is countered in Lisbon by the choice of divine love – Mary’s choice – mistakenly pitted against human love. In this light, the choice between celibacy and marriage appears of less moment than the publicly cruel manner of the choice, the use of a temple named for the Mother of God to stage the election between two Church sacraments, and the consequent shadow cast on the Church itself as a force for a Christian virtue associated with the spirit of charity (as Antonio’s quote about the Promised Land of Catholic Lisbon would suggest). The episode, finally, also highlights the

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potential ethical consequences of a decorous silence expected from young noblewomen by fathers – particularly about the ecclesiastical cornerstone of legitimate matrimony, mutual consent – that can be contrasted in other episodes of the novel with the salvific power of the sometimes indecorous speech or behaviour of Cloelia, Feliciana, Pizarro, Orellana, and – most importantly – the heroes themselves. Honour Trumps Royal Justice The final counter-narrative in the novel – a story that involves characters from Persiles’ Catholic South who reverse the main-plot trajectory of the protagonists by fleeing North – is the tale of Renato and Eusebia (Persiles 396–7, 404–14, 420–5). The princely protagonists meet them on the North Atlantic Isle of Hermits, in self-imposed exile from the French court. As such, their tale is a key episode for the novel’s exploration of the ideal of Christian politics and its actual practice by a Catholic monarch. This ‘strange’ (‘peregrina,’ Persiles 396) story about a leading French courtier (‘caballero principal francés’) and a French lady-in-waiting has been described – given the origin and station of its protagonists – as a turn on the chivalric genre and – given their hermitic retreat from the court – as an exemplum for the virtues of the ascetic life.30 I dwell instead on Renato and Eusebia’s eremitic ‘penance’ as an example less of any need for personal expiation on their part than of a Catholic society that values honour over truth. Libsomiro, Renato’s jealous rival at the French court, has falsely accused Renato and Eusebia of illicit relations ‘in offence of his royal majesty’ (‘en ofensa de la majestad real,’ Persiles 409). The resulting duel between Libsomiro and Renato is said to take place in a free, Protestant city of the empire (Germany), because duelling is outlawed by the Church in France (Persiles 409).31 And yet this fact about the ‘ley católica’ (‘Catholic law,’ Persiles 409) of the land does not deter the king, ultimate arbiter of justice, from bowing to the rigours of the cult of honour: he is portrayed as effectively unable or unwilling to overturn the duel’s unjust results. It is no accident that Cervantes should locate a story about the private duel and its troubling relation to royal authority in France. Across Europe the aristocracy’s social distinction and purpose faced increasing challenges in the sixteenth century by the democratization of war, the centralization of Crown authority, and the dilution of prestige through the sale of offices and titles.32 The honour duel came into its own in this

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period in part as a spectacular means by which noblemen could distinguish themselves from commoners and reclaim some of the former privilege for resolution of disputes from a monarchy keen on monopolizing justice and improving public order.33 The monarchy responded with efforts to persuade nobles to settle their disputes in royal courts, but often looked the other way for want of effective means to impose its will. The religious wars that ripped France apart in the late sixteenth century helped create a vacuum of royal authority that allowed the aristocracy to reassert itself. One form this reassertion of aristocratic power and distinction took was a vogue for recourse to duelling, a phenomenon – fuelled by the fashion for chivalric literature – especially marked in France and Italy but also documented in England and elsewhere in Europe.34 Renato and Eusebia’s story shows an acute awareness of this historical retreat of French royal authority in the face of aristocratic prerogative. It also suggests how political centralization might serve the cause of justice and public order – when properly exercised – as a counterweight to local privilege.35 In Renato and Eusebia’s story, the duel leaves a man’s life and a woman’s reputation to chance, and the consequence in this case is the ghastly, limbo-like ten-year exile they suffer for being disgraced (they are described as living statues, Persiles 412). The duel fails to establish the truth, and the king does effectively nothing to restore the balance, abdicating his responsibility and surrendering to public opinion. The last straw is that Eusebia’s flight for the Isle of Hermits is said only to confirm her own and Renato’s guilt in the ‘vain judgment of common opinion, almost always mistaken’ (‘vano discurso del vulgo, casi siempre engañado, pues con su huída confirmaba su yerro y el mió,’ Persiles 409). As a result, the tyranny of appearances and the effective rule of slander at the French court militates against a picture of the novel’s Catholic South governed by ‘charity ... at its finest’ (‘la caridad ... en su punto,’ Persiles 432), as Antonio hopefully declares about Lisbon on his return from the Barbaric Isle. Renato and Eusebia’s episode thematically modulates between the novel’s Barbarian and Gothic North and its Catholic South. Like Antonio’s and Feliciana de la Voz’s tales, it is centred on the tragic consequences of the preoccupation with honour sweeping all before it, the characteristic barbarity of Persiles’ South. The quasi-judicial sense lent this private duel by its participants and the French king suggests an analogy with the Barbaric Isle’s law, the trial by ordeal in which a Barbarian leader is chosen to lead his people in world conquest (Persiles

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137–9, discussed in chapter 1). It is especially telling that the story preceding Renato’s and Transila’s recounts the Hibernian ‘barbaric custom’ (‘costumbre bárbara’) of the ius primae noctis (‘the law of the first night,’ Persiles 215–18). A novelistic variation on the droit du seigneur, it is ritualized rape of the new bride by the groom’s relatives on her wedding night, sanctioned by tradition. ‘Ceremonias vanas’ is the term Transila uses to describe Hibernia’s ius primae noctis (Persiles 217), a verbal echo itself of Erasmist and Protestant animadversions against Catholic ceremonial but also an anticipation of the ritual ‘ceremonias’ (Persiles 409) the judges and seconds carry out in preparation for Renato and Libsomiro’s duel. The reference to Hibernia’s ‘ceremonias vanas’ in turn recalls the terms used to describe the Barbaric Law of the North by the Barbarian Ricla (‘vana superstición,’ Persiles 179) and Transila herself (‘de sus ritos y ceremonias y costumbres, del vano asunto de sus profecías,’ Persiles 218). As we saw in chapter 1, Transila and her father – the rationalist astrologer-sage Mauricio – contrast the ‘ceremonias vanas’ of the ius primae noctis with reason and religion. Again in chapter 1 we saw that Mauricio introduces a category to explain the persistence of these ‘ceremonias vanas,’ crucial for comprehension of this episode as well as for those we have already commented on: namely custom, which he calls a second nature (Persiles 216). The Hibernian custom partially re-enacts the Barbaric Isle’s Law (which calls for abduction or purchase of a maiden and forced marriage to a Barbarian) and both by analogy (prompted by the shared presence of ‘ceremonias’) foreshadow the barbaric custom of the outlawed duel that decides Renato and Eusebia’s fate. Ultimately across the divide between the Gothic and Barbarian North and the Catholic South they prefigure the custom of arranged marriage that leads Feliciana’s father and brother to attempt to kill her for choosing her own husband in Book 3, as we shall discuss next. We meet therefore with a displacement gradually southward of barbarism as custom rather than law, preparing the reader for the penetration of the theme in the Catholic, Southern half of Persiles. Hibernia is itself a middle region like Policarpo’s Island, between the nomadic savagery of the North and the urban – at least apparently – lawful South, so that plot, theme, and geography come together to reinforce the transitional effect. It is because of such overlapping linkages that there never takes place any substantial rupture between the barbarism of the North and the law of the Catholic South. Wherever we turn we find the two land- and mindscapes interpenetrated, all the way to Rome.

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As in the stories of Sosa and Leonor and Antonio and Ricla, Persiles infuses a situation of apparent moral clarity with qualifications and troubling implications. Renato, like the cruelly spurned Sosa in Lisbon, is not presented as entirely free of blame. He recapitulates Antonio’s past by choosing arms over letters in his defence of Eusebia’s good name (Persiles 408–9) and naively trusts in the outcome of the duel because the truth is on his side (Persiles 409–10). Confident because he is right, Renato assumes that the ‘purity of his desires’ will guide the inscrutable judgment of God. Even he enters into the spirit of a contest that comes to function here as an irrational custom, opposed to religion, on a par with the ius primae noctis and the Barbaric Law of the North. And yet Persiles’ God rewards neither Renato’s innocence nor his faith, and his deeply felt infamy on being defeated drives him into the bucolic solitudes of an apparently happy exile from the courtly world of intrigue and adulation – but also from his homeland, parents, comforts, wealth, and above all honour (Persiles 411–12). That a Catholic monarch would effectively allow a private honour duel to take the place of a trial (the riepto or judicial duel had long since fallen out of use), with such grave consequences, shows just how far Persiles’ Catholic world can stray from its own ideal of justice (represented in this episode by its ‘Catholic law’). Indeed, as an ordeal (with its root sense of judgment) that bears an entirely or largely arbitrary relation to the larger question it is asked to decide, the duel here is not fundamentally different from the Barbaric Law for the succession of the Barbarian people. The Benjamins reap the rewards of their elders’ commitment to arms, in Renato’s episode as in Persiles’ leading-man story. Defeated, Renato renounces his ‘estate’ (‘hacienda’) in favour of his younger brother Sinibaldo. As such, Renato’s profession of arms is to Maximino’s inclination to war (Persiles 703) as Renato’s younger brother Sinibaldo is to Maximino’s brother Persiles. In the same spirit of narrative analogy, Renato’s rival Libsomiro is described as ‘more proud and arrogant than sure of his conscience’ (‘más soberbio y arrogante que seguro de su conciencia,’ Persiles 410) – a characterization that makes him one of the novel’s many Southern Catholic doubles for the arch–Northern Barbarian Bradamiro (‘more arrogant than arrogance itself’ [‘arrogante sobre la misma arrogancia’], Persiles 149). As we saw in chapter 1, Bradamiro reaps what he sows, but Libsomiro is allowed to dictate the moment and the terms by which he finally comes clean. For this reason we can say that in the novel’s Catholic South, as not even on the Barbaric Isle, pride triumphs over truth.

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The account of Renato and Eusebia’s hermitic life in the North is strangely ambiguous: ‘We buried the fire [of passion] in the snow and, in peace and love like two moving statues, we have lived in this place for almost ten years’ (‘Enterramos el fuego en la nieve y, en paz y en amor, como dos estatuas movibles, ha que vivimos en este lugar casi diez años,’ Persiles 412). Ascetic reclusion is not for Renato and Eusebia a choice following a long, full life of service, unlike Soldino’s in southern France (Persiles 598–605). Such is the power of the honour code at the French court, despite the ‘Catholic law’: to fall afoul of it is to court ten years of exile that no amount of Golden Age, epicurean, and pastoral imagery used to elevate Renato and Eusebia’s environs or the reception given their guests on the Isle of Hermits (‘El adorno, las frutas, las puras y limpias aguas,’ Persiles 407) can entirely redeem, and in fact Renato calls their exile his ‘siniestro estado’ (‘sinister state,’ Persiles 420). The figure of ‘two moving statues’ used to characterize the chaste couple, married without post-Tridentine ceremony and yet living a life described in monastic terms (holy, silent, and solitary), suggests that they experience their retreat on the Isle of Hermits as a kind of living death – a social embalming by dishonour they must endure despite their innocence, which is never questioned. As a result, the picture of ongoing penance for crimes they did not commit is chilling and challenges any attempt to make a spiritual or philosophical victory of it. So it can come as no surprise that – while Renato and Eusebia speak of heaven, show contempt for the world, and await the eternal life trusting in God’s compassion on the isle – given the first chance to return to the court with honour, they seize it (Persiles 412–13, 420–4). The king’s justice does finally arrive, only late and fortuitously. Renato’s servants bring news of Libsomiro’s deathbed repentance for his malice and envy and for bearing false witness against Eusebia (Persiles 421). It is only then that, following ten years of exile and the fatal good offices of an ‘enfermedad’ (‘illness’) that kills Libsomiro, the French king – honouring the weight of last words – ‘declared ... [Renato] victorious and Eusebia chaste and pure’ (‘declaró ... [a Renato] vencedor y, a Eusebia, por honesta y limpia’). The Southern Catholic monarch’s long-delayed act of justice – which depends on Libsomiro’s chance last-minute fit of conscience – is counterpointed with an intertwined story about rights wronged by the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Periandro in his search for Auristela on a ship outfitted by a grateful Northern King Cratilo of Bituania (Persiles 418). There is also a suggestive historical counterpoint with the heroic Emperor Charles V,

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whose ‘glorious death’ (‘gloriosa muerte’) is reported by Sinibaldo in the same moment, and whose glory – the voluntary abdication of supreme power for monastic retirement at Yuste – could not be further removed from the hollow glory of Libsomiro’s death or Renato’s effectively forced retirement in disgrace. The analogy with, and the divergence from, the Spaniard Antonio’s story only heightens the sense of justice gone badly awry at the French court. Like Antonio, Renato flees North to escape the consequences of a pendencia de honor (‘an affair of honour’). Their respective Northern idylls, however, are sharply contrasted in motivations and results. Renato’s pastoral retirement from the mundanal ruido (‘the worldly noise’) of the court is described as a defeat, a retreat, even a form of hiding: ‘I sought to exile myself and come to these Northern parts to seek a place where the infamy of my infamous defeat could not reach me and where silence would bury my name’ (‘quise desterrarme y venir a estas setentrionales partes, a buscar lugar donde no me alcanzase la infamia de mi infame vencimiento y donde el silencio sepultase mi nombre,’ Persiles 411). Antonio also fled his (Spanish) homeland following a pendencia de honor, but Antonio’s enemy is long since dead and the respective families reconciled by the time Antonio returns to his hometown of Quintanar de la Orden in Castile (Persiles 513). The death of Antonio’s enemy is not presented as a condition for his honourable reintegration into Spanish society, which he undertakes with Ricla and their children on his own volition rather than at the mercy – as in Renato’s case – of a Catholic court’s failure to abide fully by its own ‘Catholic law’ and to show a greater regard for truth than reputation. What stands out in stark relief is the injustice of a penance Renato and Eusebia serve for violation of the religion of honour. Hence the ghoulish ambivalence of the imagery of ‘moving statues’ that is used to describe the couple on the Isle of Hermits, and the born-again connotations of the return once Libsomiro confesses. As the Danish Prince Arnaldo expresses the ‘common opinion’ of the court, ‘there is no blessing in life’ (‘no hay acrecentamiento de vida’) that could best the recovery of honour once lost and then regained (Persiles 421). Indeed politically that is what the king’s restoration of honour means for them, a rebirth in society rather than in Christ, in reputation rather than in virtue. In place of a celebration of a divinely ordained justice, the French court offers a defeatist renunciation or deferral of it. The ending anticipates the fortuitousness of the main-plot resolution in Rome, courtesy of Maximino’s death – as it also anticipates the fortu-

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itous death of Isabel Castrucha’s uncle in Lucca, which releases her to marry Andrea Marulo in Book 3. Justice in Persiles’ Catholic South may be blind, but it is the blindness of Lady Fortune and her breezily revolving wheel rather than the blindness of the impartial judge. In Rome, the narrator passes a glancing judgment on Renato’s story in the guise of Arnaldo’s report about his journey to the Eternal City: ‘He explained how he had encountered Renato in France, the French gentleman wrongly [against right or law] defeated in battle, but now free and victorious thanks to his enemy’s [bad] conscience’ (‘Contó también cómo había encontrado en Francia a Renato, el caballero francés vencido en la batalla contra derecho y libre y victorioso por la conciencia de su enemigo,’ Persiles 682). Unusually, as happens in Leonor’s story, the narrative interpolates a verdict of startling clarity. Its terms (‘contra derecho’ [‘against right or law’ or ‘wrongly’]) underscore the emphasis for which I have argued on the political – in particular, the judicial – failure of the ‘lawful’ Catholic South rather than the putative celebration of the ascetic life in Renato and Eusebia’s exile. The Cult of Sacrifice Averted Periandro and Auristela learn of Feliciana de la Voz’s story (Persiles 447–64, 469–83) when they cross into Spain from Portugal in Book 3, one of a sequence in which they are revealed the marvels and barbarities of the Catholic South. Near Badajoz (in Extremadura) the young woman flees to the countryside and is taken in by oxherds. Her father and brother, in hot pursuit, are determined to kill her for choosing her husband – Rosanio, a local nobleman – and for conceiving a child out of wedlock. They wind up in the temple of the Monastery of Guadalupe, a Hieronymite centre of an important cult to the Virgin. Moved by the temple, Feliciana raises her voice in song, and her voice gives her away. The brother nearly dispatches her right there in the basilica, but the father persuades him to haul her outside. In the face of such bloodthirstiness, the awesome iconic, sensory, and institutional aura of Guadalupe is largely impotent and exerts only enough power through decorum to displace the imminent sacrificial scene to the public square outside the monastery. There, Feliciana’s father and brother prepare to exact revenge in the name of family honour. Friends of the father and brother at long last persuade them to forgive their daughter and sister. Scholarship has convincingly drawn two contrary pictures of the episode: one view idealizing and celebratory of orthodox (even Triden-

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tine) values associated with the Virgin, icons, miracle narrative, ceremony, and sacrament (in this tradition, Feliciana is a fallen woman miraculously redeemed);36 another view critical of a cult that allows the most barbaric violence to flourish under its nose, Erasmist and even Protestant in its skepticism toward a temple grotesquely packed with exvotos (in this counter-tradition, Feliciana is in a sense herself the miracle).37 The two interpretive tendencies recognize powerful mythic archetypes for Feliciana: a narrative that opposes pagan subtexts (such as the story of Mirra, told by Ovid in The Metamorphoses) to the Virgin ideal;38 Feliciana’s identification with God’s creation and with nature itself; and her simultaneous portrayal as a born-again Eve, Mother of God, and cosmic first mother of all humanity who antedates and overshadows the Virgin, the Church, and Christianity. Though ideologically opposed, the two critical traditions capture important aspects of the tale: the metaphysical and institutional power of the Church, on the one hand, and Feliciana’s mythic persona, on the other. And yet neither the Church nor Feliciana is given the last word in the story. The Church is physically imposing and yet effectively absent. Feliciana is iconic and ultimately rewarded, but her fate is finally decided by others. Both the Church and Feliciana are upstaged by the murderous preoccupation with reputation, which is – as we have seen throughout this study – one of the primary manifestations of barbaric Catholic ‘customs’ in Persiles. The episode thus shares with Renato’s the glaring power of an honour code, ostensibly put on the ropes by ‘Catholic law’ (against duelling in Renato’s story, as we saw), but which we find time and again revealed to be the actual law of the Catholic lands. It links the French court of Renato’s sovereign with the local nobility of the Spanish countryside (Extremadura) and both with the Barbaric Isle. As in Sosa and Leonor’s tale in Lisbon, there are cautionary parallels with the heroes’ own quest to reconcile matrimonial gusto and ley: Persiles is pursued by his elder brother Maximino much as Feliciana is, and for much the same reason. On the other hand, we find here a limited solution to the uncontested rule of honour that obtains at the French court and to the violence institutionalized by Northern Barbarians and imitated by barbaric Southern Catholics (as discussed in chapter 1). Against such odds, the apparent miracle of reconciliation in the shadow of the great Hieronymite monastery raises more questions than answers about responsibility for the tale’s eleventh-hour resolution of conflict without violence. To address these questions I focus on the episode’s quasiethnographic interest in the Extremaduran nobility, where we would

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expect the religion of reputation to find its home: that is, the local nobility’s peculiar mores, the self-defeating way in which it sometimes understands its own interests, and the chasm between its ideals and the Catholic counter-ideals voiced by Rosanio and the concluding hymn to the Virgin. A narrative strategy we have seen used throughout Persiles is the estrangement of the familiar through paradox, a strategy particularly suited to an episode about the nobility turned against itself. Indeed, the reversal of perspective is built into the story’s Flight into Egypt subtext (Persiles 448–50): if Feliciana’s persecuting father and brother are to Rosanio, Feliciana, and the newborn child as Herod is to the Holy Family, then Spain is not hospitable Egypt but Herod’s hostile Palestine. On the run and desperate to safeguard the infant, Rosanio crosses paths with the Gothic and Barbarian pilgrim-heroes and urgently appeals for help. If there is charity and courtesy in foreign lands, he says, there must be compassionate souls everywhere (Persiles 448). The question implicitly raised by the episode is where the ideals of charity and courtesy articulated by Rosanio are to be found at home in Catholic Extremadura. Having dispensed with paternal blessing and Church ceremony for their marriage, Feliciana and Rosanio initially find sanctuary in nature, foreign pilgrims, and rustic oxherds unconcerned about (familial or ecclesiastical) ceremonial scruples. Feliciana, who has just given birth, asks to be hidden underground and – in imitation of pre-Christian fertility imagery and Marian legends about icons miraculously discovered in the hollow of a tree39 – takes cover in a holm oak (Persiles 450–1). The infant for his part is suckled by goats. In the initial encounter with the foreign pilgrims, Rosanio entrusts the newborn child and a gold chain for safekeeping to the Barbarian Ricla, described as a ‘compassionate woman’ (‘mujer compasiva,’ Persiles 448). They are all given refuge by oxherds, who do not seem to care that Feliciana and Rosanio are officially unmarried, the baby illegitimate and – as the father Rosanio points out – not yet baptized (Persiles 449). They thus find ‘charity’ (‘caridad,’ Persiles 450) where Catholic ceremony is ostensibly at large and ‘courtesy’ where we should not expect it, in ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Barbarian and Gothic pilgrims and Extremaduran rustics. In a pastoral Extremadura that recalls at once the savagery of the novel’s Barbarian North and the bucolic idealism of Vergil’s Eclogues, the bucolic ideal is located in the oxherds and the savagery in the local nobility (a pattern that applies as well to the French Lord Rubertino and the Spaniard Antonio before he meets the Barbarian Ricla). No

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wonder then that Feliciana will dress as a pilgrim and join the group, engaging in a Southern Catholic imitatio of Gothic and Barbarian Northerners much as Antonio is converted by the Barbarian Ricla in the North (as discussed in chapter 2). The reversal of perspective is most overt in the description of the basilica of Guadalupe itself, the backdrop for the would-be murder.40 Readers are revealed the haunting display of ex-votos from the astonished point of view of the protagonists, graphically conjured by the narrator. This evocation of the interior of Guadalupe, which resembles another of the basilica of Loreto in Cervantes’ El licenciado Vidriera (1613),41 has been characterized as pious and sublime and less often as a grotesque Erasmist nightmare of popular religious practice encouraged by the post-Tridentine Church.42 Rather than enter the lists to decide whether there is veiled Erasmist criticism, I draw attention to the lexicon of marvel used to describe the Northern, Gothic protagonists’ point of view. Here is the initial passage: They entered her temple and, where they expected to find on its walls, hung for adornment, purple cloth from Tyre, damask from Syria, and brocade from Milan, they found instead crutches left by the lame, wax eyes left by the blind, arms hung there by the maimed, and shrouds cast aside by the dead, who, after having fallen to the depths of misery, are now alive, now healed, now free, and now happy, thanks to the great mercy of the Mother of mercies, who in that small place has her most blessed Son take the field with the squadron of his infinite mercies. These miraculous decorations made such an impression [apprehension] on the hearts of the devout pilgrims that they took in every corner of the temple, and it seemed to them as if captives were flying through the air, with their chains wrapped around them, to hang them from the holy walls, and the ill were dragging their crutches, and the dead their shrouds, seeking a spot to display them, because in the holy temple there is no longer room: so great is the number covering the walls. (Entraron en su templo y, donde pensaron hallar por sus paredes, pendientes por adorno, las púrpuras de Tiro, los damascos de Siria, los brocados de Milán, hallaron en lugar suyo muletas que dejaron los cojos, ojos de cera que dejaron los ciegos, brazos que colgaron los mancos, mortajas de que se desnudaron los muertos, todos, después de haber caído en el suelo de las miserias, ya vivos, ya sanos, ya libres y ya contentos, merced a la larga misericordia de la madre de las misericordias, que en aquel pequeño lugar

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hace campear a su benditísimo hijo con el escuadrón de sus infinitas misericordias. De tal manera hizo aprehensión estos milagrosos adornos en los corazones de los devotos peregrinos, que volvieron los ojos a todas las partes del templo y les parecía ver venir por el aire volando los cautivos, envueltos en sus cadenas, a colgarlas de las santas murallas y, a los enfermos, arrastrar las muletas y, a los muertos, mortajas, buscando lugar donde ponerlas, porque ya en el sacro templo no cabían: tan grande es la suma que las paredes ocupan.) (Persiles 471–2)

The language of surprise (where the protagonists might expect rich purple cloth, damasks, and brocades, they come instead upon piles of ex-votos) and the perspective of wide-eyed wonder underscore the strange, exotic, marvellous appearance of Southern Catholicism to the devout Northern Gothic and Barbarian pilgrim heroes. The narrator’s own immediate comment reinforces this effect, calling it a ‘novedad’ or novelty (‘a novelty, never before seen’ [‘(e)sta novedad, no vista hasta entonces’], Persiles 472) because an entirely fresh and surprising experience for the Northern pilgrims: ‘They were astonished and could not tire of looking at what they were seeing nor admiring what they imagined’ (‘Los tenía como asombrados y no se hartaban de mirar lo que veían ni de admirar lo que imaginaban’). The snapshot of the church’s interior is marvelling, acute, and subtle about the power of sacred spaces and icons. The narrator’s terms allow readers to credit either the supernatural (Marian intercession) or faith, Christian miracle or the wonder of human imagination. Nevertheless, neither the description nor the story settles the issue for the reader. Carried away by the marvels before their astonished eyes, the pilgrims’ response to the monastery’s sensory avalanche is to imagine miracle stories about captives (historically most likely in Islamic North Africa), the lame, and the dead. The protagonist-onlookers even picture those same captives flying through the air to deposit their chains in the monastery, a Southern Catholic would-be miracle to match the Italian Rutilio’s marvellous story of the Roman sorceress’s flying carpet that he claimed bore him to Norway (Persiles 187). The miracle of liberation from captivity in real-world Barbary is thus played off implicitly against the marvels associated with captivity in the novel’s Barbarian and Gothic North. However we may think about the efficacy of the icon and the Virgin’s intercession in the lives of those who have deposited their ex-votos in the monastery, the image and temple prove unable to liberate Feliciana

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from her own captivity to her father and brother’s will. Many early readers undoubtedly took pleasure in recognizing the conventions of miracle narrative that underpin this profane entertainment (in Feliciana’s Marian attributes, the Marian setting and legendary subtext, and the sudden conversion), conventions noted by Forcione.43 Those same conventions may well have stimulated reflection on long-standing debates about the material and spiritual efficacy of prayer, temples, icons, ceremony, and sacraments.44 Earlier in the episode, the pilgrims first catch sight of the ‘great and sumptuous monastery’ (‘grande y suntuoso monasterio,’ Persiles 471) through a landscape of mountain passes. The narrator is moved to refer three times in one sentence (reverently or hyperbolically?) to the ‘holiest image’ (‘santísima imagen’) of the Virgin enclosed within its ‘walls’ (‘murallas’), calling the Virgin ‘mother of orphans’ (‘madre de los huérfanos’), ‘freedom for captives’ (‘libertad de los cautivos’), and ‘comfort for the afflicted’ (‘consuelo de los afligidos’) – telling attributes that allegorically restate such key aspects of the episode as Feliciana’s abandoned baby, the protagonists’ Barbaric Isle captivity, and the mission of the Hieronymite Order. But the narrative soon disabuses us of any hope that Feliciana will be served by the material efficacy of putatively miracle-working icons and temples, songs for Mary, or even the rapturous beauty of her voice. Despite the awesome presence of the monastery, Feliciana’s father and brother remain inclined to murder her in the shadow of the Virgin. Indeed one of the more interesting ironies of the story is that Feliciana’s soaring, sublime voice and hymn to the Virgin give her away. Far from calling forth a divine intercession, the temple and hymn very nearly seal her fate. More troublingly, the same probing questions about the efficacy of the icon could be raised about the monastery itself as sanctuary. The Monastery of Guadalupe was closely associated with the Castilian Crown through patronage and with the New World through the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico.45 The Hieronymite Order entrusted with Guadalupe followed the Rule of St Augustine and was sworn to minister to the spiritual needs of pilgrims and sailors, to religious and secular travellers. It was also charged with the care of the celebrated Mosteiro dos Jerónimos in Lisbon and several prominent royal retreats in Spain (the Jerónimos in Madrid, the Escorial near Madrid, and Yuste in Extremadura, for example), which makes evident its intimate association with Iberian royalty and with hospitality. And yet it is in this very pilgrims’ temple that Feliciana’s father is described as ‘shouting for his

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daughter’ (‘dando voces por su hija’), whose echo of the first line of the novel – a reference to Barbarian and barbaric shouts – Diana de Armas Wilson has astutely recognized.46 Although Feliciana’s brother is prepared to kill her on the spot, the father makes a small concession to its sanctity by declaring, ‘This is no ... theatre of miseries nor a place for retribution’ (‘No es ... teatro de miserias ni lugar de castigos,’ Persiles 474). The temple here too, like the Convent of the Mother of God in Sosa and Leonor’s Lisbon, is called a ‘teatro’ and is very nearly made the stage for another profanation. The concession to decorum is just powerful enough to move the imminent sacrificial scene outside, but not to avert it. Nevertheless, not before, during, or after the confrontation does a cleric make an appearance. The order most intimately associated with the itinerancy of the Spanish Crown effectively can offer Feliciana no sanctuary. In case we miss the point, we are reminded of the monarchy’s ineffectiveness just when Feliciana has decided to escape her vengeful family by joining the pilgrims on their journey. Erupting in the locus amoenus centre of her episode is the ‘strange event’ (‘estraño suceso’) of Diego de Parraces’s murder, the et in Arcadia ego cautionary tale (Persiles 464–9) that exposes the precariousness of justice in Auristela’s reputedly holy and peaceful Spain. Diego stumbles into the pilgrims’ midst, with a dagger sunk in his back, and dies before their eyes. We later learn that he was killed in open country by a relation named Don Sebastián de Soranzo. A ‘matter of love’ (‘causa amorosa,’ Persiles 465) is all we are told is behind the murder, just enough for us to notice the parallel with Feliciana’s story. The Holy Brotherhood (‘Santa Hermandad’), nowhere in sight when Diego is murdered, suddenly descends on the dead man and the pilgrims (Persiles 467). Instead of protecting the pilgrims from highwaymen, as was their duty, the constables of this Crown-sponsored rural police force take them for highwaymen and murderers of Diego, for fraudulent pilgrims in disguise. This is only the first of a series of literal-minded misreadings of appearances that threaten a miscarriage of justice. At Cáceres the pilgrims are brought before the corregidor, the magistrate appointed by the Crown to arbitrate disputes. The corregidor too (mis)judges by appearance (he relies on his lieutenant’s impression, he is quick to suspect the bloodstains on Periandro, and so on) and moves to jail the innocent pilgrims. As if more irony were needed, we learn that the corregidor is a member of the Order of Santiago, the military order putatively charged with the protection of pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. The pil-

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grims are spared the false rap only by a chance slip of paper, a note that turns up in the victim’s hand naming the murderer (Persiles 467–8). Diego had suspected Don Sebastián might want to kill him and took the precaution of leaving a note with a local innkeeper identifying him. Diego and the anonymous innkeeper thus win a place (with Doña Guiomar of Lisbon) in that small pantheon of unsung, mostly faceless heroes in Persiles whose sense of justice (in Diego’s case, from beyond the grave) is the heroic exception to the norm in the novel’s Catholic South. Were it not for this double stroke of luck, the pilgrims would be jailed for a crime they did not commit, much as Renato and Eusebia serve a penance for a crime they did not commit at the French court. Justice here too is something of a miracle – the appearance of Diego’s note acting the part of Libsomiro’s deathbed confession in France. Even so, the killer escapes, the crime is unpunished, and the dead man – as the narrator puts it dryly – remains dead. The picture of justice in this haven of peace and holiness is made complete by bribes (Persiles 469). The chain Rosanio had given Ricla to protect his and Feliciana’s child is now needed to free the pilgrims, thus linking one injustice with another. The corregidor decides to keep the portrait found on Diego for himself, a fitting reward for a magistrate wedded to appearances (a tendency that binds him to Arnaldo, Nemurs, and the Roman governor). This is what representative Catholic Southerners in Persiles do when faced with ‘meek lambs’ (‘corderos mansos’): rather than imitate, they fleece them. Diego de Parraces’s story reveals the scattershot arbitrariness, incompetence, and corruption of justice in Extremadura – but it also incidentally gives a measure of Feliciana’s vulnerability when her father and brother confront her, since we know by now that the agents of neither Church nor Crown can be relied on.47 And yet a miracle of sorts does happen: the apparently abrupt conversion of murderous father and brother into loving ones. One way to think about it is provided by the hymn to the Virgin, which Feliciana begins to sing in the temple and which offers a kind of allegorical gloss on her own story. It says that the Virgin stayed the knife of Abraham, sparing Isaac, and in his place offered the meekest lamb for the true sacrifice (‘sois el brazo de Dios que detuvistes / de Abrahán la cuchilla rigurosa / y, para el sacrificio verdadero, / nos distes el mansísimo cordero,’ Persiles 482). Feliciana’s misfortune suggests that the Abrahamic impulse to sacrifice Isaac did not end there: her own father and brother set out to sacrifice her not at God’s behest as a test of faith but in propitiation of the idol of honour. From the Barbaric Isle to Rome,

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Persiles is the novelistic record of that temptation to carry out Abraham’s abortive sacrifice in the name of faith, love, decorum, honour, authority, and interest. The flight into Egypt subtext of Feliciana’s tale makes her a latter-day Virgin Mary, but transposed to the hymn she is a wouldbe Isaac or Christ. If the Virgin of the hymn stays the sacrificial knife of Abraham, who then stays the knife in Feliciana’s story? In the sublunar world of Persiles the Virgin’s mediating role is played by the justices outside the temple, the townspeople gathered by the father’s angry shouts, and Rosanio’s pleas (Persiles 474–5). Unlike Diego de Parraces, who is murdered by his kinsman in the countryside, Feliciana has the advantage of witnesses in the town square. However, they merely manage to delay the moment of revenge. The miracle of actual reconciliation is brought about by the reasoning of Pizarro and Orellana. Scholarship informs us that by lending these surnames to the ultimate heroes of the tale Cervantes may well have been paying tribute to family and friends in Trujillo (both lineages were linked to the Cervantes of Extremadura)48 or else rooting the tale in local colour through surnames conspicuously tied to Extremadura.49 This tells us why the heroes are called Pizarro and Orellana but not how they make the peace. I quote from the brief scene in full to get a better grasp of the source and solution of the conflict. Just as violence is about to erupt, Don Francisco Pizarro and Don Juan de Orellana come providentially to the rescue: But before [Feliciana’s] father and brother could say a word, Don Francisco Pizarro embraced her father and Don Juan de Orellana her brother, for they were great friends. Don Francisco said to the father, ‘What has become of your good sense [‘discreción’], my lord Pedro Tenorio? How can this be? Is it possible that you yourself wish to perpetrate your own disgrace? Do you not see that these affronts, rather than punishments, deserve forgiveness? What is wrong with Rosanio to make him unworthy of Feliciana? And what will become of Feliciana now if she loses Rosanio?’ Don Juan de Orellana was making practically the same arguments to her brother, adding others, saying, ‘My lord Sancho, anger never promises a happy end for its impulses: it is a passion of the soul, and an impassioned soul rarely hits the mark. Your sister has known how to choose a good husband; to take revenge because they did not observe the proper ceremonies and respects will not do, for you will run the risk of toppling and levelling the whole edifice of your peace of mind. Look here, my lord

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Sancho, I have a precious possession of yours at home: I have a nephew of yours whom you cannot deny unless you deny yourself: such is his likeness to you.’ (Pero, antes que su [Feliciana’s] padre y hermano respondiesen palabra, don Francisco Pizarro se abrazó con su padre, y don Juan de Orellana con su hermano, que eran sus grandes amigos. Don Francisco dijo al padre: – ¿Dónde está vuestra discreción, señor don Pedro Tenorio? ¡Cómo! ¿Y es posible que vos mismo queráis fabricar vuestra ofensa? ¿No veis que estos agravios, antes que la pena, traen las disculpas consigo? ¿Qué tiene Rosanio que no merezca a Feliciana? O ¿qué le quedará a Feliciano de aquí adelante, si pierde a Rosanio? Casi estas mismas o semejantes razones decía don Juan de Orellana a su hermano, añadiendo más, porque le dijo: – Señor don Sancho, nunca la cólera prometió buen fin de sus ímpetus: ella es pasión del ánimo, y el ánimo apasionado pocas veces acierta en lo que emprende. Vuestra hermana supo escoger buen marido; tomar venganza de que no se guardaron las debidas ceremonias y respetos no será bien hecho, porque os pondréis a peligro de derribar y echar por tierra todo el edificio de vuestro sosiego. Mirad, señor don Sancho, que tengo una prenda vuestra en mi casa: un sobrino os tengo, que no le podréis negar si no os negáis a vos mismo, tanto es lo que os parece.’) (Persiles 475–6)

First we should note the oddities in this climactic scene of an episode that – from beginning to end – flaunts its marvels: Pizarro and Orellana, it turns out, are friends of Rosanio’s and of Feliciana’s father and brother, and yet earlier Feliciana is said not to know their names. So tight-knit is the local nobility that the conflict is very nearly a family affair, and yet they act like strangers to each other. There are variations on this theme elsewhere in the story: Feliciana fails to recognize her newborn infant in a key moment (Persiles 460), and the justices in the town square regard Don Pedro and Don Sancho sooner as Feliciana’s judge and executioner than as father and brother (Persiles 474). The passage makes particularly plain just how beholden the settlement is to the demands of reputation, how it can make strangers of kin and even blinker them about the clan interests they think they are defending in the name of honour. Pizarro and Orellana appeal to the fears and interests of Feliciana’s outraged father and brother in a language that they understand, enabling them to see through their wounded pride to the rightness of Feliciana’s gusto. The reasons Pizarro and Orellana

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offer to persuade Don Pedro and Don Sancho to forgive Feliciana and Rosanio recognize both their sense of disgrace and the dawning awareness all around that the family has more to gain by this apparent dishonour than they had had any reason to hope. There are, after all, ‘affronts that carry their own excuses with them’ (‘los agravios que traen las disculpas consigo’). What matters, they insist, is that Feliciana chose well and not the pursuit of revenge for a refusal to observe ceremonial and customary priorities. In a familiar bit of honour-code casuistry, the revenge itself is said to be a potential cause of the ‘ofensa’ because it would broadcast the transgression. Earlier in the same scene, Rosanio had given a preliminary lesson in persuasion by arguing from self-interest in the voice of reason, tacitly appealing to the theoretically honoured ecclesiastical principle of mutual consent in marriage: ‘Does a maiden deserve to die for marrying against her parents’ will?’ (‘¿Merece muerte el casarse una doncella contra la voluntad de sus padres?’). He, like the astute, ruse-orchestrating suitor Basilio in Don Quijote (II.21), invokes his rights to his beloved by pointing to his ‘cleverness’ or ‘ability’ (‘industria,’ Persiles 475), along with his accredited nobility and wealth. The explicit contrast between ‘industria’ and ‘milagro’ (‘miracle’) in Basilio’s episode50 is left implicit in Rosanio’s account. To explain this apparently miraculous conversion of imminent tragedy into happy ending, Alban Forcione has drawn attention to Pizarro’s appeal to the father’s ‘discreción’ and interpreted it as an expression of faith in the power of a humanist conception of reason.51 The redeeming role of rhetoric in this story certainly contrasts with the deadly silence that had contributed fatally to the Leonor and Sosa debacle (as discussed earlier in the chapter), much as on the Barbaric Isle Auristela’s maid Cloelia heroically speaks up by revealing that her cross-dressed disguise violates the Barbaric Law for sacrifice (Persiles 152–4). And yet Don Pedro and Don Sancho are only moved to forgive Feliciana and embrace Rosanio as one of their own when Pizarro and Orellana make the case by appeal to the family’s sense of honour and therefore to its interests. As it turns out, Rosanio is one of their own, indeed – in social terms – even better. Feliciana’s family and their choice for Feliciana (Luis Antonio) had been described as belonging to the nobility, but of middling wealth; Rosanio’s as noble and far richer (Persiles 453–5). The irony is that Feliciana’s apparently rash and impetuous passion has led her, as Rosanio’s speech hints, to make a socially better match than the one arranged, as was customary with the nobility, by her father. Feliciana has given the lie to the well-worn assumption that

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wayward desire, clandestine matrimony, and female protagonism lead inevitably to the parental nightmare of socially disastrous consequences such as bad judgment, feckless husband and father, bastard child, abandonment and disgrace, and the ever-present threat of spiralling revenge feuds. Rosanio passes the test of conjugal fidelity with flying colours as we saw, proving himself a faithful husband to Feliciana and a protective father to their newborn child. An even more powerful irony is that Feliciana heroically upholds (and potentially renews) the substance of her father’s social orthodoxy (to marry a man of equal or higher rank and wealth) and yet is nearly killed for failure to adhere to its ceremonies, violating what for Orellana is the minor issue of whether Feliciana sought authorization to marry first from her father. Even on its own narrow terms, the overriding preoccupation with reputation comes perversely close to defeating itself here. The putative miracle that reconciles love and interest takes place, therefore, because Feliciana’s reckless youthful passion has served her family’s own ends better than rational parental interest or vengeful defence of the family name. Don Pedro and Don Sancho almost immediately capitulate to this fact, earning the following narrative judgment: ‘The father and son won a reputation for prudence, the friends for intelligence and eloquence’ (‘Ganó fama de prudente el padre, hijo y los amigos de discretos y bien hablados,’ Persiles 476). They do, therefore, win renown for the classical virtue of prudence. But as we have seen, their prudence is not presented as a (philosophical) end in itself in the spirit of the broadly humanist discourse Forcione associates with ‘discreción.’ Their prudence is a precaution against the staining of the family’s reputation, conditioned by the terms of a deeply entrenched, aristocratic honour code, with its own logic (against broadcasting disgrace) and with its underlying material interests and sentimentality (Rosanio’s status and wealth, the guarantee of paternity sealed by the child’s likeness). More damningly, Feliciana’s liberation from death by her father and brother, and from an arranged marriage, does not imply liberation from the captivity of the honour code. The speech that moves the father pointedly does not appeal to Christian charity or Church authority or an enlightened humanism. It leaves in its place, and in fact depends on, the power of clan interests to persuade the father and brother to give up their murderous pursuit of Feliciana. The episode illustrates to what degree humanist reason and Catholic law are subordinated to ‘barbaric customs’ even where they are outwardly upheld in the novel’s Catholic South.

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If Feliciana’s father and brother seem at first more preoccupied with the ceremonies than with the substance of the aristocratic model of matrimony, neither before nor after the confrontation do they show the least regard for the substance (the principle of mutual consent) or the ceremony (banns, ecclesiastical officiation, and witnesses) of the ecclesiastical model of matrimony. The episode thus draws attention to a nobility with mores set in important ways against Church doctrine – notably, as we discussed in relation to the Leonor and Sosa episode, on the crucial matter of whether parental authority or mutual consent backed by the authority of the Church should dictate betrothals. The glaring absence of clerical representatives in the dispute – which recalls the French sovereign’s abdication of responsibility for justice in Renato’s episode – exposes a Church unable or unwilling to make effective its institutional commitment to the priority of mutual consent as the primary (though not exclusive) basis for legitimate matrimony, a longstanding principle affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, present in earlier Roman and Visigothic law, and reiterated by the Council of Trent. The episode breaks its final lance for an ethical over an iconic or sacramental conception of Catholicism where one might least expect it, in so ostensibly orthodox a setting as the Marian hymn that brings the narrative to a close (Persiles 477–83). We learn after the peace is made that Feliciana had been singing the twelve-stanza hymn in the temple when the sound of her voice gave her away to her brother. Auristela has asked Feliciana to transcribe the lyrics of her truncated song, which is effectively given the last word of the episode. If the middle section of the song celebrates the Creation and the concluding section the Virgin, the first four exalt the celestial House of God. The creation of this house is said to precede the creation of the world, with its foundations in humility and its pillars and walls built of faith, hope, charity, temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude. There is a powerful counterpoint between the initial vision of the monastery’s massive walls (‘murallas,’ Persiles 471), rising imposingly from the mountain fastness landscape as the pilgrims first approach Guadalupe and the invisible walls (‘muros,’ Persiles 478) of God’s House, girded by the theological and classical virtues and conjured just as the pilgrims prepare to resume their journey. Whereas the fortress-like temple that contains the sacred image is able to offer Feliciana no sanctuary, the House of God embodied by the prudence and courage of Pizarro and Orellana ultimately saves her. The hymn later reminds us of the Virgin’s role as intercessor and peace-

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maker, declaring that today justice and peace are joined in the Virgin (‘La justicia y la paz hoy se han juntado / en vos, Virgen santísima,’ Persiles 480–1). Instead of a repudiation of the Marian ideal, what we are shown is the materialization of the House of God and the Virgin, not in the icon, but in the exercise of virtue. If justice and peace are joined today in the Virgin, as the hymn would have it, the Virgin today has effectively worked through Pizarro and Orellana. Indeed, from an ethical standpoint, justice and peace in Feliciana’s tale are the Virgin. Whether Persiles’ claim for the ethical efficacy of the invisible over the visible Church is to be regarded as Tridentine, Erasmist, Protestant, or otherwise may be less interesting than the fact that it locates it in a Marian hymn, as if to say this is Mary’s orthodoxy. In chapter 1 we saw that Cervantes embedded the ecumenical orthodoxy of compassion and repentance in another equally unlikely place for it, the heart of the Roman penitentiaries’ catechism (Persiles 657). It may be a little easier now to understand why Feliciana’s song would have been cut off at the end of the fourth stanza, where the House of God is evoked, and why the hymn would be made visible (or audible) to Auristela and readers only at the end of the episode. Since the invisible Church is made manifest by the practice of the virtues, it stands to reason that the hymn celebrating that House of God would not become visible to readers until justice and peace have been realized. Nevertheless, this is hardly a triumphantly happy ending, qualified as it is by the evidence that the virtues of the Virgin’s hymn prevail – at least for the moment – only when they are recognized to serve well-entrenched patrimonial interests. Before continuing their journey, the pilgrims visit relics, confess sins, and receive the sacraments (Persiles 476–7). The relative priority of virtue and Catholic ceremony is perfectly captured here: the dispute is settled first by the human miracle of persuasion, and the sacraments follow, as confirmation and as an act binding the community in celebration. Hence, the ceremonies have their place but are clearly subordinated to ethics. We may now also grasp a little more firmly why it is that Auristela, who asks Feliciana to write down the verses, is said to appreciate more than understand them. On the Isle of Fishers (discussed next) Auristela is the virginal mediatrix, the peacemaker and reconciler of law and gusto. As the virginal embodiment of peace and justice on earth, she practises what she may not altogether understand, in stark contrast to Don Pedro and Don Sancho who do not – until late in the day – practise what they do – as noble Southern Catholics – pre-

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sumably know about Rosanio’s ‘courtesy’ or ‘charity.’ It is no mystery now either that the Northern pilgrims should respond to Guadalupe’s monastery walls, icons, and ex-votos as if they were an alien wonder to them, immaterial as they are to the ethical and political ideals represented by these exemplary Gothic and Barbarian protagonists from the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ North. The contrast between the human miracle of persuasion and the supernatural miracle of divine intervention is heightened by comparison with analogous episodes in Heliodorus’s Ethiopica and Lope de Vega’s El peregrino en su patria, Persiles’ prose epic forbears. In comparable narrative circumstances, where Persiles reveals a commitment to human agency, Heliodorus’s Chariclea is saved by an amulet and Lope’s Pánfilo by a hymn to the Virgin that moves his would-be assailants to release him. In Book 8 of The Ethiopica, Theagenes and Chariclea have been temporarily united in Memphis and are staying in the palace of the Persian satrap. The satrap’s wife Arsace has been seized with a violent desire for Theagenes, like Persiles’ Hipólita in Rome for Periandro. Her old female servant Cybele accidentally swallows the poison intended for Chariclea, and Arsace now accuses Chariclea of having murdered her. Chariclea is sentenced to death by burning, and on the following day as she climbs onto the funeral pyre the flames flow around her and, despite herself, she is saved.52 The escape is ascribed by Chariclea herself and the crowd to a miracle, worked by the gods to certify her innocence. In the event, as is later revealed, she owes her salvation to a magic stone. In Lope’s El peregrino en su patria the analogous incident concerns Pánfilo, one of two pairs of star-crossed lover-protagonists. He is carried off by outlaws to a fishing village where the captain of the brigands, Doricleo, importunes a cross-dressed lady whom Pánfilo believes to be his beloved Nise.53 Thinking her unfaithful, Pánfilo is wounded in an attempt to avenge his suspected dishonour and is captured and led off to be hanged at the captain’s order. The pilgrim begs his incipient executioners to allow him to recite one last prayer, a Marian invocation, as is Feliciana de la Voz’s hymn, and they concede. Pánfilo addresses the prayer, which begins ‘Virgin of the sea, North Star’ (‘Virgen del mar, Estrella tramontana’) to an image that he withdraws from his breast pocket. The prayer and piety so move his captors that they release him, deciding to make false report of his death to their captain. Lope here apparently cannot resist the spectacle of hard-bitten brigands with hearts of gold moved to ‘liberalidad’ by the soaring hymn to the Virgin recited by a swooning lover. In Feliciana de

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la Voz’s episode, Persiles allows itself no such divine machinery or cloying sentimentality as we find in Heliodorus’s or Lope’s Greek novels. The concluding scene of Feliciana’s tale situates the miracle of the happy ending squarely within the rhetorical realm of human persuasion by appeal to an entrenched code of honour. As we saw in Renato’s defeat at the French court, this is the effective religion of the Catholic South to which our Northern, Gothic royal protagonists have ostensibly come to ‘perfect’ their faith. Exemplary Justice Persiles’ princely journey – in which the protagonists hear others’ stories, dispense advice, even judge cases, as we shall now see – diffusely evokes the institution of the royal progress. A particularly spectacular example of a royal progress was celebrated to honour the nuptials of Philip III and Margarita of Austria in 1599, for which several chronicles detail the lavish festivities.54 Through these highly choreographed travels European monarchs practised a personal style of rulership with which to reach across the ranks of society, ritually take or reaffirm possession of dominions, confer honours, and exchange gifts.55 They made their presence felt directly, packing the court with them, moving the royal residence from town to town, and in the course of their journey, swearing to uphold local privileges, honouring local shrines, and receiving petitioners who came to ask for justice.56 The chief emblem of wise rule in medieval and early modern European monarchy was indeed the exercise of justice, and it was a duty as well as a presumption.57 Periandro and Auristela are princes rather than ruling monarchs and they remain under the cover of anonymity in their travels. But Persiles does provide a fictional example of this personal style of judicial intervention in the episode on the Isla de Pescadores (the Isle of Fishers, Persiles 342–7).58 It is an illustration of royal justice at work in anticipation of the heroes’ future roles as arbiters of the law and keepers of the peace. As such it reverses and redeems Renato’s story (to anticipate the figural discussion), which highlights as we saw the failure of royal justice in Catholic France. The Isle of Fishers is in effect a paradigmatic test case where Auristela aligns mismatched pairs with their preferences, against parental and sacerdotal authority. That is, she performs an emblematic realignment of gusto (‘pleasure’ or ‘preference’) with sacramental law, heading off the usurpation of one by the other.

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The adventure is introduced in Book 2 on Policarpo’s Isle, when the smitten Princess Sinforosa begs Periandro to tell his story from its beginning and explain how he landed on the island. Periandro must be cagey and keep up the alibi that Auristela is his sister, until they arrive in Rome and somehow sidestep his elder brother Maximino’s prior claim to her. So he chooses instead to begin his narrative with the episode of the Isle of Fishers, a pastoral oasis in Northern waters. It is a story of ‘crossed … intentions’ (‘voluntades … trocadas,’ Persiles 345) in which two couples – Carino, Leoncia, Solercio, and Selviana – have been mismatched by their parents (Persiles 345). Their forced consent is about to issue in the Erasmist companionate ideal of marriage turned nightmarish ‘captivity’ (‘cautiverio’) as Carino has it: a lifelong burden beholden not to their own tastes but to the tyranny of ‘another’s preferences [or pleasure]’ (‘el gusto ajeno’), namely their parents’. The references to ‘theatre’ (‘teatro’), ‘nuptial bed’ (‘tálamo’), and ‘Catholic ceremonies’ (‘católicas ceremonias,’ Persiles 346–7) and the consecration of a mismatch echo Leonor and Sosa’s wedding ceremony in Lisbon. Not unlike Leonor’s story, the dead-end silence of the couples in the face of paternal and ecclesiastical fiat is ascribed to ‘virginal shame’ (‘virginal vergüenza,’ Persiles 346). And yet Auristela calls a halt to the ceremony, following the example of her nursemaid Cloelia on the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 152–4), who saves her life by putting a stop to the Barbarian ritual that would have extracted the cross-dressed princess’s heart. The parallel with Leonor and Sosa’s story is underscored by the fact that Auristela takes over at the height of the originally planned wedding and reverses the outcome in the same climactic moment that Leonor discloses her choice of holy orders over matrimony to Sosa. Auristela uses her personal authority on the Isle of Fishers to redirect Church sacrament toward reconciling gusto and ley rather than pitting one against the other under the pressure of parental preference and interest. By heading off another ceremony – this one Catholic – with potentially heart-crushing (and therefore, in the novel’s terms, barbaric) results, Auristela on the Isle of Fishers redeems the story of Leonor and Sosa and pointedly shows up the miscarriage of local, royal, and papal justice in the novel’s Catholic Badajoz, France, and Rome. There are at once literary and ethical implications built into the parallel between the protagonists’ main-plot story and this local one. As noted, Periandro begins his own retrospective narrative with that of the fisherfolk because he is obliged to keep silent about his and Auristela’s story while they undertake their voyage to Rome. And yet he manages

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to tell their story vicariously nevertheless, since this episode is – like their own – a story of ‘voluntades … trocadas,’ of gustos or preferences coming up against parental (in Periandro’s case, fraternal) authority. The narrative thereby once again finds a clever way to confound the neo-Aristotelian distinction between main and subplot, with an apparent digression that is a variation on the main action. More germane to our purposes, the parallel between main plot and episode also bears ethical implications, as if these commoners were exemplary mirrors for our princely protagonists. Auristela pulls off for these crossed lovers what impersonal fate together with the royal couple’s own initiative and labours will accomplish for the heroes in Rome. Insofar as Auristela is seeking the same justice for these supplicants as Periandro and Auristela are doing for themselves, the story provides a glimpse into the future of would-be monarchs who thus appear more likely to govern themselves by the same laws that hold for their subjects. What is more, the fisherman Carino’s preference for the woman he himself calls ‘the ugly one’ (Leoncia rather than the beautiful Selviana, to whom he has been betrothed by his parents) invests this humble man’s desires with the Neoplatonic dignity conventionally ascribed only to the idealized courtier and his lady with their assumed inherent nobility. And in that same spirit Carino’s loyalty to Leoncia very clearly foreshadows Periandro’s show of loyalty to Auristela in Rome, even as her looks (and health) ebb away under the effects of a poison administered through the machinations of her Roman rival, Hipólita. As we saw in chapter 1, the narrator declares that to love ‘ugly things’ (‘las cosas feas’) appears supernatural and ‘merits being considered a miracle’ (‘[es] digna de tenerse por milagro,’ Persiles 686). We might imagine that the explanation given for Periandro’s unmovable devotion – the ‘miracle’ of loyalty – would shed only a retrospective light on Carino’s, since he – like Periandro – carries out the ‘miracle’ of looking upon his beloved ‘as she was in his soul, where he had her portrait fixed’ (‘sino en el alma, donde la tenía retratada,’ Persiles 685). But Carino, distressed by the imminent mismatch, articulates the point himself in conversation with Periandro: he cannot help the fact he says that ‘in the eyes of my soul, by the light of those virtues I recognize in Leoncia’s, I find that she is the most beautiful woman in the world’ (‘a los ojos de mi alma, por las virtudes que en la de Leoncia descubro, ella es la más hermosa mujer del mundo,’ Persiles 345). If the fisherfolk enable Auristela to anticipate the exemplarity of her (and Periandro’s) eventual rule as crowned heads of State, it is no less true that Carino

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thus enacts by foreshadowing Periandro’s epic labours in Rome. And just as Auristela here shows how much these princes merit their birthright by acting for others by the principle of justice, so it is equally true that the commoners of this episode exemplify the virtue of a noble love freed from the barbaric idolatry of appearances that governs such titled characters as the Barbarian Bradamiro, the Danish Crown Prince Arnaldo, and the French duke of Nemurs (as discussed in chapter 1). It is worth noting that Auristela rather than Periandro is royal embodiment and arbiter of justice in the making here. Auristela not only displaces Periandro, but also the authority of parents and Catholic clerics prepared to sanction a cruel mismatch for life. Her protagonism – in effect, a young woman’s against sacerdotal and parental authority 59 – illustrates Persiles’ distance from a paternalistic and even sometimes misogynistic strain in Pauline and Christian humanist texts. Despite the important affinities with St Paul discussed in chapter 2, Persiles in this moment can be seen to take stock of Pauline teachings that counselled wives be subordinate to their husbands.60 Auristela’s protagonism in this episode also reverses the marginalization of the female one finds not only in The Aeneid, but also in the suppression of Dido’s book (Aeneid IV) in early modern school curricula such as the Jesuit plan of study known as the ratio studiorum (1599).61 Heliodorus had, to be sure, preceded Cervantes in lending both male and female protagonists novelistic top billing.62 But in Heliodorus, Chariclea’s political protagonism is ceremonial and never really exercised, unlike the display of royal authority we see from Auristela long before the succession is made official in Rome. In this sense the claim can be made for Persiles that it suggests a way in which a political novel could anticipate political theory and overcome a problem inherent even in Rousseau’s revolutionary formulations: as Carole Pateman has framed it, political theory’s unacknowledged patriarchalism, the prior sexual contract that – at least implicitly – precedes the social contract.63 Unlike sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social contract theory, Persiles’ account of politics (in the main plot, on the Barbaric Isle, on Policarpo’s Isle, and in Auristela’s handling of her royal prerogative on the Isle of Fishers) keeps the relationship among sex, gender roles, and political authority front and centre. Moreover, in Rousseau’s revolutionary rhetoric, according to Carol Pateman, a fraternal, democratic order among men (defined across castes and classes) overturns paternal authority, but the new order’s common objective is access to women excluded from that order. In Auristela’s exercise of power, the fraternal alibi for her relationship

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with Periandro, and the decisive role played by the hero’s mother, Queen Eustoquia (Persiles 702), against the elder brother’s rights by primogeniture, the – at least – symbolic parity between men and women in politics is implicitly championed. The terms of Auristela’s intervention are worth dwelling on for their wider implications. She claims for herself a ‘keen and perceptive mind’ (‘un entendimiento perspicaz y agudo,’ Persiles 346), such that ‘by just seeing a person’s face I can look into his soul and read his mind’ (‘viendo el rostro de una persona, le leo el alma y le adevino los pensamientos,’ Persiles 346). Her master class in exemplary justice is shown to be served well by the value placed on reading other minds, associated here with the reading of others’ gustos – a virtue also displayed by Periandro in his dream episode (as discussed in chapter 3). Although Auristela displaces the Catholic priests, like the Northern Barbarian Ricla she comes to embody a kind of lay sanctity, declaring of her judicial intervention, ‘This is what heaven wants’ (‘Esto quiere el cielo,’ Persiles 347). Heaven’s dispositions (‘ordenación del cielo’) are thereby assumed to take the side of a very human ‘not accidental preference [or pleasure] (‘un gusto no accidental,’ Persiles 347). Periandro brings the case to a close by drawing attention to Auristela’s ‘supernatural’ understanding as evidenced by this wedding, now given a comedic rather than tragic ending in consequence of her wise and courageous judgment: ‘[T]he four embraced, all present taking it as a sign that they should approve the change, and also confirmed for themselves, as I said, that my sister’s mind and beauty are supernatural, for she had reversed those all but finalized betrothals merely by commanding it’ (‘Abrazáronse los cuatro, con cuya señal todos los circunstantes aprobaron su trueco y confirmaron, como ya he dicho, ser sobrenatural el entendimiento y belleza de mi hermana, pues así había trocado aquellos casi hechos casamientos con sólo mandarlo,’ Persiles 347). In her virginal embodiment of an ideal of justice, Auristela lives up to one of her partial namesakes, the virgin goddess of justice Astraea – last of the immortals to abandon the earth when the Golden Age came to an end, according to Hesiod, Ovid, and Dante.64 As in Feliciana’s story, we can recognize here again the evidence of the novel’s habit of throwing its weight behind the association of the heavenly (Auristela’s ‘supernatural’ understanding), of the Judeo-Christian Promised Land of liberation from ‘captivity’ (here, of a matrimonial mismatch), and of Astraea’s pagan Golden Age with justice – including conjugal distributive justice – on this earth.

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Real-World Christian Politics: The Expulsion of the Moriscos Persiles’ departure from verse and prose epic tradition, including Heliodorus’s example in The Ethiopica, is perhaps most striking in its adoption of a chronology roughly contemporary with its first readers. Classical verse and prose epic (notably, Homer, Vergil, and Heliodorus) looked to a legendary or semi-legendary past for their subject, or even (in Tasso’s case) the fairly remote historical past (the retaking of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in Gerusalemme liberata, 1581). Cervantes follows rather the example of contemporary verse epic poets such as Alonso Ercilla (La Araucana, 1569–89) and Luís Vaz de Camões (Os Lusíadas, 1572), who recognized epic subjects in sixteenth-century events: the Habsburg war against the Araucos of today’s Chile and Vasco da Gama’s expedition to India.65 Like his arch-rival Lope de Vega in El peregrino en su patria (The Pilgrim in His Homeland, 1604), Cervantes departs even from Ercilla and Camões insofar as he himself invents rather than finds his epic themes in that near-contemporary past. Persiles’ least ambiguous historical references are to the recent death of Emperor Charles V (1558) and to the future expulsion of the moriscos (1609–14) by Philip III. The first enables us to fix the novel’s earliest chronological pivot point in the two-year period of 1557–9, as discussed in chapter 2. The second reference links the novel’s own morisco episode – which takes place in Book 3, as the pilgrims pass through a village in Valencia – with the historical expulsion. This extraordinary event is presented prophetically because the novel’s chronology demanded it and yet it was a fact of the still quite recent (and controversial) past when the novel was published in 1617. The event itself remains a subject of analysis and controversy. Therefore, it can come as no surprise that this episode should frequently be pressed into service in attempts to identify Cervantes’ personal response to it. It makes a powerful test case for the novel’s exploration of politics, its conflicting ideals and its actual practice. I build on and complement Francisco Márquez’s contextual reading of the morisco episode and, by the method used, explore the documentary possibilities of literary form in historical debate about early modern politics.66 This reading recovers the novel’s potential internal contexts for the episode and suggests how they might complete the evaluation of an expulsion that exists simultaneously as a fictional narrative and as an extratextual reality. As such I complement by reversing the hermeneutic direction of Márquez’s commentary, by working from the

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inside out, from ‘text’ to ‘context.’ The argument illustrates a more general principle anticipated in the opening pages of the book: how Persiles may be seen to provide local narrative contexts for explication, how one episode can be taken to reframe or comment on another. As such, extratextual historical contexts are not the only contexts we may turn to in order to make sense of a problem we discover in Persiles. By so reading we may find that the novel provides its own contexts for evaluating episodes, the characteristic function of the category ‘history’ in literary interpretation. It may serve as another illustration of a common narrative strategy in Cervantes, the playful equivocation between the Spanish sense of historia as history and historia as story that is evoked in Persiles’ subtitle ‘northern history or story’ (‘historia septentrional’). Francisco Márquez reconstructs a moderate and even more radical ‘político’ (‘political’ [i.e., pragmatic]) position in court and ecclesiastical circles neutral about or opposed to the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609–14. It favoured peaceful assimilation of the Christian descendants of Muslim converts on largely religious grounds. Márquez shows that a critical or moderate stance on the policy was by no means anomalous and proposes that it may well have characterized a significant plurality of the political and ecclesiastical establishment. This would help to explain the secrecy with which it was executed and the vigour of its apologists, only too conscious of the opposition and criticism they would face. I suggest that there is internal, novelistic evidence to reinforce the kinds of reservations about Philip III’s decree that Márquez painstakingly documents through historical sources. The crux of the debate is the morisco Jarife’s second, prophetic speech and, in particular, the imperatives he uses to spur on the expulsion of his fellow moriscos from Spain. The speech is an apology for the policy wrapped in a virulent philippic against his own people. Jarife delivers the speech while his morisco compatriots torch and abandon their village in Valencia, with the help of Barbary Turks prepared to convey them to North Africa. Jarife and his niece Rafala themselves are sincerely Christian converts who wish to remain in Spain against the preferences of their neighbours. As a result, they find themselves taking cover in the village church with the protagonist-pilgrims while the razzia is underway. It is about 1558 (or 1606) in novelistic time. Here is the narrator’s scene-setting, followed by Jarife’s invocation of the future Philip III and the decree that would drive most of his people from Spain in 1609–14 (the bold-facing is mine, designed to enable comparison with iterations of the same terms elsewhere in Persiles):

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The alarm passed, those who had sought refuge in the church collected themselves, and the jadraque [lord or sacristan], taking heart again and thinking once more about his grandfather’s prophecy, almost as if he were full of heavenly spirit, said: ‘Onward, noble youth! Onward, invincible king! Trample, push aside, and wreck every kind of obstacle [or scruple] and leave Spain smooth, pure, and cleared of this evil caste that so darkens [or frightens] and spoils [or diminishes] it! (Pasó el sobresalto, volvieron los espíritus de los retraídos a su lugar y el jadraque, cobrando aliento nuevo, volviendo a pensar en la profecía de su abuelo, casi como lleno de celestial espíritu, dijo: – ¡Ea, mancebo generoso; ea, rey invencible! ¡Atropella, rompe, desbarata todo género de inconvenientes y déjanos a España tersa, limpia y desembarazada desta mi mala casta, que tanto la asombra y menoscaba!’) (Persiles 553)

Some readers have regarded the keywords in Jarife’s speech (which I have bold-faced) as rank hyperbole, and Márquez indeed detects irony. But as Carlos Romero has rightly insisted, we must be careful not to claim irony in Cervantes wherever it appears that a character is saying something of which we do not approve. I do not propose to deny the anti-morisco invective in Jarife’s speeches. Instead I suggest that by paying attention to thematic and lexical echoes of this episode elsewhere in the novel, we may come away with a more complex view of its implied judgment on the morisco expulsion, and even some evidence for claiming the narrative weighs in against Philip III’s decree. We may also come away with a renewed appreciation for the deep underlying thematic and narrative unity of a novel criss-crossed with multiple actions and a large cast of characters. An author famously reluctant to buttonhole his readers and apparently so averse to preaching that he concedes the categorical statements even of his prologues to invented characters (such as ‘the friend’ in Don Quijote’s prologue, responsible for the notion that it is a ‘satire’ of chivalric books) does not easily yield sound-bite morals. As a rule, what he gives us to evaluate the overt statement of a particular speech are characterization, consequence, and association. We can eliminate consequence in this case, because the morisco expulsion is handled as a future event. Elsewhere, for instance in the pirate captain’s encomium of Policarpo’s ideal commonwealth discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the narrative’s evaluation of its flaws is rendered, in part, by the wages of Policarpo’s lust and the fire that sweeps across the isle. Jarife’s

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characterization is another matter. A morisco who disqualifies his own people for villainy and treachery, among other stereotyped insults, can hardly be regarded as a reliable authority. The paradox has been noted by scholars, although due consideration of its source has not always headed off the temptation to put Jarife’s speech in the author’s mouth in some historical accounts of the morisco expulsion.67 A preliminary warrant for questioning the narrative’s (and Cervantes’) straight-faced approval of the expulsion is the parallel with the novel’s Barbaric Isle prophecy, which associates the oracular messianically harnessed to political ends with barbarism (Persiles 137–8). Much as the Barbaric Law attributes the political prophecy to an old, wise man (or sorcerer), the morisco Jarife attributes his own prophecy of the expulsion twice to his grandfather (Persiles 548, 553). Since Jarife’s paean to Philip III’s decree is couched in prophetic terms, in the context of the novel the Barbaric Isle’s prophetic law – and its pretensions to world conquest and unity through force of arms – invites readers to consider the possibility that the morisco expulsion may well be regarded in the novel’s terms as barbaric by association. Encouraged by this thematic frame for the expulsion in the paradigmatic opening episode of Persiles, I note lexical echoes of the terms used by Jarife’s speech elsewhere in the novel. Rather than pronounce outright on their ironic sense, I propose simply to draw attention to other significant uses of these very same keywords in the text. The appearance of Jarife’s charged words in diverse narrative contexts may give us further grounds for interpreting the speech besides extra-textual historical evidence or the appeal to ironies of one textual instance based on senses for words that may not indeed be shared by all readers. Context is, after all, what we rely on to invoke or deny irony, to determine, that is, whether what is said is also meant. By tracking the multiple, novelistic associations with the prophetic form and the telling diction of Jarife’s speech about the future expulsion of his own people, we open our eyes to the potential effects of local, narrative context on our readings and anchor our perceptions of irony within it. The novel’s local contexts may thus provide both a guide and an evidentiary constraint for our readerly impulse to read between the lines where indirection was inevitable, to move judiciously beyond the literal, and to find our footing on the slippery slope of subtext begging to be negotiated. The most interesting of such local narrative contexts for Jarife’s keywords regarding the expulsion is the immediately subsequent episode

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about Ambrosia Agustina (Persiles 558–63), a story about the tyranny and wages of blind desire (as Agustina puts it, ‘[el deseo] me tenía tan ciega,’ Persiles 559). Three of Jarife’s most charged terms are echoed verbatim in it, not only reiterating but also reframing them and the speech itself. On the heels of the morisco village adventure, the protagonists and their travelling companions find themselves in Barcelona listening to Ambrosia’s tale. As she has it, Contarino de Arbolánchez, gentleman of the Order of Alcántara, fell in love with her, and she – led by her ‘weak character’ (‘mi fácil condición,’ Persiles 558) – let him become ‘master of [her] body and [her] soul’ (‘señor de [su] persona y de [sus] pensamientos’). Contarino is immediately given orders to lead a tercio (‘infantry unit’) marching from Lombardy to Genoa, there to embark for Malta, which is girding itself for assault by the Turks. Within days Ambrosia puts her honour and life at risk by running away from home disguised as a pageboy, enlisting as the servant of a drummer in an infantry company. The plan had been to join the soldiers heading for Cartagena and thence to Italy, where she would seek out her husband. Here I quote her account in full, bold-facing the parts of her speech that so strikingly echo Jarife’s about the expulsion (recall that he recommends Philip III ‘[t]rample, push aside, and wreck every kind of obstacle [or scruple]’ [‘¡Atropella, rompe, desbarata todo género de inconveniente’]): [I] hoped [my husband] would not think ill of my daring or blame my desire, which had so blinded me that I overlooked the danger I would risk of being recognized if I took ship in my brother’s galley. But since a heart in love encounters no obstacles [scruples] it will not trample, nor difficulties it will not push aside, nor fears it will not face down, I smoothed over all the rough spots on the road ahead, conquering my fears, and hoping even in the midst of desperation; but as events alter first intentions, mine – more ill-conceived than ill-intentioned – put me in the circumstance I will now recount. ([E]speré que [mi esposo] no afearía mi atrevimiento ni culparía mi deseo; el cual me tenía tan ciega, que no reparé en el peligro a que me ponía de ser conocida, si me embarcaba en las galeras de mi hermano. Mas como los pechos enamorados no hay inconvenientes que no atropellen, ni dificultades por quien no rompan, ni temores que se le opongan, toda escabrosidad hice llana, venciendo miedos y esperando aun en la misma desesperación; pero, como los sucesos de las cosas hacen mudar los

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primeros intentos en ellas, el mío, más mal pensado que fundado, me puso en el término que agora oiréis.’) (Persiles 559)

The bold-facing helps us notice the telling overlap in keywords between Agustina’s account of her wanton misadventure – atropella, rompe, inconveniente – and those used in the jadraque’s speech to describe Philip III’s expulsion. The additional internal evidence provided in what follows takes the form of other novelistic contexts in which Jarife’s keywords (atropella, rompe, inconveniente) crop up. I enumerate these other iterations telegraphically in this paragraph with relevant boldfacing, to highlight how they are used in different episodes. All reinforce the sense of arbitrary behaviour driven by passions that break the bonds of law, invariably suggesting capriciously erotic or irate behaviour (in three instances by political leaders): 1 The Barbarian Bradamiro’s decision to keep the cross-dressed Periandro for himself (‘[D]eterminó de libertarle, aunque se pusiese a romper por todo inconveniente’ [‘[H]e decided to free him, even if this obliged him to push aside any obstacle [or override any scruple]’) Persiles 155 2 Two commentaries on King Policarpo, who is brought down by his wayward lust in Book 2: a ‘[C]uando el amoroso deseo se apodera de los pechos poderosos, suele romper por cualquiera dificultad, hasta llegar al fin de ellos; no se miran respetos, ni se cumplen palabras, ni guardan obligaciones y, así, no había para qué fiarse en las pocas o ninguna en que Policarpo les estaba.’ (‘[W]hen amorous desire takes hold of the hearts of the powerful, it usually pushes aside [overrides] any obstacle to reach its goal; due respect is not shown, nor are promises kept, nor obligations honored. So there was no reason to believe that Policarpo would feel the least obligation to them.)’ Persiles 327 b ‘[C]uando ocupa a un alma la pasión amorosa, no hay discurso con que acierte ni razón que no atropelle.’ (‘[W]hen love’s passion fills a soul, there is nothing it can say that will hit the mark nor reason it will not trample underfoot.’) Persiles 395 3 Ortel Banedre, in confession to Periandro and company about Luisa la talaverana – ultimately his femme fatale – says, ‘¡Oh fuerzas poderosas de amor (de amor, digo, inconsiderado, presuroso, y lascivo, y mal intencionado), y con cuánta facilidad atropellas disin-

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ios buenos, intentos castos, proposiciones discretas!’ (‘Oh powerful forces of love! I mean reckless, impulsively lustful and ill-intentioned love – with what ease you trample good intentions, chaste intentions, and discrete [rational] propositions!’ Persiles 495) 4 Two commentaries on Ruperta’s desire to avenge herself on her husband’s murderer Claudino Rubicón by killing his son Croriano, in Book 3: a There is Ruperta’s justification for wanting revenge: ‘Los deseos que se quieren cumplir no reparan en inconvenientes, aunque sean mortales’ (‘The desires wanting fulfillment pay no heed to obstacles [or scruples], though they prove fatal,’ Persiles 592) b And there is the narrator’s subsequent gloss on Ruperta: ‘¿Qué no hace una mujer enojada? ¿Qué montes de dificultades no atropella en sus disignios?’ (‘What won’t an angry woman do? What mountains of difficulties will she not trample underfoot with her scheming?’ Persiles 593) If we are prepared to bring these novelistic associations to bear on our reading of the key terms of Jarife’s speech and its apology for Philip III’s expulsion of the moriscos, we may also be ready to take Agustina’s final judgment of her own behaviour as an implicit narrative verdict on Philip III’s policy: ‘Brother of mine, I am Ambrosia Agustina, your sister, and I am also the wife of Lord Contarino de Arbolánchez. Love and your absence, dear brother, gave him to me for a husband, although he left before enjoying me; I, bold, impulsive and ill-considered, came searching for him dressed as you see me now.’ (‘Hermano mío, yo soy Ambrosia Agustina, tu hermana, y soy ansimismo la esposa del señor Contarino de Arbolánchez. El amor y tu ausencia, ¡oh hermano!, me le dieron por marido, el cual, sin gozarme, me dejó; yo, atrevida, arrojada y mal considerada, en este traje que me veis le vine a buscar.’) (Persiles 562)

By tracing the prompt of lexical echo – atropella, rompe, inconveniente – from Jarife’s to Agustina’s immediately following episode, and by then translating Agustina’s judgment on her behaviour into the political context of Jarife’s speech about Philip III’s decree, we have textual grounds for claiming that the narrative sees the expulsion as driven by

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something like the same blind passion or ‘deseo … cieg[o]’ by which Agustina earlier characterizes herself (Persiles 559). We also find ourselves with something like a thumbnail sketch of the contemporary description of the tyrant. The mirror of princes that Juan de Mariana directs to the very same Philip III on his accession to the throne, entitled De rege (1599), supplies this characteristic portrait of the tyrant: ‘Let all that is great be laid low, they say to themselves, and so they seek to satisfy their desires, if not openly and by resorting to force, with evil cunning, with secret accusations, with calumny’ (‘Caiga todo lo que está alto, dicen para sí, y procuran la satisfacción de sus deseos, si no de un modo manifiesto y apelando a la fuerza, con malas mañas, con secretas acusaciones, con calumnias’).68 Jarife’s apparent paean to Philip III’s expulsion of his own people may thus by indirection imply something quite different about the monarch and the decree, in particular the relative weight of passion and reason that went into its making and execution – in the novel’s terms, the balance between barbarism and the law with which it was carried out.69 It is important to emphasize that by tracking such verbal ripples across episodes, I do not claim to have discovered a method by which to determine unambiguously what Cervantes thought about the expulsion. My objective is more modest: to expand the range of evidence we consider when we evaluate the implications of Jarife’s speech (and others like it) and, in so doing, to enhance our reading of the text’s complexities. The suggestion does not depend on determining whether such narrative associations are conscious or unconscious, planned or spontaneous, an issue that is probably undecidable. Linguistic competence of native speakers is largely unconscious and, as a rule, a fuller, more accurate expression of meaning than the necessarily more conscious competence of non-native speakers. It may be enough that, unconsciously or not, Cervantes associated questionable (in this case, passion-driven) behaviours with Jarife’s keywords. My own argument about narrative thus far has emphasized the rich vein of explanatory power in association: association of Jarife’s (and his grandfather’s) prophecy of Philip III’s expulsion with the prophetic Barbaric Law and its promise of unity by conquest, association of Jarife’s keywords about that expulsion with several episodes (including the immediately following one) in which such words are used to describe behaviours blinded by passion. By paying attention to such associations we may head off two temptations. The first is the naive temptation of surrendering to the express statement of any one speech, deaf to the

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ways in which a complex narrative such as Persiles conditions implication by characterization, consequence, and association. The second temptation is to make too liberal use of irony as an escape hatch. The ultimate judgment about the irony or not of Jarife’s speech may thus depend on the novel’s own multiple contexts for precise definition of the keywords in question. Such an argument is not meant to stand alone. From the beginning I have acknowledged my reliance on Francisco Márquez’s rich reconstruction of the contemporary debate about the expulsion. In the end, however, what such a context can reliably tell us is not what the narrative verdict may itself be, but that Cervantes was well-informed regarding its terms and that Persiles was by no means anomalous or unusual in the questions it (implicitly) raises about Philip III’s decree. Don Quijote prepares us for all this, because something very like its lexical slyness is at work in the renowned morisco Ricote episode of part 2 (II.54 and II.63–5), published in 1615. A morisco who steals into postexpulsion Castile to recover his buried treasure before heading back into exile, Ricote – like Persiles’ Jarife – finds himself justifying the ways of Philip III against his own people (and, unlike Jarife, against himself). There is in Ricote’s speech a more heightened mix of paradox, hyperbole, and irony than in Jarife’s. This renders the speech all the more poignant to some readers because the apology he appears to make for his own expulsion reminds us that even such sincerely Christian moriscos as Persiles’ Jarife and Rafala were not in historical fact later spared the pain of eviction from their homeland. Ricote’s Christian wife and daughter Ana Félix are forced into exile just as surely as their apostate compatriots. Ricote’s philippic against his people has been cited yet more often than Jarife’s, as evidence of Cervantes’ approval of the expulsion and even heartfelt hatred for the moriscos. Ricote does indeed wind up the speech with a rousing tribute to Philip III’s prudence: ‘[Such a] Heroic decision of Philip III’s [the expulsion], and unheard-of prudence to put it in don Bernardino de Velasco’s hands!’ (‘¡Heroica resolución del gran Filipo Tercero, y inaudita prudencia en haberla encargado al tal don Bernardino de Velasco!’ Don Quijote II.65).70 Unlike Jarife – who apostrophizes the future Philip III about the expulsion – Ricote directs his panegyric to Don Bernardino, the count of Salazar, responsible for carrying out Philip III’s decree in Castile. Don Bernardino, says Ricote, is incorruptible (‘it is useless to hope for favours or bribes’ [‘no hay que esperar en favores ni en dádivas’]) because the great Don Bernardino sees that ‘the whole body of our nation is contaminated and rotten’ (‘todo el cuerpo de nuestra

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nación está contaminado y podrido’). He therefore, Ricote continues, sooner applies the fire that cauterizes than the balm that heals and, so, with prudence, with wisdom, with diligence, and with fears (‘y así, con prudencia, con sagacidad, con diligencia y con miedos que pone’), he has borne on his stout shoulders the proper execution of this great contrivance (‘desta gran máquina’). Critics of the expulsion have noticed the paradox of a morisco condemning his own people, himself included even more pointedly than Persiles’ Jarife in his speech. Some readers have also noticed the irony – even the mock encomium – in a rhetoric whose hyperbole has made not a few question its sincerity. Nevertheless, a straightforward reading of it does suggest – as it has suggested to yet other readers – unqualified support for the expulsion of this ‘hidden root’ (‘raiz escondida’), as he calls his own people, which will in Ricote’s phrase flower in time and bear poisonous fruit for Spain. The expulsion in Ricote’s same speech is said to leave Spain clean and disencumbered of the fear in which ‘our teeming numbers’ (‘nuestra muchedumbre’) keep her. And yet there is more ambiguity in Ricote’s speech than he lets on. Hiding in plain sight, lurking in Ricote’s speech like a diamond in the rough, there is a kind of evidence against Philip III’s ‘prudence.’ Ricote’s apparent praise for Don Bernardino includes an enumeration of four virtues. It would not be quite accurate to describe them as the four cardinal virtues as codified in Plato’s Republic IV and Augustine’s City of God V.20: prudence or wisdom (prudencia or sagacidad in Spanish), courage or fortitude (valor or fortaleza), moderation or temperance (moderación or templanza), and justice (justicia). Nevertheless, the structure and sequence, four virtues beginning with prudence, do evoke the Platonic template for virtue, a topos for Cervantes and his contemporaries.71 Ricote, however, speaks of ‘prudence’ (‘prudencia’) and ‘wisdom’ (‘sagacidad’) – interchangeable in the contemporary lexicographer Covarrubias’s definition of the wise (sagaz) man72 – ‘diligence’ (‘diligencia,’ close to but not identical with ‘fortitude’), and ‘fears’ or ‘terror’ (‘miedos’). The classical virtues that have gone missing in Ricote’s speech about Don Bernardo are moderation or temperance and justice. A redoubled ‘prudence’ or ‘wisdom’ has taken the place of ‘moderation,’ because we know from Ricote that Philip III’s agent is unyielding before ‘petitions’ (‘ruegos’) and ‘lamentations’ (‘lástimas’) and that he sooner cauterizes than heals with the balm of ‘mercy’ (‘misericordia’). And ‘fears’ or ‘terror’ (‘miedos’) has displaced justice, the traditional emblem of wise rule. In Plato’s account, justice

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follows from the presence of the other three cardinal virtues. It is the virtue toward which all others tend in the ideal city State. Therefore, in Ricote’s speech one of Plato’s virtues is doubled (prudence), another omitted (moderation), and the fourth (justice, the chief political virtue in The Republic) is replaced by fear. Ricote thus appears to invoke the four cardinal virtues to describe Philip III’s policy of morisco expulsion, but he has conspicuously omitted justice and put fear in its place. As if to underscore the point, Ricote’s friend Sancho Panza admits to the sympathy that many of Ricote’s and Ana Félix’s Old Christian neighbours had felt for her as the train of exiles sadly made its way out of the village (Don Quijote II.54),73 but fear of the king held them back: ‘On my word many wanted to hide her or abduct her on the high road, but fear of going against the king’s commandment restrained them’ (‘Y a fee que muchos tuvieron deseo de esconderla y salir a quitársela en el camino, pero el miedo de ir contra el mandado del rey los detuvo’). If Ricote’s Philip III is prudent and diligent, he is certainly not moderate nor especially is he just. Instead it appears that he rules – at least where this expulsion is concerned – by fear. The king who governs more by fear than by justice, according to classical definition and long-standing tradition, is a tyrant.74 Much as Jarife’s hyperbolic praise of Philip III’s policy may be associated with Agustina’s ‘blind … desire’ (‘deseo … cieg[o]’), a chief attribute of tyranny in rulers, Ricote’s in Don Quijote associates him – through his agent Don Bernardo de Velasco – with the chief means by which tyrants rule. In a speech that reads like praise, as it would have to under the watchful eye of royal censors, what Ricote rhetorically gives with one hand (prudence, wisdom, and diligence) he takes away with the other (fear). There is a muted protest against the expulsion in another telling aspect of the Ricote episode. A former Christian renegade helps rescue Ana Félix’s Old Christian beloved, Don Gregorio, from captivity in Algiers (Don Quijote II.65).75 This act of charity wins the Christian renegade reconciliation with the Church’s corpus mysticum (‘mystical body’). Here is Paul’s standard account of the mystical body (1 Cor. 12.12–13): ‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.’ The Pauline image is graphically invoked to describe the renegade’s return to the fold: ‘The renegade rejoined and reconverted himself to the

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Church, and where once he was a rotten member he became a pure and healthy one with penance and repentance’ (‘Reincorporóse y redújose el renegado con la Iglesia, y de miembro podrido volvió limpio y sano con la penitencia y el arrepentimiento’). In the following paragraph the Pauline corpus mysticum makes a second appearance in Ricote’s speech, when he hails the expulsion on the grounds that ‘as [Don Bernardo de Velasco] sees that the whole body of our nation is contaminated and rotten, he sooner uses the cautery that burns than the balm that heals’ (‘como [don Bernardo de Velasco] vee que todo el cuerpo de nuestra nación está contaminado y podrido, usa con él antes del cauterio que abrasa que del ungüento que molifica’). While many moriscos were Christian in name only, even one sincere morisco rendered theologically troubling any such broad-brush policy aimed at a whole people, as opponents indeed argued. For this reason, the General Inquisitor (Cardinal Niño de Guevara) and key members of the Council of Valencian bishops (meeting in 1608–9) stood resolutely against Philip III’s decree.76 In Ricote’s own family, his wife and daughter Ana’s sincere Christianity makes the point, serving as proof against the idea of the ‘rottenness’ of the whole morisco nation and therefore as a tacit reminder that the expulsion was a sacrilege, even in strictly doctrinal Christian terms. Thus in Don Quijote’s Ricote episode the ‘renegado’ – a confirmed Christian traitor who rescues Don Gregorio but had earlier traduced the faith – is reconciled to the Church’s mystical body through the repentance and the mercy that Don Bernardo de Velasco denied the moriscos. On the other hand, moriscos – such as Ricote’s wife and daughter Ana Félix – who are not only sincere converts but also show evidence of a heroic attachment to a Christianity and a Spanish homeland they have never betrayed are treated by Philip III’s policy as unreconcilable and rewarded with summary exile. In effect, the royal decree reverses the Pauline teachings figured by the imagery of the mystic body so conspicuous in this scene: blood ties weigh more than loyalty, more than the Christian virtues (charity, faith, and hope), and more even than Church sacrament in defining who is and who is not a Christian. The episode’s use of Pauline imagery exposes a royal policy that was, at its root, heretical, insofar as it questioned the efficacy of the Christian sacrament of baptism (virtually all moriscos were baptized). The expulsion effectively denied the Pauline commitment to the peaceful conversion of Gentiles, which is equivalent to denying the very heart of Christianity’s avowed distinction from blood-based religions such as

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Judaism. In the Ana Félix episode, Philip III’s Spain prefers a confirmed traitor (the renegade) – a man who had ‘turned Turk’ and crossed over to the Muslim side – to the confirmed loyalty and Christianity of moriscos, and this because he is a man of Old Christian stock. The Crown does so in the name of ‘prudence,’ precisely the Machiavellian spin on the classical virtue denounced by self-professed Christian political theorists such as Ribadeneyra (Tratado, 1595) who vilified the pragmatic, Machiavellian (or Tacitean) moderates or ‘políticos’ liable to put interests of State before Christian conscience.77 This is what passes for justice, prudence, and Christian conscience in Philip III’s Spain, as filtered through Cervantes’ fictional world. Sufficient attention to historical context obliges us to notice at least one significant contrast between Persiles’ and Don Quijote’s morisco episodes. As Márquez Villanueva points out, the large numbers of unassimilated moriscos in Valencia (as in the Persiles episode), often living in virtual isolation in villages of their own, were a challenge very different from the more dispersed, assimilated moriscos in mostly land-locked Castile (Don Quijote’s Ricote among them).78 Coastal pirateering by Turkish and Barbary pirates was a real problem, making coexistence between moriscos and Old Christians all the more difficult to achieve in seaboard kingdoms such as Valencia. Despite thus setting the political and moral bar higher, Persiles appears to reject the rigorist solution to the problem of the assimilation of Spain’s ‘others’ insofar as we can say that the expulsion is associated with the Law of the Barbaric Isle and passion-driven behaviours. The novel as a whole provides one clue to explain this eccentric stance. There is no evidence in Persiles that shared religion, ethnicity, or even family ties are a guarantee of lasting peace or unity in the Barbarian North or Catholic South, even within Spain in the shadow of the Monastery of Guadalupe, as demonstrated by Feliciana de la Voz’s story discussed earlier in the chapter. The fact of dissent by itself could not possibly constitute sufficient justification for expulsion, since dissenting voices are always present in this novel. To put it another way, no matter how often a ruler resorted to expulsion of the conspicuously different, the problem of discord and of conflict would always, to judge by the pattern in Persiles, come back to haunt him. By the time we have reached the morisco episode in Book 3 of Persiles there is ample evidence from the novel’s Gothic and Barbarian North and Catholic South that, even on its own Machiavellian terms, the fantasy of unity underlying Philip III’s decree is doomed as a kind of political blindness. Some other solu-

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tion to inevitable conflict is called for, since harmony of wills is almost never lastingly achieved in this novel. One solution is exemplified by the royal hero and heroine as they handle their personal crisis in Rome: Auristela’s prevarication over whether to marry, and Periandro’s response – unusually self-restrained for the novel – to the divergence between their initial vow and Auristela’s later divided gusto – the principle of mutual consent over force discussed in chapter 1. We close this section by considering one final example of local narrative context for Persiles’ morisco episode. We have noticed in this chapter (as in chapter 2) that the Exodus subtext of the Promised Land is sometimes reversible in Persiles, representing different kinds of liberation from captivity that can lead either to the novel’s Gothic and Barbarian North or to its Catholic South. This attribute of the novel’s idiosyncratic conception of liberation and captivity is suggested once again in the morisco context by the tale that immediately precedes Jarife and Rafala’s in Persiles, an episode featuring two false captives (Persiles 527–40). The so-called false captives are two Spanish students from the University of Salamanca who make up a story about themselves to win sympathy and alms from villagers gathered in a public square. In the story they portray themselves as erstwhile Christian captives in Algiers, in the area of North Africa that Cervantes’ contemporaries called Barbary (Berbería). As suggested in chapter 1, the name Barbary and the reiterated vocabulary of mazmorras (‘dungeons’), corsarios (‘pirates’), and cautiverio (‘captivity’) make of this Muslim enclave a comedic (and apocryphal) version of the Northern Barbaric Isle. Although captivity in Barbary is a con game for these students, an occasion for them to test their skill at lying plausibly and to line their pockets, it was a real-world Barbaric Isle for many thousands of Christian captives (including Cervantes from 1575 to 1580, as is well known) who had been or still were held in Algerian dungeons for ransom or hard labour. The false captives’ episode bears a kind of looking-glass relation to the morisco Jarife’s first major speech. This speech – which reviews at some length the conventional arguments used by apologists to justify Philip III’s decree of expulsion (Persiles 547–9) – invokes the biblical Exodus, comparing the moriscos to the Hebrews of the Old Testament Exodus and (by metonymy) with the Promised Land: ‘For if the few Hebrews that went over into Egypt multiplied so much that at the time of their exodus they numbered more than 600,000 families, what might we have to fear from them, who are even more numerous and live more comfortably?’ (‘Que si los pocos hebreos que pasaron a Egipto multi-

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plicaron tanto que en su salida se contaron más de seiscientas mil familias, ¿qué se podrá temer de éstos, que son más y viven más holgadamente?’ Persiles 553). In the light of the heroes’ pilgrimage, this use of the Promised Land trope to describe moriscos (identified with the Hebrews in Egypt) not long before their expulsion from Spain should give us pause, since elsewhere in the novel it is associated with Catholic lands, Rome, and – allegorically – the Church. Jarife’s comparison is meant to make a point about threatening morisco fertility, but within the metaphorical economy of the novel – so rich in Exodus imagery – it reminds us that Promised Lands in Persiles can be relative. Pressure to assimilate by persuasion or force placed the Spanish Muslim and then the (baptized) morisco community under siege, especially following the royal decree of 1502 that obliged Muslims to choose between baptism or exile.79 One of the consequences of mounting pressure to abandon ancestral customs (foods, dress, language, ablutions, and other Islamic practices) was increasing restiveness. The restiveness led eventually to the Revolt of the Alpujarras (1568–70), which took place within ten years of Persiles’ earliest unambiguous indication of chronology (1557–9). The Salamanca students’ (false) story of Christian captives in Islamic Algiers mirrors Jarife’s story of Christian moriscos in Spain who abandon their Valencian village – liberated, by their lights – for Islamic Barbary. For Spanish captives in Islamic Algiers, Barbary was their Egypt and Spain the Promised Land. For many Spanish moriscos (as for all of Persiles’, other than Jarife and Rafala), their Spanish homeland had become an Egypt and Islamic Barbary their Promised Land. What is particularly striking about the morisco episode’s following on the heels of the false captives’ is that it suggests a small-scale recapitulation within Book 3 of the overall main-plot movement of the novel, with its frequent reversals of Barbarian North and Catholic South, of Egypt and Promised Land, of bondage and liberation. The sequence carries out a local variation, complete unto itself, of the larger trajectory of the novel by turning perspectives on their head, suggesting how one man’s Egypt can reasonably be another’s Promised Land, and how unchristian tyranny is liable to create and recreate Egypts and Barbaric Isles even where Catholicism is the law of the land. Rival Epic Models of Christian Politics If the made-up French king of Renato’s story exemplifies the sacrifice of royal justice to the honour-driven vagaries of reputation, the Habsburg

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Philip III’s morisco expulsion the confusion of tyranny with Platonic and Christian virtue, and Auristela on the Isle of Fishers the contrasting triumph of a royal justice that seeks to right the same wrongs for subjects that it seeks for itself, Persiles’ Rome gives us a brief glimpse of yet another model for Christian politics in the anonymous poet-pilgrim’s tribute to two Christian epics (Persiles 663–5). In a museum established by ‘a monsignor of the [papal] court, inquisitive [or careful or strange] and rich’ (‘un monseñor, clérigo de la Cámara, curioso y rico’), there is a portrait gallery of as yet (about 1559 in novelistic time) unknown or unborn illustrious future personages. The description of the monsignor and his ‘admirable’ gallery – called ‘the most extraordinary museum in the world’ – comes to us in the words of an unnamed Spanish poetpilgrim in conversation with Periandro. Recalling his visit on the previous day as he made the rounds of Roman sights, the poet-pilgrim singles out two of these would-be worthies and sings their praises. We cannot be surprised, since he is a poet himself, that his gaze would happen to fall on the likenesses of two fellow poets. The brief exchange between the poet-pilgrim and Periandro is worth quoting in full, because it voices an influential view of Christian epic by which Persiles has often been measured, because it gives us a perfect example of just how marvellous and strange the novel’s Rome often is, and finally because Rome thereby becomes the occasion for Cervantes to indulge one of the more pokerfaced displays of his humour: [The monsignor] had the most extraordinary museum in the world, because there were no figures in it of persons who in fact had lived or were now alive, but rather some blank tablets prepared so that illustrious persons to come would have their portraits painted on them, especially those who were to be famous poets in coming centuries; among these tablets [the poet-pilgrim] had especially noticed two, one of which had ‘Torcuato Tasso’ inscribed at the top and below it could be read Jerusalén libertada [Jerusalem Delivered]; on the other was written ‘Zárate,’ and below [the name] Cruz y Constantino [The Cross and Constantine]. ‘[The poetpilgrim] asked the man showing [him the tablets] what the names meant. He replied it was expected that soon the light of a poet would be discovered on earth who was to be called Torcuato Tasso, and that he was to sing of Jerusalem recovered with the most heroic and agreeable plectrum [style] of any poet until then known, and that almost immediately he was to be followed by a Spaniard called Francisco López [Zárate], whose voice would fill the four corners of the earth, and whose harmony was to

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suspend the hearts of peoples by narrating the discovery of Christ’s Cross and the wars of the emperor Constantine, a truly heroic and devout poem worthy of being called a poem.’ To which Periandro replied: ‘It is hard for me to believe that [he] would take the trouble of preparing these tablets so far in advance in order to paint those to come, because in effect this very city, head [capital] of the world [or caput mundi], contains other marvels even more astonishing. Will other tablets be prepared for future poets?’ asked Periandro. ‘Yes’ – responded the pilgrim; ‘but I did not want to stop and read the titles, being satisfied with seeing just the first two. However, I saw so many at first glance that it became obvious to me that when they come into the world (which my guide [the monsignor] assured me was not far off) there will be a very great harvest of all kinds of poets.’ ([T]enía un museo, el más extraordinario que había en el mundo, porque no tenía figuras de personas que efectivamente hubiesen sido ni entonces lo fuesen, sino unas tablas preparadas para pintarse en ellas los personajes ilustres que estaban por venir, especialmente los que habían de ser en los venideros siglos poetas famosos; entre las cuales tablas había visto dos, que en el principio dellas estaba escrito, en la una, ‘Torcuato Tasso’ y, más abajo un poco, decía Jerusalén libertada; en la otra estaba escrito ‘Zárate,’ y, más abajo, Cruz y Constantino. ‘Preguntéle al que me las enseñaba qué significaban aquellos nombres. Respondióme que se esperaba que presto se había de descubrir en la tierra la luz de un poeta, que se había de llamar Torcuato Tasso, el cual había de cantar Jerusalén recuperada con el más heroico y agradable plectro que hasta entonces ningún poeta hubiese cantado, y que casi luego le había de suceder un español llamado Francisco López [Zárate] cuya voz había de llenar las cuatro partes de la tierra, y cuya armonía había de suspender los corazones de las gentes contando la invención de la Cruz de Cristo, con las guerras del emperador Constantino, poema verdaderamente heroico y religioso, y digno del nombre de poema.’ A lo que replicó Periandro: ‘Duro se me hace creer que de tan atrás se tome el cargo de aderezar las tablas donde se hayan de pintar los que están por venir, que, en efeto, en esta ciudad, cabeza del mundo, están otras maravillas de mayor admiración. Y ¿habrá otras tablas aderezadas para más poetas venideros?’ – preguntó Periandro. ‘Sí’ – respondió el peregrino – , ‘pero no quise detenerme a leer los títulos, contentándome con los dos primeros; pero, así, a bulto, miré tantos, que me doy a entender que la edad cuando éstos vengan (que, según me dijo el que me guiaba, no puede tardar) ha de ser grandísima la cosecha de todo género de poetas.’) (Persiles 664–5)

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So it is that the poet-pilgrim celebrates poems on the Conquest of Jerusalem (in the First Crusade of 1095–9) and the Christian conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (274–337 CE), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) and Francisco López Zárate’s Cruz y Constantino (The Cross and Constantine). One need not doubt the monsignor’s or the poet-pilgrim’s praise of these poems to grasp that the vision of Christian epic in Persiles – its objectives, methods, and sensibility – appears contrary in fundamental ways to both. Setting aside the formal qualities of what the poet (apparently speaking for the monsignor) calls Tasso’s ‘heroic and agreeable plectrum [style]’ (‘heroico y agradable plectro’) and Zárate’s ‘harmony’ (‘armonía’), ought we to take the corresponding versions of Christianity exalted by the monsignor’s museum for the novel’s or Cervantes’ own? As has sometimes been suggested, should we regard them as a mark of the author’s adherence to militantly Counter-Reformation ideals? The monsignor is an official – clerical, indeed papal – voice of Rome, and we would expect his taste in Christian epics to be orthodox. Broadly considered, the relation of these poems to Persiles is more complex and interesting than a sequence of epic bows to Trent would imply. But in order to establish this reading we would need to move beyond the poetpilgrim’s overt statement of the monsignor’s views and compare the dominant action, characterization, and representative virtues promoted in these Christian epics to those we find in Cervantes’. This kind of attention to Tasso’s and Zárate’s themes might also help explain why Tasso’s renowned epic is lumped together with Zárate’s now-forgotten poem in the monsignor’s museum and why they might be models for what Persiles sooner repudiates than emulates. Tasso’s Gerusalemme undoubtedly needs less of an introduction than Zárate’s Cruz, but for our purposes it is worth recalling briefly that Tasso chose for his subject the First Crusade, led by Duke Godfrey, lord of Bouillon. Among his paladins was the handsome, fearless, and gallant model of Christian knighthood, Tasso’s hero Tancred of Hauteville. A city once open to Christian worship under the Fatimids of Egypt, Jerusalem had been taken by the less-tolerant Seljuk Turks in 1070, and pilgrims returning home began to report accounts of harassment and desecration. Pope Urban II seized the moment to preach a crusade at Clermont in 1095, and it was embraced most enthusiastically by the French nobility. Godfrey was among the first to heed Urban’s call and led an army of Franks and Germans first to Constantinople and then to the Holy Land, where he took Jerusalem in 1099 and was acclaimed

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king. Tasso’s epic is centred on the military deeds and amorous skirmishes of the climactic year of the crusade, the battle for Antioch and the siege of Jerusalem. Zárate chose for his theme Constantine’s ‘discovery’ (or ‘invention’) of the cross, a motif in the emperor’s life that bears on two watershed moments of his Christian career: first, the military victory that eventually won him the principate, and second, the tradition (commemorated still by a feast day on 18 August) that his mother Helena discovered the cross on which Christ was crucified.80 Constantine’s dream vision of the cross on the sun, which he later alleged prompted his conversion, was followed the next day by a battle that won him the highest worldly honour of all, first caesar or augustus of the empire – war waged and laurels captured in the name of the Prince of Peace. Zárate’s Constantine the Great is the emperor who excelled in military virtues needed to defend an impossibly long frontier against growing threat, which had led to the Roman principate’s reorganization into rule by a tetrarchy of emperors whose residence was no longer fixed at Rome but near the four main fronts. Successful in war over the course of his long life against Picts, Franks, Goths, and Sarmatians, Constantine was acclaimed caesar by his troops in the West, eventually defeated his peers to reunite the empire, and fixed the imperial residence in the East by founding Constantinople in 330. His greatest victory took place in 312 against Maxentius at Saxa Rubra. Eusebius, the emperor’s contemporary biographer (Life of Constantine), reports he attributed it to a dream vision of a cross above the sun, on account of which he was persuaded to send his soldiers into battle bearing crosses on their shields. Although heavily outnumbered, they won the day.81 Constantine reportedly saw the hand of God in this unlikely victory and restored Church property stripped by previous pagan emperors, favoured Christian clergy, and undertook a massive church building program including the first St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, replaced in the sixteenth century by Bramante’s. Among others, Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 335 on the site of the rock cave where by tradition Christ was buried and rose from the dead. Zárate hails Constantine’s conversion as a triumph for Christianity, a landmark event for the Christianization of the Roman empire. Indeed not long after, in 380, the emperor Theodosius would declare it Rome’s State religion. Yet historians who do not share this triumphalist view of Constantine’s conversion have described it in such a way that it might be more accurate to speak rather of the emperor’s Romanization of Christian-

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ity.82 Constantine’s rule itself has been characterized as frankly monarchical, appropriating much of the Roman Senate’s legislative power, restoring the hereditary principle, and clothing the imperial office with imposing ceremony and ecclesiastical coronation, sanctification, and support.83 A State religion allied with the empire, Christianity for its part began to adopt the principate’s hieratic ceremonial, inflexible hierarchy, bureaucracy, and ruthless lust for power.84 As the monsignor’s own evidently encomiastic commentary suggests in Persiles’ Rome (at least as reported by the poet-pilgrim), the Christianity he celebrates in Tasso and Zárate is less the religion of the meek, of caritas, and of the Pauline conversion of Gentile ‘others’ by word and example than it is the crusader religion of Constantine’s (and Zárate’s) wars and Pope Urban II’s (and Tasso’s) reconquered Jerusalems. This is evident already in the pilgrim-poet’s characterizations of the poems (Tasso’s Gerusalemme is ‘heroic,’ Zárate’s Cruz is ‘a truly heroic and devout poem worthy of being called a poem’), a panegyric that amounts to saying the Christian epic poems are praiseworthy for being – well – Christian epic poems: sabre-rattling (‘heroic’), pious (‘devout’), and epic-sounding (‘worthy of being called a poem’). We cannot be sure whether the tautology – that Zárate’s is a poem worthy of being called a poem – is the poet-pilgrim’s or Cervantes’ joke, but it surely is not the monsignor’s. Tasso was to sing of Jerusalem retaken and Zárate to fill the four corners of the earth with a heartswelling, rapturous song about the discovery of Christ’s cross and ‘the wars of the emperor Constantine.’ This is all very well for the monsignor, but we might ask ourselves what the militaristic values he commemorates have to do with Persiles and Sigismunda’s kind of heroism or Christianity. As anticipated in chapters 2 and 3, Persiles’ revaluation of epic arms in their relation to conjugal and spiritual love does not issue in a renunciation of warrior virtues and prowess altogether, much less in an embrace of pacifism. However, its characterization of the heroes and its choice of main action – an amorous and spiritual quest bent on the heart of Christianity instead of the infidel periphery – suggest a new kind of Christian epic. Its exemplary heroism is demonstrably capable of martial virtues and yet, as we saw in chapter 2, it emphasizes conquest of self, charity for brothers and others alike, and the need for spiritual conversion among Catholics. Persiles’ elder brother and rival Maximino, by contrast, is a paladin himself of the martial vision of Christian epic promoted by the monsignor, associated as he is with the warrior’s crude manners (‘a quien la aspereza de sus costumbres en algún modo

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le hacían aborrecible,’ Persiles 702) and continual wars abroad (‘anduvo ocupado en la guerra que siempre tenía con sus enemigos,’ Persiles 703). As such, he emerges, in part, as a personification of what the epics of Tasso and Zárate represent in the poet-pilgrim’s account of the monsignor’s museum. Crowned by Persiles’ effective defeat of Maximino, Cervantes’ Christian epic in this light implies a shift away from an epic tradition given to singing the praises of crusading wars of conquest and forced conversion of infidels as the highest Christian enterprise. What Tasso’s and Zárate’s epic subjects share is their projection of (western) Roman power to the East: in Constantine’s case, toward the eastern frontiers in Egypt and Persia; in Tasso’s, against the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem. Both feature cities that are paradigmatic mirror images of Rome: Constantine’s Nova Roma or New Rome (which only later was named Constantinople, for its founder), and Jerusalem itself, by Christian tradition the centre of the world and model for the evangelist John’s apocalyptic imagery associating the Christian faithful in Rome with New Jerusalem. We saw in chapter 1 that Persiles deliberately reverses the epic priority of the imperial periphery with respect to Rome. Gothic protagonism, Persiles’ homeland origin in Thule, and the epic journey from west to east redirects the Vergilian translatio imperii and the corresponding historical thrust of European conquest toward the New World in the West. In the Rome book, we are invited by reference to Tasso’s and Zárate’s Christian epics to notice that Persiles also reverses their projection of Roman power to the eastern edge of the empire. Cervantes’ Christian epic therefore reorients the story of epic conquest from western and eastern peripheries back toward Rome. Viewed in the light of the monsignor’s exemplars of Christian epic, Persiles’ characterization of its epic hero, its main action, and its conception of Rome’s relation to the imperial periphery suggest that Persiles should be regarded as more of an anti- or counter-Christian epic than an ideological fellow traveller with Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata or Zárate’s Cruz y Constantino. One powerful ideological implication of this geographic reversal is that Persiles appears to make a narrative bid to re-spiritualize the imperial ideal, to wrest the legacy of Christianity from its earlier perverse historical appropriation as an apology for worldly power and wars of conquest. Persiles’ Christian epic heroes pursue neither opportunistic conversions on the model of Zárate’s Constantine nor conquest of infidels on the model of Tasso’s Goffreddo, Tancredo, and Rinaldo. Against the cult of conquest and the deification of the aristocratic honour code,

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Persiles offers a counter-model of Christian politics, implicitly competing with those epic poets the poet-pilgrim praises in the same spirit that Cervantes explicitly announces his challenge to Heliodorus in the dedicatory pages of the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novellas). In Periandro’s response to the monsignor, he invokes the image of Rome as ‘head of the world’ (‘cabeza del mundo’). In a novel about princely heirs ostensibly on a pilgrimage of faith, this topos is apt to remind us that the body politic and the Pauline sacramental body were conventionally ‘headed’ by monarchs and by Christ. As would-be monarchs, Periandro and Auristela too will be ‘heads’ (‘cabezas’) of a Christian body politic. Their example of charity and justice suggests a corpus mysticum for which they serve as heads that St Paul might actually recognize as akin to his own ideal of it, unlike the amputated body of Philip III’s post-morisco Spain or the corrupt body of the novel’s Rome. Once the elder brother Maximino dies and Persiles and Sigismunda occupy their now united thrones, one might expect – assuming the monsignor’s (or poet-pilgrim’s) celebration of Tasso’s and Zárate’s epic values were theirs and the novel’s – that when the news of the Barbaric Isle’s restoration comes in Rome (Persiles 679) the protagonists would launch a campaign to conquer, Christianize, and bring the rule of law to the Northern Barbarians.85 Instead, by the time these ‘less than perfect Catholics’ reach Rome, they have had occasion to learn all too well that enough homegrown barbarities are committed in the Catholic heartlands by barbaric Catholics to warrant an inward-turning conquest and conversion – of barbarians and barbarities that orthodox Catholics either abet or fail to avert, and before which the Church finds itself impotent. Against the proselytizing urge, the assumption that nonChristians should be brought by hook or by crook into the fold,86 and the belief that the appropriate mission for Christian rulers was to throw the resources of the State behind this effort, Persiles finds numerous ways to draw attention to the demands that Christians (especially rulers, in this context) must make on themselves, on being good Christians and becoming better ones. Tasso and Zárate can therefore be seen rather as the epic roads not taken, forms of militant Christianity with the miles Christianus as model, kinds of Imitatio Christi, and paths to fulfillment of the promise of Christ that Persiles renounces for itself. Periandro has the last word here, an expression of the sheer marvellous exoticism of Rome. This city, head of the world, he says, contains marvels even more astonishing (‘están otras maravillas de mayor admiración’) than blank tablets on which to inscribe poets and poems

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to come. Because Periandro does not elaborate, it is left to the reader to decide which of the many unnamed marvels of Persiles’ Rome he could mean. Certainly the observation evokes guidebooks to the sights of Rome, which conventionally promised to lead travellers to the Mirabilia Urbis Romae. His comment further underscores, as we saw in chapter 1, that the novel’s Catholic South is the heroes’ exotic end of the road, no less rife with wonders (including the marvellous characters both good and bad met with in Rome) than the novel’s Barbarian and Gothic North. Finally we could read in Periandro’s remark a teasing allusion to the effect he and Auristela have on others, the marvel the protagonists are repeatedly said to induce wherever their unearthly beauty and Christian virtue make themselves known (not least in Rome). What this catalogue of marvels may also suggest is that, in Cervantes’ Rome, all roads lead to Persiles. Accepting the invitation implied in Periandro’s question (‘Will other tablets be prepared for future poets?’), we might then take a cue from the monsignor’s museum and fill one of the blank slates set aside for the bumper crop of ‘poets to come’ (‘poetas venideros’) with Cervantes and his epic.87 Indeed, as we have seen, Persiles offers an alternative vision of Christian epic to Tasso’s and Zárate’s through marvels of its own. It is an alternative to Tasso and Zárate for not only its choice of prose over verse, but also for its portrayal of a Christianity that does not renounce profane love, that is centred on caritas, and that promotes persuasion over force in the resolution of differences, as we have seen in the course of this chapter. We have noted evidence throughout this study that Persiles’ Rome is as much in need of spiritual conquest as is its Barbarian and Gothic North and in urgent need itself – like the Spanish castaway Antonio – of conversion. Periandro’s and Auristela’s journey in this context emerges as Cervantes’ answer to Zárate’s (and Constantine’s) ‘wars’ and Tasso’s (and Urban II’s) First Crusade: the epic of a spiritual conquest of self rather than a military conquest of others. A Redemptive Vision of Christian Politics The earthly paradise of the Dominican monastery in the North (Persiles 706–7) offers a visionary contrast to the conquest and conversion tropes of Tasso’s and Zárate’s epics. It also offers an implicit alternative to Philip III’s historical expulsion of the moriscos, with its corresponding amputation of the sacramental body politic. It is an ecumenical rather than imperial-monarchical or militantly crusading model of institu-

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tional Christianity. As exemplified also by Cloelia on the Barbaric Isle (Persiles 152–4) and Pizarro in Feliciana de la Voz’s story in Guadalupe (Persiles 475–6), the Dominican monastery embodies the triumph of language and instruction over arms in Cervantes’ Christian epic. It is hardly a United Nations, for the languages of the old western empire are favoured. But there is no threat or promise of proselytizing except through voluntary education, much less is there reference to the use of force. It is a positive vision of Christianity at work in the world. The monastery is mentioned only once, in Rome when Persiles’ servant Seráfido gives his account of Northern geography and mores to Rutilio. For this reason the brief passage is worth quoting in full: There is also another major island almost always covered in snow, which is called Greenland, and on one of its headlands there is a monastery under the rule of St Thomas with monks from four nations: Spaniards, Frenchmen, Tuscans, and Romans [or Latin-speakers]; they teach their languages to the leading members of the island so that when they leave the island, they will be understood wherever they go. The island, as I said, is buried in snow, and at the top of a low mountain there is a marvellous, noteworthy spring, which spills and pours forth a great abundance of water so hot that when it flows into the sea it not only thaws but also heats it, such that an incredible bounty of diverse fish are caught there, with which the monastery and the whole island support themselves, because the fishing is the source of all their income and benefits. (Hay otra isla, asimismo poderosa y casi siempre llena de nieve, que se llama Groenlanda, a una punta de la cual está fundado un monasterio debajo del título de Santo Tomás, en el cual hay religiosos de cuatro naciones: españoles, franceses, toscanos y latinos; enseñan sus lenguas a la gente principal de la isla, para que, en saliendo della, sean entendidos por do quiera que fueren. Está, como he dicho, la isla sepultada en nieve y, encima de una montañuela está una fuente, cosa maravillosa y digna de que se sepa, la cual derrama y vierte de sí tanta abundancia de agua, y tan caliente, que llega al mar y, por muy gran espacio dentro dél, no solamente le desnieva, pero le calienta, de modo que se recogen en aquella parte increíble infinidad de diversos pescados, de cuya pesca se mantiene el monasterio y toda la isla, que de allí saca sus rentas y provechos.’) (Persiles 706–7)

This novelistic vision conflates the mythic subtexts of the earthly or garden paradise and the tower of Babel with millenarian hopes for a

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new spiritual age.88 With its hill, fountain, four nations (in place of the Edenic four rivers), perennial Golden Age temperate climate, and natural abundance, the garden paradise is brought down to earth and mercantilized. The monastery makes its own way in the world by engaging in a trade that also evokes apostolic fishers for souls. Here the attempt to unite heaven and earth does not issue in a tower symbolic of human arrogance and self-defeating discord, but in an embrace of this world in its human diversity. The plurality to be sure is limited to four European (Latin and three Romance) languages, the universal discourse is Christian, and the benefits of schooling are limited to an elite, yet the vision is emphatically ecumenical and implicitly eschews militant proselytizing. It is worth noting the association of this vision of heaven on earth with the novel’s North rather than with its Rome or with other traditional locations for the earthly paradise in the Orient, South America, or Antarctic islands promoted by pagan and Christian authorities alike.89 Persiles thus reverses its own rhetorically prompted expectations that link the novel’s Rome with New Jerusalem and its North with barbarism or less than perfect Catholicism. The contrast between the novel’s less-than-exemplary actual Rome and this utopian vision of the Northern monastery is underscored precisely because we first learn of it in Rome from a Northern servant of Periandro’s hot on his trail. If we are tempted to dismiss this Northern vision as an example of the coupling of Persiles’ North with myth and its South with history, we should remember first that there were travellers’ reports of a Dominican monastery in Greenland.90 But we should also recall the power of myth to drive and shape history. We might especially bear in mind the at-once generative and obfuscatory effect of the Edenic vision of the fountain and four rivers on Columbus’s framing of what were, for him, initially anomalous features of South American topography.91 On his third voyage (1498) Columbus sailed south of the Cannibal Islands in the neighbourhood of Trinidad, and sailors noted fresh water in the Gulf of Paria in Venezuela, a circumstance that required great rivers and therefore a vast expanse of land. Columbus’s hypothesis for this anomaly, which he confided to his diary, was to imagine the great land mass was the location of the earthly paradise.92 The earthly paradise theory explained the freshwater gulf in his mind, for according to all approved biblical and pagan authorities, paradise contained a fountain from which sprang the four great rivers of the Orbis Terrarum.93 In contrast to the subsequent historical results of Columbus’s encounter with what he saw as earthly paradise in the New World – conquest and despo-

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liation – one cannot help but notice that the Dominicans in Cervantes’ Greenland prize their economic self-sufficiency and teach languages so that the leading citizens will be capable of making themselves understood in the world. Perhaps as readers we are expected to infer that some such arrangement explains Periandro’s mastery of Garcilaso and the Latin poets, as we saw in chapter 3. It may well be a Southern Catholic, even colonial, outpost in the North, but there is no mention of sacraments or instruction in catechism, to say nothing of conquest, forced conversion, or violent end times. Auristela as Symbolic Crossroads of Church and State Exemplar of royal justice as we saw, Auristela far more than Periandro bears the glory and the burden of piety in the novel. Rome for Periandro is not primarily catechism, but marriage to Auristela (Persiles 658). The convent is a temptation for Auristela throughout (on Policarpo’s Isle in Book 2 as well as Rome in Book 4), and when she renounces that vow for marriage with Periandro and political succession she is sacrificing one possible self for another. Marriage and a public role as monarch are opposed not so much to Christianity as to the ascetic life. Auristela does not repudiate Christianity but lives her Christianity in the world, placed in the service of profane ends: not only marriage and children, but also politics (including succession to the throne and the practice of justice, as we saw on the Isla de Pescadores) – two forms of this-worldly transcendence explored in the novel. Art is yet another form of transcendence, portraiture on the face of it, and more broadly the vocational destiny and choice of the poets and playwrights who appear as characters or as passing references, including Periandro himself and even Cervantes in the self-portrait he treats his readers to in the prologue and in the dedication.94 Although Auristela’s life-saving choice of matrimony can be seen as a contrast to, indeed as a redemption of, Leonor’s homicidal choice of the nunnery in Lisbon (as discussed earlier), this does not entitle us to claim that the novel renounces asceticism altogether.95 Nor even in Leonor’s case can we claim that the choice itself is presented as the cause of Sosa’s death rather than the manner in which it is made. In Book 3 the hermit-sage Soldino is portrayed favourably. His retirement from the world follows a long, full life in the service of Charles V, which is capped by the contemplative solitude of his old age and the study of mathematics and astrology (Persiles 598–605). Soldino’s tribute to

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Charles V has reminded more than one reader of the emperor’s own abdication in 1555 and his subsequent retirement to the monastery at Yuste, a renunciation of worldly ambition that the Hibernian sage Mauricio earlier admires as he reflects on the multiple motives that lead to the embrace of bucolic solitudes (Persiles 413–14). The Italian Rutilio is moved to adopt the solitary life himself on the Isle of Hermits, offering to take over from Renato and Eusebia and run the lighthouse when they return to France. Although he is a young man, the ascetic choice is presented positively in part it appears – to judge by Rutilio’s own wondrous response to what he sees as a ‘sure’ (‘segura’) life (Persiles 413) – because it serves as an antidote to the life-threatening perils of his prior sexual adventurism. For Rutilio, in any case, it is a temporary choice (Persiles 700). Auristela’s forced election between two paths to virtue (matrimony and holy orders) is an instance of the inevitable kind of internalized sacrifice that the novel does not show a way to evade. Another is the impersonal sort represented by Maximino’s death in Rome, which is the prior condition for Periandro’s and Auristela’s marriage without trampling of rights – much as the fortuitous death of Isabel Castrucha’s uncle, for all of Isabel’s histrionic ingenuity, is the decisive event preparing the way for her marriage to Andrea in Book 4. Cloelia’s defence of Auristela against the Barbaric Law (discussed in chapter 1), Ricla’s sparing of Antonio on the Barbaric Isle (discussed in chapter 2), and Pizarro’s dissuasion of Feliciana’s father in Guadalupe (discussed earlier in this chapter) are examples of sacrificial situations avoided in this novel because characters heroic enough to step forth or speak up do so, and in a language understood by the oppressors. This recourse to language and persuasion, and its association with courage, makes a stark contrast to the silence and evasiveness that characterize Sosa and Leonor’s story. Without a change in the hierarchy of values – what is punished and rewarded – in Persiles’ novelistic world, this kind of heroism would appear destined to remain exceptional, not only on the Barbaric Isle but also in the novel’s Catholic South, where the preoccupation with honour trumps the claims of both Catholicism and the Crown as independent forces for justice and virtue (the cases of Feliciana and Renato-Eusebia). Heroic charity heads off the gratuitous sacrificial act, associated in the discursive context of ‘civilization’ (sixteenth-century law, reason, and humanity) with barbarism, and in the discursive context of Christianity with cruelty. But there is no possible

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escape altogether from sacrifice here, in the sense that every redemption gained in this novelistic world is conditional.96 There are at least two other senses in which Auristela becomes a touchstone for the official Church: in her association both with the Church’s defence of the veneration of images and with its figural or typological tradition of exegesis. The first strikingly reaffirms the novel’s commitment to seeking transcendence in this world. The second relates theme, narrative structure, and imagery through an equally striking literary appropriation of a sacred hermeneutical tradition. I conclude the chapter with a few remarks about them in this and the following section. Auristela and Periandro are paragons of beauty, admired and even worshipped for it. Together with the silence about their relationship, indeed it is their beauty that brings down Policarpo in Book 2. In Book 3 and in particular Book 4, Auristela becomes the focal point of a dispute in Rome not only as image but as source of imagery, of the portrait that had bewitched Maximino and of another that now pits Arnaldo against the duke of Nemurs. The first sets brother against brother, Persiles against Maximino. The potentially fratricidal consequence of this rivalry is brought home by the murderous veneration that the second portrait provokes. Arnaldo and Nemurs nearly kill each other over the likeness and the promise of possession of Auristela herself they take it for. They then proceed to unleash a bidding war in Rome over the image. All three Christians (Maximino, Arnaldo, and Nemurs) are thus linked to the Northern Barbarian Bradamiro, another barbaric literalist, who mistakes the cross-dressed Periandro for a girl on the Barbaric Isle. Murderous worship of the idol of beauty, of Auristela’s image – materialized in the portrait over which the men fight – even of Auristela herself as image, suggests an everyday, customary rather than sectarian idolatry, a comedic version of the abomination abhorred by God for which idolaters are smitten by the sword in Deuteronomy. The imperialist Sepúlveda had argued for just war against the Amerindians on, among other grounds, the practice of human sacrifice understood as a diabolical category mistake, an overliteral interpretation of ‘the letter that kills.’97 In Maximino’s reliance and Arnaldo and the duke of Nemur’s violent fixation on Auristela’s portrait, Persiles suggests that Christians are sometimes guilty of their own variations on an over-literal, even idolatrous interpretation of the letter that kills, which can lead to human sacrifice in the name of honour.

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In this context Auristela herself and her portrait could also be read as a test case in the profane, erotic realm for what is at stake in the doctrine of the veneration of images newly defended by the Council of Trent.98 In fact the text itself invites us to make this association – to bridge the profane and sacred implications of the veneration of images – in the description of and response to the iconography of the portrait in Rome: [The pilgrims] happened to see a full-length portrait (from tip-to-toe) of a woman wearing a crown on her head – although the crown itself was split in half – and who was standing with her feet set on a globe. No sooner had they seen it than they recognized the face as Auristela’s, drawn so true to life there was no doubting it. ([V]ieron en una pared [de la Calle Bancos] un retrato entero de pies a cabeza de una mujer que tenía una corona en la cabeza, aunque partida por medio la corona, y, a los pies, un mundo, sobre el cual estaba puesta. Y, apenas la hubieron visto, cuando conocieron ser el rostro de Auristela, tan al vivo dibujado, que no les puso en duda de conocerla.’) (Persiles 659)

Auristela and the work’s owner, a famous painter, fall into conversation about the painting’s iconography and meaning. Auristela makes no mention of the likeness to herself but wonders what it means that the woman is painted with a crown on her head – what is more, split down the middle – and that her feet are set on the globe. In this uncanny moment of recognition and distance, of universal ideal and earthly particular, the painter’s response resonates beyond the painting and appears to take in the novel’s broader ideological commitments: ‘Those my lady … are painters’ fantasies, or cappriccios as they are called, and perhaps it means that this maiden deserves to wear the crown of beauty and is trampling the world underfoot; but I take it to mean that you, my lady, are its original and that you deserve a whole crown, and not just a painted world but a real and true one.’ (‘Eso, señora, … son fantasías de pintores, o caprichos, como los llaman. Quizá quieren decir que esta doncella merece llevar la corona de hermosura, que ella va hollando en aquel mundo; pero yo quiero decir que dice que vos, señora, sois su original, y que merecéis corona entera, y no mundo pintado, sino real y verdadero.’) (Persiles 660)

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The iconographic attributes broadly suggest those of the Virgin of the Apocalypse. Indeed the image of the Virgin trampling the world underfoot recalls one of the three icons kept by Renato and Eusebia on the altar of the Isle of Hermits (Persiles 405). And yet what to make of the crown split down the middle? It seems fitting that this image – half portrait, half religious icon – should be glossed by a painter rather than a cleric. In the balance between religious and aesthetic commitments, between the didactic and the pleasurable, the choice tells us something important about where the novel’s priorities lie. We are first reminded that painters take artistic liberties, that meanings therefore may be capricious and invite multiple interpretations. The painter then offers a conventional reading of the portrait: it could mean the lady deserves the crown of beauty and has the world at her feet. But then he tells us what he thinks it really means, inverting the religious sense in which the Virgin stands for ideals of purity that raise her above the world. The painter’s commentary makes Auristela the original and the Virginal iconography the travesty – it is the sacred representation that is inferior, as if the flesh-and-blood Auristela were the Platonic ideal and the image of the Virgin its imperfect, misleading material copy. In the same vein, the world on which the Virgin tramples in order to demonstrate her superiority to the mundane is presented as the ‘real and true’ (‘real y verdadero’) reward preferable to the painted or idealized one of the iconographic tradition. The novel finds a way yet again to invert the ascetic (and Neoplatonic) hierarchy of values and to affirm the truth of particular embodiment over the prestige of ideal or abstract conceptions, especially those that encouraged contempt for the bodily and the worldly.99 How does this encounter on the Roman street renowned for its trade in religious imagery (Calle de Bancos),100 with its idiosyncratic reflection on the sacred and profane veneration of images, shed light on the talismanic power of Auristela’s image elsewhere in the novel? Maximino (who knows Auristela only through her portrait), the Roman governor (who covets her portrait for his collection), and Arnaldo and Nemurs (fervent, possessive, belligerent, and spendthrift Christian admirers of the same portrait) can be read in view of this episode as illustrations of various kinds of veneration of the image (Petrarchan, courtly, dynastic, aesthetic, economic, sexual, and religious) and an exploration of their possible sources and consequences. In particular they suggest that a misguided adoration of the image may well confuse possession of it with possession of what it represents and lead to violence in the name of love, much as early modern doctrinal disputes

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between Catholics and Protestants over the status of the image led to violence in the name of religion.101 A misguided adoration of the image may also seek to drag the Virgin down from her allegorical heights, recklessly and often lawlessly lusting after particular virgins rather than aspiring to the values for which the Virgin Mother stands. Prose Epic as Vernacular Scripture Persiles’ boldest gesture may well be its recurring identification of the princely heroes with Christ. The Christological reminiscences do not, of course, exhaust the significance of these characters, linked as we have seen to a wide array of classical, biblical, and later profane paradigms. Nevertheless, the Christological dimension of Periandro and Auristela not only helps make sense of the contrarian religious and political sensibilities of this idiosyncratic Christian epic (as we have seen over the course of this study), it may also shed light on its distinctive narrative structure. By this I mean the narrative counterpoint of a main action interlaced with superficially unrelated but thematically closely linked secondary stories. The mental habit of relating stories by patterns in a sequence involving some kind of fulfillment or redemption underlies the exegetical practice of typology that linked Old and New Testament stories, a practice already absorbed into vernacular poetry and reflection on profane literature by Dante and his followers. In this sense Persiles’ peculiar structure – its close weaving of main plot and subplots – bears a formal affinity with the typological method, and the widespread verbal and visual diffusion of typology’s underlying assumptions may well have contributed to the novel’s shaping. It is important to recognize, however, that an argument for Persiles’ affinities with figural structures or mentalities (whether theological or poetic) could not be grounded solely in formal features of the novel. After all, we find varying degrees of the narrative pattern – the complex weaving of main with secondary stories – in all of Cervantes’ longer fiction, including La Galatea and the two parts of Don Quijote. And any number of literary models for it have been plausibly suggested, whether the example of narrative interruption and insertion of Heliodorus’s The Ethiopica and pastoral novels such as Montemayor’s Diana (1559),102 the chivalric epic interlace of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516),103 or the experiments in interpolation of Mateo Alemán’s picaresque Guzmán de Alfarache (1599).104 If there is some explanatory reward for proposing that what Cervantes does in Persiles is to structure the novel on the typo-

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logical scheme and harness it for the needs and possibilities of profane literature, it is that the author’s long-standing interest in juggling multiple plot lines is thus lent additional thematic and ideological reasons for being in Persiles. The hypothesis, therefore, is deliberately particular to Persiles. But since Cervantes’ solutions to the challenge of negotiating narrative unity and variety in long fictions were unique in each case (indeed distinct in part 2 of Don Quijote from part 1), this may turn out to be an advantage rather than a problem. What the figural model enables us to do with Persiles is to provide a single framework that neatly bridges the ideological and narrative peculiarities of Persiles – the aforementioned narrative structure, the Christological attributes of the protagonists, and the prominence of key typological motifs. Through the characterization of Periandro and Auristela, the theme of Church and State or Christian politics may therefore be figuratively brought together with an important organizing principle for the narrative. Other scholars (including Casalduero, Forcione, and Wilson) have noted typological echoes – particularly the Exodus subtext of the flight from Egypt to the Promised Land – in the main-plot movement from the Barbaric Isle to Rome.105 They have also noted it in allusion throughout, especially in the imagery: for example, in Rutilio’s sonnet with its evocation of Noah in Book 1, in the figure of the overturned ship that recalls Jonah’s story near the opening of Book 2, or in the Abrahamic and sacrificial lamb references in Feliciana’s hymn to the Virgin in Book 3. My own reading pursues this feature of Persiles by concentrating on the Christological identification of the two protagonists and the recurring Abrahamic motif of the sacrifice averted. Through this sacrificial motif I propose a figural relationship between the novel as a whole and the Gospel, as well as a figural pattern that governs the relationship among episodes within the novel. We first undertake a brief excursus on typological theory and practice to help us define the nature of the claim more carefully. Typology, broadly speaking, is the study of the relation by analogy that one event taken to be a prefiguration bears to another taken to be its fulfillment.106 Typology can simply designate a figural analogy in a work that operates tout court on the principle of prefiguration and fulfillment. But historically it refers to the method of patristic exegesis whereby Old Testament or classical pagan characters, events, or objects are read as types, figures, or shadows fulfilled in Christ’s Incarnation or Second Coming or in the Church itself. As such it is a distinctively Christian

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hermeneutic tradition in origin, initiated by Jesus of Nazareth himself and by St Paul. This exegetical tradition sought correspondences between Old Testament types and New Testament antitypes, in accord with the belief that Jesus fulfilled Jewish prophecies heralding the Messiah.107 Prominent prefigurations of Christ are Adam (as father), Noah (as covenanter), Melchizedek (as priest), Moses, David (saved by prayer before the lions), Samson, and Jonah’s three days and nights in the belly of the fish (a type so understood by Jesus himself, according to Matthew 12.41–2 and later associated with death and resurrection). In Book 2 of Persiles the overturned boat bearing the pilgrim cohort is compared to a whale (Persiles 283) in a figure that recalls Jonah, who was swallowed by the fish for ignoring God’s directive to prophesy the fall of Nineveh. Important biblical events in this exegetical tradition are the flood and crossing of the Red Sea as baptism and liberation from Egypt and the Exodus as prefigurations of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus’ flight into Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of the innocents.108 The parallels between Moses’ exodus from Egypt and Jesus and his family’s flight into Egypt are perhaps the most compelling in the context of Persiles, given the Exodus subtext that we (with other scholars) have documented more than once in previous pages (recall the approach to the Catholic South is described as an Exodus to the Promised Land, e.g., Persiles 432). Much as Moses liberated Israel and handed down the law, Jesus would liberate his people and hand down a newer, higher law (Jesus is presented in Matthew as a new and improved Moses). Joseph and Jonah are types for Christ and, like Persiles, are dreamers. Joseph, Jesus, and Persiles are outsiders in the Big City: Joseph in pharaoh’s court, Jesus in the Pharisees’ Jerusalem, and Persiles in Rome. Jonah’s Nineveh, like Babylon in John’s Book of Revelation, suggested Rome to many later readers. As in Persiles, John’s Rome figures as the great, foreign, and corrupt imperial court. Typology was an instrument by which the early Christian fathers could maintain both the unity and diversity of the two main parts of the Bible. Recognizing the New Testament’s special status for Christians and yet rescuing the Old Testament for them, they preserved the letter of Hebrew scripture by an act of Christian interpretation. As a result, there is an oft-noted ambivalence toward the Hebrew legacy in this Christian interpretive tradition. The relation between Old and New Testament would play itself out in later Christian exegesis as the tension between the law and the spirit, the body and the soul, and the literal and the figurative, which also constitute important thematic axes in Persiles, as we

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have seen.109 Typology offered the Christian authors of the New Testament a means of reconciling their belief that Jesus Christ was the Messiah with Hebrew scriptures regarded both as the hallowed origin and the superseded beginning of the later work.110 Patristic readers who practised typological exegesis were thus engaging not in allegory or prophecy, but in the interpretation of history. Erich Auerbach in his classic essay on figura joined others in distinguishing typology from prophecy, moral allegory, and eschatology, in that the prefiguration or type retains its integrity as a historical reality separate from the fulfillment, with a meaning of its own, at the same time that it is presented as a merely literal copy of a higher spiritual reality.111 Auerbach was careful to distinguish between what he regarded as the artificial rhetoric of (pagan) allegory from the historical consciousness of (Jewish and Christian) figural thinking. In his account of allegory, the didactic message usually absorbs the historical referent, and the comparative term is typically an abstraction. That is, the allegorical sign is forgotten once it has served its purpose of identifying a concept. In the case of figural typology, however, both members of the comparison (the type and its fulfillment) are historical and symbolic realities. Thus, according to Auerbach, the prefiguration both is and means. The sacred texts – together with the profane ones modelled on them and their commentaries, such as Dante’s Commedia – are both history and metaphor in his understanding of figura.112 In the light of this brief overview it is particularly significant that Persiles’ primary typological motif should be the Sacrifice of Isaac. The Akedah or binding of Isaac became the supreme example of self-sacrifice in obedience to God’s will and the symbol of Jewish martyrdom. Isaac became a type first for Christ, who fulfilled it perfectly, then also for Christians, who are Abraham’s seed after the spirit according to Pauline doctrine: the substitution of the ram for Isaac was itself regarded as a significant typological object prefiguring Christ’s crucifixion (1 Cor. 5.7). For Alberto Barugel, the portrayal in Genesis of Isaac sensing the solemnity of the occasion and yet walking in perfect obedience, while carrying the wood upon which he is to be sacrificed, ranks among the most Christological portraits found in the Old Testament.113 In Persiles the sacrifice of Isaac is twice invoked at strategic moments: at the very beginning of Book 1 (on the Barbaric Isle) and at the beginning of Book 3 (in Feliciana de la Voz’s hymn to the Virgin) or, to put it another way, in the beginning and again in the middle of the novel. The first allusion is identified with Auristela, the second with Feliciana

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– who thus becomes a kind of type (nearly sacrificial victim to her father) to Auristela’s redeeming antitype. This is the relevant passage from the Barbaric Isle: The governor, wanting to get on with the tests [of the Barbaric Law] the sooner to give Periandro [disguised as a girl] his proper companion, ordered the youth [Auristela disguised as a boy] sacrificed immediately, and his heart made into a powder for the ridiculous and fraudulent test. Many Barbarians immediately took hold of the boy; with no more ceremony than blindfolding him, they made him kneel, tying his hands behind him. Without saying a word, meek as a lamb, the youth awaited the blow that would end his life. (El gobernador, con deseo de apresurar sus pruebas y dar felice compañía a Periandro, mandó que al momento se sacrificase aquel mancebo, de cuyo corazón se hiciesen los polvos de la ridícula y engañosa prueba. Asieron al momento del mancebo muchos bárbaros; sin más ceremonia que atarle un lienzo por los ojos, le hicieron hincar de rodillas, atándole por atrás las manos. El cual, sin hablar palabra, como un manso cordero, esperaba el golpe que le había de quitar la vida.’) (Persiles 152)

And here is the Old Testament type (Gen. 22.9–13): When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.

The description of Auristela going like a lamb to the slaughter powerfully evokes the stories of both Isaac and the crucified Christ. Isaac was to be sacrificed to prove Abraham’s absolute obedience to God, and a ram was substituted. The act and imagery were taken to foreshadow Christ’s crucifixion, and in the Book of John especially, Christ is described with Lamb of God Passover imagery (John 1.29). As Isaac was

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obedient unto the point of death, so Christ offered himself in perfect obedience to his father’s will.114 And it is in the same sacrificial sense of self-giving that the Christian is called to share and that Auristela mimes in her long-suffering silence.115 The ‘meek lamb’ imagery used to describe Auristela on the Barbaric Isle thus links her both with Abraham’s displaced sacrifice of Isaac (the human sacrifice under the knife, displaced by a ram) and Christ’s later fulfillment of it (the actual human sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the redemption of human original sin). By launching Persiles with such a charged image that in itself recapitulates the typological movement from Old to New Testament (and from law to grace), Cervantes suggests the novel itself is somehow participating in that figural economy. To follow the logic of typology, Auristela is to Christ as Christ is to Isaac; and Persiles is to the Bible (both Old Testament and New) as the New Testament is to the Old – a recapitulation of the scriptural sequence projected into the present and translated into the domain of profane literature by an author whose professed desire is to entertain. As if to confirm the typological significance of the novel’s sacrificial motif (which makes its first appearance on the Barbaric Isle, near the beginning of Book 1), Feliciana’s hymn to the Virgin (at the beginning of Book 3, or the middle of the novel) explicitly recalls Abraham, the patriarch of the new covenant: ‘[Y]ou are the wife / who gave immaculate flesh to the sacred Word, / and who turned Adam’s fall to good fortune; / You are the hand of God / that stayed Abraham’s harsh blade / giving us the true sacrifice / of that meekest [or most gentle] lamb’ (‘Sois la esposa / que al sacro Verbo limpia carne distes, / por quien de Adán la culpa fue dichosa; / sois el brazo de Dios que detuvistes / de Abrahán la cuchilla rigurosa / y, para el sacrificio verdadero, / nos distes el mansísimo cordero,’ Persiles 482–3). In Feliciana’s hymn, Jesus not only redeems Adam’s fall, the Virgin is the hand that stays Abraham’s blade and offers Christ in Isaac’s place (‘the meekest lamb’ [‘el mansísimo cordero’]). The part of God in Isaac’s story, taken by the Virgin in Feliciana’s hymn, is played – in Auristela’s – by Cloelia, because she heads off the princess’s imminent sacrifice on the Barbaric Isle. Other moments reinforce the typological associations of the main characters and action, the senses in which they reincarnate their Old and New Testament antitypes in a new key. When the Roman penitentiary who instructs Auristela in the faith describes Christ’s ‘labours of his life’ (‘trabajos de su vida,’ Persiles 657), he in effect offers a Chris-

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tological gloss of the novel’s title The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda and, therefore, of its protagonists. Auristela contributes to this Christological theme when, in the Domicio episode of Book 3 (set in France), she describes the critically wounded Periandro as a ‘mountain’ (‘monte’): ‘You were a mountain, but a humble mountain that hid from the eyes of others under the shadows of your industry [diligence] and discretion [reason]’ (‘Monte érades vos, pero monte humilde que, con las sombras de vuestra industria y de vuestra discreción, os encubríades a los ojos de las gentes,’ Persiles 576). Carlos Romero notes the mountain topos’s roots in the Bible and devotional literature such as Francisco de Osuna’s Ley de amor santo (Law of Holy Love, 1530), which disseminated the association of mountain with eminence.116 I would add that ‘monte’ is one of the names of Christ discussed by Fray Luis de León in his fundamental elaboration of this tradition, De los nombres de Cristo (On the Names of Christ, 1583).117 Persiles’ narrative structure, imagery, and characterization thereby suggest the Old Testament type, the New Testament antitype, and Cervantes’ own novelistic answer to the sequence. We need not take this for a theological claim rather than for a narrative premise. Sacred typology was not only a tool of theological exegesis, but also appeared in sacred drama and processions, constituting as such a fairly diffused forma mentis. Typological sequences were everywhere to be seen in autos sacramentales (‘Eucharist plays’) and pasos (‘parade carts’). Indeed, typology’s popularization in feast-day processional carts can be documented in relaciones (‘chronicles’ or ‘reports’) from the farthest-flung corners of the Habsburg monarchy. To take just one representative example, in 1603 four allegorical carts depicting the angelic state (featuring the archangels), the natural law (featuring Abraham and Isaac prominently), the written law (featuring Moses), and the law of grace (featuring Christ, the Apostles, the Church Fathers, and the theological virtues) were drawn through the streets of Quito (Ecuador) to celebrate the canonization of Raimundo de Peñafort – a personal initiative of Philip III’s blessed by pope Clement VIII.118 The public use of such an iconographic shorthand to represent a complex typological scheme of Old Testament anticipation and New Testament redemption demonstrates to what degree the monarchy and Church could count on popular comprehension of the outlines – at least – of this figural tradition to promote their causes. And yet we should not understate the boldness and significance of such a gesture in a context in which the Council of Trent had refused

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to authorize the circulation of scripture in the vernacular. Nor should we neglect to notice Cervantes’ taste for paradox even in this charged context. Persiles’ Barbaric Isle at once evokes New World sacrificial rituals (pointedly placing them on the edge of Europe) and the Old and New Testament origins of Christianity in an act of (Abraham’s allayed and Christ’s redeeming) sacrifice. Although in the novel Rome is ostensibly at the antipodes of the human sacrifice of the Barbaric Isle, Persiles’ Rome itself comes off as a Barbaric Isle in Catholic disguise (as discussed in chapter 1). Cervantes may have been encouraged to represent his actual novelistic Rome in highly unflattering terms because, quite apart from reform-minded animadversions against the vices of the sixteenth-century papal court, there was Rome’s role in the New Testament. Built into Jesus of Nazareth’s story is the association of Rome with the barbarism (as well as the redemption) of human sacrifice. He was killed by his own but under Roman jurisdiction and by the kind of punishment – crucifixion – reserved in Roman legal codes for the seditious, especially for insubordinate slaves. It therefore can come as no surprise to us that Persiles’ principal avatars of Christ – the protagonists – should themselves both be nearly killed in separate incidents in Rome (Auristela by poisoning, Periandro by a sword thrust through his chest). What thematic and ideological significance could there be in this association of Auristela (and Periandro) with both Isaac and Christ? Auristela’s thwarted sacrifice on the Barbaric Isle emerges as a model for heading off re-enactments of Abraham’s would-be sacrifice and Christ’s crucifixion in the name of faith, love, honour, authority, and interest in one story after another (consider the examples of Leonor, Renato, and Feliciana discussed in this chapter). On the Barbaric Isle, as discussed in chapter 2, it is Cloelia’s heroic intervention that stays the knife. Her act of persuasion is echoed by Pizarro and Orellana in Feliciana’s story, who convince Feliciana’s father and brother not to kill her for having a child out of wedlock. In both cases, as already mentioned, persuasion comes about by appeal to the values of the would-be sacrificers. What is more, Auristela and Periandro’s example suggests that something like a figural pattern characterizes the relation of many of the apparently unrelated secondary stories to the main-plot journey. The prefiguration would be represented by the many episodes that involve a sacrificial impulse either realized or threatened but averted; the fulfillment, by the alternatives (mainly exemplified by the protagonists) to the cult of sacrifice associated in the discursive context of ‘civ-

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ilization’ with barbarism, in the discursive context of Christianity with cruelty (and, in the epics of Tasso and Zárate, with conquest and politically motivated conversion), and in the ethnographic context of the novel’s Catholic South with revenge in the name of honour. Although the protagonists are said to be in need of instruction in the faith, their ‘labours’ (notably in Rome) constitute a kind of redemptive (and comedic) rewriting of the tragic stories of Taurisa and the gentlemen duellers on the North Atlantic island (Persiles 257–9), Leonor and Sosa in Lisbon (cruel type to Auristela’s charitable antitype in her decision to marry rather than sacrifice Periandro on the altar of her piety; Persiles 199–205, 437), and Ortel Banedre and Luisa la talaverana in Rome (Persiles 652–6). And yet Periandro and Auristela are exemplary types or fulfillments even in relation to characters whose stories end happily, but for the wrong reasons according to the standard of Catholic perfection set by the novel’s Roman Church (for instance, in the penitentiaries’ catechism). Rutilio escapes captivity in a Roman jail only on condition he marry a Roman sorceress, who reveals herself to be a she-wolf and whom he stabs through the heart (Persiles 185–94). He calls the adventure his ‘labour’ or ‘trabajo’ (Persiles 186), a local variation on the novel’s title with its evocations both of Hercules and Christ as we have seen. And the stabbing itself is a Catholic re-enactment of the Barbaric Isle’s sacrificial law. Transila escapes custom-sanctioned rape by her groom’s relatives in Hibernia, but at the price of exile (Persiles 213–18). Renato and Eusebia are restored to honour following ten years in selfimposed exile from France for a crime they did not commit, by the chance deathbed confession of their accuser (Persiles 408–21, 682). Feliciana de la Voz in Extremadura (Spain) is saved by appeal to the honour code rather than to Catholic law or humanist virtue (Persiles 474–7). Stung by Flora’s rejection, the brutal French nobleman Rubertino and his henchmen assault the pilgrims in France and nearly succeed in abducting the young woman before the Spanish-barbarian mestizo Antonio puts an end to the rape with an arrow through the Catholic ‘gentleman’s’ heart (Persiles 580–1). And in Lucca Isabela Castrucho manages to outwit her greedy uncle and marry the man of her choice, Andrea Marulo, only by carrying out an elaborate deception involving a parody of the Church rite of exorcism and of the sacraments of confession and matrimony (Persiles 611–27). In contrast, Periandro and Auristela’s performance of charity, forgiveness, and selfrestraint is presented as the living Roman catechism very much needed

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in a Catholic world more inclined to celebrate its Christian law than to live it. Although the protagonists are ostensibly the Northern Goths less than perfectly versed in the Catholic law (Persiles 651), they inherit the mantle of Christ to the extent that – like the Barbarian Ricla – they actually incarnate rather than outwardly keep the law of love: in the erotic realm, by honouring the principle of mutual consent; in the Christian realm by practising caritas; in the political realm, by exercising justice. Insofar as typological exegesis and poetic practice helped shape Cervantes’ novelistic experiments in Persiles (whether in the relation of the parts to the whole or the novel’s relation to scripture), it appears to have served the author mainly as a creative principle for writing ‘a book … of entertainment’ (‘un libro … de entretenimiento’),119 as a generative poetics rather than a theological hermeneutic. Typology could offer a stimulus for reflection on and narrative invention about the rich ambiguity of historia as history and historia as story, in Auerbach’s terms of history and metaphor.120 And finally it could model a figural way of reading and a way of writing, in the service of a Christian epic novel constructed, no less than Don Quijote, on the appropriation of other discourses – in this instance, of a major conceptual discourse associated with theology, the queen of the sciences. Don Quijote makes equally heady claims for chivalry in his speech to the poet Lorenzo (Don Quijote II.18), as a discipline demanding the widest knowledge of the practical and contemplative arts. It is no accident that Don Quijote should address these remarks to a young poet, who despite his father’s preference for the safer fields of law and theology is quixotically (and so, perhaps, also foolishly) determined to follow his own star and inclination. Don Quijote means to encourage the poet, and places poetry nearly on the same footing as his beloved chivalry, establishing parallels between and ennobling the two vocations by drawing on terms used by the canon of Toledo in his earlier defence of chivalric literature understood as prose epic (Don Quijote I.47). The claims Don Quijote makes for chivalry, like the canon’s for prose epic (discussed in the introduction), were common currency to humanists who praised poetry in the lofty terms made familiar to us already by Dante and his commentators – as an encyclopedic compendium of human knowledge and revealed vision, an expression of literal historical and hidden spiritual senses, and as a potential vehicle for higher truths usually reserved for theology.121 Persiles may be regarded as the incarnation of the vision articulated by both Don Quijote and the canon, thematically

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and formally carving out an autonomous if not independent place for poetry understood as imaginative literature, which had claims of its own to universality as a meeting ground for the arts and sciences. And if the Church was to deny the faithful access to scripture in the vernacular as confirmed by Trent, Cervantes in Persiles would provide a novelistic alternative.

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Epilogue: Cervantes’ Human and Divine Comedy

Now that we have concluded our own epic journey to Persiles’ Rome, what might we say about Cervantes’? A novelistic Rome to which all roads lead but where official truths are honoured mainly in the breach discourages definitive conclusions. It may be inevitable that the traveller of Persiles’ highways and byways should be left with an acute sense of roads not taken. In that spirit I glance briefly both backward and forward, to suggest how Persiles might be situated in other biographical, historical, and literary narratives I will only try to sketch here. Cervantes launches his prose epic with a narrative reflection on barbarism, much as the Western historiographic tradition itself is often said to in Herodotus. Cicero called Herodotus at once the Father of History and a first-rate teller of fabulous tales, a polarity – the association of history with truth and fiction with lies – that fiction-writers have frequently sought to reverse ever since.1 The quibble on historia as history and historia as story in Persiles’ subtitle – Historia setentrional (Northern Story or History) – enacts its own variation on Cicero’s observation about Herodotus. It also invites us – at least in the comedic spirit of Cervantes’ ‘entretenimiento’ – to read Persiles as an exploration of the possible truths of fiction and the actual lies of some versions of history. Fiction’s challenge to history continues to fascinate writers, and Persiles’ may be illuminated – retrospectively – by an observation that the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes makes about Gabriel García Márquez: ‘For García Márquez a novel is the fundamental act we call a myth, the re-presentation of the founding act.’2 What he means by this, in part, as he goes on to explain, is that the novel can be a response to the inadequacies and omissions of the official, documented history of the times. Persiles not only imagines a founding act (the Barbaric Isle sacrificial

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Law) that may be read as a parable for the self-appointed guardians of ‘civilization.’ It also provides us reasons – as we have seen – to read it as an ‘historia’ that gives voice to a reality largely silenced in the official histories of its day: namely homegrown forms of barbarism. Although the apparently diverse themes explored in this study – barbarism; religion; eros, dream, and profane literature; and politics – are united by their epic pedigree, they can also be understood as variations on the broader theme of freedom and constraint, or eleción [sic] (choice or chosenness) and destino (destiny) (Persiles 232). These are the categories Periandro calls on to explain the twin impulses that drive him and Auristela to Rome, and they articulate the chief conceptual means by which the novel’s poetics and ethics meet. In this light what has often been viewed in the past as a disparate and indigestible series of adventures is brought together under the thematic umbrella of the complex nature and ethical implications of freedom and constraint, perhaps the master theme that characterizes all of Cervantes’ works from La Galatea and the comedias through Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novellas).3 In the text’s terms, as we have seen worked out in the previous chapters, this theme frequently translates into the interplay between custom (costumbre) and law (ley); charity (caridad) and law (ley); and preference or pleasure (gusto) and law (ley). Again following the lead of the novel, we can say that for each of the discursive contexts examined there is a figurative Barbaric Isle and a Rome, a barbarism and a higher law. In chapter 1, the fundamental contrast is between the lawless gusto governing both the Barbaric Law of the Barbarian North and the barbaric custom of the Catholic South (with rape as its limit case) counterpointed to the principles of mutual consent and repentance exemplified by the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Goths Periandro and Auristela in Rome. In chapter 2, the contrast pits the idolatry of sacrament and catechism and the hold of the honour code in the Catholic South against the higher law of charity embodied most conspicuously (and paradoxically) by the Barbarian woman Ricla and the Northern Goth protagonists. In chapter 3, the contrast is between, on the one hand, an unvarnished warrior ethos and a dynastic law of primogeniture represented by the first-born Maximino and, on the other, a conjugal model of love and a higher heroism that subordinates the warrior to the lover, the poet, and the dreamer represented by his younger brother Persiles. In chapter 4, finally, it is the alternative in politics of persuasion to force, civil and Church law to the honour code, and justice to tyranny.

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What this means for Persiles and Sigismunda’s epic is, as we have seen, an epic that celebrates the heroism of mutual consent over violence (chapter 1), of charity over doctrine and sacraments (chapter 2), of letters and conjugal love over arms (chapter 3), and of royal justice over tyranny (chapter 4). Given the recurring pattern of Barbaric Isle impulses all the way to Rome (chapter 1), the precedence of charity over ceremony (chapter 2), and the renunciation for itself of a militant, crusader model of the Christian epic and the epic hero (chapter 4), Persiles is the epic as well of a conversion never definitively achieved, of the ethical injunction to aid those in need over doctrinal or ritual requirements, of a spiritual rather than a temporal power, and of an understanding of the Christian gospel that celebrates Christian soldiers who love rather than conquer others. While an emphasis on Persiles’ epic scope would appear to highlight its public, even impersonal, character, Persiles’ itineraries parallel in significant measure those of Cervantes’ own life. Protagonists who wander round the Mediterranean weathering improbable turns of fortune are a theme not only of the Greek adventure novel but also of Cervantes’ biography. Yet another theme shared by Persiles and Cervantes’ life is captivity in an alien cultural world that proves in some ways to be exemplary. Much as in Persiles Antonio the Spaniard is rescued and personally redeemed by Ricla the Barbarian despite their isolation on the Barbaric Isle (as discussed in chapter 2), Cervantes’ own five-year captivity in Algiers (1575–80) led him to voice admiration – in such plays as El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel – for the commercial spirit, relative disregard for caste-bound values such as honour, and comparative openness to outsiders he observed in Algerian society.4 The author’s complicated relation to officialdom, both civil and ecclesiastical, may also have left its elusive mark on Persiles. Antonio’s account of his youthful, honourdriven scrape with another nobleman over formulas of address could owe something of its retrospective wryness to a similar incident in Cervantes’ life, assuming that the ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ of a royal arrest warrant is our author (in which case he would have wounded an Antonio de Sigura in a duel), an incident that biographers have often cited to explain his abrupt departure for Italy in 1569.5 Cervantes’ and Persiles’ relation to the Church continues to challenge scholars, and on this score at least, the biographical facts can be deceiving. Cervantes joined a holy brotherhood called the Congregación de los Esclavos del Santísimo Sacramento (‘Brotherhood of the Slaves of the Holy Sacrament’) in 1609 and then, in 1614, became a member of

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the Third Order of St Francis. But what did this mean for him? The brotherhood in particular bears a name that could not sound more militantly Counter-Reformation, an impression that would seem to be borne out by the ascetic rules of the brotherhood Jean Canavaggio has noted in his biography. And yet Canavaggio also points out that the Congregación drew all the leading literary lights of the day (including Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Vicente Espinel, and Vélez de Guevara) and operated like a literary academy, with meetings, justas poéticas, and networking with aristocratic patrons. It became a fashionable haunt for courtiers, and its rule evidently was gradually forgotten, since there were repeated calls to restore it. And what of Cervantes’ decision to become a lay member of the Franciscan Order? He professed as a tertiary late in life, following several family members. Canavaggio’s account, again, suggests that this may have been a fairly conventional – and frugal – way to prepare for death within his family.6 On the other hand, Eugenio Asensio has shown us that Franciscanism was a powerful force for religious renovation in Spain well into the sixteenth century, and therefore a possible vehicle for transmission of the reform-minded Pauline values whose prominence in Persiles we saw in chapter 2. It may be that Persiles has more to tell us about this aspect of Cervantes’ life than the life has to tell us about Persiles: the novel’s insistent idealization of charity before ceremony, for instance, may give us the measure of what Cervantes’ turn to lay Franciscanism meant to him and his response to the post-Tridentine Church. A narrative that embraces and challenges several of the most authoritative ideological and literary discourses of its time, and even to take an Olympian view of the literary and political panorama of early modern Spain, thus may turn out to be one of the author’s most deeply personal works. As we have noted throughout this study, Christian virtue in Persiles’ Rome is normally exemplified by the ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Northern Gothic outsider heroes, who journey to a city that holds out the promise of instruction in the faith and that delivers instead a display of official justice marred by rampant corruption. Tacitus had long since established the primitivist picture of Germanic barbarians meant to chastise degenerate Rome for straying from its founding virtues. The spirit of Tacitus’s denunciation of Rome’s vice viewed from its (putatively exemplary) German periphery was famously revived in the sixteenth century in a well-known variation that appears in Antonio de Guevara’s pseudo-history, Libro de Marco Aurelio (The Book of Marcus Aurelius, 1528). Readers will recall the extraordinary parable of the ‘Villano

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del Danubio’ (‘The Danubian Peasant’), in which the Germanic peasant of the title upbraids the Roman Senate for failing to uphold its own self-professed philosophical virtues and for allowing tyranny, expropriation, and exploitation to sully its name. Not a few scholars have recognized the thinly veiled allegory for the imperial Spain whose monarchy trumpeted its inheritance of the Roman mantle. But attention to Persiles’ formal, thematic, and archetypal complexities should not obscure the fact that Goths and the Gothic had very particular historical and – highly charged – political meanings in Spain.7 One of Cervantes’ earliest extant plays reminds us that the Castilian and then the Spanish monarchies had promoted their ancestral connection with the Visigoths (La destruición de Numancia, verses 503–4, ca. 1581), a link reinforced by legend and chronicle. The Gothic past and the commonplace topos of the ‘último godo’ (‘last Goth’) had indeed acquired the status of a national ‘master narrative’ by the sixteenth century.8 The ‘último godo’ refers to Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king to rule Spain and – in the popular imagination represented by ballad tradition – the cause of Christian Spain’s ‘loss’ to the Islamic invasion of 711. The historiographic scheme of destruction and restoration – the destruction of a kind of pre-lapsarian (because pre-Islamic) Visigothic lost paradise of political unity, racial purity, and Christian orthodoxy and its restoration through reconquest – have been traced back to prophecies of St Isidore of Seville that predicted the fall and redemption of the Gothic kingdom in Spain.9 Castilian and Spanish royalty and aristocracy claimed direct descent from the Goths, and the Crown routinely appealed to the trope of destruction and restoration to justify its authority. This historiographic myth – in the sense of sacred narrative – was revived by successive monarchs of the Iberian kingdoms through the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, particularly when a crusader ideal was needed to mobilize support for yet another territorial war against the Spanish Muslims10 or in moments of political crisis such as followed the revolt of Flanders in 1566 and the revolt of the moriscos in 1568 (Philip II even gave his heir – born in 1578 – a second name after the Visigothic martyr-saint Hermenegildo).11 The myth was remarkably flexible, invoked by Christians to explain their fears and vigilance and by Muslims and moriscos to galvanize resistance or to supernaturally account for their defeat. It was sometimes even turned against the monarchy, as for instance in the 1550s by Bartolomé de las Casas to lament and denounce the ‘destruction’ of the Indies by conquistadors unchecked by the Crown or in the 1580s by

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Lucrecia de León, the political rebel and visionary who pictured a saviour in the person of Miguel de Pedrola who would redeem Spain from the tyranny and calamity of Philip II’s policies.12 The Habsburg dynasty in Lucrecia’s messianic vision was presented as the usurper cast in the role of the Muslims of the original myth. Toledo – the ancient Visigothic capital and the one city that had been spared the general destruction, in her view – was therefore the lone city on a hill that could initiate Spain’s and Christianity’s salvation. One of the purposes – and effects – of the Gothic myth was to render invisible (or at least parenthetical) the Islamic presence in Spain, a drive extended later to the (baptized) moriscos. Its main political use, however, was to reinforce the sense of entitlement shared by Asturian, Leonese, Castilian, Navarrese, and Aragonese rulers and later Spanish monarchs of a dynastically unified kingdom, who dreamed of restoring their ancient rights as legatees of the Visigoths – an inheritance that for some included territories as far south as Mauritania. The dynastic union of all the Iberian kingdoms under Philip II in 1581 (sealed by the Estatuto de Tomar) would be celebrated – by historians and chroniclers of the Crown – as the final, fully realized restoration of the Visigoths. The personification of Spain in Cervantes’ La destruición de Numancia articulates this triumphant vision just when the unification of the Iberian peninsula had brought the old messianic hopes to a fever pitch. This historiographic and political tradition helps make sense of the protagonism of Gothic characters in Persiles. It especially throws into relief the critical edge lent their seemingly idealized virtues as they journey past Toledo and Madrid. While all narrative roads in Persiles lead to Rome, its ideological roads would seem to lead to these two cities – the seats respectively of the primate of the Spanish Church and the court of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy (Persiles 503–10). In Book 3 of Persiles the Gothic and Barbarian pilgrims approach and mention but conspicuously fail to visit Toledo and Madrid, alleging Antonio the Spaniard’s urgent desire to return home after many years of exile on the Barbaric Isle, Toledo’s too numerous to be rushed ‘great [monuments or wonders]’ (‘grandezas’), and their fear of unnamed ‘impediments’ (‘estorbos’) in Madrid. Toledo is carefully admired from a distance, as if by a narrative ten-foot pole, and Madrid is dismissed with only a casual remark. Nevertheless, two comments are made in passing about these symbolically charged places, in terms that suggest a sardonic foray of sorts into the political manipulation of the Visigothic past – Persiles’ own contribution to the kind of critical response to official

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mythmaking exemplified earlier by Antonio de Guevara. Periandro, seized by a traveller’s fit of awestruck praise in view of the great rocky crag of a city (Periandro’s ‘peñascosa pesadumbre’), calls Toledo ‘glory of Spain and light of its cities, in whose bosom the relics of the brave Goths have been stored for endless centuries awaiting the day when their dead glory will be revived and will serve as a clear mirror and storehouse of Catholic ceremonies’ (‘gloria de España y luz de sus ciudades, en cuyo seno han estado guardadas por infinitos siglos las reliquias de los valientes godos para volver a resucitar su muerta gloria, y a ser claro espejo y depósito de católicas ceremonias!’ Persiles 505). For Periandro, the former imperial capital and seat of the primate of Spain is apparently a kind of giant monstrance for the relics of the Goths, a place where ceremonies are celebrated. Relics and ceremonies were, of course, charged words in the sixteenth-century context of religious reform, as expressions of an exterior religiosity (see chapter 2). The comment does, moreover, seem to suggest that the legacy of the godos so prized by the Habsburg Crown and its predecessors was moribund (‘su muerta gloria’) and in need of reviving. More slyly, there is that stress on ceremonies, ‘vain’ elsewhere in the novel (Persiles 217) and so often implicitly contrasted with the spirit of charity (as discussed in chapters 2 and 4). Persiles itself, however, offers a context, as we know by now, for precise evaluation of this speech’s implications. Recall the paean to Lisbon that Antonio delivers as the pilgrim party sails into the city’s harbour (discussed in chapters 2 and 4). There he promises his wife Ricla the Barbarian that she will ‘see the Catholic ceremonies by which [God] is served and will observe Christian charity at its finest’ (‘verás juntamente las católicas ceremonias con que se sirve [Dios] y notarás cómo la caridad cristiana está en su punto,’ Persiles 432). Lisbon (the first major port of entry into the novel’s Catholic heartlands), says Antonio, will display Catholic ceremonies and Christian charity at their finest. By conspicuous contrast, Periandro’s speech – which to all appearances looks like praise of Toledo – refers to ceremonies (as does Antonio’s) but omits charity. After the Sosa and Leonor episode in Lisbon, we cannot be surprised that Periandro might have given up on finding charity in places where ceremony – as apparently here in Toledo – rules. But it is nevertheless striking that it should have dropped out of a speech that refers to the seat of the Spanish Church. Whereas Toledo is described as the ‘mirror and storehouse of Catholic ceremonies’ (‘espejo y depósito de católicas ceremonias’), the Gothic and Barbarian pilgrims

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clearly merit characterizing – given their exemplarity on this score – as ‘the mirror and storehouse of Catholic charity’ (see chapter 2 especially). Periandro speaks in this passage as a Gothic pilgrim, with his purportedly ‘less than perfect’ mastery of the catechism, and yet what looks like a foreigner admiring Toledo from a distance, a pilgrim come to revere, is symbolically – because Toledo had been the Visigothic capital of Spain – an outsider coming home (like Aeneas to Rome). It is as if these apparently foreign, primitive Goths had returned to reclaim their legacy, to revive the dead glory of the Visigoths’ relics. As a result, we meet with a kind of prophecy in Periandro’s speech of their ‘resurrection’ (‘para volver a resucitar su muerta gloria’). And Persiles’ heroes do indeed revive that dead, Gothic glory over the course of the novel. But in place of Toledo’s relics of past glories and ceremonies, they offer a living example: reviving – not ceremonies but – charity (‘caridad’) and courtesy, the better part of the Christian legacy and the Gothic ideal. The greatest irony of the passage may be that Toledo had a reputation, by some lights, for honouring neither ‘Catholic ceremonies’ (‘católicas ceremonias’) nor ‘charity’ (‘caridad’). On the one hand, Toledo was historically associated with the preservation of the Mozarabic rite (which competed with the Roman rite in Iberia) and – as Michael Nerlich has emphasized – with the Arian heresy. On the other hand, this leading see of Spain figures notoriously in the picaresque classic Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) as a place where – despite the city’s wealth and the presence of many religious orders – charity had died and gone to heaven, an impression that probably followed from the effects of the epochal Poor Law adopted in 1540 against mendicancy and vagrancy in Castile.13 One more historical reason could explain the absence of charity in Persiles’ Toledo, as the city where purity of blood statutes were instituted by the cathedral chapter in 1547 (promoted especially by the Archbishop Silíceo).14 The statutes, meant to discourage descendants of Jewish and Muslim converts from seeking preferment, targeted New Christians (conversos and moriscos) in favour of Old Christians (or, to use the code word of the period, Goths). As we saw in chapter 2, Persiles’ Gothic protagonists are insistently associated with St Paul and with Pauline virtues, signally with the theologically central virtue of charity (‘love one another as yourself’). It bears recalling that St Paul presented charity as a single, universally acceptable law that would supersede all others (including Moses’ Decalogue), binding Jews and Gentiles in a Christian community – envisioned as a mystic body of

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the Church – no longer defined by blood ties and ritual practices such as circumcision or dietary laws. Paul, therefore, was the champion of a conception of Christianity based on election rather than inheritance, distinguished by membership in the spirit and not by physical or ritual marks of belonging or continuity of bloodlines. For this reason too – as is well known – St Paul was embraced especially warmly by conversos. There is no little irony then in Gothic protagonists presented as more attuned to charity than ceremony, since this was a profile routinely associated with New Christians – the very community against which the purity of blood statutes were directed. It reminds us that Persiles’ Goths are not the Spanish Church’s or the Crown’s Goths or even the historical Visigoths of Spain but Goths from quasi-invented homelands on the northwestern edge of Europe. The Toledo cathedral’s purity of blood statutes (which thereafter gained ground in major Spanish institutions such as the colegios mayores, other cathedral chapters, and some religious orders) and the Habsburg Crown’s expulsion of the moriscos (1609–14, discussed in chapter 4)15 – policies preoccupied with the imposition of bodily proofs of belonging – effectively denied the Pauline principle of the mystic body bound by caritas, the underlying basis for a Christianity distinguished from religions that are inherited rather than chosen. That is, through such policies, the Spanish Church and Crown set aside the mystical conception of the Pauline body of believers to assert an inherited (racial) one. The Habsburg myth of continuity with historical, Spanish Visigoths is opposed here by a novelistic counter-myth of fictional Goths from Tile and Frislanda, whose example pursues a restoration of dead, Gothic glory less preoccupied with physical manifestations of religiosity (ceremonies, relics, and pure bloodlines) than with a revival of key religious and political virtues, a Pauline resurrection in the spirit despite their ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ command of the catechism – against a post-Tridentine Church and Crown that had embraced St Peter’s (institutional) legacy too closely at the expense of St Paul’s (mystical) one. Persiles’ second-born triumph over Maximino’s first-born’s rights to Sigismunda is, to use the terms Persiles relies on to explain their journey to Rome, a kind of triumph of ‘eleción’ (choice) over ‘destino’ (destiny). Similarly, the novel’s characterization of the heroes, their virtues, and their association with St Paul suggest a conception of a Christian body of believers that favours religious ‘eleción’ over the ‘destino’ of inherited purity of blood. Toledo, however, is also celebrated for midwifing an alternative to its own dead, Gothic glory of relics and ceremonies: the religion of

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profane literature associated with Garcilaso de la Vega, of which Periandro proves himself an adept (Persiles 503–5). A native of Toledo, Garcilaso de la Vega (ca. 1503–36) serves as an alter ego of sorts for both Cervantes and the novel’s hero.16 Periandro is distinguished as a reader, lover, and reciter of the Toledan poet. He pays Garcilaso the courtesy of quoting him by memory three times over the course of the novel, and his fullest reference appears as the pilgrims approach Toledo. The sight moves the hero to quote from Garcilaso’s Egloga I, which as a poet himself he reworks (as he had reworked Garcilaso’s Sonnet X), responding to Garcilaso’s city- and landscape in order to exalt him all the more: he directly identifies the poet with Salicio (Garcilaso’s pastoral mask) and both implicitly with Orpheus. The narrative makes a point of calling attention to the fact that Persiles knows Garcilaso – the patria’s pre-eminent poet – better than Antonio the Spaniard (who, moreover, happens to live near Toledo), because Periandro is a reader. His love of poetry is said to enable him to see things better than those who do not read poetry. The contrast here is with Antonio, but in chapter 3 we saw how it also distinguished Periandro from – and gave him the advantage in courtship of Auristela over – the Danish Prince Arnaldo. Antonio does not know Garcilaso the way Periandro does, any more than he knew the spirit (rather than the law) of Catholicism before he met the Barbarian Ricla on the Barbaric Isle. Periandro stands here in relation to the poet who would define the early Spanish literary canon as he and his fellow pilgrims stand in relation to the inner core of Catholicism in this novel: as an exemplar for the Catholic South, which is seemingly oblivious to both Garcilaso and charity, the avatar of a sacred and profane religion for which Toledo is a memorial rather than a living example. Although the approach to Toledo was an opportunity for Cervantes to indulge his oft-remarked ‘cult of Garcilaso’ and perhaps even defend the poet’s legacy against ascetic critics,17 his association with Periandro rather than with Antonio highlights the absence in the Catholic South of another key virtue voiced alongside charity by Rosanio (Persiles 448) soon after the pilgrims first cross into Spain: courtesy. Garcilaso de la Vega was the very embodiment in Spain of the Renaissance courtier ideal of the soldier-poet (and died fighting under Charles V’s banners). He was a friend of the Catalan poet Juan Boscán, said to have encouraged Boscán to undertake his celebrated translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano into Castilian (trans. 1534). In this encounter between Periandro and Toledo (especially in contrast to Antonio), the

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novel suggests that appreciation of Garcilaso (and therefore of poetry and courtesy), like the practice of charity, may have died and gone to Thule in the restored Gothic Spain of Philip II and Philip III. Madrid’s characterization makes the point about courtesy particularly bluntly. The old pilgrim woman (as she is described, Persiles 510) has only the following to say about the royal court, a place where noble youths devote themselves to the game of love: they are ‘young [or small or petty] men reputed to be the sons of grandees, and though mere fledglings they are drawn to the decoy of any beautiful woman, of whatever quality, for wilful love does not seek qualities, only beauty’ (‘pequeños que tenían fama de ser hijos de grandes que aunque pájaros noveles se abatían al señuelo de cualquiera mujer hermosa, de cualquiera calidad que fuese: que el amor antojadizo no busca calidades, sino hermosura’). The court is thereby reduced to a joke about young men (‘pequeños,’ also small, even small-minded or petty) who are said to be sons of big or grand men (with a quibble on ‘grande’ meaning grandee) when they are merely titled. It is a particularly interesting joke since the one behaviour for which the court is distinguished suggests the capricious lustfulness of the Barbaric Isle in a lighter key, in effect a court sans courtesy. The young noblemen are portrayed as fledgling birds of prey, chasing after anything beautiful like so many comic Bradamiros, Nemurs, and Arnaldos in the making (and on the make): a jocular, frivolous reincarnation of the Barbaric Isle with its Barbarians distinguished by their idolatry of appearances. It is no wonder that the pilgrims will skip this destination, since they have been there before. It may be a little easier now to grasp more fully why the protagonists do not enter Toledo or Madrid. The view from afar and the implied counterpoint established between Toledo and Madrid, on the one hand, and the pilgrim-heroes’ ongoing ‘revival’ (‘resucitar’) of dead, Gothic glory (through charity and courtesy), on the other hand, underscores the strangeness and exoticism of their virtues in the homes of the alleged Gothic restoration, the Spanish Church’s seat and the Spanish Habsburgs’ court. We need not question the sincerity of Periandro’s praise of Toledo to recognize that in this narrative and ideological context his speech can begin to sound like a mock encomium. The snapshots we are given in Persiles of Lisbon, the French court, Toledo, Madrid, and Rome make plain that the highest political and religious virtues are not associated in the novel with particular peoples, castes, places, or institutions. The episodes of Leonor and Sosa in Portugal, Renato and Eusebia in France, and Feliciana and Rosanio in

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Spain (discussed in chapter 4) all point to evidence of an institutional vacuum in Catholic Europe, in which the Church and Crown prove absent or ineffective when it comes to enforcing their own laws and promoting virtue. In particular it appears that the Northern pilgrims in search of enlightenment in the faith can look neither to Toledo as a locus for charity nor to Madrid as a locus for courtesy. Toledo (like Rome, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2) is a capital not of Catholicism but of Catholic ceremony and Madrid is a court devoid of courtesy. By their contrasting example, the Gothic protagonists expose a Southern, Catholic society quick to pay lip service to the ideals of charity, peace, and justice voiced in Feliciana’s hymn to the Virgin (discussed in chapter 4) but apt to realize them only as if by a miracle. The pilgrimhero Goths from quasi-invented homelands on the periphery of what had been the Roman Empire incarnate values apparently now forgotten by the Spanish Church and court, though self-proclaimed heirs of Rome and the Visigoths. In response to the failure of court and Church – of Madrid and Toledo – to abide by their own highest ideals, Persiles – through its protagonists – imagines not a revolution or schism or heterodoxy, but a revival and renewal of the ideals embodied by those myths, of the best values associated with Toledo as birthplace of Garcilaso and as seat of the Church: what Garcilaso had come to represent (the ideal soldierpoet courtier, the classicizing innovator, the prince of Spanish verse open to the best of native, classical, and Italian traditions) and the Pauline call for a re-spiritualization of institutions and a renewed attention to the ethical demands of Christianity. Persiles here does not target the Gothic myth or even invert royal appropriation of it – as Bartolomé de las Casas or Lucrecia de León had done.18 The idealized Gothic protagonists from semi-mythical homelands on the northwestern edge of Europe are sent to an historically contemporary, Catholic Europe, not to topple political and religious ideals, but to renew them. Persiles thus offers a Gothic counter-myth to rival the Crown’s own Gothic myth. The contrast between Thule’s Goths and Spain’s monarchic and ecclesiastical would-be Goths suggests a need for less Church relic and ceremony, Crown resurrections of dead, Gothic glory, and aristocratic honour codes – and for more charity, justice, and courtesy. Persiles therefore cannot be said to diminish the ideal honoured mainly in the breach but it does cast doubt on those who claim to have fulfilled it. It is one of the more powerful ironies in Persiles that the alibi for this journey should be the heroes’ need to receive lessons in the faith. They help mark the dis-

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tance between professed Catholic and humanist ideals and wellentrenched customary realities, suggesting how much ‘civilizing’ and Christianizing are needed in the Catholic heartlands. In this light, Cervantes’ prose epic may well merit being regarded as an important literary chapter in the history of the ‘civilizing’ and Christianizing of Europe itself. Persiles’ commitment to an ironic deflation of (mainly) public myths that spares no one is announced already in its prologue, where it includes the author himself. Cervantes spins an amusing, poignant yarn – days before his death – about his encounter with a bumbling student admirer, just as he is about to enter Madrid by the bridge of Toledo. Cervantes’ valedictory persona there is Christological (like Christ’s entry into Jerusalem days before the Crucifixion, John 12), as Elias Rivers observed,19 but also evocative of the laughing god Silenus, whom Don Quijote remembers riding into the city of 100 gates (Don Quijote I.15). Cervantes turns the occasion into a celebration of the comedic possibilities of literature, life, and even his own dropsy-induced imminent death. The student aficionado falls all over himself in praise of Cervantes, whom he calls ‘the delight of the muses’ (‘el regocijo de las musas,’ Persiles 121). Cervantes dismisses the phrase as nonsense, insisting that he is not the delight of the muses, but simply Cervantes. Having burst the bubble of the student’s inflated praise, Cervantes asks him to climb back on his ass and to give him – in place of hyperbole – conversation. We have no trouble recognizing the authorial persona of Don Quijote in such moments: if Don Quijote’s deflationary ironies take aim mainly at the hero’s personal myths and Persiles’ mainly at the founding myths of the Spanish ruling dynasty and the Church, here the two come together in Cervantes’ puncturing of his own public reputation. In a period marked by the most brutally self-serving political and religious narratives about the restoration of lost Gothic paradises or ecclesiastical realizations of heaven on earth, a writer (and his willing readers with him) could still – if nothing else – don Lucian’s, Erasmus’s, More’s (and Silenus’s) garb and laugh. In the preceding pages we have explored the prose epic understanding of Heliodorus (and, by association, of Persiles) not only as a category of antiquarian interest in view of sixteenth-century poetics but also as a hermeneutic principle that could encourage us to read Persiles in new – albeit historically grounded – ways. By finding a place for Persiles in the history of both the epic and the novel we may be brought to look at our own critical narratives of literary history in a different light. We need

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only recall the examples of Georg Lukács and M.M. Bakhtin to realize that such a possibility would appear paradoxical, if not contradictory, within a historical narrative that customarily casts the novel as foil to the epic.20 The point about narratives of literary history is brought out even more sharply if we make the conceptual adjustments necessary to allow Persiles a place within the history of the novel. Doing so might challenge us to fine-tune categories we ordinarily use to narrate changes in literary taste, the relationship between what we might call ideal romance and realistic novel,21 and more broadly what we mean by modernity in literature. If we think of literary history as a story with more than one path to the future, Persiles’ scope, rhetoric, and style of realism may begin to look more intelligible even by ‘modern’ – as opposed to historical – criteria. Modern epic, modernism, genre fiction, the adventure novel, and magic realism have opened up entirely new avenues for the creation of long prose fictions, for our understanding of the evolution of taste in the ‘modern’ period (in which the popularity even of ‘naive’ romance has never fallen off, in prose narrative or film), and for an appreciation of the multiple paths to not only our modernity but also possible alternative modernities. Modern epic (Faust, Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, to cite Franco Moretti’s examples)22 and ‘magic realism’23 in particular have affinities with Persiles that make its kind of realism more comprehensible, and look much less like a dead end, than is the case if the critical narrative we tell concludes with Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, or La Regenta. If we accept that modernity is never achieved once and for all, and that realism is not a permanent standard valid for all readers and all times, we may find ourselves reevaluating not only Persiles’ place within Cervantes’ corpus and the development of early modern prose fiction, but also Don Quijote’s, and what is taken to be distinctive about it. To close I borrow a page from Persiles’ own oft-remarked circularity and return to the beginning, indeed to its first word: ‘The Barbarian Corsicurvo shouted into the narrow opening of the deep dungeon, more a tomb than a prison for the many living bodies buried there’ (‘Voces daba el bárbaro Corsicurvo a la estrecha boca de una profunda mazmorra, antes sepultura que prisión de muchos cuerpos vivos que en ella estaban sepultados’). Here the barbarian and Christian themes germinate: Voces means shouts in the idiom dar voces but on its own also stood for voices and words,24 archetypal attributes by which the insider was distinguished from the outsider, the ‘civilized’ from the babbling,

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broken- or fork-tongued barbarian. ‘Voces’ too announces not so much a challenge to as a secular fulfillment of a Gospel promise. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,’ as the first chapter of the Book of John proclaims in a text often read at Easter celebrations. Only the singular is made plural: in the beginning are words, voices (and shouts). As we have seen, in Persiles the world of words is often a Babel in need of translation, persuasion, and negotiation; not only between and within peoples, religions, and languages but, as story after story demonstrates, between private gusto and public ley, between the rival gustos of characters, and finally – as Auristela’s doubts in Rome show – even between competing gustos within individual characters. The novel would appear in this light to become a figure for the incarnation of its themes: the word made flesh in the sense of the word enacted, so that its poetics and its ethics model one another. It would also appear to suggest that only when ideal ethical and political – rather than historical – Romes triumph over Barbaric Isles do epic labours become heroic loves.

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Appendix Composition Dates of Persiles

For my reading of Persiles I take a deliberately conservative position on the composition dates of the novel. I assume only what we know with a reasonable degree of certainty: that Cervantes announced to the world that he was close to publishing Persiles on four different occasions (in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares in 1613, in the Viaje del Parnaso in 1614, in the dedication to Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses in 1615, and in the dedication and the prologue to part II of Don Quijote in 1615) and that the novel was published posthumously in 1617. What these facts suggest is that completing and publishing Persiles were very much on the author’s mind in the last few years of his life, and yet that he had not quite readied it for publication upon his death in 1616. What they do not tell us with any certainty is (1) how early he may have begun its composition, (2) when he might have had the chance to develop whatever his original plan was (especially in competition with so many other works that saw the light in his last years) and therefore whether he had finished any parts of Persiles long before publication, (3) how much interpolation or outright revision (not only of grammar, style, reference, and allusion but also of story and characterization) he undertook in later stages of writing, or, finally, (4) how routinely he worked simultaneously on more than one text. Given the straightforward history of Cervantes’ announcements of publication, speculation about early composition dates is usually driven by the conviction that Persiles represents a formal and ideological step back from Don Quijote. The scholarship on this issue1 demonstrates that the degree to which there is controversy over the composition dates of Persiles and the extent to which scholars are prepared to make so-far unverifiable assumptions about working methods often depend on prior assumptions about (1) what they regard as the formal and ideo-

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logical differences between Don Quijote and Persiles, (2) how plausible they think it for the author to have written two such apparently different works as Persiles and Don Quijote more or less simultaneously, and (3) how they believe this author’s generic and ideological trajectory should have evolved, that is, what they consider to be the characteristics of more or less mature work in relation especially, again, to Don Quijote (e.g., a trajectory that follows an apparently progressive, generic, and always distinct logic from ideal romance to ironic realism; or one that moves through fixed, and again always distinct, stages of religious thought from a mild Erasmism, through a rational materialism, and then back to a militantly orthodox religious conformism). Since I see no reason to assume that distinct generic styles and ideological tendencies could not coexist, in greater or lesser degree, across narratives and among different characters if not in the author’s own mind, I have tried to avoid formulating my commentary in such a way that it depends on early or late dates of composition beyond what we know (as summarized above) with reasonable certainty. The evidence of the fourth and last book of Persiles demonstrates that Cervantes – in this case at least – may well have preferred working up a complete draft of a book before returning to parts of it for greater or lesser revision. Persiles’ Book 4 is half as long as and more schematic in structure than the first three books and its prose is much less burnished. And yet so far as the narrative structure and characterization are concerned it is complete and coherent. Since we do not have a paper trail of manuscript to judge by, there is no incontrovertible evidence against the possibility that he could have written a draft of much of the novel early in his life (with the sketchiness of Book 4) and then in the course of revisions in the years leading up to his death thrown out or thoroughly revised the earlier drafts. Besides Cervantes’ announcements of imminent publication in 1613–15, we do have at least one internal piece of textual evidence that points to late outright composition of, or interpolation into, Book 3: the explicit reference there to Philip III’s expulsion of the moriscos, which took place in 1609–14 (Persiles 547–8). What complicates the matter further is that, as Stephen Harrison has proposed, there is at least one good reason to believe that Book 4 – though the least finished of the published books – could have been composed earliest: because of the in medias res structure of the narrative, the author may have needed to work out the novel’s end before undertaking the early books.2 That is, on account of the foreshadowing characteristic of this kind of narrative, Cervantes would have wanted to start with a clear idea of where his characters would wind up. I would add

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that the dense weave of anticipations and recapitulations that characterizes this novel recommends the assumption of substantial mulling, or substantial revision, or both. Taken together, the evidence outlined suggests that Cervantes worked with a fairly clear outline (and eventually draft) of the whole of Persiles before completing parts in fine detail and that he probably resorted to revision, interpolation, and even fresh beginnings over the course of the novel’s composition. In his critical edition of Persiles Carlos Romero proposes two periods of planning or composition, one stimulated by the appearance of Alonso López Pinciano’s Philosophía antigua poética in 1596 (with its defence of Heliodorus’s Ethiopica as a model for long prose fictions) and materially sustained in subsequent years while Cervantes resided in Seville (with its rich libraries, active literary academies, and busy presses). The second period of composition (especially of Books 3 and 4) Romero situates late, in 1614 or even 1615, owing to several important chronological references or allusions in these books. My own reading of Persiles responds to the evidence of a formal and ideological complexity that would more plausibly correspond to a late work, as the outcome of the author’s long experience, reflection, maturation, and especially rethinking or revision. This view tends to confirm the bare facts as we know them (more or less important revisions if not composition in his last years, posthumous publication of a novel whose final book is not quite as polished as the previous three, allusions or references to historical events that took place in 1606 and 1609–14) and corresponds roughly to Carlos Romero’s hypothesis but does not exclude the possibility of earlier dates of germination or composition. Indeed, if I were to speculate about a possible earlier terminus a quo for seeding of the idea of Persiles, I would propose the publication of Fernando de Mena’s translation of The Ethiopica in 1587. It was the most complete and important contemporary translation into Spanish, as measured by number of editions, quality of text, and renown. And it would have appeared two years after Cervantes published La Galatea, just about when he had given up on the stage. In other words, the Mena translation came out at a moment when it is plausible to imagine the author was prepared to begin turning over in his mind the outlines of a new work, in this case what would eventually become Persiles. Another important milestone, which might conceivably have encouraged Cervantes to continue Persiles (and/or to rethink earlier plans or drafts or to redouble his pace), would have been the publication of Lope de Vega’s own variation on the Heliodoran model, El peregrino en su patria, in 1604.

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Introduction 1 This claim appears in Cervantes’ prologue to his Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novellas, 1613). 2 Alexander Welsh, ‘The Influence of Cervantes.’ 3 Max Singleton argues that Persiles must have been composed early, much earlier in any case than Don Quijote, because otherwise Cervantes’ personal trajectory would reverse the trend of literary history toward the standards of realism Singleton associates with Don Quijote (complex, dynamic characterization; perspectivism; mixed social classes and linguistic registers; humour; natural dialogue; tragicomedy). See Max Singleton, ‘El misterio del Persiles.’ For the less extreme and, until recently, dominant view that Persiles was composed or finished late in life but nevertheless represents an abortive, frustrated, or otherwise disappointing regression to an idealizing (or Italianate) mode of fiction in contrast to Don Quijote, see Carlos Romero Muñoz’s lucid account of the scholarship in his ‘Introducción,’ Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 15–29. For a brief overview of my own position regarding the dates of composition, see the appendix. 4 See Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, ‘Cultural literaria de Miguel de Cervantes y elaboración del Quijote.’ For the notion that Cervantes may have cultivated a kind of dissimulation or even hypocrisy in his writing, see Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 248–50. 5 See, for instance, the beginning of Mary Gaylord Randel’s ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda,’ and Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ xi–xiv. 6 Cervantes announced Persiles’ publication five times between 1613 and 1615: in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, in the poem Viaje del

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Parnaso, in the dedication to the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, and in the dedication and the prologue to the second part of Don Quixote. 7 Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Dedicatoria al conde de Lemos,’ Don Quijote de la Mancha, 623. 8 By 1629 ten editions had seen the light. This compares to eleven printings of the first part of Don Quijote between 1605 and 1617. For a review of Persiles’ early publishing history, see Rudolf Schevill, ‘Studies in Cervantes: Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 2n1 and 2n3, and especially Carlos Romero, Para la edición crítica del ‘Persiles’: Bibliografía, aparato y notas, 5–15, and his edition of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 81–6, both of which describe the known editions and translations. Daniel Eisenberg questions whether the print run is evidence for Persiles’ popularity with the reading public or whether Persiles merely profited from the popularity of earlier works by Cervantes such as Don Quijote, since the number of editions fell off almost immediately following its initial publication in 1617. See his review of Jean Canavaggio’s Cervantes, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 122. The long view of Persiles’ publishing history shows a complex, and perhaps unexpected, pattern. There were six editions in 1617, one each in 1618 and 1619, another in 1625, and a tenth in 1629, then a gap till the edition of 1650–70, and yet another gap till an edition of 1719. At that point, interest seems to revive, with eight more editions till 1805, in the same period when Don Quijote’s influence, popularity, and critical reception as paradigm for ‘the novelistic’ were consolidated. This is the pattern followed by translations of Persiles as well. Indeed, the evidence of translations, imitations, adaptations for the stage of Persiles or its progeny (by Pérez de Montalbán, Rojas Zorrilla, and Calderón de la Barca, for instance), and references to Persiles suggest a success d’estime that would be maintained through the eighteenth century. González Rovira’s review of the Spanish editions of Heliodorus’s Ethiopica sheds interesting light on this question. The first editions for which we have evidence are the translations from Amyot’s French version, published in 1554, 1563, and 1581. These were followed by Fernando de Mena’s celebrated translation, first published in 1587, with three more editions in 1614, 1615, and 1616. There is a reference to a version in verse (apparently in manuscript) by Agustín Collado del Hierro in 1632, although it was not published till 1787. Together with novels in the Heliodoran mode by Lope de Vega published in 1604 and Enrique Suárez de Mendoza in 1629 and the translation into Spanish of Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon that appeared in 1617, what this publishing history suggests is that Persiles’ success coincided not only with

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Don Quijote’s but also with a real vogue for the Greek adventure novel, which can be traced from the 1550s through the early 1630s. Cervantes’ choice of genre and Persiles’ strong initial reception thus came at the midpoint or height of the fashion – indeed on the heels of three successive editions of Mena’s translation of The Ethiopica in 1614, 1615, 1616 – and may have helped to extend it through Suárez de Mendoza’s imitation of 1629. On the history of translations of Heliodorus in Spain, see Javier González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 20–3; on the height of the fashion for Greek novels in Spain and its subsequent decline, see 249–52 and 329–35. On Persiles’ reception history, see Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Carlos Romero, 52–3, and Javier González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 249–52 and 311–27. Arturo Farinelli noted Calderón’s possible debt to Enrique Suárez de Mendoza’s Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica (Eustorgio and Clorilene: A Muscovite Story, 1629) for aspects of La vida es sueño. Arturo Farinelli, La vita è un sogno, 222–3. On the reception of Greek novels in Spain, their impact on Renaissance literary theory, narrative technique and characteristic motifs, see Javier González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, especially 13–154. For other examples of Spanish reception of the Greek novel, see Antonio Cruz Casado, ‘Periandro/Persiles: Las raíces clásicas del personaje y la aportación de Cervantes.’ Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 11–87. Richard Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain, xvii–xix. See also Sara T. Nalle, ‘Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile.’ B.W. Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain, 1–48. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle and the ‘Persiles,’ 27–87, and Rogelio Miñana, La verosimilitud en el Siglo de Oro, 30–51. E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 2–3, and Rogelio Miñana, La verosimilitud en el Siglo de Oro, 11 and 21–138. See Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, 777–801, and González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 13–19. Javier González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 16–17. Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, 777–801. A paradox of a literary history that casts The Ethiopica as a generic throwback is that its sixteenth-century revival has been plausibly related to social and political changes associated with modernity: colonial expansion, inter-

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Notes to page 8 national commerce, and racial mixing; the growth of a female readership (responsive, in particular, to female protagonism in the Greek adventure novel); the rise of an urban, middle class more likely to recognize itself and its values in the characteristic heroes and actions of the Greek novel than in chivalric books or epic; and even predominantly converso Erasmist translators who may have been drawn to the labours-in-exile of The Ethiopica’s protagonists as a literary expression of their own compromised social situation. See Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love, 8–23. On the English case, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, 25–64. Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.’ Antonio Vilanova, ‘El peregrino andante en el Persiles de Cervantes.’ Pursued by Jürgen Hahn, The Origins of the Baroque Concept of ‘Peregrinatio.’ Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, ‘Introduction,’ Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 7–27. Alban Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance. In Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ Alban Forcione draws attention to the refined academic humour of the hero’s badinage with the rationalist pedant Mauricio in Book 2 and the narrator’s literary hijinks in Books 2, 3, and 4. Stanislav Zimic sees evidence of parody of the Greek novel in ‘El Persiles como crítica de la novela bizantina.’ Amy Williamsen’s Co(s)mic Chaos: Exploring ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’ dares to suggest Persiles is a funny book, characterized by its own kinds of humour and irony; generic hybridity and parody; and the meta-fictional complexity of its multiple, nested narrators. For a review of the scholarship on humour in Cervantes, especially Don Quijote, see Adrienne Martín, ‘Humor and Violence in Cervantes.’ Lozano Renieblas proposes we regard Persiles not as the last of the idealizing Greek novels but as the first modern adventure novel, trading the former’s unabashed fantasy for the latter’s verisimilitude in its treatment of time, place, and characterization. See Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles.’ Maurice Molho, ‘Préface,’ Les travaux de Persille et Sigismonde: Histoire Septentrionelle, 61–8. Maria Alberta Sacchetti finds irony and realism in Persiles’ characters and follows William Childers in attributing Cervantes’ realist reworkings of romance conventions to the impact of Mateo Alemán’s picaresque Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). See Maria Alberta Sacchetti, Cervantes’ ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’: A Study of Genre. Julio Baena takes Cervantes for our contemporary and Persiles for a kind of

Notes to pages 8–9

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proto-postmodern fiction, revelling in a fragmentation of master narratives whose parts add up to more than the whole. See Julio Baena, El círculo y la flecha: Principio y fin, triunfo y fracaso del ‘Persiles.’ In Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes, Ruth El-Saffar broke new ground by reading the whole of Cervantes’ work in terms of ‘the recovery of the feminine’ and Persiles, in that light, as a step forward in Cervantes’ evolution. Wilson’s Allegories of Love explores a protofeminism informed by the Renaissance Neoplatonic recovery of androgyny, with its more favourable view of women and human love. With other scholars (notably Margaret Anne Doody, in The True Story of the Novel) she recognizes progressive elements in Greek romance – especially the shared protagonism of hero and heroine – that mark it off from a chivalric romance tradition largely centred on male exploits in war and love. She also suggests that a critical emphasis on neo-Aristotelian influence – especially regarding plot construction and verisimilitude – may tend to obscure a decidedly non-Aristotelian novelistic vision of sexual difference that implicitly repudiates the natural and divine subordination of women and that bears close affinities with the Neoplatonism of Leone Ebreo. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, Wilson argues that novels have emerged and re-emerged since antiquity to express ideological transgression and cultural hybridity and that America – by way of parody of the New World chronicle, for example – served as a stimulus for the ‘novelistic’ in both Persiles and Don Quijote. Michael Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, o la ‘Divina Comedia’ de Cervantes. This passionate, fundamental book came to my attention when my own manuscript was largely finished. At key points of our readings we arrive at complementary conclusions, even if the interpretive frame, the reasoning, and the emphases often differ. I anticipated several of these coincidences in an article published in Spanish in 2004 (‘Europa como bárbaro nuevo mundo en la novela épica de Cervantes’), which Nerlich evidently did not see. Where pertinent, I point out convergences and divergences in the notes. Frederick A. de Armas, ‘Metamorphosis as Revolt: Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda and Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo,’ and William Childers, Transnational Cervantes. See E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 49–57, and Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 49–87. Rudolph Schevill, ‘Persiles y Sigismunda: Virgil’s Aeneid.’ Maurice Molho revisits the epic connections in the preface to his French translation of Persiles. See his preface to Les travaux de Persille et Sigismonde, 20–4. On classical reminiscences of the athletic games in Persiles, see Cristina Castillo

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Notes to pages 10–14 Martínez, ‘La paloma y otros juegos en El Persiles.’ Frederick A. de Armas suggests that Cervantes may have patterned his literary trajectory from the pastoral La Galatea to the prose epic Persiles on Vergil’s cursus honorum, the so-called Vergilian Wheel. It stipulated a poet should move from the low style of pastoral through the middle or mixed style of agricultural bucolics to the high style suitable for martial epic. See ‘Cervantes and the Virgilian Wheel: The Portrayal of a Literary Career.’ Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, 5. See E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 200–2, and Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 64–7. E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 104–7. Jean Canavaggio, ‘Alonso López Pinciano y la estética literaria de Cervantes en el Quijote.’ E.C. Riley offers qualifications in Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 3–5. Michael Nerlich also argues for the creative stimulus of Aristotelian poetics in Persiles, especially as mediated through Pinciano (whose choice of the dialogue form would have made his poetics particularly congenial to Cervantes), and against a Romantic and post-Romantic tendency to reduce its sixteenth-century revival to rule-making. See El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 20–9 and 80–1. Alonso López Pinciano, Philosophía antigua poética, 121. There are variations on this image in La gitanilla, El licenciado Vidriera, and Viaje del Parnaso. Jean Canavaggio attributes Cervantes’ understanding of poetry as a science to Alonso López Pinciano in ‘Alonso López Pinciano y la estética literaria de Cervantes en el Quijote,’ 28. On poetry as a science in Cervantes, see also Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 45–6. For examples of this idea dating to ‘the late Greek world,’ see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 1: 44–5, 97. For the medieval conception of poetry as science, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, 15–33. Alban Forcione’s Cervantes, Aristotle, and ‘Persiles’ makes the case for Persiles’ creative, ironic response to sixteenth-century neo-Aristotelian debates about the proper characteristics of long prose fictions. López Pinciano, Philosophía antigua poética, 468. Reflections on Persiles and theories of epic proposed by Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin in Mary Anne O’Neil, ‘Cervantes’s Prose Epic.’ See especially M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel.’ The contrast between Persiles and sixteenth-century learned verse epics published in Iberia, such as Ercilla’s La Araucana or Camões’s Os Lusíadas, reveals patterns comparable to Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata: although Ercilla and Camões, like Cervantes, both make the interesting choice of a

Notes to pages 14–17

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56 57 58 59 60

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near-contemporary rather than remotely historical theme for their epics, the primacy of war over love remains and appears to go hand in hand with the choice of verse over prose and of history over fiction. The advantage of the comparison with Tasso is that, like Cervantes, he took an overt interest in sixteenth-century literary precept on epic and, also like Cervantes, genuinely attempted a reconciliation between epic conventions and the often contrary pleasures of popular literary genres. For sixteenth-century Spanish verse epics, see Frank Pierce, La poesía épica del Siglo de Oro and Elizabeth Davis, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 27–45 and 66–8. E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 49–57, and Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 69. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 66–8. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 67 and 76. William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller, 17–19. E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 163–78. On history and fiction in Cervantes and contemporary literary theory and practice, see E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 163–78, and Bruce Wardropper, ‘Don Quijote: Story or History?’ E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 163–78. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 80. Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 72–5, 79, and 83–4. Rogelio Miñana, La verosimilitud en el Siglo de Oro, 47, 56–8, and 66–70. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 179–95. Isabel Lozano Renieblas demonstrates in Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles’ that Cervantes consistently drew on geographic and historical lore – some of it legendary but widely known – to lend credibility to the settings chosen for Persiles’ episodes. I have in mind the kinds of early modern ethnography studied, for instance, by Anthony Pagden, in The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, in Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625. This statement about Persiles echoes another the author famously issues in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novellas, 1613), which defends the value of entertainment because we cannot always be occupied by ‘negocios’ (‘business’) or ‘templos’ (‘worship’). For a lucid reflection on Persiles and contemporary conceptions of ‘entretenimiento,’ see Augustin Redondo, ‘El Persiles, “libro de entretenimiento” peregrino.’ Francisco Márquez Villanueva notes the historical coincidence of a festive

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turn in Spanish court life following Philip III’s accession in 1599 with the discovery of a heterogeneous reading public avid for entertainment. This public’s willingness to pay for its leisure was met with a narrative fiction more interested in appealing to the diverse tastes and levels of anonymous readers than it was in honouring classical precepts, developments marked by the publication of Mateo Alemán’s picaresque Guzmán de Alfarache (1599), part 1 of Don Quijote (1605), and Francisco López de Ubeda’s selfdescribed ‘libro de entretenimiento’ La pícara Justina (1605). See Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Cervantes en letra viva, 31–47. Isabel Lozano Renieblas has turned on its head what she sees as an earlier tendency to regard Persiles as a purely didactic text, making the case for reading Persiles primarily within a context of literary entertainment. See Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles.’ One of the implications of my argument is that the ordinary distinction between the utile and the dulce breaks down in Persiles no less than in Don Quijote or the Novelas ejemplares. The entertaining and the edifying were inextricable, as is well-known, in such characteristic early modern phenomena as paradoxography (which I discuss briefly in this chapter), court foolery, and carnival practices. 63 I borrow my characterization of New Comedy from R.J. Dorius’s entry on ‘Comedy’ in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 64 See David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. 65 Northrop Frye detects both a quest theme and a theme of the settling of a social order in epic, exemplified by the first and second halves of The Odyssey and The Aeneid. The first twelve books of The Odyssey deal with the wanderings of the hero and the journey through wonderlands of marvels and terrors; the next twelve books never leave Ithaca, and their action is that of a typical comedy of recognition and intrigue, as the unknown and ridiculed beggar eventually turns out to be the returning hero. The first six books of The Aeneid have a similar quest pattern; the next six – the account of the struggle of Aeneas with the Italian warlords – also have the structure of romantic comedy, with its compacts, ordeals, and other traditional features of comic action, ending in success, marriage, and the birth of a new society. In both epics the main interest shifts halfway, from the hero’s private perils to this social context. Still according to Frye, this division of narrative between a quest theme and a theme of the settling of a social order has a biblical parallel in the story of the Exodus, where forty years of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness are followed by the conquest and settlement of the Promised Land. I suggest that what Frye calls the theme of the settling of a new social order is the epic quest in Persiles and that Cervantes’ epic renounces war as a means for achieving it.

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66 Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 67 and 76–7. 67 Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 852 (under paradoxa). 68 For a recent overview of the history of paradoxical discourse and its relation to Don Quijote, see Charles D. Presberg, Adventures in Paradox: ‘Don Quixote’ and the Western Tradition. The summary account of paradox that follows is heavily indebted to Presberg. For specifically Spanish expressions of paradoxical discourse, see also Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (Valladolid, 1539) y el tema áulico en la obra de Fray Antonio de Guevara. On the early modern literature of paradox or paradoxography, see Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, and Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly. 69 For the relations among Christian humanism, paradox, and Don Quijote, see Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘El caballero del verde gabán y su reino de paradoja’ and Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, 62–6. 70 Francisco Márquez Villanueva notes the importance of Oliva Sabuco de Nantes’s Nueva filosofía de la naturaleza del hombre (1587), which offered a widely read and influential defence of the therapeutic value of – indeed, the physiological need for – entertainment. See Cervantes en letra viva, 66–73. 71 See Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, 62–6, and Alban Forcione, ‘Afterword: Exemplarity, Modernity, and the Discriminating Games of Reading,’ 341–51. 72 See Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly. 73 Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 299. 74 On Sklovskij’s principle of estrangement, see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism, 176–80. 75 For a discussion of Tasso’s recommendation in relation to Persiles, see Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 37–45. 76 Torquato Tasso, Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, 109. 77 Jean Canavaggio suggests that by adopting this trajectory Cervantes may not only have ‘contradicted’ Tasso but also his own original plan. See Canavaggio, ‘L’Espagne du Persiles,’ 21. 78 Isabel Lozano Renieblas questions whether Torquemada’s Jardín is the primary source for Persiles’ Northern geography. Based on the coincidence of textual detail, she finds closer parallels in Olaus Magnus, Zeno, Támara, and G. de Veer. My argument about Torquemada here does not refer to geographic details but rather to the underlying conceit of both texts. It is enough for my purposes that Cervantes has the priest refer to the Jardín the way he does in Don Quijote I.6. See Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles,’ 119–71.

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79 Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas, 96. 80 Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas, 96. 81 Here and throughout the book I use civilized and civilization as a convenient shorthand for sixteenth-century Spanish equivalents such as humanity, reason, Roman (or written) law, writing and literacy, Christianity, moral and physical self-control, and courtly refinement, several of which are discussed over the course of the study. There was no single term in early modern Spanish – any more than in English or French – that embraced the full range of attributes we have come to associate with ‘the civilized’ or ‘civilization,’ which I enclose in quotation marks to signal the anachronism. Until the late eighteenth century ‘to civilize’ in European languages was used predominantly as a technical term in the field of law to refer to the process by which criminal trials were transferred to the civil courts; more broadly, it could refer to the historical process by which a codified, Roman law was adopted in place of or alongside oral common law traditions. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Le mot civilisation.’ The emergence from barbarism was also associated in sixteenth-century Spanish texts variously with settled against nomadic society, tillage against pasturage in agriculture, and the possession of manufactures. Augustine and Aquinas had long since established the relevant hierarchy of rights, rising from the natural law (the light of reason pertaining to all humanity) through positive law (civility proper) to sacred law or grace (Christianity). I am indebted to Ernest Lowrie for the clarification and the reference. 82 The centrality of wonder to the early modern conception of knowledge is explored in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. 83 E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 179–99. 84 Alban Forcione, ‘Afterword,’ especially 346–51. 85 See Anthony Cascardi, ‘Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel,’ and Alexander Welsh, ‘The Influence of Cervantes.’ 86 Barbara Fuchs, Romance, 2–11. 87 See Mary Gaylord, ‘Framing Peter N. Dunn,’ 8. 88 Mary Gaylord Randel, ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda.’ 89 Michael McKeon notes ‘the persistence of romance, both within the novel and concurrently within its rise.’ McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 3. 90 E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 116–31 and Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 28–9. 91 Raymond Williams, Keywords, 23.

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92 Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 122, 126, 209–10, 226. 93 Michael Nerlich also regards Persiles as a major historical, political, and philosophical text, deeply (and creatively) rooted in humanism and with affinities to Dante’s Commedia (particularly in a structure indebted to numerology and astrology) and De Monarchia (particularly in the antipapal, pro-imperial Ghibelline politics he associates with Lucca as a setting for the Isabel Castrucho episode). See El ‘Persiles’ descodificado 20, 394–404, 413, 521–49, 691–701. Chapter 1 1 Mary Gaylord Randel, ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda’; Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 122; and George Mariscal, ‘Persiles and the Remaking of Spanish Culture.’ More recently, see also David Castillo, (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque, 94–112; Jean-Marc Pelorson and Dominique Reyre, El desafío del ‘Persiles,’ 49–58; Michael Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, o la ‘Divina Comedia’ de Cervantes; and William Childers, Transnational Cervantes. 2 Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.’ 3 Antonio Vilanova, ‘El peregrino andante en el Persiles de Cervantes,’ and Jürgen Hahn, The Origins of the Baroque Concept of ‘Peregrinatio.’ 4 Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Introducción, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, by Miguel de Cervantes, 20–2. 5 Alban Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda.’ 6 William J. Entwistle’s apt phrase for the novel. See ‘Ocean of Story.’ 7 Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 17, 181–208. 8 Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 122, 126, 209–10, 226. 9 Persiles’ references and allusions to Augustine are a scholarly commonplace. In this chapter I emphasize the critical implications of the vision of Rome given us in both the City of God and Persiles. For an Augustinian reading of Persiles that stresses the idealization of Rome in both texts, see Angelo DiSalvo’s Cervantes and the Augustinian Religious Tradition. 10 The chivalric genre also sometimes sent its protagonists on far-flung border-crossing adventures. See Daniel Eisenberg, Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age, 62.

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11 All references to Heliodorus’s Ethiopica are to Fernando de Mena’s Spanish translation of 1587, the version most likely known to Cervantes. See Heliodoro, Historia etiópica de los Amores de Teágenes y Cariclea. 12 All subsequent references are to Lope de Vega’s El peregrino en su patria, edited by Myron A. Peyton. 13 See Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians, especially 83 on cruel savagery (of, for instance, Spanish encomenderos) as the first criterion for characterizing ‘the barbaric’; and Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, especially 131 for Sepúlveda’s version of the law–custom distinction. In Democrates alter Sepúlveda declares – as an argument for outright conquest and forced conversion of the Mexica – that they do not have written laws, only barbaric customs and institutions. 14 We have the following comment from a contemporary relación: ‘[H]e liked to mingle with [Granadan Muslims] and highly praised the poverty they bore with such happiness, their humility, and their obedience; he highly praised their customs; he would say they should take our faith and we their customs, and if they converted they would be far superior to Christians in their customs’ (‘holgaba mucho de andar entre esta gente i alabava mucho su pobreza con tanto contentamiento, i mucho su humildad, i mucho su obediençia, alabava mucho sus costumbres, dezía que ellos avían de tomar nuestra fe y nosotros sus costumbres, i que tovieran o toviesen fe hazen en las costumbres a los xriptianos mucha ventaja’). Quoted by Francisco Márquez, ‘La voluntad de leyenda de Miguel de Luna,’ 87n51. 15 For discussion of classical references to and the Renaissance reception of the Ultima Thule topos, see James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction, 121–222. 16 An entry appearing under heart in Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature is described as ‘enemy eaten produces magic strength’ (D1335.1.2), which bears relating to the ordeal context that Cervantes provides for his made-up ritual. 17 Cervantes’ treatment of this absurd ritual is worthy of more renowned deflations of the high-flown recognizable to us from Don Quijote: The annotator’s report that Aldonza, known to the hero as his lady love Dulcinea, has a good hand at salting pork, for instance; or Montesinos’s walnut-sized rosary beads and the dead hero Durandarte’s cured heart in Don Quijote’s dream-vision in the cave (Don Quijote II.22–3). See Peter

Notes to pages 41–2

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Dunn, ‘La cueva de Montesinos por fuera y por dentro: Estructura, épica, fisonomía.’ All instance a fondness for the killer detail Cervantes is often said to have admired in Antonio de Guevara’s high-spirited mockery of historical personages such as Marcus Aurelius. In view of the political context that Cervantes lends his Barbaric Law, it is worth noting that the folk motif of the eaten heart could well reflect actual historical practices, vestiges of which have been documented in the past hundred years. The Nigerian novelist Aké Soyinka writes in his memoir that as a child he was fascinated with the traditional ruler’s ritual cannibalism of the previous king’s heart and liver. ‘I would watch the Alake on our visits wondering if I could detect the stain of human blood on his lips.’ Chris King, review of The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis by Wole Soyinka, 26. Scholars since the early-twentieth-century editors of Persiles, Schevill and Bonilla, have pointed to a passage in the Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales describing an Andean practice of cannibalism. See especially Wilson, Allegories of Love, 109–29. Perhaps the most obvious Amerindian association is Mexica ritual practice. Hernán Cortés’s Second Letter addressed to Emperor Charles V, published and widely circulated in the sixteenth century, gives one of many such descriptions: ‘[The Mexica idols] are made of dough from all the seeds of the vegetables that they eat, ground and mixed together, and bound with the blood of human hearts that they [their priests] tear out while still beating.’ (‘Son [los ídolos] hechos de masa de todas las semillas de legumbres que ellos comen molidas y mezcladas unas con otras, y amásanlas con sangre de corazones de cuerpos humanos, los cuales abren por los pechos vivos y les sacan el corazón.’) See Cortés, Cartas, 240. For a review of classical, early Christian, and medieval romance examples and interpretations of the eaten heart, see Milad Doueihi, A Perverse History of the Human Heart, 1–45. Trent reaffirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation, as confirmed by the Trentine Creed of 1564 (article of faith #5), in these terms: ‘I profess, likewise, that in the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead; and that in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist there is truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ The doctrine – repudiated by most Protestants – prompted savage attacks in the sixteenth century that depicted Catholics, the pope especially, as cannibals. See Frank Lestringant, Cannibals, 71–2. Taurisa’s passing suggestion that the Barbaric Law may not derive from an ancient sage, but from the devil, recalls a sixteenth-century ethno-

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Notes to page 42 graphic reliance on the diabolical parody to frame accounts of New World religions when ritual or belief came uncomfortably close to Christian practice or belief, especially the sacrament and doctrine of the Eucharist. Several Spanish chroniclers and ethnographers compared the Eucharistic sacrament with Amerindian practices such as ritual cannibalism, a reflex that could be counted on to mobilize the Inquisition. Such was the fate of a comparison, albeit framed as demonic parody, in José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), which ran into trouble with the Italian, rather than with the Spanish, censors. Donatello Ferro, ‘Sospetti e censure nella prima traduzione italiana della Historia natural y moral de las Indias de José de Acosta.’ Deliberate parodies of Eucharistic symbolism either arose within or were falsely attributed to persecuted religious communities in Spain. Sebastián de Horozco (1510–80), in his Relaciones históricas toledanas, records a folk legend about Jewish child-murder involving the motif of the pulverized heart. He describes an alleged Jewish belief that the heart of an innocent child mixed in a powder with the Eucharist would lead Christians who tasted it to go mad and die (‘que tomando el coraçón de un niño ynoçente sin pecado y el sanctissimo sacramento del altar todo quemado y hecho polvos y echado en las aguas que ouviessen de beber los Xpianos, que luego en bebiendo las dichas aguas raviarían todos y reventarían’). Quoted in Domingo Ynduráin, ‘Las cartas de Laureola (beber cenizas),’ Edad de Oro 3 (1984): 307. The motif of the heart figures prominently in the cult of the Sacred Heart, which experienced a surge in the late sixteenth century. The cult is traced to the Church father Origen, who wrote that John was able to write the truest gospel because he had once rested on Jesus’ bosom; in the Middle Ages, images of John resting his head on Jesus’ breast came to symbolize the Sacred Heart, the pathway to contact with the divine, and it became a popular object of devotion and contemplation, particularly among women in monastic communities. ‘Gallery: Jesus and the Beloved Disciple,’ Bible Review. See Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 201–2. Ritual sacrifice and cannibalism – actual and symbolic – are widely diffused in religious ritual and belief across cultures as documented by James Frazier in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Dante and Boccaccio tell versions of a story in which a husband serves up a lover’s heart to a cheating wife. The Barbaric Law’s messianic prophecy may also be read as a parody of Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue, which announces the birth of a wonder-boy who will usher in a golden age – a well-known

Notes to pages 42–50

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28 29

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type for Jesus Christ in Christianized interpretations and elaborations of the Roman poet’s vatic imagery. See Doueihi, A Perverse History of the Human Heart, 47–62. Diana de Armas Wilson notes the parallel between Persiles and Maximino and the Old Testament stories of Jacob and Esau and of Joseph and his brothers, in Allegories of Love. Casalduero, Sentido y forma de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 28; Alban Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 40; and Eduardo González, La persona y el relato: Proyecto de lectura psicoanalítica, 127. Wilson discusses these readings in Allegories of Love, 120–1. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 143–4. In Book 1, chapter 9 of Comentarios reales, the Inca Garcilaso writes: ‘And because they, unlike the pagan Romans, did not know how to create imagined gods such as Hope, Victory, Peace and others like them, because they did not raise their thoughts to invisible things, they worshipped whatever they saw, differentiating some from others without reflecting upon the objects of their worship’ (‘y porque no supieron, como los gentiles romanos, hacer dioses imaginados como la Esperanza, la Victoria, la Paz y otros semejantes, porque no levantaron los pensamientos a cosas invisibles, adoraban lo que veían, unos a diferencia de otros, sin consideración de las cosas que adoraban’). Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, 21. For recent commentary on the Americanist dimension of Persiles, see Mariscal, ‘Persiles and the Remaking of Spanish Culture’; Wilson, Allegories of Love, 109–29, and Cervantes, The Novel, and the New World. Scholars have long tracked echoes of New World chronicles and ethnographies in Persiles, among them Rudolf Schevill and Adolfo Bonilla, Introducción, Persiles y Sigismunda, by Miguel de Cervantes, xxv–xxix; J. Campos, ‘Presencia de América en las obras de Cervantes’; Stelio Cro, ‘Cervantes, “el Persiles” y la historiografía indiana’; and Carlos Romero Muñoz, ‘Oviedo, Olao Magno, Ramusio: Note sulla “mediazione veneziana” nel primo tempo della composizione del “Persiles.”’ See Schevill and Bonilla, Introducción, xxvi–xxvii. Antonio Cruz Casado, ‘Persiles y Sigismunda: De Cervantes a Rojas Zorrilla,’ 549. Guanacol today is the name of a town on the Argentine side of the northern Andean border with Chile. This barbaric island episode is narrated in Book 9. There is no modern edition of Eustorgio y Clorilene. I have consulted the following edition: Enrique Suárez de Mendoza y Figueroa, Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica. The references to the Indies appear on fols. 87r. and v. Detailed

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Notes to pages 50–6 plot summaries are given by J.A. Van Praag, ‘Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica (1629) de Enrique Suárez de Mendoza y Figueroa,’ and González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 311–27. The references to the goddess Ceres in Suárez de Mendoza y Figueroa, Eustorgio y Clorilene, 87v., 88r.–v., 89r., and thereafter in Book 9. Suárez de Mendoza y Figueroa, Eustorgio y Clorilene, 90v.–92r. Romero Muñoz, ‘Oviedo, Olao Magno, Ramusio,’ and Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles.’ I refer to Ludovico Ariosto’s Opere, edited by Adriano Seroni. Antonio de Torquemada, Jardín de flores curiosas, 130. The warrior-god (dios guerrero) in Fray Luis de León’s renowned poem, the ‘Profecía del Tajo’ (Prophecy of the Tajo), is described as a ‘bramidor.’ Miguel Sánchez el Divino, La isla bárbara and La guarda cuidadosa. See now María Antonia Garcés’s Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale. For the relevant speech in El trato de Argel, see Teatro completo, 887 (verses 1527–31). Carlos Romero wonders whether the description of the tents used by Persiles’ Barbarians draws on the author’s memories of his Algerian captivity. Carlos Romero Muñoz, Introducción, 151n3. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: 135–85. Skinner, Modern Political Thought, 2: 154–61, 164–5, 167, 174–5. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2: 161–6, 175, 320, 329–31, 334, 341–2, 346. Juan de Mariana, Del rey y de la institución real, 468. According to a student of the ‘wild man’ motif widespread in medieval art, literature, and folklore, this willingness to identify the ‘wild man’ within ‘give[s] external expression ... to the impulses of reckless physical selfassertion which are hidden in all of us, but are normally kept under control.’ On the motif, see Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology. For the quote, see p. 3. For a well-documented review of the many examples of the wild man motif in early modern Spanish theatre, see Oleh Mazur, ‘The Wild Man in the Spanish Renaissance and Golden Age Theatre: A Comparative Study.’ For my account of sixteenth-century law, I am indebted to Anthony Pagden, Introduction, Political Writings, by Francisco de Vitoria. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 160. For an overview of natural law with examples of or variations on the phrase ‘inscribed in the heart’ in the sixteenth-century Spanish revival of Thomism, see Skinner, Modern Political Thought, 2: 148–73.

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52 Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana. 53 Francisco Rico, Nebrija frente a los bárbaros: El canon de gramáticos nefastos en las polémicas del humanismo, especially 29–72. 54 See Juan Manuel Rozas’s edition, Significado y doctrina del arte nuevo de Lope de Vega, 182 verses 33–48. 55 María de Zayas, Desengaños amorosos, 476. 56 On the Argumentum, see Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, 118–21. 57 Hanke, Struggle for Justice, 82–3. 58 Hanke, Struggle for Justice, 83. 59 Diana de Armas Wilson regards Las Casas’s use of the discourse of barbarism to denounce the Conquest as an important precursor for Persiles’ Barbaric Isle. See Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 165–6 and 205–6. 60 Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, 278. 61 For a review of sources on the novel’s geography and ethnography available to Cervantes, see Schevill and Bonilla, Introducción, xi–xxvii, and Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide, ‘La pericia geográfica de Cervantes demostrada con la Historia de los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 270–93. More recently Isabel Lozano Renieblas studied Cervantes’ geographic choices in Persiles in relation to Greek and contemporary adventure novels and travel literature in Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles,’ 81–117. Mariarosa Scaramuzza Vidoni discusses utopian and Golden-Age subtexts for Persiles’ geography, as well as early modern travel literature. See Deseo, imaginación, utopía en Cervantes, 115–84. 62 See, for example, Rafael Osuna, ‘El olvido del Persiles,’ 61, 67–8; Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Introducción, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, by Miguel de Cervantes, 19–20; and Alberto Navarro González, Cervantes entre el ‘Persiles’ y el ‘Quijote,’ 56. Alban Forcione defends the novel’s unity subtended by an allegory of Christian history, the theme of bondage and liberation, and the motifs of lightness and darkness in Cervantes’ Christian Romance, especially 11 and 46–7n39. Diana de Armas Wilson also sees a profound unity in the novel but offers the category of gender and the concept of androgyny as the primary organizing principles in Allegories of Love, especially 80–90. Carlos Romero reviews parallels between the first and second halves in his Introducción, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda by Miguel de Cervantes, 37–41. 63 The phrase itself was first coined about forty years after the Peace, but aptly sums up the governing principle of the agreement. Friedrich Heer, The Holy Roman Empire, 165. 64 Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. Francisco Rico, 1073.

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65 George Mariscal notes the significance of their novelistic reintegration as mestizos into an Old Christian, Spanish society marked by the increasing prominence of purity of blood statutes and other forms of racial exclusion. Mariscal, ‘Persiles and the Remaking of Spanish Culture.’ 66 Wilson, Cervantes, 73–4, 178–208. See also Jean Canavaggio, ‘L’Espagne du Persiles,’ 37–8. 67 H. Eric R. Olsen, The Calabrian Charlatan, 1598–1603: Messianic Nationalism in Early Modern Europe, especially 1–28. 68 For medieval literary and historical antecedents of political prophecy, see Joaquín Gimeno Casalduero, ‘La profecía medieval en la literatura castellana y su relación con las corrientes proféticas europeas.’ On Habsburg claims to universal monarchy, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800, 29–62. A survey of political, religious, and literary prophecy (including millenarism, eschatology, and astrology) in the Middle Ages in José Guadalajara Medina, Las profecías del Anticristo en la Edad Media. 69 Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, 7. 70 Alain Milhou, ‘La chauve-souris, le nouveau David et le roi caché (trois images de l’empereur des derniers temps dans le monde ibérique: XIIIe–XVIIe s.).’ 71 Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, 119 and following. 72 Charles V’s defeat of Francis I at Pavia in 1525 and subsequent imprisonment provoked a fresh round of messianic hopes in Spain and belief that the Habsburg emperor had been chosen by God to fulfill a providential mission, leading Christianity (including the French and the English) in a war to retake Jerusalem and convert the Muslim infidels. See Augustin Redondo, ‘Mesianismo y reformismo en Castilla a raiz de la batalla de Pavía: el Memorial de don Beltrán de Guevara dirigido a Carlos V (1525),’ especially 242 and notes 40 and 41 for relevant references on political messianism associated with Charles V. 73 Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas, 207 and following. 74 Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas, 162 and following. 75 Pagden, Lords of All the World, 11–62. 76 Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 158. 77 Werner Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, 62. 78 The Habsburgs promoted dynastic connections to both the Argonaut Jason and the Trojan Aeneas. See Pagden, Lords of All the World, 41, and Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas, 5–22, 67–118.

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79 Elsewhere I offer two different, but complementary, readings of Cervantes’ ambivalent response to the Roman legacy as portrayed by this play. See Michael Armstrong-Roche, ‘Imperial Theater of War: Republican Virtues under Siege in Cervantes’s Numancia’ and ‘(The) Patria Besieged: BorderCrossing Paradoxes of National Identity in Cervantes’s Numancia.’ 80 On Seneca and Columbus, see James Romm, ‘New World and novos orbes: Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of the Americas.’ 81 Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 90–2. 82 On the auri sacra fames topos in classical Spanish literature, see Melchora Romanos, ‘El discurso contra las navegaciones en Góngora,’ and Lía Schwartz Lerner, ‘El motivo de la “auri sacra fames” en la sátira y en la literatura moral del siglo XVII.’ 83 I borrow my characterization of New Comedy from R.J. Dorius’s entry for ‘Comedy’ in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974). 84 Wilson, Allegories of Love, 110–26. 85 Claude Chauchadis, La loi du duel: Le code du point d’honneur dans l’Espagne des XVI–XVII siècles, especially 205–303, 361–473. 86 Avalle-Arce, Introducción, 27. 87 There may also be an epic echo here: Turnus’s ally, the female warrior Camilla, is killed by an arrow through her breast in Book 11 of The Aeneid. If so, Rubertino is identified with an Amazon warrior and in particular with the forces opposing the hero’s epic destiny. 88 On the motif of sorcery in Persiles see José-Ignacio Díez Fernández and Luisa-Fernanda Aguirre de Cárcer, ‘Contexto histórico y tratamiento literario de la “hechicería” morisca y judía en el Persiles,’ and Antonio Cruz Casado, ‘Auristela hechizada: Un caso de maleficia en el Persiles.’ 89 Miguel de Cervantes, ‘El coloquio de los perros,’ in Novelas ejemplares, 604–5. 90 For example, Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 95. 91 E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 193. 92 On the legal status of duelling in sixteenth-century Spain, see Chauchadis, La loi du duel. In 1613 the jurist Francisco de Pradilla Barnuevo cited both the pragmatic of the Catholic Kings (a law promulgated at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480) and the Council of Trent (Session 25, canon 19) as longstanding legal grounds for outlawing ‘rieptos y desafíos’ (‘judicial and ordinary duels’). See Chauchadis, 234–5. On this point see as well Carlos Romero’s note in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda by Miguel de Cervantes, 255n3. 93 Molho, Lozano Renieblas, Sacchetti, and Nerlich all regard the juxtaposition of the two sonnets here, one in praise and the other in vituperation

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Notes to pages 85–9 of Rome, as an expression in miniature of Persiles’ ambivalent picture of Rome. See Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 432. Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, 27–33. See the entry for ‘penitencia’ in Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 861. Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo del ‘Persiles,’ 185–8. An excellent historical study of sixteenth-century Roman prostitution and ‘the unusually prominent place [these women held] in its cultural identity and social practice’ can be found in Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Prostitutes in Late-Sixteenth-Century Rome.’ The quote is from 396. Ludovico Ariosto, Opere, 515, 567. For at least one sixteenth-century witness (Pérez de Oliva) to the association of Amazons with cannibals (hence of Hipólita and Rome with the Barbaric Isle), see José Piedra, ‘Loving Columbus,’ 246. On Ariosto and Cervantes, see especially Maurice Chevalier, L’Arioste en Espagne (1530–1650): Recherches sur l’influence du ‘Roland furieux,’ 439–91. Herodotus, The History, 624. For other examples of Amazons in sixteenth-century chronicles and fiction, see María Rosa Lida Malkiel, ‘Fantasía y realidad en la conquista de América,’ 215–18, and María Marín Pina, ‘Aproximación al tema de la Virgo Bellatrix en los libros de caballerías españoles.’ For a discussion of the Scythian ‘other’ in Herodotus’s History, see François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. See Theodor E. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch and the Story of the Choice of Hercules.’ One version of this legendary history was written by Philip II’s morisco translator (of Arabic) Miguel de Luna in the Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo (part 1 published in 1592, part 2 in 1600). On Hercules in Spain and particularly his iconography in the visual arts, see Santiago Sebastián, Arte y humanismo, 197–202. For a well-documented overview of the reception of the Hercules legend in Spanish literature and chronicle, see Marianne Breidenthal, ‘The Legend of Hercules in Castilian Literature up to the Seventeenth Century.’ For an account of Hercules iconography in emblematic devices, paintings, tapestries, triumphal entries, commemorative medals, and royal pageants associated with Spanish Habsburgs from Charles I to Philip IV, see Jonathan Brown and J.H. Elliott, A Palace for a King, 156–61 and especially the corresponding notes. The Gallic Hercules myth invented by Lucian – the hero whose power comes from eloquence and persuasion rather than

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physical force – may also bear relating to Persiles. Cervantes’ hero is both Odysseus-like in his wiliness and Achilles-like in his physical prowess and courage, but in contrast to his warrior brother, Maximino, Persiles stands out as a smooth talker. The famously diplomatic Henri IV (1553–1610), who sought to end the religious wars in France by converting to Catholicism and promoting official toleration of Protestantism (Edict of Nantes, 1598), adopted the Gallic Hercules type for his device. 104 In Don Quijote II.60, when Don Quijote meets the Catalan bandit Roque Guinart, Roque tries to reassure the knight of his good intentions by saying he is not the Egyptian King Busiris, feared for slaying foreign males. Roque (or Cervantes) mistakenly calls Busiris ‘Osiris,’ but what is pertinent for our purposes is that Roque (and Cervantes) in this moment is referring to a particularly significant episode (for our purposes) in Hercules’ life. In the course of carrying out his eleventh labour, Hercules is seized while traversing Egypt and nearly meets the same fate as other strangers at the hands of King Busiris. Instead Hercules bursts his bonds and slays both Busiris and his son. But the reference is doubly interesting in this context because the story of King Busiris bears such telling affinities with Persiles’ Barbaric Isle prophecy, suggesting another link between Hercules and the protagonists of Cervantes’ Labours. Busiris had taken to sacrificing strangers on an altar of Zeus in accordance with a certain oracle emitted by a learned seer from Cyprus, who said famine would be warded off if a foreign male were sacrificed to Zeus annually. As we discussed in chapter 1, it is Auristela dressed as a boy who takes the place of Hercules in Cervantes’ reworking: nearly sacrificed as a foreign (apparent) male in accordance with the Barbaric Isle prophecy, Auristela will – with Periandro – make an escape but, in another telling variation on the Hercules legend, it is not our epic hero(es) who kill the Barbaric Isle stand-ins for Busiris (the unnamed governor and his rival Bradamiro) but the Barbarians who kill each other. On Roque Guinart’s reference to Osiris (Busiris), see Breidenthal, ‘The Legend of Hercules,’ 195. 105 Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Dedicatoria al conde de Lemos,’ Don Quijote de la Mancha, 623. 106 For a different reading of Hipólita’s character, see Carmen Hsu, Courtesans in the Literature of the Spanish Golden Age, 213–16. Hsu interprets Hipólita as the embodiment of a recurring type of the rich, beautiful, and cultivated but (her weakness) emotionally vulnerable courtesan, usefully situating her in a classical Roman, Italian, and Spanish tradition. I recognize Hipólita’s complexity as a character but cannot quite see her as Hsu’s ultimately repentant, selfless heroine. The problem with such a

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108 109 110 111 112

113 114

Notes to pages 95–102 reading is that Hipólita had already repented once, after falsely accusing Periandro. In view of this pattern, there is no telling whether her second repentance (when she calls off the poisoning and offers Periandro money) will hold. Indeed, the narrator seems to make her, as discussed earlier, the example of a type contrary to Hsu’s, namely damas del vicio ‘who may have regrets but know no remorse’ (‘se arrepient[e]n sin arrepentirse,’ Persiles 667). She may therefore merit being regarded sooner as a parody of Hsu’s vulnerable courtesan type than as a paradigm. The point I would emphasize is that even Hipólita’s late repentance, whether final or not, follows from the example of Periandro and Auristela, the outsider, ‘less than perfectly Catholic’ Goths who give this Roman character a lesson in clemency. Nerlich also links Persiles’ representation of Rome to reform-minded Protestants and Catholics who denounced the great meretrix romana (‘Roman whore’) as a threat to peace or as a sink of vice. For Nerlich, the courtesan Hipólita is the incarnation of the image of Rome as a great prostitute, but also of Rome as a beacon of a culture and civilization – of art, eroticism, and courtesy – that predates the Church. See El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 360–9, 373, 381, 417–24, 435, 520–1. For Cervantes’ handling of Rome in Persiles, the example of Lucian and Lucianesque satire and paradox may have been key. On the transmission, translation, and imitation of Lucian in Spain, see Michael O. Zappala, Lucian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Translation, especially 63–220. See Redondo, ‘Mesianismo y reformismo en Castilla,’ especially 253–4 and notes 116 and 117. Quoted by Redondo, ‘Mesianismo y reformismo en Castilla,’ 253n116. Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, 363–78. See Marcel Bataillon, ‘Cervantes y el “matrimonio cristiano.”’ The palindromic quibble on Roma and amor was topical already in antiquity (exploited, for instance, by Ovid). Lope de Vega lends it to Diana in act 1 of El perro del hortelano (published in 1618). It makes an appearance too in Francisco Delicado’s La lozana andaluza (1528). Situated in Rome in the years preceding its Sack in 1527 by imperial troops, La lozana features (and is named for) a Spanish courtesan much as Persiles’ Rome episode is dominated by the Ferrarese courtesan Hipólita. Schevill and Bonilla, Introducción, xxxvi. On Arthurian romance and Don Quijote, see Edwin Williamson, The Halfway House of Fiction: ‘Don Quixote’ and Arthurian Romance. On the transmission of the Arthurian romance in Spain, see María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, ‘Arthurian Literature in Spain and Portugal, and Marina Brownlee,

Notes to pages 103–11

115 116 117 118

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‘Romance at the Crossroads: Medieval Spanish Paradigms and Cervantine Revisions.’ Randel, ‘Ending and Meaning.’ Cesáreo Bandera, Mímesis conflictiva: Ficción literaria y violencia en Cervantes y Calderón, 127–32. See, for example, Ruth Anthony El Saffar, ‘In Marcela’s Case.’ Although I am persuaded by many aspects of Nerlich’s reading of Persiles, I find myself parting ways with him on Auristela’s ‘conversion.’ We agree that her sudden change of heart about marriage to Persiles casts a morally dubious light on her piety (and maybe, though less obviously, on monastic life) and that it immediately follows the lessons in faith given by the penitentiaries. But I cannot see how the text authorizes us to blame the penitentiaries for Auristela’s misreading of their lessons – moved though she is by them – since their teachings as reported say nothing about the superiority of the monastic to matrimonial life, as Nerlich implies. Nerlich may be right to deplore a tendency in some Persiles criticism to smooth over problems in the quest for a text that celebrates religious and political orthodoxy, but it seems hardly a step forward to smooth over problems in the quest to blame every wrong on the Church or the monarchy. In particular, Nerlich here overlooks the delicious irony that Cervantes has these putative representatives of papal orthodoxy dwell at length on ideals – of compassion and of repentance – that would pass muster in almost any religious tradition. More pointedly, they represent the ethical principles betrayed most conspicuously in Rome by the Catholic Goth Auristela and the Catholic Roman Hipólita. See El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 378–81. See Lloyd Bonfield, ‘Developments in European Family Law.’ Protestant and Catholic reformers (the latter notably through the Council of Trent, 1545–63) were responsible for the reinforcement of both ecclesiastical and parental authority in matrimony – a tendency that became ever more marked in the period following the novel’s primary chronology (1557–9). Reformers were responding in part to the social plague of frivolously improvised ‘clandestine marriages,’ but they also sought to ensure that the sacrament of marriage was properly regarded as a holy matter not undertaken lightly. See Bataillon, ‘Cervantes y el “matrimonio cristiano.”’

Chapter 2 1 See Javier González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 13–19. 2 Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, 777–801.

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Notes to pages 111–12

3 A lucid analysis of Lope de Vega’s El peregrino en su patria with bibliographic pointers in González Rovira, La novela bizantina, 209–26. Still useful guides to El peregrino are Peyton’s substantial introduction to his edition, 11–74, and Ruth Nutt Horne, ‘Lope de Vega’s Peregrino en su patria and the Romance of Adventure in Spain before 1604.’ 4 The religious superficiality of Lope’s ‘pilgrim’ characters may be symptomatic of a growing interest in travel for pleasure, rather than for religious or economic motives. In this light, the efflorescence of travel literature in Spain, especially from the 1560s and 1570s, bears relating to the revival of the Greek novel in the same period. Although the travel literature addressed both religious and secular travellers and referred to both kinds of ‘pilgrim’ in its titles, there is an increased emphasis on the profane rather than on the sacred valences of travel (i.e., on the ‘pilgrim’ understood as traveller and foreigner rather than as religious devotee). Even in books addressed to religious pilgrims, one finds a marked appeal to readerly interest in the sights and in history, architecture, art, and customs. Bartolomé de Villalba y Estaña’s El pelegrino curioso has been described as the first Spanish travel book centred on Spain, not written for historical, scientific, economic, religious, or patriotic ends, but – according to the author – out of a desire to ‘satisfy his desire to see [things]’ (‘saciar su ánimo de ver’). Navarro González reviews many examples of what could be considered travel (even conquest) books in this period that include ‘pilgrim’ in the title, among them Peregrino andaluz en el viaje del mundo, Venturoso pelegrí, and Antonio de Saavedra’s El peregrino indiano (about Cortés’s conquest of Mexico). See Alberto Navarro González, ‘España vista y visitada por los españoles del siglo XVI.’ This travel literature may well mark a milestone in the consolidation of modern tourism, particularly what would later be called the Grand Tour. See José Manuel Herrero Massari, Libros de viajes de los siglos XVI y XVII en España y Portugal: Lecturas y lectores. Travel for pleasure and travel literature came into their own at the same time that Antonio Vilanova notices an explosion of pilgrim protagonists in fiction (see ‘El peregrino andante en el Persiles de Cervantes’). Given the fact of both renewed confessionalism in the Church and the conspicuous growth of travel for pleasure and enlightenment, it becomes apparent that the presence of ‘pilgrim’ in travel book titles or of ‘pilgrim’ characters in literature should by no means be interpreted as a purely or even primarily ‘Counter-Reformation’ phenomenon. On sixteenth-century travel literature and Persiles, see Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles. 5 On The Ethiopica see Reinhold Merkelbach, Roman und Mysterium in der

Notes to pages 112–14

6 7 8 9

10

11

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Antike; Tomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, 101–4; and Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 160–72. For the religious theme in The Aeneid, I have relied especially on Philip Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, and D.C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition, 129–87. For The Gerusalemme, see Sergio Zatti, L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano: Saggio sulla ‘Gerusalemme liberata,’ and David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, 213–47. Alberto Navarro González, Cervantes entre ‘el Persiles’ y ‘el Quijote,’ 71–2. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 89–105. For a sharp, nuanced discussion of Tasso’s Gerusalemme in the light of the epic tradition, see C.M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 139–93. On the heroic ideal, Christianity, and epic in Tasso’s Gerusalemme, see especially Judith A. Kates, Tasso and Milton: The Problem of Christian Epic, especially 66–124. Increasing numbers of scholars interested in the religious theme have raised questions, echoing and amplifying Américo Castro, about Persiles’ putative Tridentine orthodoxy – among them, Mercedes Blanco, Mariarosa Scaramuzza Vidoni, and María Alberta Sacchetti. The occasional scholarly voice has even broken a lance for the novel’s heterodoxy, notably Antonio Márquez, who sees a Pyrrhonist skepticism in ‘La ideología de Cervantes: El paradigma Persiles,’ 1 and 12–13; and Maurice Molho, who detects evidence of a doctrine of the double truth, rooted in a rationalist materialism identified with Pomponazzi, in ‘Filosofía natural o filosofía racional: Sobre el concepto de astrología en Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 673–9. More recently we have begun to see a renewed commitment to returning religion to the centre of fresh interpretations of Persiles. In El ‘Persiles’ descodificado Michael Nerlich explores the evidence for an Arian, Erasmist, or even Protestant Cervantes in Persiles through the Gothic characterization of the protagonists, the relative absence of Catholic institutions and officials, the lay spirituality of the hermit Soldino and Cervantes’ own lay Franciscanism, and the less than ideal representation of Rome. In particular he argues for an ecumenical strain in Persiles favouring the peaceful coexistence of confessions and opposed to the religious wars that were ripping Europe apart. William Childers also sets out to re-examine Persiles’ religious theme in Transnational Cervantes. Childers locates a critical distance from Trent especially in the novel’s handling of pilgrimage(s), which in his reading (in part inspired by Victor Turner) serves as an occasion for characters to form or recognize communities that transcend political, ethnic, linguistic, and even official religious boundaries. Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 307–20; and Marcel Bataillon,

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12

13

14

15

16 17

18

Notes to pages 114–18 Erasmo y España, and ‘El Erasmismo de Cervantes en el pensamiento de Américo Castro.’ Scholars who defend its orthodoxy include Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’; Rafael Lapesa, ‘En torno a La española inglesa y el Persiles’; Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Introducción, 7–27; and Alban Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda,’ especially 31–6 and 103–4n25. Forcione’s characteristically subtle argument recognizes a number of Pauline and Erasmist elements, but does not suppose they appreciably alter the novel’s fundamental orthodoxy. One of the difficulties of the orthodox position – suggested by the qualifying labels inserted parenthetically in my commentary – is that it does not always distinguish sufficiently among Christian, Catholic, or Counter-Reformation versions of it, sometimes, as in Forcione’s case, issuing in an orthodoxy so broadly defined that it becomes essentially synonymous with Christianity. Antonio Vilanova occupies a more anomalous position yet, in ‘El peregrino andante en el Persiles de Cervantes.’ Antonio Vilanova classifies the protagonists as Counter-Reformation heroes, yet his criterion is based not on religious grounds but on the vogue of fictions centred on pilgrims that coincided with the period following the work of the Council of Trent (1545–63). More recently, Javier González Rovira documents the early support for translations, adaptations, and variations of and on the Hellenistic romance in Christian humanist and particularly Erasmist circles, in La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 18. See my note 10 for scholars who have, in varying degrees, questioned the novel’s religious orthodoxy. See Eugenio Asensio, El erasmismo y las corrientes espirituales afines: conversos, franciscanos, italianizantes, 13–14 (Marcel Bataillon’s prologue) and 17–36; and Marcel Bataillon, ‘Hacia una definición del erasmismo,’ 147–50. On Juan de Valdés’s influence in Neapolitan reform circles, see Massimo Firpo, Entre alumbrados y ‘espirituales’: Estudios sobre Juan de Valdés y el valdesianismo en la crisis religiosa del ’500 italiano. For a review in English of sixteenth-century Spanish reform currents, see A. Gordon Kinder, Casiodoro de Reina: Spanish Reformer of the Sixteenth Century, xiii–xv and 1–17. Asensio, El erasmismo y las corrientes espirituales afines, 35–6. See John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, and Nicholas Terpstra’s review of it in American Historical Review, 1316–17. Reprinted in H. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, 587–9 (nos. 1862–70).

Notes to pages 118–23

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19 Session 4 (8 April 1546). H.J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 17–20. 20 Session 6 (13 January 1547). Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees, 29–50. 21 Session 7 (3 March 1547). Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees, 51–5. 22 Session 13 (11 October 1551). Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees, 72–80. 23 Session 25 (3–4 December 1563). Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees, 214–17. 24 Carlos Alberto Moreyra has argued that the creeds of Persiles include coded language that would have been recognizable to the Inquisition as an expression of heretical doctrines on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. See ‘Los credos del Persiles.’ 25 See notes 10 and 12 of this chapter for a review of scholarship on the religious theme in Persiles, including the sources of my characterization here. 26 Bataillon, Erasmo y España, especially 699 and following. 27 An account of Philip II’s qualified support for the decrees of the Council of Trent (whose publication was declared subject to the laws and customs of the country) in John Lynch, Spain, 1516–1598: From Nation State to World Empire, 369–85. 28 A.N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, 14, 16, 72–3. See also Klaus Haacker, ‘Paul’s Life.’ 29 Bataillon, Erasmo y España, especially 160, 162, 190–208. Antonio Vilanova’s studies of Erasmism in Cervantes – collected in Erasmo y Cervantes – focus mainly on Don Quijote, but they are fundamental for a full understanding of Cervantes’ relationship to Christian humanism. Vilanova does not recognize a necessary contradiction between the Counter-Reformation and Erasmist humanism and also detects ways in which Cervantes distances himself from both Trent and Erasmus. On the Enchiridion and Don Quijote, see Antonio Vilanova, ‘Don Quijote y el ideal erasmista del perfecto caballero cristiano.’ Francisco Márquez Villanueva finds evidence of a nonconformist spirituality in Cervantes’ first novel, La Galatea, in ‘Sobre el contexto religioso de La Galatea.’ 30 See José Luis Abellán, El erasmismo español, and Manuel Revuelta and Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, eds., El erasmismo en España. 31 On the relationship between charity and sacrament in the Enchiridion, see Bataillon, Erasmo y España, 190–205. 32 The Christian humanist embrace of folly and the influence of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly on Cervantes has been studied mainly in relation to Don Quijote rather than Persiles. On Erasmus, Don Quijote, and folly, see Vilanova, Erasmo y Cervantes. 33 Antonio’s ode to Lisbon recalls the Comendador don Gonzalo de Ulloa’s

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34

35 36 37 38 39

40

41

Notes to pages 124–7 ‘loa’ to that city delivered before the king in Tirso’s El burlador de Sevilla. Don Gonzalo presents Lisbon as an emblematic, virtuous Christian city, enumerating its churches and convents in multiples of three and its Godgiven prosperity and abundance in contrast to Seville with its swarm of Portuguese prostitutes and political corruption. In Persiles, Antonio’s paean to Lisbon is contested by events. Lisbon is the scene both of Leonor’s disastrous decision to take the veil (which results in Sosa’s and her own death) and of Ortel Banedre’s murder of a young, violent Portuguese man. Although odes to cities were an ancient topos, Fernando Bouza links the proliferation of such odes to Lisbon in this period with a movement to fix the Habsburg royal residence in the Portuguese capital. Fernando Bouza, ‘Sola Lisboa casi viuda: La ciudad y la mudanza de la corte en el Portugal de los Felipes.’ Lisbon makes a natural choice for Persiles’ epic midpoint insofar as, according to legend, it was said to have been founded by Odysseus. The parallel with Paul’s ‘labours’ was observed by the German translator of Persiles, Anton Rothbauer, in the introduction to his 1963 edition. Noted by Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 103–4n25. On Paul’s voyage to Rome as narrated in Acts, see Wilson, Paul, 241–50. Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, 161. For the iconography of caritas-cruelty, see James Hall, Subjects and Symbols in Art, 64 under the entry for ‘charity.’ This was observed already by Américo Castro, in El pensamiento de Cervantes, 271. David Castillo and Nicholas Spadaccini also note Cervantes’ ethnographic interest in underscoring the pagan origins of this religious celebration in Spain. They regard the cultural syncretism of Persiles’ Catholic South as a kind of mockery of an official ideology of religious orthodoxy and conformity promoted by Crown and Church. See David Castillo and Nicholas Spadaccini, ‘El antiutopismo en Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 125. According to tradition, the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego in 1531, on a hill outside Mexico City where there had been a shrine to the Mexica goddess of fertility Tonantzin. Interesting observations on the Old and New World cults of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Persiles in Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 90–105. On the ethics of travel in the Erasmist tradition, see Augustin Redondo, ‘Devoción tradicional y devoción erasmista en la España de Carlos V: De la verdadera información de la Tierra Santa de Fray Antonio de Aranda al Viaje de Turquía.’ Giovanni Allegra studies Torquemada’s proto-Romantic interest in popular

Notes to pages 127–38

42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54

55 56

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traditions and pre-Christian folklore in ‘Antonio de Torquemada, mitógrafo “ingenuo” y popular,’ 55–9. See the Council of Trent’s Twenty-Fifth Session, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees, 216–17. Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation, 96–8. William Christian prefers to speak of ‘local’ religious practices increasingly scrutinized, reformed, or suppressed by a centralizing Church especially wary in the aftermath of the Protestant schism of lay authority in spiritual matters. He describes sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic reformers as opposed to both Church authority and local religious practices. See Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 158–75. See O’Malley, Trent and All That, 114–17. Nobert Elias, The Court Society, 215, 223. Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Carlos Romero, 156nn17–18. See the entry for ‘Trojan War’ in Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, 312. Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 109–12. In El pasajero (II.368), Suárez de Figueroa refers to some nobles who had come to avoid ‘vos’ altogether because of its promiscuous, indecorous misuse. The ‘premáticas’ (‘statutes’) came to impose severe penalties on transgressors. See Rafael Lapesa, ‘Personas gramaticales y tratamientos en español,’ 153–4. For historical and literary documentation of contemporary formulas of address, see also Nadine Ly, ‘Note sur l’emploi du tratamiento “señoría” dans le theatre de Lope de Vega.’ Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 109, 111–12. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce contrasts what he sees as Huarte’s purely exemplary, doctrinal use of the anecdote and Cervantes’ greater interest in character, in ‘Tres vidas del Persiles.’ My translation. Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, 556. Huarte’s position is a little more complex than this suggests. Although it is true that among the six attributes of honour he lists, the first two can be summed up as merit, virtue, good character, and wealth, the third is lineage or ancestry. See Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, 559–60. Stefano Arata, ‘I primi capitoli del Persiles: Armonie e fratture,’ 81. Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 179 and following on Transila, 251–2 on Ricla.

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Notes to pages 140–52

57 Forcione, Cervantes’s Christian Romance, 110. 58 María Stoopen offers an elegantly worked out reading of Persiles’ Barbaric Isle she-wolf episode in the light of the Lycaon story told by Ovid in The Metamorphoses. Lycaon is transformed into a wolf as punishment for mocking divine authority and serving Saturn a sacrificed captive. In Persiles’ retelling of the tale, according to Stoopen, Lycaon is replaced by the Roman sorceress and cannibalism by sexual possession. A woman’s temptation – once again in alliance with the devil – will provoke the loss of paradise. See María Stoopen, ‘El peregrinaje de Licaón.’ 59 See José Luis Alonso Hernández, Léxico del marginalismo del Siglo de Oro, 577 under the entry for ‘pan’; and Camilo José Cela, Diccionario del erotismo, 1: 298–300 under the entry for ‘comer’ (Cela registers Golden Age examples from La lozana andaluza and erotic verse). 60 Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, 208–11. 61 Nerlich makes the interesting suggestion that Ricla’s name, scrambled (Clari), may have been inspired by the Clarisas – the Franciscan sister order committed in principle to an inner piety and to active charity in the world. One could infer from Nerlich’s proposal a secret affinity between Ricla the Barbarian and Cervantes the (lay) Franciscan tertiary. See El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 440–3, 468n4. 62 Gonzalo Guerrero’s story is told by Bernal Díaz, among other sixteenthcentury chroniclers, historians, and poets. On its early transmission, see Rosa Pellicer, ‘Gonzalo Guerrero: El primer aindiado (Historia y literatura: Siglos XVI y XVII).’ Unlike Guerrero and his companion, Antonio and Ricla form a society unto themselves in exile from both their communities of origin, Antonio eventually returns home with Ricla, and the conversion and acculturation are mutual. Antonio’s return to Spain after a kind of conversion back to Christianity following the example of a nonChristian with whom he had lived for years bears affinities with the tale of another renowned castaway, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (1542 and 1555). 63 See Giulia Lanciani, Os relatos de naufragios na literatura portuguesa dos séculos XVI e XVII, and Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire. 64 For the historical roots of Las Casian primitivism, see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages. 65 Bartolomé de Las Casas, Obra indigenista, 68–70. 66 Avalle-Arce, ‘Tres vidas del Persiles,’ 85.

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67 González Rovira, La novela bizantina de la Edad de Oro, 187–201, 351–71. 68 Here I take myth to mean a sacred or otherwise central narrative about a community’s origins, values, or future. See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, 1–20. 69 Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘Don Quixote: Story or History?’ especially 6. 70 George Mariscal reads the integration of Antonio el bárbaro and Constanza into the novel’s Spain as an implied challenge to a society increasingly based on exclusion by purity of blood statute, expulsion, and conquest. See ‘Persiles and the Remaking of Spanish Culture.’ 71 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 555. 72 See Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. 73 Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave, 15–24. 74 On the history of mentalités, see Philippe Ariès, ‘Mentalités,’ and Michel Vovelle, Idéologies et mentalités. 75 Casalduero compares Antonio’s and Ricla’s cave to the catacombs of the early, primitive Christian Church. See Joaquín Casalduero, Sentido y forma de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 37. 76 Wilson, Allegories of Love, 126. 77 Ronald W. Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II: The ‘de regimine principum’ and Associated Traditions. On Pedro de Ribadeneyra, see especially 277–314. 78 Marcel Bataillon discusses Erasmus’s defence of this Pauline principle in Erasmo y España, 204. 79 My translation from the Spanish edition of Bataillon, Erasmo y España, 204. 80 For a review of proposals, arguments, evidence, and bibliography, see Carlos Romero’s introduction to his edition of Persiles, 29–34. A particularly detailed account, especially useful for the thorough listing of temporal references in the appendices to the article, is Kenneth Allen, ‘Aspects of Time in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda.’ 81 J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716, 224. 82 There is evidence from Charles V’s correspondence in this period that he and not his son Philip II – then in Flanders – was chiefly responsible for the policy of religious repression in 1558–9. See José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, ‘1559 ¿Crisis religiosa española o europea?’ 83–4. 83 The historical summary is derived from Elliott, Imperial Spain, 224–7. For a more detailed account of the effect of Valdés’s Index of 1559 on Spanish cultural life, see Bataillon, Erasmo y España, 716–24. 84 Tellechea Idígoras, ‘1559,’ 91. When Madame de Lafayette looks back to

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Notes to pages 167–71 select a significant historical moment for the setting of her novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678), she settles on the court of Henri II and the year of 1558.

Chapter 3 1 Although Ariosto’s Orlando furioso is often credited with fusing the two and thus creating a romance epic, some scholars recognize that the fusion took place at least episodically in the Carolingian tradition. For a discussion of the contrasting themes of love and war in medieval and early modern epic and ‘romance’ see Jane Everson, The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism: The Matter of Italy and the World of Rome, especially 163–222. 2 A standard review of the relevant sixteenth-century theoretical ‘quarrels’ in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, especially 2: 819–1105. 3 Ruth El Saffar, Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes, 133. 4 Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 78–105. 5 On the fusion of Mars and Venus as a motif in the sixteenth-century articulation of the courtly ideal, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 86–96. Northrop Frye discusses Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano in terms of a principle of will he associates with the prince and a principle of grace he associates with the courtier. Northrop Frye, ‘Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano,’ 321. For the Mars and Venus motif in Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetry, see Daniel L. Heiple, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, 281–392. 6 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, especially 8–27, 31–41, 45–6. 7 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, 9. 8 See E.C. Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, 49–57, and Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 49–87. 9 El Pinciano’s discussion of ‘the heroic poem’ or epic appears in the eleventh epistle of Philosophía antigua. See Alonso López Pinciano, Philosophía antigua poética, 449–88, especially Fadrique’s comment on 461. 10 See especially Rudolph Schevill, ‘Studies in Cervantes: Persiles y Sigismunda III. Virgil’s Aeneid.’ 11 A comparative study of Calasiris’s and Periandro’s retrospective narratives is made in Tilbert Diego Stegmann, Cervantes’ Musterroman ‘Persiles’:

Notes to pages 171–9

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Epentheorie und Romanpraxis um 1600 (El Pinciano, Heliodor, ‘Don Quijote’), 113–44. Miguel de Cervantes, ‘Dedicatoria al conde de Lemos,’ Don Quijote de la Mancha, 623. A survey of the earthly paradise topos in A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic. Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 231–2. Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Carlos Romero Muñoz, 383n8, 384nn13, 14. Hernando de Hoces’s complete Spanish translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi appeared in 1554. See Roxana Recio, Petrarca en la Península Ibérica: el discurso poético en los Triunfos. The ensign Campuzano’s friend, the graduate, quotes from Petrarch’s Trionfi d’amore in El casamiento engañoso. See Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, 533. On parallels between Petrarch’s Trionfi and Persiles’s Sensualidad episode, see Clark Colahan, ‘Sulpicia y la sensualidad: un caso de pentimento petrarquista en Persiles y Sigismunda.’ For a useful overview of the literary and visual tradition of the allegorical and processional triumph from Petrarch and Boccaccio, including sixteenth-century Habsburg examples, see Santiago Sebastián, Arte y humanismo, 225–43. On Petrarch, see Sandro Sticca, ‘Petrarch’s Triumphs and Its Medieval Dramatic Heritage.’ Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 231. See Alban Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ and Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda.’ Antonio Vilanova, ‘El peregrino andante en el Persiles de Cervantes.’ The painting recalls epic ecphrases (Achilles’ shield, the hall of paintings in Dido’s palace at Carthage) as well as the historical Roman custom of the triumph – parades of prisoners, booty, and floats representing conquered cities that included painted depictions of the military victory. Persiles also draws attention to the contemporary use of painted canvases by both authentic and fraudulent ex-captives, who relied on them to illustrate their real or made-up misfortunes in North African dungeons when making the rounds of villages for alms (see Persiles 309–10, 527–39). This shared use of painted canvases suggests a parallel between the labours of the novel’s Gothic heroes (including their captivity on the Barbaric Isle) and those of ex-captives in Algiers, such as Cervantes himself. All text references are to The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. R.D. Williams. Book and verse number keyed to this edition appear in parentheses in the body of the text for ease of reference.

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Notes to pages 181–9

24 A well-documented review of the genre of the dream-vision in Spanish letters within a European context appears in Teresa Gómez Trueba, El sueño literario en España: Consolidación y desarrollo del género. She notes that by the seventeenth century the genre had largely run its course and was kept alive mainly through parody. 25 Lope de Vega, El peregrino en su patria, 537–41. 26 We can bring out Cervantes’ revaluation of the epic hero by recalling an observation of Georg Lukács’s: ‘The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual.’ Lukács voices here the conventional notion of epic as the expression not of a personal but of a collective destiny. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 66. 27 This phrase was a commonplace for Rome, documented in seventeenthcentury guidebooks to the city. Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles,’ 185–6. 28 Wilson, Allegories of Love, 67. 29 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy,’ 149. On the iconography of Venus in the representation of an ideal of sacred and of profane love, see Panofsky’s discussion 160–9. 30 James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, under the entries for ‘Lust’ and ‘Venus.’ For a review of the scholarship on this humanist revaluation of Venus and profane love and an early sixteenth-century Spanish example in the celebrated staircase at the University of Salamanca, see Sebastián, Arte y humanismo, 188–97. 31 Panofsky, ‘Neoplatonic Movement,’ 142–3. 32 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 257–9. 33 Cervantes, Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Romero Muñoz, 383–4n12. 34 Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 42. 35 Wilson, Allegories of Love, 75. 36 Among the closest images to Cervantes’ Sensualidad to be found in sixteenth-century learned epic is Camões’s Canto 9 representation of Venus in her chariot drawn by swans. It appears in the island-of-love hiatus in Os Lusíadas, which is, as Carlos Romero points out, an exceptional instance of an epic digression treated as a reward rather than as a problematic deviation from public destiny. See Cervantes, Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Romero Muñoz, 385–6n18. 37 Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. Rico and Forradellas, 16. On Leone Ebreo and Cervantes, see Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 148–55 and Wilson, Allegories of Love, 93–105. 38 León Hebreo, Diálogos de amor, 44–6. 39 For multiple examples of the Great Mother archetype across cultures,

Notes to pages 190–5

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detailed discussion, and references, see Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Forcione calls the ‘peña’ a hollow hill, which he reads archetypally as belonging to the earthly paradise tradition. Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the ‘Persiles,’ 231. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 22–3 and 166–70. Carlos Romero Muñoz reviews scholarship on this and other possible sources of this episode in his edition: Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 595n11. Wilson, Allegories of Love, 69–77. Aurora Egido, ‘La poética del silencio en el Siglo de Oro: Su pervivencia,’ 57. A broader literary context for the workings of ley and gusto in Persiles would include the contrasting emphases on law (‘lei’) and pleasure (‘piacere’) famously given expression in Tasso’s and Guarini’s pastoral plays, Aminta (performed 1573, printed 1582) and the Pastor Fido (printed 1590). They gathered around them the most vocal partisans of the chief rival values associated with profane literature in the late sixteenth century: entertainment and moral edification. Discussed in Weinberg, Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2: 1074–1105. In Aminta Tasso had – for some, notoriously – associated pleasure with the law in the utopian space of a naturally just and harmonious Golden Age (‘s’ei piace, ei lice’ [‘if it pleases, it is legitimate (or lawful)’]), which by tradition contrasts with our own fallen Iron Age of wanton lust, greed, and injustice. Guarini’s pastoral play the Pastor Fido reaffirmed the norm, particularly that which obtained in the wake of the Council of Trent: ‘s’ei lice, ei piace’ (‘if it is legitimate [or lawful], it pleases’). It is understood that taste or pleasure must remain within the boundaries marked by the (Christian and neo-Aristotelian literary) law or precept. In Spain, Lope de Vega’s defence of his own New Comedy or nueva comedia (El arte nuevo de hacer comedias, 1609) hinges on the defence of the laws of public gusto or amusement over academic and moralist precept, and he takes appeal to popular taste for his North Star (‘porque a veces lo que es contra lo justo, / por la misma razón deleita el gusto’ [‘because at times what goes against what is just (or the norm or precept or law) / for that very reason pleases taste’], verses 375–6). See Juan Manuel Rozas’s commentary and edition, Significado y doctrina del arte nuevo de Lope de Vega. See C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 152–65; Panofsky, ‘Neoplatonic Movement,’ 136–7.

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Notes to pages 196–200

47 Marcel Bataillon has called the sacralization of matrimony the sixteenthcentury orthodoxy to which both Catholic and Protestant reformers bent their knee. See Marcel Bataillon, ‘Cervantes y el “matrimonio cristiano.”’ 48 Alban Forcione, ‘Cervantes’s La Gitanilla as Erasmian Romance,’ especially 96–165. 49 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘Bonifacio y Dorotea: Mateo Alemán y la novela burguesa,’ especially 67–9 and 83–7 and notes 22 and 54–7. 50 Diana de Armas Wilson explores the re-evaluation of conjugal love in Allegories of Love. Alban Forcione reviews contextual – particularly Erasmist – material on this theme, brought to bear primarily on the Novelas Ejemplares rather than Persiles, in Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels. 51 Mary Gaylord Randel, ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda.’ 52 Cesáreo Bandera, Mímesis conflictiva: Ficción literaria y violencia en Cervantes y Calderón, 126–32. 53 On the arms-letter topos in Cervantes, see Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 213–19. For a discussion of the topos and Renaissance attempts to ennoble military exploits by association with humanist ideals, see Peter Russell, ‘Arms versus Letters: Towards a Definition of Spanish FifteenthCentury Humanism,’ and Anne Cruz, ‘Arms versus Letters: The Poetics of War and the Career of the Poet in Early Modern Spain,’ 61–2. 54 According to Herrero García, Garcilaso – unlike Góngora or even Lope – was the only Golden Age poet to be universally celebrated in seventeenthcentury Spain. Miguel Herrero García, Estimaciones literarias del siglo XVII, 61–2. On Cervantes and Garcilaso, see José Manuel Blecua, ‘Garcilaso y Cervantes’; Elias L. Rivers, ‘Cervantes y Garcilaso’; and Jean Canavaggio, ‘Garcilaso en Cervantes: “¡Oh dulces prendas por mi mal halladas!”’ 55 Periandro’s oneiric vision at this moment resembles a sequence of stanzas in Ariosto’s Orlando in which Orlando fleetingly dreams that his beloved Angelica is in danger (in fact – like Auristela – Angelica has been abducted by pirates in North Atlantic waters), thrashes about in bed apostrophizing her in regret, and falls asleep again only to be visited by a dream of himself as the hapless lover in a peaceful, green world ravaged by a sudden storm (Orlando VIII.71–84). 56 For examples of this motif in earlier and contemporary texts, see Egido, ‘La poética del silencio,’ 59 and following. 57 Here is the full text of Garcilaso’s Sonnet X in Bienvenido Morros’s edition: ¡Oh dulces prendas por mi mal halladas, dulces y alegres cuando Dios quería,

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juntas estáis en la memoria mía y con ella en mi muerte conjuradas! ¿Quién me dijera, cuando las pasadas horas que’n tanto bien por vos me vía, que me habiades de ser en algún día con tan grave dolor representadas? Pues en una hora junto me llevastes todo el bien que por términos me distes, lleváme junto el mal que me dejastes; si no, sospecharé que me pusistes en tantos bienes porque deseastes verme morir entre memorias tristes. Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética y textos en prosa, 31. Periandro quotes the opening line for the first time when he comes face to face with Auristela on the Barbaric Isle, following a long separation (Persiles 144). 58 On the proliferation of portraits in Persiles and their ideological implications, see Mary Gaylord Randel, ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 156–9. 59 Fernando de Herrera, Anotaciones a la poesía de Garcilaso. 60 The allusion is recognized by all of Garcilaso’s early commentators, including El Brocense, Fernando de Herrera, Tamayo de Vargas, and Azara. See Antonio Gallego Morell, ed., Garcilaso de la Vega y sus comentaristas, especially 267, 343, 603, and 668. Chapter 4 1 For a discussion of Platonic utopianism in Persiles, see Antonio Martí, ‘Ecos de utopías de Platón en el Persiles.’ 2 See the helpful introduction to Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, 1–18. 3 For a superb study of Guevara’s Relox de príncipes and the mirror tradition, see Augustin Redondo, Antonio de Guevara (1480?–1545) et l’Espagne de son temps, 523–85. 4 Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, 11–12. 5 On princely mirrors in Spain I have relied especially on Ronald W. Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II: The ‘de regimine principum’ and Associated Traditions. 6 J.A. Van Praag, ‘Eustorgio y Clorilene: Historia moscóvica (1629) de Enrique Suárez de Mendoza y Figueroa,’ especially 238–9. 7 See Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favouritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621. 8 Arturo Farinelli, La vita è un sogno, 222–3.

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Notes to pages 210–18

9 A useful account of Philip II’s struggles with the papacy over ecclesiastical jurisdiction (especially revenues) and his only qualified support for the decrees of the Council of Trent (their publication was declared subject to the laws and customs of the country), in John Lynch, Spain, 1516–1598: From Nation State to World Empire, 369–85. 10 Alban Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance: A Study of ‘Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 65. 11 Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 165–6. 12 Lewis Hutton, ‘El enamorado portugués del Persiles de Cervantes.’ The radically different weight lent Leonor’s cruelty in the name of God among scholars (divided over whether zeal or charity is presented as the higher virtue) recalls an older debate about Zoraida, the Christian Algerian maid who arranges with her father’s Christian captive Ruy Pérez to flee Algiers for Spain and, along the way, leaves her father stranded on the North African shore. See María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale, 202–9, with a review of the critical tradition on 204. 13 On Trent’s tametsi decree, see Usunáriz, ‘El matrimonio como ejercicio de libertad en la España del Siglo de Oro.’ 14 As does Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love: Cervantes’s ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ 166. 15 Session 24 (11 November 1563). H.J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 180–90. 16 Session 23 (15 July 1563). H.J. Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 160–79. 17 Ruth Anthony El Saffar, ‘In Marcela’s Case.’ 18 Michael Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, o la ‘Divina Comedia’ de Cervantes, 452. 19 For a discussion of the principles of decorum, verisimilitude, and moral exemplarity in sixteenth-century literary theory, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 1: 436–40. 20 Jesús María Usunáriz, ‘El matrimonio como ejercicio de libertad en la España del Siglo de Oro.’ 21 See Aurelio Espinosa, ‘Early Modern State Formation, Patriarchal Families, and Marriage in Absolutist Spain.’ 22 This recurring source of conflict (in which the young were allied with clerics and/or the ecclesiastical courts against parents) was commonplace not only in sixteenth-century Spain, but also in colonial Mexico. Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821.

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23 See Renato Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain. 24 Thomas R. Hart, The Early Court Theater in Portugal and Valencia, 311–12. 25 I thank Josiah Blackmore for drawing my attention to Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda’s shipwreck narrative. See his lucid discussion of it in Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire. 26 Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles,’ 46–7. 27 This paradoxical reversal of expectation crops up yet again in Feliciana’s episode, discussed later, when Auristela discovers that the shipwrecks, storms, and corsairs of the high seas are to be found in Spain on land (Persiles 457–9). 28 On the theme of silence, particularly of the honrada doncella, see Aurora Egido, ‘El sosegado y maravilloso silencio de La Galatea’ and ‘Los silencios del Persiles.’ Auristela exemplifies the topos, biting her tongue to keep from showing her jealousy of Hipólita to Periandro: ‘modesty ties the tongue such that it cannot bring itself to protest’ (‘la honestidad ata la lengua de modo que no puede quejarse,’ Persiles 678). 29 On the ‘marvellous silence’ of Don Diego’s house with pertinent bibliography, see Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘El caballero del verde gabán y su reino de paradoja,’ 156–9. 30 For an overview of this scholarly tendency, see Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love, 168–9. 31 On the legal status of duelling in sixteenth-century Spain, see Claude Chauchadis, La loi du duel: Le code du point d’honneur dans l’Espagne des XVI–XVII siècles. In 1613 the jurist Francisco de Pradilla Barnuevo cited both the pragmatic of the Catholic kings (a law promulgated at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480) and the Council of Trent (Session 25, canon 19) as long-standing legal grounds for outlawing ‘rieptos y desafíos’ (judicial and private duels). See Chauchadis, La loi, 234–5. 32 See V.G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History. 33 On the medieval and early modern Spanish monarchy’s ongoing struggle to impose royal authority by regulating private justice (especially the duel), see Francisco Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta: siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII, 46–80. As Tomás y Valiente’s discussion makes plain, the Spanish Crown had still not succeeded in banning duels at least as late as the reign of Ferdinand VI in the eighteenth century. 34 Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel. Peltonen argues that the honour duel was a sixteenth-century innovation imported into England from Italy and France. See Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England. 35 See Julius Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800, 1–10, 44–116, 216–53.

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Notes to pages 231–45

36 Notably Alban Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 87–9 and 123–8, and Egido, ‘Poesía y peregrinación en el Persiles,’ 19–20. 37 See Mercedes Blanco, ‘Literatura e ironía en Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ and Michael Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 571–632. 38 Diana de Armas Wilson, Allegories of Love, 200–22. 39 William Childers explores the parallels between Feliciana’s episode and the Marian legend of Guadalupe. See his discussion of the Feliciana episode in Transnational Cervantes, 90–105. 40 Childers notes a reversal of perspective in relation to the legendary subtext of the tale: if the Moors are the desecrators of the Marian image in the legend, the father and brother take their place – as unchristian and unspanish outsiders – in Feliciana’s story. See Transnational Cervantes, 88. 41 Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes, 259. Castro’s observation is mentioned by Carlos Romero, who moreover suggests that Cervantes may have plagiarized himself. See Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Carlos Romero Muñoz, 472n4. 42 Mercedes Blanco, ‘Literatura e ironía en Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 632–3. 43 Alban Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four ‘Exemplary Novels,’ 331. 44 Keith Thomas discusses Protestantism’s ambivalent relationship with what he calls the ‘crudely material efficacy’ of spiritual formulae, or the belief that images and rites had miraculous powers, in Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, 39. 45 See Françoise Crémoux, Pèlerinages et miracles à Guadalupe au XVIe siècle. William Christian calls Guadalupe the most important religious shrine in sixteenth-century Spain. See Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 121. 46 Wilson, Allegories of Love, 208. 47 Childers also observes the parallels between Parraces’ and Feliciana’s stories and the picture of treachery, corruption, and violence they offer of a Spain held up as a refuge for the novel’s pilgrims. See Transnational Cervantes, 90 and 96. 48 Carlos Romero, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 729. 49 Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo del ‘Persiles,’ 176–82. 50 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 806. 51 See Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision, 333. 52 Heliodoro, Historia etiópica de los amores de Teágenes y Cariclea, 314. 53 Lope de Vega, El peregrino en su patria, 146–55. 54 See Jenaro Alenda y Mira, Relaciones de solemnidades y fiestas públicas de

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España, 1: 126–8; and Felipe de Gauna, Relación de las fiestas celebradas en Valencia con motivo del casamiento de Felipe III. On the royal progress held to celebrate Philip III’s nuptials, see Elizabeth Wright, Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598–1621, 52–7. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘The Improbable Empire,’ 123. For a lucid, well-documented discussion of this topos as it figures in Guevara’s key mirror of princes the Relox de príncipes (1529), see Redondo, Antonio de Guevara, 640–8. See also Manuel García-Pelayo, El reino de Dios, arquetipo político: Estudio sobre las formas políticas de la Alta Edad Media, 148–53, 218–22. The day-to-day administration of justice took place through multiple overlapping bureaucracies. On Habsburg efforts to establish a royal judiciary through the Royal Council and its chanceries that was independent of noble, municipal, and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, see Richard Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile 1500–1700, especially 150–62. On Erasmus’s and Vives’s opposition to marriages contracted without paternal sanction, see Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘Bonifacio y Dorotea: Mateo Alemán y la novela burguesa,’ 83–4n54. Márquez observes that an important consequence of this Christian humanist restriction on matrimony was the reduction of women to the status of pawns in family politics. The relevant Pauline texts are as follows: (1) I Corinthians 14.34–5: ‘Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home.’ And (2) Ephesians 5.22–4: ‘Wives, be subject to your husband as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church, the body of which he is the Saviour. Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.’ Here follow the stipulations for readings designed to cultivate eloquence according to the Jesuit curriculum. I have highlighted the relevant proposed outright censorship (of The Aeneid’s Book 4 and the Eclogues entirely) and expurgations: ‘Ad cognitionem linguae, quae in proprietate maxime et copia consistit, in quotidianis preaelectionibus explicetur; ex oratoribus unus Cicero iis fere libris, qui philosophiam de moribus continent; ex historicis Caesar, Salustius, Livus, Curtius et si qui sunt similes; ex poetis praecipue Virgilius, exceptis Eclogis et quarto Aeneidos; praeterea odae Horatii selectae, item elegiae, epigrammata et alia poemata illustrium poetarum antiquorum, modo sint ab omni obscaenitate expurgati.’ The document is reproduced in an appendix of Domingo Ynduráin’s Humanismo y Renacimiento en España, 524.

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Notes to pages 248–61

62 Discussed by Wilson, Allegories of Love, 41–4. 63 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, especially 78–9, 86–7. 64 See Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, especially 1–28 on the classical and medieval sources and their revival by Charles V in sixteenth-century imperial propaganda. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish elaborations of the myth, see Frederick A. de Armas, The Return of Astraea: An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón. The emperor Constantine identified Mary with the Virgin Astraea, and the return of Saturn’s Golden Age with the Incarnation, in his Christianized interpretation of Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue. For this and later uses of Astraea in Spanish Habsburg imperial insignia and other royal iconography, see Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor, 31–2, 46, 66, 90, 93, 113, 137, and 223. 65 For an account of Ercilla’s and Camões’s formally and ideologically complex responses to Vergil’s ‘poetics of empire,’ see James Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in ‘La Araucana’ and ‘Os Lusíadas.’ 66 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘El morisco Ricote o la hispana razón de estado,’ especially 285–95. My subsequent references to Márquez are to this study. See now Childers, Transnational Cervantes, 169–93. 67 See, for examples, Lynch, Spain 1516–1598, 320; and Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 228. 68 Juan de Mariana, Del rey y de la institución real, 479. 69 Melveena McKendrick argues that the depiction of sexual transgression in Lope de Vega’s contemporary political plays becomes ‘a codified critique of princely conduct.’ McKendrick, Playing the King, 48. 70 Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1166. 71 The codification and diffusion of the four cardinal virtues (justice, prudence, moderation, and fortitude) can be attested in royal iconography on public display for such ceremonial occasions as the death of the emperor Charles V. We have a detailed description of the allegorical program of his ceremonial túmulo (‘catafalque’) erected in Mexico City, featuring the classical and theological virtues. A similar one was erected in Valladolid, the royal court, in 1559. See Santiago Sebastián, Arte y humanismo, 308–15. 72 See the entry for ‘sagaz’ in Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 920. 73 Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1076. 74 José Antonio Maravall, La teoría del estado en el siglo XVII, 399–411. 75 Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1164–5. 76 Márquez Villanueva, ‘El morisco Ricote,’ 273.

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77 On the current of political pragmatism conventionally derived from Tacitus in Spain, see Enrique Tierno Galván, El tacitismo en las doctrinas políticas del Siglo de Oro español, and Maravall, La teoría española del Estado. 78 Márquez Villanueva, ‘El morisco Ricote,’ 307. 79 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent, Historia de los moriscos: Vida y tragedia de una minoría, 19. 80 I have consulted the following edition: Francisco López de Zárate, Poema heróico de la invención de la cruz, por el emperador Constantino Magno. 81 Both Charles V and Philip II actively propagated the Constantinian legacy, attributed military victories to the image of Christ’s Cross affixed to their arms, and appropriated as Habsburg family motto Constantine’s ‘In Hoc Signo Vinces.’ See Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas, 191, 202–6. 82 Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, 19–27. 83 A standard account remains John Bagnell Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire: From the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian, 5–24. I have also relied on Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC–AD 337). 84 Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, 63–6. 85 The dream of Jerusalem’s recovery remained alive well into the sixteenth century. Perhaps the most striking example is Columbus’s fervently pious hope that the wealth obtained through trade and conquest would be used by Isabel and Ferdinand to finance another crusade to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims (by 1492, in Ottoman Turk hands). America would thereby provide the means for the definitive conquest of Jerusalem and usher in a New Age, hastening the Second Coming of Christ and the Judgment Day. On this aspect of Columbus’s self-understanding based on passages in his Libro de profecías, see John Noble Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy, 229–34. 86 Judith Whitenack’s study of the conversion topos in chivalric books registers promises, bribes, and persuasion with intimidation as typical strategies. See Judith Whitenack, ‘Conversion to Christianity in the Spanish Romance of Chivalry, 1490–1524.’ 87 Aurora Egido also proposes that Cervantes here is implicitly reserving a blank tablet for his own likeness and epic, staking a generic claim for Persiles and equating his epic with others that already adorn the gallery of classic icons. I would agree that a claim is being made implicitly about genre and that we are invited to compare Persiles to Tasso’s and Zárate’s Christian epics. I am less persuaded that Zárate’s Cruz belongs alongside Tasso’s Gerusalemme in such a would-be pantheon, especially since Dante’s

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Notes to pages 274–9 Commedia is left altogether out of the reckoning. Instead I think we are meant to notice the oddity of this canon and to contrast rather than conflate Persiles with epics whose vision of Christianity differs in such fundamental ways from its own. See Egido, ‘Poesía y peregrinación,’ 36–7. On the history and attributes of the earthly paradise topos, see especially A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, 8–93. In addition to Giamatti, cited in the previous note, see Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History, 65 and 96. For the historical sources on the Dominican monastery and other aspects of Persiles’ northern geography, see Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles,’ 81–111 and 124–71. O’Gorman, The Invention of America, especially 94–104. O’Gorman, The Invention of America, 96. O’Gorman, The Invention of America, 97–8. Mary Gaylord restates with fresh observations an earlier argument about the importance in Persiles of artists, portraits, authorial self-portraiture, and artistic representation in ‘Cervantes’s Other Fiction,’ 117–25 (especially 119–23). For a study of the hermit in Cervantes, see Aurora Egido, ‘El eremitismo ejemplar: De La Galatea al Persiles.’ What differentiates Maximino’s sacrifice from the Barbaric Isle’s Law and many actual or would-be Southern Catholic sacrifices is that it is impersonal. Periandro and Auristela are morally compromised only insofar as their flight is an evasion, an indefinite deferral of a potential transgression – of the law of primogeniture – they are ultimately spared committing by the hand of fate. Although the novel appears to end happily, the protagonists’ happiness depends on Maximino’s death. Julio Baena has persuasively emphasized this sacrificial element of Persiles, although with a Girardian bent that collapses the distinction I defend between the impersonal sacrifice that is not avoidable in this novel and the many self-interested and self-gratifying urges to sacrifice for which the novel does present possible alternatives. Julio Baena, El círculo y la flecha: Principio y fin, triunfo y fracaso del ‘Persiles,’ 110–11. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, 143–4. Session 25 (3–4 December 1563). Schroeder, ed., Canons and Decrees, 215–17. Karl-Ludwig Selig and Mary Gaylord both have remarked on the proliferation of icons and portraits in Book 4, and Gaylord has discussed it in the

Notes to pages 279–81

100 101

102

103 104

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context of the Platonic doctrine of reality, in which the sublunar world is a mere shadow or copy of the world of ideal forms. See Karl-Ludwig Selig, ‘Persiles y Sigismunda: Notes on Pictures, Portraits and Portraiture’ and Mary Gaylord Randel, ‘Ending and Meaning in Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda,’ especially 157–62. Noted by Michael Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 566. Nerlich interestingly relates the split crown in Auristela’s portrait and the fight between Arnaldo and Nemurs for possession of the image to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious wars, identifying Arnaldo (the Danish prince) with a Protestantism less beholden to icon worship and a Nemurs (the French duke whose title recalls two edicts signed at Nemours in 1585 and 1588, which suppressed Protestantism in France) with a Catholicism that promoted the sacralization of images. I find the identifications broadly persuasive (although, as I note in chapter 1, Arnaldo appears to be indifferent to religion of any stripe) but do not agree – as I argue throughout the book – that Arnaldo is presented as any less literal-minded or much more sympathetic than Nemurs (or, therefore, that Persiles implies that a rival orthodoxy such as Protestantism was self-evidently preferable to Catholicism or any less responsible for the religious wars): Arnaldo is just as prepared to fight for the portrait as Nemurs. Elsewhere we learn that he participates in the traffic of women with the Barbaric Isle, that he is duped – despite doubts – by Persiles’ and Sigismunda’s alibi from the beginning to the end of the novel, and that he easily accepts marriage to Sigismunda’s sister Eusebia when Sigismunda is definitively paired off with Persiles. See Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, 561–9. Discussed by Tilbert Diego Stegmann, Cervantes’ Musterroman ‘Persiles’: Epentheorie und Romanpraxis um 1600 (El Pinciano, Heliodor, ‘Don Quijote’), 113–53. David Quint, ‘Narrative Interlace and Narrative Genres in Don Quijote and the Orlando Furioso.’ Celina S. Cortázar, ‘Notas para el estudio de la estructura del Guzmán de Alfarache’; Francisco Rico, ‘Estructuras y reflejos de estructuras en el Guzmán de Alfarache’; and M. Smerdou Altolaguirre, ‘Las narraciones intercaladas en el Guzmán de Alfarache y su función en el contexto de la obra,’ 521–5. See Forcione, Cervantes’ Christian Romance, 88 and Wilson, Allegories of Love, 136–41. A.C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante, 1.

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107 Paul’s ‘And that Rock was Christ’ (1 Cor. 10.4 referring to Exod. 17.1–7, Num. 20.2–14) is a defining moment. His typological explanation of the first and second Adam, of Adam and Moses as types fulfilled in Christ, set the example: ‘Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come’ (Rom. 5.14). See Ira Clark, Christ Revealed: The History of the Neotypological Lyric in the English Renaissance, 5–6. A fundamental study of medieval typology is Henri Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture. For Paul’s leading role in the development of typological exegesis of Scripture, see especially Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, 2: 216–26. 108 Clark, Christ Revealed, 7. 109 Clark, Christ Revealed, 6. 110 Earl Miner, ‘Preface,’ ix; Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature, xvii. 111 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura,’ 11–76. In my account of Auerbach, I have relied in part on Graham Pechey’s letter to the Times Literary Supplement. 112 Although Dante’s authorship of the Letter to Can Grande (the sample of commentary on the Paradiso sent to Dante’s patron in Verona) remains a matter of dispute among specialists, it was published together with the Paradiso and documents an early response to it modelled on patristic exegesis of the four senses or fourfold method. The Letter is renowned for interpreting Dante’s epic by this method, usually reserved for sacred texts. What is particularly interesting for our purposes is that the biblical story it cites to illustrate the application of the method is Exodus. The literal (or historical) interpretation of Exodus says that it is about the Hebrews celebrating Passover and leaving Egypt; the allegorical (or typological or figural) that their exile anticipates and is redeemed by Jesus’ death and resurrection or spiritual liberation; the tropological (or moral) that the movement in the story represents the passage from a state of sin to a state of grace; and the anagogical (or eschatological) that the story of Exodus is about the soul’s return to heaven, its cosmic home, the passage from the material and temporal to the spiritual and eternal or future glory. The Letter to Can Grande in this respect was simply echoing (and translating to profane literature) a patristic tradition, in which Psalm 113 – a song celebrating Israel’s Exodus from Egypt – was used by the early fathers to illustrate the four interpretive senses of the scripture. Dante inserts a phrase from the Vulgate version of this psalm in Purgatorio – ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’ – claiming the Exodus as a prefiguration of his own journey of conversion, linking his literary enterprise with the exegetical traditions of the Church. See Peter Hawkins, ‘Dante and the

Notes to pages 283–92

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115

116

117 118 119 120

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Bible,’ 126. We recognize these interpretations not only for Exodus, but also as by now standard allegoreses of Persiles. Persiles criticism itself can therefore be read by the fourfold method of interpretation, as Isabel Lozano Renieblas has wittily (and perceptively) done in the introduction to her study of Persiles. For the discussion of Isaac in this section and further references, see Alberto Barugel, The Sacrifice of Isaac in Spanish and Sephardic Balladry. Christian art and literature have reflected a deep interest in the sacrifice of Isaac since the early part of the third century. The Index of Christian Art lists 1450 entries for Genesis 22.1–19. See Barugel, The Sacrifice of Isaac. Atonement is the Christian theological term for humanity’s reconciliation with God through the sacrificial death of Christ. Atonement is needed to cleanse ritual and moral impurity (or sin), purged by tradition through the shedding of blood and required on account of multiple broken covenants beginning with Adam and Eve’s transgression. Although Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul followed the Prophets (notably Isaiah and Hosea) in calling for repentance and mercy over blood sacrifices, they also elsewhere promoted Christ’s death as an expiation and his resurrection as a justification for all humanity. For an overview, see the entry for ‘atonement’ in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 122–4. Carlos Romero also identifies examples of the topos in Horace’s Ode II.10 (‘Ad Licinium’) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (VII.oct. 9). See Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Romero Muñoz, 576n14. Fray Luis de León, De los nombres de Cristo, 242–64. Santiago Sebastián, Contrarreforma y barroco: Lecturas iconográficas e iconológicas, 146. Cervantes, ‘Dedicatoria al conde de Lemos,’ Don Quijote, 623. Alicia Parodi offers a very different yet compelling typological reading of Persiles. Parodi’s reading tends to emphasize allegory over history, to borrow Auerbach’s terms. However, like my own typological reading, Parodi’s is grounded in Persiles’ explicit references to St Paul. See Alicia Parodi, ‘San Pablo, o quien sólo Dios sabe, en el Persiles.’ For the medieval conception of the encyclopedia and liberal arts curriculum and Dante’s Commedia, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, especially 3–33.

Epilogue 1 G. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian, 7. 2 Carlos Fuentes, ‘Gabriel García Márquez and the Invention of America,’ 7. 3 See Luis Rosales, Cervantes y la libertad.

356 4 5 6 7

Notes to pages 293–5 María Antonia Garcés, Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale. Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, 62–4. Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, 301, 308–10, 390–3. Michael Nerlich also proposes a historical and political reading of the Gothic theme in Persiles. Nerlich’s proposal is thoughtful, well-grounded, and interesting. I emphasize differences here, because the issue is fundamental and it may encourage others to join the debate. Nerlich’s reading tends to stress the legacy of the historical Visigoths in Spain (the Arian heresy, a matrimonial law based on mutual consent without ceremony) or such sixteenth-century successors as the Protestants of northern Europe. This leads him to defend the novel’s ecumenical spirit (characters of different nations and possibly faiths get along in this novelistic world without religious wars), with which I agree, and, now and again, to suggest a Protestant subtext, about which I have my reservations (partly addressed in chapter 1). If Cervantes had wished readers to associate his exemplary Gothic heroes with Protestantism – which Nerlich regards as ‘logical,’ though a departure from his literal reading of the text – he would, in Nerlich’s view, have had to suggest this by indirection on account of the censors (which would offer one explanation for the heroes’ ‘less than perfect’ Catholicism). However, if a Protestant subtext had been so important to the author, he could very well have made his protagonists Catholic recusants in overtly Protestant homelands, a choice that would have served Catholic triumphalism even better than his actual choice and yet would have allowed readers so inclined to associate the heroes’ virtues with the ambient Protestantism. One of the consequences of Nerlich’s reading is a tendency, at times, to idealize the historical Visigoths (whereas the text actually idealizes quasi-mythical Goths) and even sixteenth-century Protestants, which Nerlich sometimes identifies with characters such as the Danish Prince Arnaldo (I do not sympathize nearly as much with Arnaldo as Nerlich does, for reasons I discuss in chapters 1 and 3). See Michael Nerlich, El ‘Persiles’ descodificado, o la ‘Divina comedia’ de Cervantes, 95–108, 160–2, 196–207, 286–7, 416–17, 583–5, 637–40, 693–4. My reading of the Gothic theme instead emphasizes the historical and political legacy of the Gothic myth in Spain, particularly its use by dynastic propagandists. This focus on the mythic (or counter-mythic, to be exact) rather than historical dimension of the theme helps to explain the archetypal quality of the heroes’ homelands and most especially their idealization. The advantage of retaining Gothic homelands that are quasi-mythical and quasi-historical (Persiles’ homeland is described as the at-once mythical Thule and historical Iceland; Sigismunda’s is the island kingdom of

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Friesland, whose status as an island was still recognized in European maps of 1617 but whose status as an independent kingdom was mythical) is that the associated Gothic restoration is therefore precisely not limited by links with a particular people (Visigoths), with a historical past (the Visigothic or Roman legacy in Spain, regarding matrimony for instance), or with an orthodoxy that rivalled Catholicism (such as Arianism or Protestantism). Arguably the thrust of the quasi-mythical displacement and idealization is to head off a too-complacent identification of virtue with a historical place, people, religion, or epoch. A displacement that locates important religious, political, and literary ideals in a remote, semi-mythical, but still Catholic periphery (a Catholic homeland of the spirit rather than the law) has the effect of emphasizing the ethical dimension of what may have been lost within a Catholic tradition skewed, neglected, or abused by its institutional custodians – the Church and the Crown; a displacement that locates those ideals in an Arian past or Protestant present would tend to frame the problem as a doctrinal dispute, exchanging one idealized orthodoxy for another (Tridentine Catholicism for Arianism or Protestantism). A reading that accepts what the text gives us (quasi-invented Gothic, but still Catholic homelands for the exemplary heroes) will, as a result, tend to find in Persiles evidence for belief that a spiritual and political revival was possible within Catholicism and for a conviction that Catholicism (even Trent) had ethical resources to draw on for such a religious restoration – evidence, moreover, that does not depend on whitewashing a competing orthodoxy such as Protestantism. To the extent that there is a religious struggle implied by the contrast between the exemplary Gothic heroes and the ethically dubious Catholic world they traverse it would be – in this light – for the soul of Catholicism, a struggle I have sometimes characterized (following the novel) as a battle between St Paul’s mystical and St Peter’s institutional legacies. That Cervantes may have understood it this way – that an ethical and political renewal represented by the novel’s heroes could draw on the Church’s and Crown’s traditions – is suggested by the fact that Persiles locates its own ecumenical orthodoxy in the apparently least likely places: in the mysteries of the faith taught by the penitentiaries in Rome (discussed in chapter 1) and in the hymn to the Virgin partially sung in Feliciana’s Extremadura (discussed in chapter 4). This representation of a kind of loyal opposition to Church and Crown would not have been unique to Persiles. To illustrate how a moderate reform current could remain alive and even public in Spain after Trent, we need only remember Fray Luis de León’s Los nombres de Cristo (The Names of Christ, 1583): a post-Tridentine, Christological meditation that sets out to

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11

12 13

14 15 16 17

Notes to pages 295–300 imagine a Catholicism along Pauline lines, subordinating ceremony to ethics and vouching for an internalization of the living law in place of the deadening recital of the written law (we could say, promoting St Paul’s legacy before but not instead of St Peter’s). Fray Luis is just one example of a major sixteenth-century figure who found a way to keep a Pauline spirituality alive in the post-Tridentine Spain of Philip II. Los nombres de Cristo’s Paulinism is symptomatic of important but tacit religious and political affinities with Persiles. Mary Gaylord, ‘Pulling Strings with Master Peter’s Puppets: Fiction and History in Don Quixote,’ 131. Alain Milhou, ‘La chauve-souris, le nouveau David et le roi caché,’ 61. A useful overview of medieval and sixteenth-century Spanish discussions of ancestors, including the Celtiberians and the Visigoths, can be found in David A. Lupher, Romans in a New World, 195–226. On the wave of goticismo (the preoccupation with the Visigothic past of Spain) in official circles following these political crises of Philip II’s reign, see Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘Trasfondos de “La profecía del Tajo”: Goticismo y profetismo.’ Márquez makes the observation about Philip III’s second name. Alain Milhou, ‘De la destrucción de España a la destrucción de las Indias.’ See Anne Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain, especially 3–4, and Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo. On the sixteenth-century ‘purity of blood’ statutes, see Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 230–54. On the expulsion of the moriscos, see Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, 214–29. For the cult of Garcilaso de la Vega in Cervantes’ works, see the bibliography in chapter 3, note 54. Pedro Malón de Chaide is representative of a current of asceticism that scapegoated profane literature (particularly on love) for moral ills and lamented its hold on young (especially female) readers. He set out to write on sacred matters in a way that would draw such readers back to God. The result was his gripping novelized version of La conversión de la Magdalena (The Repentance of Mary Magdalene, 1588). In the prologue, Malón de Chaide singles out pastoral and chivalric books and love lyric as a moral poison, corrupter of the young. ‘After all, what else are the books of love and the Dianas and Boscanes and Garcilasos, and the monstrous books and miscellanies of fabulous stories and lies of the Amadises, Floriseles and Don Belianis, placed in the hands of the young, but a knife in the pos-

Notes to pages 302–4

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session of a furious [insane] man?’ (‘Porque ¿qué otra cosa son los libros de amores y las Dianas y Boscanes y Garcilasos, y los monstruosos libros y silvas de fabulosos cuentos y mentiras de los Amadises, Floriseles y Don Belianis, puestos en manos de pocos años, sino cuchillo en poder del hombre furioso?’). Garcilaso de la Vega stands metonymically in Malón de Chaide’s j’accuse for love lyric, the kind that was thought to upstage God in the thoughts of young – again, especially, female – readers. ‘How will [such a girl] spare a moment to think about God if she has spent many on Garcilaso?’ (‘Cómo se recogerá a pensar en Dios un rato la [doncellita] que ha gastado muchos en Garcilaso?’). Reading Garcilaso, he says, only breeds a desire to be served and courted (‘[n]ace un deseo de ser servidas y recuestadas’). See Pedro Malón de Chaide, La conversión de la Magdalena, 57–63. One way that Cervantes responds to this kind of moralist attack on literature is through an irony of reception: since moralists claimed that books of chivalry and Garcilaso lead readers to worship the idol of profane love in place of God, Cervantes gives us protagonists who are avid readers of this moral poison – Don Quijote of Amadís and Persiles of Garcilaso himself – and yet who are nevertheless courtly and Christian soldiers, paragons of chastity and of charity. There were genuinely critical voices of the actual Visigothic past of Spain. Juan de Mariana, in his renowned Historia general de España (General History of Spain, 1604), not only dwells in detail on the topical barbarism of the Visigoths in Spain – their status as rude parvenus in the Roman ecumene – but rubs salt in the wound with his account of sacrificial practices that involved humans. See Juan de Mariana, Historia general de España, especially 99 and 101. The lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias also minces no words in his Tesoro (1611). In the dictionary entry for ‘Rodrigo,’ he speaks of Don Julián’s ‘barbaric revenge’ (‘bárbara venganza’) for avenging a personal affront – ‘the last Goth’ King Rodrigo’s seduction of his daughter Florinda – by betraying a whole nation to the Islamic invaders. Apparently it was Juan de Mariana (Covarrubias cites him as his source) who made sure to remind everyone that robar (‘to rob’) was a word imported into Spanish by the Visigoths. Elias L. Rivers, ‘Cervantes’ Art of the Prologue,’ 171. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 56–69, and M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel.’ Particularly lucid accounts of literary realism are presented in Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism, and Darío Villanueva, Theories of Literary Realism. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez. We are probably limited to speaking of affinities (by analogy, parallel, or

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resemblance) between Cervantes’ Persiles and twentieth-century magic realism because it has been nowhere nearly as widely read and commented upon as Don Quijote, but there is at least one important example of direct reference: Alejo Carpentier opens El reino de este mundo with an epigraph from Persiles. See Frederick de Armas, ‘Metamorphosis as Revolt: Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda and Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo.’ Reservations about the usefulness of the label ‘magic realism’ and its applicability to Alejo Carpentier’s fiction are noted in Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, 107–29. Arturo Uslar Pietri emphasizes the magic of reality rather than the reality of magic in his discussion of what he takes to be the originating impulse of ‘magic realism’ in his generation of Latin American writers. The characterization suits the paradoxical strain of realism that appears to govern Persiles. See Arturo Uslar Pietri, Letras y hombres de Venezuela, 287–8, and especially Godos, insurgentes y visionarios, 135–40. There is a useful overview of magic realism in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. William Childers offers his own, more elaborate reading of Persiles as a work of magic realism in Transnational Cervantes, where he provides a suggestive framework for reading Persiles as a text that belongs in a reconfigured Anglo- and Hispanic-American canon and that speaks in illuminating ways to social and political issues (especially multiculturalism and immigration) that we tend to consider peculiar to our age. 24 See the Diccionario de Autoridades entries for ‘voz,’ 3: 524–5. Appendix 1 See especially Stephen Harrison, La composición de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda’; Isabel Lozano Renieblas, Cervantes y el mundo de ‘Persiles,’ 19–37; and Jean-Marc Pelorson, ‘Problèmes de la genèse du Persiles.’ 2 Stephen Harrison, La composición de ‘Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,’ 160–1.

Contents

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Contents

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Index

Note: Specific characters and episodes in Persiles can be found under thematic entries, such as ‘Persiles – religion, Antonio’s conversion.’ For convenience, whenever discussion of specific characters and episodes is extensive, this information is also brought together under character-specific entries, such as ‘ Persiles – Antonio and Ricla.’ Abraham, 135 absolutism, 53 Acosta, José de, 39; Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 73, 322n21 Adam, 282, 354n107 Adamastor, 221–2 Aeneas, 326n78 The Aeneid (Vergil), 9; Aeneas rescues his father and escapes burning Troy, 130–1; as arch-epic, 171, 178; auri sacra fames in, 73; Camilla’s death, 327n87; critical reception of, 15; Dido as evil figure, 190; Dido’s funeral pyre moment/ curse, 202–4; dream visions in, 178–81, 183–4; as an epic of victors, 169; funeral games in, 174; Greek novel’s difference from, 17; the heroic in, 167; influence on Persiles, 36; Mars reproaches Aeneas, 191; and Persiles, 130–1, 168, 171–6, 178–84, 190–1, 198,

202–3; quest vs. social order in, 316n65; religious elements in, 112–13; sexual cave imagery in, 145; women in, 175, 248 Alaric, 84, 95 Alcazarquivir, Battle of (1578), 66 Alciato, Andrea: In silentium, 194 Alemán, Mateo: Guzmán de Alfarache, 6, 96, 280, 312n29, 316n62 Algiers, captives in, 52, 263, 341n22 allegory, 151–2, 283 Amadís de Gaula (Rodríguez de Montalvo), 6, 14, 102, 153, 359n17 Amazons, 35, 88–91, 102, 328n98 Aminta (Tasso), 343n45 Amyot, Jacques, 9, 171, 310n8 androgyny, 168, 313n31 angels, 132 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 167 Apuleius: Golden Ass, 18, 186, 192 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 318n81

382

Index

La Araucana (Ercilla), 169, 250, 314–15n48 Argumentum apologiae (Las Casas), 57–9, 325n59 Arian heresy, 298 Ariosto, Ludovico, 19; Orlando furioso, 14, 50–1, 88, 167, 190–1, 280, 340n1, 344n55 aristocracy, 128, 224–5, 295 Aristotle: as authority on reason/ rationality, 57; ethics of, vs. Christian, 39; on the golden mean, 194–5; on just-war defense of conquest, 121; on lust vs. chastity, 188; Metaphysics, 195; Nicomachean Ethics, 189; Poetics, 7, 26; on poetry, 11, 15; on verisimilitude, 19–20; on women vs. men, 147. See also neoAristotelianism arms-letters topos, 134, 143, 198 Arte nuevo (Lope de Vega), 15, 56–7, 71, 343n45 Arthur, King, 66, 102–3 artistic creation, 195–6 art-nature synthesis, 132 asceticism, 275–6, 300, 358n17 Asensio, Eugenio, 115–16, 294 Astarte, 189 Astete, 85, 118 Astraea, 350n64 Athenians vs. Persians, 88 atonement, 355n115 Auerbach, Erich, 152, 283, 289 Augsburg, Peace of (1555), 64, 325n63 Augsburg Diet, 64 Augustine, Saint, 65, 318n81; City of God, 18, 35, 84–5, 91–2, 95, 97, 259 auri sacra fames (hunger for gold topos), 73

Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, 167 Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista, 135, 152, 334n12, 337n52 Avila, Juan de, 116, 163 Azara, José Nicolás de, 345n60 Baena, Julio, 312–13n30, 352n96 Bakhtin, M.M., 13, 303–4 Bandera, Cesáreo, 104, 198 Bandinelli, Baccio, 184–5 banned books, 163 barbarism, 319n93; Barbaric Isle (see under Persiles); Christian, 58, 325n59 (see also honour, code of); classes of, 57–8; conquistador customs, 39, 320n13; emergence from, 318n81; European, 50–1, 54–5, 58, 292; features associated with, 58–9; just-war debates on, 39, 55, 57–8, 75, 77; New World, 58; vs. social contract, 54–5; of the Spanish Conquest, 39, 58, 320n13, 325n59. See also civilization/the civilized Barugel, Alberto, 283 Bataillon, Marcel, 160–1, 344n47; Erasme et l’Espagne, 114–16, 122, 339n78 Birth of Venus (Botticelli), 185 Black Legend, 149 Blackmore, Josiah, 222 Blanco, Mercedes, 333n10 Boccaccio, 322n25 Boiardo, Matteo Maria: Orlando innamorato, 87, 167 Bonilla, Adolfo, 102, 321n19 The Book of Prophecies (Columbus), 72 Borja, San Francisco de, 163 Boscán, Juan, 300 Botticelli, Sandro: Birth of Venus, 185

Index Bourbons, 68 Bouza, Fernando, 336n33 Brevíssima relación de la destruycción de las Indias (Las Casas), 149–53, 295 El burlador de Sevilla (Tirso de Molina), 335–6n33 El Buscón (Quevedo), 294 Busiris, King, 329n104 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez: Naufragios, 338n62 Caesar Augustus, Emperor, 69–70 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro: La vida es sueño, 4, 62, 209 Camões, Luís Vaz de: Os Lusíadas, 187, 191, 221–2, 250, 314–15n48, 342n36 Canavaggio, Jean, 294, 314n42, 317n77 cannibalism, ritual, 34, 75, 321nn19, 21, 322n24. See also heart-eating rituals Cano, Melchor, 39 caritas (charity): vs. Christian law, 115; city of God created by, 85; Erasmus on, 122–3; vs. law, 207; vs. law/cruelty, 124; St Paul on, 30, 122–5, 146, 298–9. See also under Persiles – religion Carpentier, Alejo, 360n23 Carranza, Bartolomé, 163 Casalduero, Joaquín, 334n12, 339n75 Castiglione, Baldassare: Il Cortegiano, 300–1, 340n5 Castillo, David, 336n39 Castro, Américo, 114, 333n10, 348n41 Catholic Church: as city of God, 85; confession/penance as a sacrament, 86–7; on Latin vs. the vernacular, 32, 286–7; Latin Vulgate/ver-

383

naculars used by, 121; law vs. customs of, 35, 39, 86, 288–9, 320nn13, 14; orthodoxy vs. honour, 157 (see also honour, code of); vs. Protestantism, on images/rites, 279–80, 348n44, 353n101; vs. Protestants, 61, 329n103; reform traditions of, 30, 35, 96, 116–17, 331n119 (see also Erasmism); sacraments, 86–7, 118, 121, 165–6. See also Council of Trent; Counter-Reformation; Persiles – church and state; religious wars La Celestina (Rojas), 6 Cervantes, Miguel de: adventures/ wanderings of, 293; Algerian captivity of, 52, 263, 293, 341n22; Church affiliations of, 293–4; duel fought by, 293; Erasmism in, 335n29; Franciscanism of, 30, 116, 293–4, 338n61; on poetry as a science, 11, 314n42; polyphony used by, 120 – works: El coloquio de los perros, 80; La cueva de Salamanca, 52; La destruición de Numancia, 70, 295–6; La Galatea, 215, 280, 292, 314n36, 335n29; El licenciado Vidriera, 233, 314n42, 348n41; Novelas ejemplares, 271, 292, 306, 315–16n62; El retablo de las maravillas, 52; El trato de Argel, 52. See also Don Quijote; Persiles Chain of Being, 8, 33, 74, 129, 160 Chanson de Roland, 167 chansons de geste, 167 charity, 30, 122–5, 146, 212–13, 292, 298–9. See also caritas Charlemagne, 68 Charles V of Spain, 350n64; abdica-

384

Index

tion of, 228–9, 275–6; on Constantine, 351n81; death of, 162, 228–9, 250; Francis I defeated by, 326n72; praised in Persiles, 165; reign of, 67–8, 161–2; religious repression by, 339n82; retirement to Yuste monastery, 228–9, 276 Childers, William, 12, 133, 312n29, 333n10, 348nn40, 47, 350n66, 360n23 chivalric books: conversion topos in, 351n86; far-flung adventures in, 36; popularity of, 7; as prose epic, 167, 289 chivalry, 289 Chrétien de Troyes: Le Conte de Graal, 102 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christian III of Denmark, 65 Christian humanist writers. See humanists Christianity: Aristotelian vs. Christian ethics, 39; on the Barbaric Isle, 65–6, 326n65; vs. blood-based religions, 261–2, 298–9; conversion mission of rulers, 271, 351n86; election- vs. inheritance-based, 299; vs. Judaism, 135, 261–2. See also Catholic Church; Persiles – religion; Protestantism Christian politics. See Persiles – church and state Christian spirituality, 111–66; and the honour code, 134–5, 153–60; and imperfection, 160–1, 294; overview of, 111–20; and pagan Europe, 125–9; Pauline (see Paul, Saint); religious/literary paradox, 160–6; vs. sensory Christianity/materialism, 146–7. See also Persiles – religion

Christian, William, 337n44 Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem), 268 Cicero, 11, 56, 291 Cisneros, Francisco Jiménez de, 116 City of God (Augustine), 18, 35, 84–5, 91–2, 95, 97, 259 civilization/the civilized, 128, 153–4, 303, 318n81. See also barbarism Clarín (Leopoldo Alas y Ureña): La Regenta, 167, 304 Clarisas, 338n61 Clement VIII, Pope, 286 Collado del Hierro, Agustín, 310n8 The Colloquys (Erasmus), 197 colonialism, 149 El coloquio de los perros (Cervantes), 80 Coloquios (Torquemada), 176–7 Columbus, Christopher, 72–3, 274–5, 351n85 Comentarios reales (Inca Garcilaso), 53, 321n19, 323n29 Commedia (Dante), 140, 283, 319n93, 351–2n87 common law, 318n81 Complutense Polyglot Bible, 116 confessionalization/social discipline, 128, 163 Congregación de los Esclavos del Santísimo Sacramento, 293–4 conjugal love, 42, 99 Conquest. See Spanish Conquest consent, 54. See also under marriage Constantine, Emperor, 267–70, 350n64, 351n81 Constantinople, 268, 270 constitutionalism, 53 constraint vs. freedom, 292

Index Le Conte de Graal (Chrétien de Troyes), 102 Contreras, Jerónimo de: La selva de aventuras, 6, 152 La conversión de la Magdalena (Malón de Chaide), 358–9n17 conversos, 116, 122, 299 corpus mysticum (mystic body), 139, 260–1, 271, 298–9 Il Cortegiano (Castiglione), 300–1, 340n5 Corte Real, Jerónimo, 221 Cortés, Hernán, 73; Second Letter, 321n19 Council of Castile, 163 Council of Trent: catechism of 1564 (Tridentine Creed), 116–18, 122–3, 321n21; Catholic reform after, 96; on duelling, 347n31; on marriage, 31, 121, 164, 197, 213–14, 218–20, 242; measures taken/affirmations by, 118; mission of, 117; orthodoxy defined by, 115; publication of decrees (1564), 30, 346n9; and publication of Persiles, 162; tametsi decree (1563), 218; on transubstantiation, 118, 321n21; on veneration of images, 278 Council of Valencian bishops (1608–9), 261 Counter-Reformation, 3, 8, 65, 85–6, 114, 117–20, 163–4, 267, 332n4, 334n12 courtesy, 222, 232, 298–302, 330n107 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, 18, 86, 90, 186, 259, 359n18 El Criticón (Gracián), 152 cross, Constantine’s discovery of, 268 Cruz y Constantino (Zárate), 265–72, 351–2n87

385

La cueva de Salamanca (Cervantes), 52 cuius regio, eius religio (in the prince’s land, the prince’s religion), 64–5, 325n63 Cupid and Psyche, 192 Cusa, Nicholas of, 160; De docta ignorantia, 18 Cybele, 189 Cyropaedeia (Xenophon), 208 Cyrus the Great, of Persia, 208 Dante Alighieri: Commedia, 140, 283, 319n93, 351–2n87; De Monarchia, 319n93; on the Golden Age, 249; heart-eating story by, 322n25; Letter to Can Grande, 354n112; on poetry, 11, 289; Scriptural typology used by, 280 David, 282 David’s Psalm 86, 84 De docta ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa), 18 De Indis (Vitoria), 56–8 De legibus (F. Suárez), 53 Delicado, Francisco: La lozana andaluza, 330n112 De los nombres de Cristo (León), 286, 357–8n7 De Monarchia (Dante), 319n93 De rege (Mariana), 54–5, 208, 257 Des cannibales (Montaigne), 151 destiny, 183–4, 292, 299, 342n26 La destruición de Numancia (Cervantes), 70, 295–6 Diálogo de las cosas occurridas en Roma (A. de Valdés), 95–6 Diálogos de amor (Hebreo), 187–9, 194–5 Dialogues (Lucian), 18

386

Index

La Diana (Montemayor), 6, 215, 280 Discorsi del poema eroico (Tasso), 14, 19–20 Dominicans, 163 Don Olivante de Laura (Torquemada), 21 Don Quijote (Cervantes): American stimulus for, 313n32; Ana Félix episode, 258, 260–2; as burlesque, 3–4, 15, 109; chivalric literature read by Don Quijote, 3; Cide Hamete’s criticisms (fictional author), 23; critical reception of, 310–11n8; deflation of the highflown in, 320–1n17; Don Quijote on chivalry, 289; Don Quijote on silence, 222; editions/printings/ translations of, 4, 310n8; as entertainment, 19; Erasmist readings of, 114; Golden Age imagery, 141–2; influence on later novels, 23; Marcela episode, 104, 185–6, 214–15; morisco episode, 258–62; narrative structure of, 280; as a novel, 114; paradox in, 19, 109; as parodic chivalric literature, 13–14; Peace of Augsburg’s influence on, 64; vs. Persiles, 3–4, 7, 22–5, 309n3; on poetry as a science, 11; as pseudo-history, 15; realism of, 3, 309n3; Ricote episode, 258–61; as a romance, 23–4; romance idealism vs. novelistic realism in, 103–4; as romantic parody, 3; Roque’s reference to Hercules, 329n104; Sancho as reality principle, 24; Sancho’s letters, 93; as satire of chivalric books, 24 Doody, Margaret, 113 dream visions, 178–84, 342n24

duelling, 76–7, 82–3, 134–5, 224–5, 227, 347nn31, 33, 34 Dunn, Peter, 24 earthly paradise theory, 274–5 Ebreo, Leone, 313n31; Diálogos de amor, 187–9, 194–5 educational revolution, Castilian, 6 The Education of a Christian Prince (Erasmus), 208 Egloga I (Garcilaso), 300 Eisenberg, Daniel, 310n8 El Brocense, Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, 202, 345n60 eleción (choice), 42, 292, 299 election, birthrights overturned by, 42–3 Elias, Norbert, 128 Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 167, 304 Elizabeth I of England and Ireland, 163 Elliott, J.H., 163 El Saffar, Ruth, 12, 168, 214, 313n31 Enchiridion (Erasmus), 122–3, 125, 163 El Encubierto (Murciélago; New David), 67 entertainment, humanists on, 18–19, 317n70 entertainment literature, 6–7, 315–16n62 the epic: anniversary games in, 173–4; barbarians as foreigners/ anti-heroes in, 39; Carolingian, 167, 340n1; chivalric, 167, 289; classical restraint vs. creative liberty in, 9; encyclopedic range/reach of, 10–12; and fiction vs. history, 15–16, 291; Greek novel’s difference from, 17; heroic vs. erotic

Index values in, 167; the highborn/heroic in, 10; and history, 36–40; literature and the epic hero, 168, 198–204, 344–5n57; love and war in, 167, 340n1; marvels in, 19–20; vs. novel, 13, 304; political meaning in, 169–70; prose and verse classical models for, 15, 36, 170–1, 250; public life as focus of, 9–10; public vs. private destiny in, 183–4, 342n26; and romance, 340n1; social order in, 17, 316n65; subject choice as poet’s life crisis, 10, 14; themes of, 11–12, 314–15n48; of victors vs. losers, 169–70. See also Persiles – dream episode and epic; Persiles – epic status Epicurean ideal, 18 Epistles (St Paul), 18, 115–16, 121, 124 Erasme et l’Espagne (Bataillon), 114–16, 122, 339n78 Erasmism: folkloric interests of, 18, 127; Pauline teachings used in, 121; on Rome, 95; in Spain, 115–16; this-worldly focus of, 165 Erasmus: on caritas, 122–3; The Colloquys, 197; The Education of a Christian Prince, 208; Enchiridion, 122–3, 125, 163; ‘monacatus non est pietas,’ 214; Praise of Folly, 18, 335n32; on virtues, 157 Ercilla, Alonso: La Araucana, 169, 250, 314–15n48 Eros, 191–2 eros and the soul, 195–6 espejo tradition (mirror of princes), 7, 17, 157–9, 208–9, 247, 257 Espinel, Vicente, 294

387

Estes, 87 ‘Estragos que causa el vicio’ (Zayas), 56–7 The Ethiopica (Heliodorus): as adventure novel, 16–17, 171; Calasiris’s narrative, 172; Chariclea’s political protagonism, 248; critical reception of, 5, 15, 111; imitations of, 50, 152, 170–1; influence/revival of interest in, 6–7, 311–12n20 (see also under Persiles); internal chronology of, 250; miracle in, 244; narrative structure of, 280; vs. The Odyssey, 38; pagan spirituality in, 111; Persiles modelled after, 11–13, 18–19, 36, 167–8, 170–2; plot, 5–6, 36; politics in, 36–7, 205; prophecy in, 181–2; as prose epic, 9, 170–1; publication of, 124; religious elements in, 111–13; sacrificial theme in, 38, 113; Theagenes and Chariclea are crowned/ordained, 50, 112; translations of, 6, 311n8, 320n11 Eucharist, 42, 75, 112, 118, 144–6, 321–2n21 Eusebius, 268 Eustorgio y Clorilene (E. Suárez de Figueroa), 6, 50, 209, 311n9 Exodus, 316n65 Extremadura, 231–2, 237–8 Falerina (in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato), 87 Farinelli, Arturo, 209 Faust (Goethe), 304 female readership’s growth, 311–12n20 Ferdinand of Austria, 68 Ferrara (Italy), 87

388

Index

Ficino, Marsilio, 185 First Crusade, 267–8, 272. See also Gerusalemme liberata Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary, 167, 304 folk beliefs, messianic, 66 Forcione, Alban: on Antonio’s pilgrimage, 134; on The Colloquys, 197; on discreción, 241; on dream episode in Persiles, 177–8; on epic status of Persiles, 9, 12, 314n44; on humour in Persiles, 312n26; on idealizing modes/genres, 23; on miracle conventions in Persiles, 235; on religion in Persiles, 334n12; on Sensualidad’s peña, 343n40; on the she-wolf episode, 140; on Sosa’s story as Christian piety, 212; on supernatural aspects of Antonio and Ricla’s story, 132; on unity in Persiles, 325n62 Fourth Eclogue (Vergil), 66, 322–3n25, 350n64 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 242 Franciscanism, 116, 294. See also under Cervantes, Miguel de Francis I of France, 326n72 Frazier, James, 322n24 freedom vs. constraint, 292 Frye, Northrop, 10, 14, 208, 316n65, 340n5 Fuchs, Barbara, 24 Fuentes, Carlos, 291 La Galatea (Cervantes), 215, 280, 292, 314n36, 335n29 Gama, Vasco da, 250 García Márquez, Gabriel, 291; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 304

Garcilaso de la Vega. See Vega, Garcilaso de la Garden of Eden, 87 Gaylord, Mary, 12, 24, 33, 103, 197, 352n94, 352–3n99 genres, 13, 23–4. See also specific genres Georgics (Vergil), 59, 69–71, 73 Germania (Tacitus), 151, 294 Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso): Armida and Clorinda as evil figures, 190; as epic, 14, 17, 314–15n48; as an epic of victors, 169; Greek novel’s difference from, 17; the heroic in, 167; as historical fiction, 15; historical subject of, 250; influence on Persiles, 36; isle of love in, 191; in Persiles (poet-pilgrim episode), 265–72; religious elements in, 112–14; on Roman power projected East, 270; war/love as focus of, 268; and Zárate’s Cruz, 267, 351–2n87 Godfrey, Duke, 267 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Faust, 304 Goez, Werner, 68 Golden Age, 41–3, 141–2, 206, 249, 274, 322–3n25, 343n45, 350n64 Golden Ass (Apuleius), 18, 186, 192 Golden Fleece, 71–2 golden mean and conquest of self, 194–5 Gómara, Francisco López de, 73 Gómez Trueba, Teresa, 342n24 Góngora y Argote, Don Luis de, 344n54; Soledades, 73 González Rovira, Javier, 310n8, 334n12 Gorgon, 189

Index Gospel narratives, 152 Goths/the Gothic. See Visigoths Gracián, Baltasar: El Criticón, 152 Granada, Fray Luis de, 163 Grand Tour, 332n4 Great Mother Goddess, 189–90, 222 Greek novel, 6–7, 16–17, 111, 310–11n8, 312n20 Grotius, Hugo, 53 Guadalupe Monastery (Spain), 233–5, 242, 244, 262, 273, 348n45 Guarini, Giovanni Battista: Pastor Fido, 343n45 Guerrero, Gonzalo, 149 Guevara, Antonio de, 296–7; Libro de Marco Aurelio, 294–5, 321n17; Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, 18; Relox de príncipes, 208 Guzmán de Alfarache (Alemán), 6, 96, 280, 312n29, 316n62 Habsburgs: Cervantes’ impatience with, 52; effective abdication after Philip II’s death, 209; family motto of, 351n81; vs. France, 61; genealogical descent of, 68, 299, 326n78; Italy and Portugal under, 61, 66; messianic hopes of, 66–7, 326n72; Royal Council established by, 349n58; war against the Araucos, 250 Hanging Gardens of Babylon, 87 heart-eating rituals, 40–4, 75, 320–2nn16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25 Hebrews. See Jews Heliodorus. See The Ethiopica Henri II of France, 163 Henri IV of France, 329n103 Henry VIII of England, 64 Hercules, 88–9, 102, 328–9nn103, 104

389

Herod, 282 Herodotus, 88, 171, 291 Herrera, Fernando de, 73, 202, 345n60 Herrero García, Miguel, 344n54 Hesiod, 249 Hesperides, 87 Hieronymites, 235 Hippolyta, 35, 88–91, 102 Historia general de España (Mariana), 359n18 Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Acosta), 73, 322n21 history: and epic, 36–40; vs. fiction, 15–16, 291; literary, 304; and myth, 152–3; vs. poetry, 15–16; vs. story, historia as, 15, 251, 289, 291–2 Hobbes, Thomas, 53–4 Homer: The Iliad, 9–10, 15, 17, 37, 170, 172–4. See also The Odyssey honour, 135, 337n54; code of, 134–5, 153–60, 228, 231, 270–1; human sacrifice in name of, 277; vs. royal justice, 224–30. See also duelling Horace, 10, 19, 355n116 Horozco, Sebastián de, 322n21 Hsu, Carmen, 329–30n106 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 135–6, 337nn52, 54 humanists: on entertainment, 18–19, 317n70; Erasmist, vs. CounterReformation, 335n29; folly embraced by, 160–1, 335n32; on imaginative literature, 6–7; influence in Spain, 163; on matrimony vs. celibacy, 196; paternalistic/ misogynistic attitudes toward marriage, 248, 349n59; on poetry, 11, 289. See also under Persiles Hutton, Lewis, 212, 346n12

390

Index

Iconologia (Ripa), 185 ideal forms/reality, 279, 352–3n99 idolatry, 45–6, 83, 100, 277, 323n29 The Iliad (Homer), 9–10, 15, 17, 37, 170, 172–4 iluminismo, 116 imagination, 195–6 imperfection in Christianity, 19, 123, 160–1, 294 imperialism, messianic, 66–7, 326n72 Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. See Vega, Inca Garcilaso de la indigenism, 39 ‘In Hoc Signo Vinces,’ 351n81 Inquisition, 163, 261, 322n21, 335n24 Inquisitorial Indexes, 116–17 In silentium (Alciato), 194 international law, 53, 77 investiture crises, 68 Iron Age, 343n45 Isaac, binding/sacrifice of, 237–8, 283–5, 287, 355nn113, 114 Isidore, Saint, of Seville, 67, 295 Isis, 189 La isla bárbara (Sánchez), 51 ius peregrinandi (foreigners’ right to travel/trade), 58 ius primae noctae (law of the first night), 75, 226 Jardín de flores curiosas (Torquemada), 20–2, 51, 67, 127–8, 317n78 Jason (Argonaut), 71–2, 326n78 Jerusalem/Zion: as community of believers, 84; Godfrey’s taking of, 267–8; prophecy of world conquest after recovery of, 66–7, 326n72; recovery of, 66–7, 113–14, 269, 326n72, 351n85 (see also First

Crusade; Gerusalemme liberata); Seljuk taking of, 267 Jesuits, 116, 128, 248 Jesus Christ: atonement following from death of, 355n115; burial rock cave of, 268; crucifixion of, 285, 287; Erasmus on teachings of, 160–1; exegetical tradition initiated by, 281–2 (see also typology, Christological); good Samaritan story by, 223; Hercules as prefiguring, 89; humanity of, 132–3; as incarnation, 86–7, 152; labours of, 124; as Lamb of God, 139; loaves and fishes parable associated with, 147; as Messiah, 282–3; prefigurations of, 282, 354n107 (see also typology, Christological); Second Coming of, 351n85; as wonder-boy who will usher in golden age, 322–3n25 Jews: conversos, 116, 122, 299; exodus from Egypt, 263–4; heart-eating myth attributed to, 322n21; who break the law, St Paul on, 56; witchcraft associated with Jewish women, 79 Joachimites, 67 Joachim of Fiore, 116 John of Patmos: Revelation, 125, 282 Jonah, 282 Joseph, 282 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 304 Judaism vs. Christianity, 135, 261–2 justice, royal, 245, 349n58 just-war debates: on barbarism, 39, 55, 57–8, 75, 77; on conquest, 35, 58, 75, 121; on human sacrifice, 277

Index Kagan, Richard, 6 Kant, Immanuel, 53 keywords and relational meanings, 27–8 The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda. See Persiles Lafayette, Madame de, 339–40n84 Lapesa, Rafael, 334n12 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 39, 159, 302; Argumentum apologiae, 57–9, 325n59; Brevíssima relación de la destruycción de las Indias, 149–53, 295 law: Barbaric Law (see Persiles – Barbaric Law); and charity, 292; as classical latinity/philology, 56; common, 318n81; vs. custom, 29–30, 39–40, 75, 86, 292 (see also under Catholic Church); divine, 56; and gusto (pleasure or taste), 47–8, 56–7, 184, 191–6, 203, 292, 343n45; international, 53, 77; ius primae noctae, 75, 226; philosophy of/jurisprudence, 55–6; and pleasure/taste, 343n45; positive, 318n81; of repudiation, 158; Roman, 318n81; sacred (grace), 318n81; scope of/thematic reference to, 56–7. See also natural law Lazarillo de Tormes, 6, 298 Leo III, Pope, 68 León, Fray Luis de: De los nombres de Cristo, 286, 357–8n7; ‘Profecía del Tajo,’ 324n39 León, Lucrecia de, 295–6, 302 Letter to Can Grande (Dante), 354n112 Leucippe and Clitophon (Achilles Tatius), 310n8 Ley de amor santo (Osuna), 286

391

Libro de Marco Aurelio (A. de Guevara), 294–5, 321n17 El licenciado Vidriera (Cervantes), 233, 314n42, 348n41 life as spiritual pilgrimage, 33 Lisbon, 123, 297, 335–6n33 literacy rates, 6 literary history, 304 Livy, 81–2 Locke, John, 53–4 Lope de Vega. See Vega, Lope de López de Ubeda, Francisco: La pícara Justina, 316n62 López de Zárate, Francisco. See Zárate, Francisco López de López Pinciano, Alonso. See Pinciano, Alonso López love: and adoration of images, 279– 80; conjugal, 42, 99; courtly, 220; vs. law, 207; lust as, 189; and war, in the epic, 167, 340n1; vs. war, 17–18, 31, 168–9, 173–5, 184, 198, 203–4, 269–70, 316n65. See also Persiles – Rome conquered by love Low, Jennifer, 347n34 La lozana andaluza (Delicado), 330n112 Lozano Renieblas, Isabel, 50, 80, 312n27, 315n60, 316n62, 317n78, 327–8n93, 355n112 Lucan: The Pharsalia, 15, 169 Lucian: Dialogues, 18; Hercules legend of, 328–9n103; True History, 18 Lujuria. See lust Lukács, Georg, 13, 303–4, 342n26 Os Lusíadas (Camões), 187, 191, 221–2, 250, 314–15n48, 342n36 lust: vs. chastity/reason, 184–5, 187–9, 193; as earthly love, 189

392

Index

Luther, Martin, 116–17 Lutherans, 65, 95, 121 Lycaon, 338n58 Machiavelli, 262; The Prince, 208 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 167, 304 Madrid: court’s return to, 30, 162–4, 302; in Persiles, 296, 301–2 magic realism, 304, 359–60n23 Magnus, Olaus, 22 Malón de Chaide, Pedro, 31; La conversión de la Magdalena, 358–9n17 Margarita of Austria, 245 Mariana, Juan de, 39; De rege, 54–5, 208, 257; Historia general de España, 359n18 Mariscal, George, 12, 33, 326n65, 339n70 Márquez, Antonio, 333n10 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco: on The Colloquys, 197; on entertainment, 315–16n62, 317n70; on La Galatea, 335n29; on humanist restrictions on marriage, 349n59; on the moriscos’ expulsion, 250–2, 258, 262, 350n66 marriage: arranged, 76, 78, 99, 211, 218–19, 223, 226, 240–2, 246 (see also Persiles – Auristela, Isle of Fishers episode); Catholic/Protestant reformers on, 331n119; clandestine, 145, 197–8, 219, 240–1, 331n119; disputes between the young and parents, 218–19, 346n22; dynastic model of, 31, 42–3, 175, 195, 198; false promises of, 196; humanist/Pauline paternalism/misogyny regarding, 248, 349nn59, 60; ius primae noctae, 75; vs. monastic celibacy, 196, 212–16,

219, 223; by mutual consent, 31, 42, 54, 109, 218–20, 223–4, 240, 242; sacralization of, 196–7, 343n45; two-year trial of romance before, 197–8. See also under Council of Trent Mars and Venus, 168, 191 Mary, Virgin, 223, 282, 350n64 Mary Magdalene, 90 Mary of Guise, 64 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 64–5, 163 Maxentius, 268 McKendrick, Melveena, 350n69 McKeon, Michael, 318n89 Medea (Seneca), 59, 71–3 Medusa, 189, 194 Melchizedek, 282 memory, 196 Mena, Fernando de, 308, 310–11n8 Mendoza, Fray Enrique de: El privado christiano, 209 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 3 Meneses, Felipe de, 163 Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (A. de Guevara), 18 messianic imperialism, 66–7, 326n72 The Metamorphoses (Ovid), 214, 231, 338n58 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 195 Mexica, ritual cannibalism by, 321n19 middle class’s rise, 312n20 Middlemarch (Eliot), 167, 304 Miñana, Rogelio, 7 miracles, 235, 244, 348n44 mirror of princes. See espejo tradition modernity, 304 Molho, Maurice, 327–8n93, 333n10

Index Molina, Tirso de: El burlador de Sevilla, 335–6n33 Monda, festival of, 126–7 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de: Des cannibales, 151 Montemayor, Jorge de: La Diana, 6, 215, 280 More, Thomas: Utopia, 18 Moretti, Franco, 304 moriscos: apostasy allegations against, 39; barbarian status of, 89; expulsion of, 30–2, 80, 250–64, 272, 350n66; Inquisition’s opposition to the expulsion, 261; in Valencia vs. Castile, 262; witchcraft associated with moriscas, 79 Moses, 282, 354n107 Mosteiro dos Jerónimos (Lisbon), 235 mountain topos, 286 Mozarabic rite, 298 Murciélago (El Encubierto; New David), 67 Muslims: of Barbary, 53, 263; Christian mission to convert, 264, 326n72, 351n85; descendants of converts from, 251, 298; and Gothic myth, 295–6; prophecy/ goal of recovering Jerusalem from, 66–7, 113–14, 270. See also moriscos mystic body (corpus mysticum), 139, 260–1, 271, 298–9 myth: definition of, 339n68; Gothic, 295–6; of heart eating by Jews, 322n21; and history, 152–3; Persiles as, 151–2; Roman, 74 natural law, 318n81; as inscribed in the heart, 56; vs. Spanish customs,

393

39; Stoics on, 56; Vitoria on, 56, 77 Naufragios (Cabeza de Vaca), 338n62 Navarro González, Alberto, 112 Nebrija, Antonio de, 56 neo-Aristotelianism: on literary marvels, 26–7, 81–2; on plot unity/variety, 26–7, 178, 201; on verisimilitude, 19–20, 22, 81, 178, 195, 201. See also under Persiles Neoplatonism, 168, 185, 196, 313n31 Nerlich, Michael: on Arian heresy, 298; on Aristotelian poetics’ influence on Persiles, 314n40; on Auristela’s conversion, 331n118; on Auristela’s portrait, 353n101; Gothic reading of Persiles, 356n7; on Hipólita, 330n107; on humanism of Persiles, with affinities to Dante, 319n93; on ideological complexity of Persiles, 12; on Leonor in Persiles, 216; on religion in Persiles, 333n10; on sonnets about Rome in Persiles, 327–8n93; on sources for Ricla’s name, 338n61 New Christians, 116, 122, 298–9. See also moriscos; purity of blood statutes New Comedy, 17, 73, 108–9, 112, 170 New David (El Encubierto; Murciélago), 67 New Jerusalem: as apocalyptic vision, 154; imagery of, 125; Rome as, 74, 82, 84, 160, 270 New World: vs. Barbaric Isle, 49–50, 55; Columbus’s voyages to, 72–3, 274–5; debates on Spanish presence in, 39; demonization of religious practices in, 42, 321–2n21; historians of, 72–3

394

Index

Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 189 Nieto, José, 116 Niño de Guevara, Fernando, 261 Noah, 282 noble savage/primitivism, 149–53 North African dungeons, Christian captives in, 52, 263, 341n22 the novel: American stimulus for, 313n32; characteristics of, 22–3; Don Quijote as, 114; vs. epic, 13, 304; The Ethiopica as, 16–17, 171; Greek, 6–7, 16–17, 111, 310–11n8, 312n20; El peregrino as, 37, 111–12; vs. the romance, 7–8, 13, 24, 103–4, 318n89 Novelas ejemplares (Cervantes), 271, 292, 306, 315–16n62 Nueva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre (Sabuco de Nantes), 317n70 The Odyssey (Homer), 9; anniversary games in, 174; Calypso vs. Penelope, 144; on dreams, 179–80; epic exploits in, 10; as epic model, 171; vs. The Ethiopica, 38; influence on Persiles, 36; isle of love in, 191; Odysseus kills Antinous, 45, 130, 156; Odysseus with Calypso, 143; and Persiles, 168, 170–1, 173–6, 179, 191; quest vs. social order in, 316n65 Old Testament: birthrights overturned by election in, 42; linked with New Testament by typology, 135, 205, 277, 280–6, 354n107 oleander, 186 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 304 Orbis Terrarum, 274

Origen, 322n22 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 14, 50–1, 88, 167, 190–1, 280, 340n1, 344n55 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 87, 167 Osuna, Francisco de: Ley de amor santo, 286 Ottomans, 66–7 Ovid, 249; The Metamorphoses, 214, 231, 338n58 paganism, 111, 125–9 Pamela (Richardson), 167 paradox, 18–22; in Don Quijote, 19, 109; of the perfect Christian, 160–1; religious/literary, 160–6; and verisimilitude, 22, 164. See also under Persiles Parmenides (Plato), 18 Parodi, Alicia, 355n120 El pasajero (C. Suárez de Figueroa), 337n50 the Passion, 133 Passover meal, 145 pastoral narratives, 7, 215 Pastor Fido (Guarini), 343n45 Pateman, Carole, 248 patriarchalism, 248 Paul, Saint: association with converts, 122; on caritas (charity), 30, 122–5, 146, 298–9; Epistles, 18, 115–16, 121, 124; on ethical standards, 158; exegetical tradition initiated by, 281–2, 354n107; labours of, 123–4; on the mystic body, 260–1, 298–9; on natural law, 56; paradoxical tradition developed by, 160; paternalistic/misogynistic texts on marriage, 248, 349n60; on peaceful conversion of Gentiles, 261–2; and

Index the perfect Christian, 160–1; role in inventing Christianity, 122; virtues associated with, 159; voyage to Rome, 124. See also under Persiles – religion Peace of Augsburg (1555), 64, 325n63 Pedrola, Miguel de, 295–6 El pelegrino curioso (Villalba), 332n4 Peñafort, Raimundo de, 286 Perceval, 102–3 El peregrino en su patria (Lope de Vega): as apolitical, 205; as epic adventure novel, 37, 111–12; The Ethiopica’s influence on, 6; ghostly visitation in, 182–3; miracle in, 244; publication of, 111; religious theme in, 111–12; and travel literature, 332n4 Periander of Corinth, 158 Persiles (Cervantes): and The Aeneid, 144; as allegory/myth, 151–2; American stimulus for, 313n32; anticlimactic ending of, 24, 103–4; Antonio’s story, 60–3; arms-letters topos in, 134, 143, 198; Arnaldo’s story, 65; asceticism in, 275–6; Barbary motif, 52, 263; Bradamiro’s name, sources for, 51; Cervantes encounters student admirer, 303; Cervantes’ hopes for, 4, 309–10n6; chronology within, 30–1, 37, 161–6, 250; circularity of, 27; Claricia’s story, 80–1; complexities of, 12, 34; composition dates of, 306–8, 309n3; concepts as narrative premises in, 28–9; conflicting voices in, 119–20; consent’s centrality in, 54; conservatism of, 3; critical reception of, 4,

395

310–11n8; dedication for, 4; Domicio’s story, 77; vs. Don Quijote, 3–4, 7, 22–5, 309n3; editions/ printings/translations of, 4, 310n8; and The Ethiopica, 3, 6, 16–17, 124, 130, 309n1 (see also The Ethiopica); Eusebia’s story, 60–3, 135; Feliciana’s story, 77, 79, 126; Félix’s story, 77; female protagonists’ status, 137, 248; genres absorbed by, 13, 22; Gothic reading of, 297–8, 302–3, 356–7n7 (see also under Persiles – geography); Hipólita’s story, 77; historical ambitions of, 15–17, 22, 315n60; homosexual overtones of, 44; humanism of, 32, 164–5, 185, 319n93; humour of, 8, 89, 265–6, 269, 312n26; icons/portraits in, 352–3n99 (see also under Persiles – Auristela); imitations of, 4, 50, 209 (see also Eustorgio y Clorilene); imperialist orthodoxy challenged by, 8 (see also translatio imperii); interpretation of, fourfold, 355n112; irony in, 8, 159, 312n29; Isabel’s story, 77, 229–30; Jarife, 251–60, 263–4; Lisbon, ode to, 123, 297, 335–6n33; Madrid in, 296, 301–2; Mauricio’s story, 63, 65, 75–7, 80–1; meta-fictional elements of, 8, 312–13n30; narrative structure of, 62–3, 172–4, 280–1, 286, 289; and The Odyssey, 143–4; Ortel’s attempt to win Luisa, 125–6; paradox in, 18–22, 26–7, 34, 59, 109–10, 148, 232, 287, 317n77; Persiles, 32, 70 (see also Persiles – Periandro); pilgrimage to Rome, 8; piracy in, 41; plot, 4–5, 8;

396

Index

Persiles (continued) publication of, 4; rationalism of, 8, 312n26; realism of, 8, 24, 164, 204, 312nn27, 29; Renato’s story, 60–3, 135; revival of interest in, 310n8; as a romance, 8, 24, 114; and Rome vs. Augustine’s City of God, 35, 319n9; Ruperta’s story, 63–4, 77; Rutilio’s story, 60–3, 77–8, 80–2; sacrifice in, 352n96; sexual orthodoxy challenged by, 8, 313n31; Sigismunda, 32, 62 (see also Persiles – Auristela); Sosa’s story, 60–3; stage adaptations of, 4, 310n8; Taurisa’s death, 49; title’s meaning, 89, 124, 285–6; Toledo in, 296–8, 300–2; Transila’s story, 63, 75–6; unity of, 26–7, 60, 191, 325n62 – Antonio and Ricla: Antonio and Ricla’s story, 129–30, 132–3, 136, 141–8, 152, 223, 338n62; Antonio as unofficial Church representative, 138; Antonio’s advice to son after poisoning, 157; Antonio’s conversion, 135–6, 140, 147, 223, 338n62; Antonio’s story, 125, 133–5; Antonio the younger and Cenotia, 156; Antonio the younger and Costanza, 152, 339n70; Antonio the younger as human angel (hybrid), 132, 139; Antonio the younger’s character, 148; Antonio the younger’s rescue of Félix, 78–9; the cave, 339n75; Ricla as Calypso and Penelope, 143–4; Ricla as Christ figure, 138–9, 145, 147, 152; Ricla as noble savage, 149, 151–2; Ricla’s association with charity/compassion, 139–40, 146, 154; Ricla’s materiality/spirituality,

147; Ricla’s name, sources for, 338n61; Ricla’s role on Barbaric Isle, 65–6, 75; Ricla’s story, 125, 133; Ricla’s vs. Hipólita’s hospitality, 148–9 – Auristela (Sigismunda): Arnaldo’s passion for, 46–7, 65, 83; beauty of, 277; Catholicism of, 65; chastity vow by, 5, 47, 90, 119, 191, 263; children/grandchildren of, 144; as Christ, 280–1, 284–9; as Hercules, 329n104; Isle of Fishers episode, 54, 62, 210, 243–6, 248, 265; mission of, 42; peace/justice embodied by, 243–4, 249; portrait of, 46, 82, 100, 201, 277–9, 353n101; vs. Sigismunda, xiii–xiv; silence of, 347n28 – Barbaric Isle, 33–110; barbarism as ethical vs. religious problem, 58–9; and Bradamiro as archetype for Christian characters, 40, 227; Bradamiro intervenes in sacrifice and frees Periandro, 43–5; Bradamiro’s arrogance, 43, 46, 134, 227; Bradamiro’s death, 45, 48, 130, 156; vs. Catholic South, 29–30, 34–5, 40, 42, 46, 59, 153–4 (see also under Persiles – geography); Christianity/mestizos on, 65–6, 326n65; commentary on, 49–50; gender ambiguity in sacrifice scene, 43–5; idolatry/adoration of appearances, 45–6, 83, 100, 277; law of world conquest, 66; and law vs. custom, 29–30, 39–40, 149; literary inversions on, 131–2; location of, 60; vs. New World, 49–50, 55; overview of, 33–5; prince/ captain’s death, 48–9; restoration

Index Persiles (continued) of, 271; Ricla’s role, 65–6, 75; ritual sacrifice of, 38–9; as satire of imperialism, 29; self-destruction of, 48–9, 130, 137; she-wolf episode, 80–2, 140, 338n58; and social contract theory, 53–5; sources for, 49–53, 324n43, 325n59; and Tile (Thule), 40; traffic in women, and patriarchal practices, 34, 106, 156, 353n101. See also Persiles – Rome as Barbaric Isle – Barbaric Law, 40–59; abduction/ forced marriage, 226; Bradamiro’s rebellion against, 47–8; cannibalism as messianic imperialism in, 34; Cloelia intervenes and denounces the law, 43–4; vs. gusto, 47–8; heart-eating ritual in, 40–4, 320–1nn17, 18; as lawless, institutionalized tyranny, 47–8; marriage under, 43; as natural/sacred right, 47; overview of features of, 42, 321–2n21; paradox of, 34, 59, 109, 287; Periandro and Auristela are reunited and spared, 43–4; on political prophecy, 253; and political succession, 42–3; sources for, 53; as state of nature, 39, 53–4; Taurisa’s account of, 41, 321–2n21 – church and state, 31–2, 205–90; Abrahamic sacrificial impulse, 237–8; Ambrosia Agustina episode, 253–7; Auristela as Christ, 280–1, 284–9; Auristela as crossroads of, 275–80; charity and Catholic ceremonies, 212–13; cruelty in the name of faith, 210–24, 346n12; Diego de Parraces’s murder, 236–8, 348n47; Dominican monastery,

397

272–5; exemplary justice by Auristela, 245–9; Exodus/Promised Land subtext, 249, 263–4, 281–2, 316n65; false captives episode, 263–4; Feliciana as sacrificial type, 283–4; Feliciana’s father and brother miraculously forgive her, 240–1, 244–5; Feliciana’s hymn to the Virgin, 242–3, 285; Feliciana’s story, 210–11, 222–3, 226, 230–40, 347n27, 348nn40, 47; Golden Age, 249; Guadalupe basilica, 233–5, 242, 244, 262, 273; honour vs. royal justice, 224–30; Isle of Fishers episode, 245–9; language/persuasion as heroic, 276; law vs. caritas/love, 207; Leonor, silence by and about, 216–18, 222–4; Leonor/Sosa and Auristela/ Periandro, 222–3; Leonor’s story, 210–17, 219, 221–2, 275, 346n12; Leonor vs. Marcela, 214–15; marvels, 233–4, 272; moriscos’ expulsion, 250–64; overview of, 205–10; and paradox, 232, 253, 258–9, 287; Pauline ethics vs. institutional authority, 209–10, 212–13; Periandro as Christ, 280–1, 287–9; Pizarro and Orellana’s role, 238–40, 242–3; poet-pilgrim/monsignor’s museum episode, 265–7, 269–72, 351–2n87; Policarpo’s Isle episode, 206–7; political parity between men and women, 248–9; prose epic as vernacular Scripture (typological reading), 280–90, 355n120; Renato and Eusebia’s story, 210, 224–30; Roman model of, 264–72; sacrificial practices, 211, 230–45; Sosa’s

398

Index

Persiles (continued) story, 210–23, 236, 246, 275–6, 288; war vs. love, 269–70 – dream episode and epic, 167–204; and The Aeneid, 168, 171–6, 178–84, 190–1, 198, 202–3; Arnaldo’s enthrallment to life’s surfaces, 198–201; Arnaldo’s obtuseness, 201–2, 204; Castidad, 176–7, 184, 189, 193, 199; and chaste elopement, 191; the dream’s association with the hero, 182–3, 342n26; eros in Ruperta’s story, 191–4, 222; and female seductive figures, 190–1; Garcilaso’s Sonnet X, 200–1, 300; and ley/gusto, 184, 191–6, 203, 343n45; literature and the epic hero, 168, 198–204, 344–5n57; and lust vs. chastity/reason, 184–5, 187–9, 193; and marriage, 197–8; and marvels, 190, 202; Maximino as warrior/epic hero, 168–9, 198, 269–70; narrative evocation of epic, 172–4; and The Odyssey, 168, 170–1, 173–6, 179, 191; overview of, 167–76; painting commemorating dream episode, 178, 341n22; parts of the dream episode, 176; Periandro and Auristela’s secret love, 200–1; Periandro as redeeming Dido, 202–3; Periandro wakes himself, 199–200, 344n55; Policarpo’s Isle as an illusory home, 172–3; recitation of the dream, 177–8; Roman destiny in the dream, 183–4; Sensualidad/sexuality, 168, 175–8, 183–98, 204, 342n36; Sulpicia’s story, 193; war vs. love, 168–9, 173–5, 184, 198, 203–4

– epic status: Aeneid as a model for, 130–1; and as entertainment, 17–19, 289, 315–16n62; Ethiopica as a model for, 11–13, 18–19, 36, 167–8, 170–2; heroic deeds, 10; and history, 36–40; the ideal vs. the material, overview of, 33–4; and love vs. war, 17–18, 31, 316n65; neo-Aristotelian poetics’ influence, 9–11, 314nn40, 44; paradoxical inversions/marvels in, 18–22, 26–7, 317n77; and El peregrino, 37; politics, 8–9; scope of, 292–3; and Tasso, 14–15, 19–21, 314–15n48; on Tasso’s poem on Jerusalem conquest, 32; themes of, 25–6; Vergilian themes in Policarpo’s Isle passages, 9, 314n36; on Zárate’s poem on Constantine’s conversion, 32 – Feliciana: father and brother miraculously forgive her, 240–1, 244–5; Feliciana’s story, 77, 79, 126, 210–11, 222–3, 226, 230–40, 347n27, 348nn40, 47; hymn to the Virgin, 242–3, 285; as sacrificial type, 283–4 – geography, 59–74; Barbarian/ Gothic Northern settings, 20–2, 37–8, 59, 317n78; Barbarian/ Gothic North vs. Catholic South, 60; Catholic countries, 61–3; eastward movement of protagonists, 67–8, 73; exodus from Egypt, 67; Friesland, 356–7n7; Golandia, 61–3; Hibernia, 61, 63, 75–6, 226; historical sources for, 62–5, 127; and imperial messianism, 66–8; island vs. mainland settings, 63, 73; Isle of Fishers, 62; Isle of Hermits,

Index Persiles (continued) 60, 62–3, 162; liberties taken with, 63–4; movement from Portugal through Spain to Italy, 61; pilgrimage to Rome, generally, 61–2; Policarpo’s Isle, 62–3; as reversal of spiritual/temporal priorities, 73–4; Rome as re-enactment of Policarpo’s Isle and Barbaric Isle, 63; Seráfido describes journey of Persiles and Sigismunda, 68–9; Tile (Thule) as Persiles’ homeland, 59–60, 68–9, 270, 356n7; Tile (Thule) to Rome journey, 59–60, 67–8, 71, 270. See also Persiles – Rome as Barbaric Isle; Persiles – Rome conquered by love – Hipólita: as archetypal otherness, 90; artistic taste vs. ethical vacuity of, 87–8; Auristela poisoned by, 91, 97–8, 156; pardoned by Periandro, 161; and Periandro’s cross/cloak, 88, 91, 128; repentance of, 90–1, 95, 329–30n106; Ricla’s vs. Hipólita’s hospitality, 148–9; as ‘Roman whore,’ 330n107; and Rosamunda, 128–9 – Maximino: blesses Persiles’ marriage to Sigismunda, 42, 121, 204; death of, 8, 42, 276, 352n96; entitlement to Sigismunda, 5, 48, 90, 98, 191, 195; rivalry with Persiles, 12–13, 31, 43, 70, 277 – Periandro (Persiles): beauty of, 277; vs. Bradamiro, 48; chastity vow by, 5, 263; as Christ, 280–1, 287–9; commitment to conjugal love, 42; election of, 42–3; jealousy of Arnaldo, 47; mission of, 42; vs. Persiles, xiii–xiv; planned rescue of

399

Auristela, 40–1; on revenge, 157–8 – religion: Antonio and Ricla’s cave, 339n75; Antonio and Ricla’s story, 129–30, 132–3, 136, 141–8, 152, 223, 338n62; Antonio as unofficial Church representative, 138; Antonio’s advice to son after poisoning, 157; Antonio’s conversion, 135–6, 140, 147, 223, 338n62; Antonio’s story, 125, 133–5; Antonio the younger and Cenotia, 156; Antonio the younger and Costanza, 152, 339n70; Antonio the younger as human angel (hybrid), 132, 139; Antonio the younger’s character, 148; Auristela’s piety, 119; Catholic readings, 66, 114–15, 118, 334n12; on charity vs. sacrament, 30, 165–6; Cloelia’s death/faith in Christ, 136–7; and colonialism/imperialism discourse, 149, 151; Costanza’s charity, 154–5; Counter-Reformation readings, 3, 8, 65–6, 85–6, 114, 117–20, 163–4, 267, 332n4, 334n12; count’s death, 143; Erasmist readings, 114, 334n12; Exodus/Promised Land subtext, 124–5, 128–9, 145, 249, 263–4, 281–2, 316n65; Golden Age imagery, 141; heaven/hell as earthly, 129, 147–8; heresy, 335n24; and the honour code, 134–5, 153–60; human agency vs. the divine, 140–1; Jesus’ humanity, 132–3; and Las Casas’s primitivism, 149–51; law and grace, 132, 135, 139, 144, 161, 223; and marriages, 121; North-South hierarchy, 128–9,

400

Index

Persiles (continued) 134, 142–3, 148–9, 153–4; Ortel falls off his horse, 158–9; Ortel is aided by Doña Guiomar, 159–60; Ortel plans revenge against Luisa, 157–8; pagan Europe, 125–9; Pauline readings, 30, 115–16, 120–5, 135, 161–6; Periandro pardons Hipólita, 161; pilgrimages, 126–7; religious/ethnic inversions, 130–1; religious/literary paradox, 160–6; Ricla as Calypso and Penelope, 143–4; Ricla as Christ figure, 138–9, 145, 147, 152; Ricla as noble savage, 149, 151–2; Ricla’s association with charity/compassion, 139–40, 146, 154; Ricla’s materiality/spirituality, 147; Ricla’s name, sources for, 338n61; Ricla’s story, 125, 133; Ricla’s vs. Hipólita’s hospitality, 148–9; scholarship on, 114, 333n10, 334n12; sexual cave imagery and the Eucharist, 144–6 – Renato and Eusebia, 60–3, 135, 210, 224–30 – Rome as Barbaric Isle, 74–97; Antonio the younger’s rescue of Félix, 78–9; Arnaldo and Nemurs as arch-Barbarians, 82–3; Auristela’s catechism in Rome, 85–6, 92; Bartolomé’s letter, 92–4; Cenotia poisons Antonio the younger, 78, 91, 156–7; death scenes, 82–3; duelling, 76–7, 82–3; eaten heart/Eucharistic motif, 75; Hipólita and Periandro’s cross/ cloak, 88, 91, 128; Hipólita and Rosamunda, 128–9; Hipólita as archetypal otherness, 90; Hipólita as ‘Roman whore,’ 330n107;

Hipólita poisons Auristela, 91, 97–8, 156; Hipólita’s artistic taste vs. her ethical vacuity, 87–8; Hipólita’s repentance, 90–1, 95, 329–30n106; honour code, 76–7, 83; ideal vs. earthly Rome, 83–5, 97, 109; justice/captivity/corruption in Rome, 91–4; law vs. custom, 75–7, 96–7, 288–9; marvels/miracles, 79–82; Northern, Catholic barbarism, 76–9, 96–7; Periandro’s cross, 88, 91–2; Pirro’s passion/violence, 95, 161; poisoning, 78–80, 91, 97–8, 156–7; and reform, 95–6, 330n107; revenge killings, 77–8; Rubertino’s attempted abduction, 78, 327n87; sacrificial practices, 74–5; sonnets about Rome, 83–4, 327–8n93; sorcery, 79–82; Southern, Catholic barbarism, 74–6, 78–9, 96–7 – Rome conquered by love, 97–110; Auristela as heroine, 106–8; Auristela marries Periandro, 108; Auristela’s barbarism, 106; Auristela’s love for Periandro, 106–7; Auristela’s piety/conversion, 104–6, 331n118; Auristela’s poisoning/disfigurement, 91, 97–100, 156; Auristela’s recovery from poisoning and refusal to marry, 100–1, 104; Auristela’s transformation into Sigismunda, 97; and civilization, 109; paradox of, 109–10; Periandro as hero, 101–2, 105–6; Periandro as Perceval, 102–3; Periandro’s loyalty during Auristela’s illness, 99–100, 247; Periandro’s transformation into Persiles, 97; Roma/amor palindrome, 102, 330n112

Index Persiles (continued) – Sosa and Leonor: Leonor, silence by and about, 216–18, 222–4; Leonor/Sosa and Auristela/ Periandro, 222–3; Leonor’s story, 210–17, 219, 221–2, 275, 346n12; Leonor vs. Marcela, 214–15; Sosa’s story, 60–3, 210–23, 236, 246, 275–6, 288 Petrarch, 83, 98–9, 215, 220–1, 279; Trionfi, 177, 341n16 Petronius: Satyricon, 18 The Pharsalia (Lucan), 15, 169 Philip II of Spain, 30–1, 61, 67, 122, 161–4, 209, 296, 346n9, 351n81 Philip III of Spain, 286; accession of, 257, 315–16n62; court’s return to Madrid, 30, 162–4, 302; Crown management transferred to duke of Lerma, 209; marriage to Margarita, 245; moriscos expelled by, 30–2, 80, 250–61, 263, 272; in Persiles, 162; reign of, 162–3; tyranny of, 257, 260 Philip IV of Spain, 67, 209 Philosophía antigua poética (Pinciano), 10–12, 171, 308 La pícara Justina (López de Ubeda), 316n62 pilgrim characters, 332n4 Pinciano, Alonso López, 9, 13, 15–17, 25–7, 31, 314nn40, 42; Philosophía antigua poética, 10–12, 171, 308 pirates, 262 Pius IV, Pope, 118, 123 Pizarro, Francisco, 126 Plato, 208; Parmenides, 18; philosophy praised by, 11; on reality/ideal forms, 279, 352–3n99; The Republic, 195, 259–60; Symposium, 185; Timaeus, 195. See also Neoplatonism

401

Pliny, 80 Poetics (Aristotle), 7, 26 poetry: and chivalry, 289; of courtly love, 220; vs. history, 15–16; humanists on, 11, 289; as imaginative literature, 289–90; oracular power of, 198–9; as a science, 11, 314n42 political legitimacy, consent-based, 54 political theory, 248 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 333n10 Poor Law (1540), 298 positive law, 318n81 Pradilla Barnuevo, Francisco de, 347n31 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 18, 335n32 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 167 primitivism/noble savage, 149–53 primogeniture, 5, 16, 48, 175, 191, 195, 352n96 The Prince (Machiavelli), 208 princely education, 32, 205, 208. See also espejo tradition printing press, 6 El privado christiano (Suárez de Mendoza), 209 profane literature, 300, 358–9n17 ‘Profecía del Tajo’ (León), 324n39 Protestant Church of Ireland, 64 Protestantism: vs. Catholic Church, 61, 279–80, 329n103, 348n44, 353n101; and the Inquisition, 163; Lutheranism, 65, 95, 121; on marriage reform, 331n119; restored by Elizabeth I, 163; on transubstantiation, 321n21. See also religious wars proto-feminism, 313n31 Prudentius, 184, 188 Psalm 113, 354n112

402

Index

purity of blood statutes, 298–9, 326n65, 339n70 Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de, 294; El Buscón, 127 Quint, David, 169–70 Quintilian, 11 Rabelais, François, 18 racial exclusion, 326n65 ratio studiorum, 248 realism, 3, 10, 103–4, 304, 359–60n23. See also under Persiles reality/ideal forms, 279, 352–3n99 reason/rationality: Aristotle as authority on, 57; barbarians distinguished from rational humans by, 57–8; vs. lust, 184–5, 187–9, 193 La Regenta (Clarín), 167, 304 religion. See Catholic Church; Persiles – religion; Protestantism religious reform: Catholic traditions, 30, 35, 96, 116–17 (see also Erasmism); and local religions, 128, 337n44; on marriage, 331n119; models of, 128 religious repression/Indexes, 30, 117, 163, 322n21, 335n24, 339n82. See also Inquisition religious wars, 64, 118, 161, 163, 225, 329n103, 333n10, 353n101, 356n7 Relox de príncipes (A. de Guevara), 208 Remus and Romulus, 81 The Republic (Plato), 195, 259–60 El retablo de las maravillas (Cervantes), 52 Revelation (John of Patmos), 125, 282 Revolt of the Alpujarras (1568–70), 264 Ribadeneyra, 157, 262; Tratado de la

religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano, 208 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 167 Riley, E.C., 7, 15–16, 81 Ripa, Cesare: Iconologia, 185 Ripalda, 85, 118 Rivers, Elias, 303 Rodrigo of the Visigoths, 89, 295, 359n18 Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci: Amadís de Gaula, 6, 14, 102, 153, 359n17 Rojas, Fernando de: La Celestina, 6 Rojas Zorrilla, Francisco de, 50 the romance: critical vs. conformist, 23; Don Quijote as, 23–4; and epic, 340n1; Greek vs. chivalric, 313n31; idealism/archaism of, 23–4, 103–4; light vs. darkness in, 33; vs. the novel, 7–8, 13, 24, 103–4, 318n89; Persiles as, 8, 24, 114; as a textual strategy, 24. See also under Don Quijote Roman empire: Christianization of, 268–9; scope of, 70 Roman law, 318n81 Romanticism, 3, 7–8 Rome: Alaric’s sacking of, 84, 95; Augustine on (see City of God); vs. Carthage, 203; crucifixion used in, 287; marvels of, 271–2; as model for Christian politics, 264–72; mythologized, 74; as New Jerusalem/Promised Land, 74, 82, 84, 160, 270; paganism of, 125, 158; prostitution in, 88; reformers’ attacks on corruption in, 95–6; soul city of, 184, 204, 342n27. See also under Persiles Romero, Carlos: on the Barbarians’

Index tents in Persiles, 324n43; on Heliodorus as a source for Persiles, 130; on El licenciado Vidriera, 348n41; on the mountain topos, 286; on Os Lusíadas, 342n36; on reference to Philip III in Persiles, 162; on Sensualidad’s oleander crown, 186; on sources for the Barbaric Isle, 50 Romulus and Remus, 81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 248 royal progress, 245 Sá, Leonor de, 220–1 Sabuco de Nantes, Oliva: Nueva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre, 317n70 Sacchetti, Maria Alberta, 312n29, 327–8n93, 333n10 Sacred Heart cult, 322n22 sacred law (grace), 318n81 sacrifice, human: the crucifixion as, 285, 287; in Ethiopian religion, 38; just war with Amerindians over, 277; by the Visigoths, 359n18; as widely diffused among religions, 322n24. See also heart-eating rituals Salazar, Catalina de, 4 Samson, 282 Sánchez el Divino, Miguel: La isla bárbara, 51 São João (ship), 220–1 Satyricon (Petronius), 18 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 9 Schevill, Rudolf, 9, 102, 321n19 Schmalkaldic wars, 64 School of Salamanca, 39 Scotland, 63–4, 163 Scythians, 88–9 Sebastião of Portugal, 66

403

Second Letter (Cortés), 321n19 self, conquest of, 194–5 Selig, Karl-Ludwig, 352–3n99 La selva de aventuras (Contreras), 6, 152 Seneca: Medea, 59, 71–3 sensuality: in the dream episode, 168, 175–8, 183–98, 204, 342n36; and pleasure, 187–9; sensitive soul as, 195–6. See also Venus Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 45, 57–8, 75, 151, 227, 277, 320n13 Seville, 336n33 shipwreck narratives, 149, 220–2, 338n62 Sigismunds of Poland, 62 silence, 194, 216–18, 222–4, 347n28 Silenus, 303 Silíceo, Archbishop, 298 Singleton, Max, 309n3 Skinner, Quentin, 53 social contractarian thought, 29, 39, 53–5, 248, 316n65 Soledades (Góngora), 73 Sonnet X (Garcilaso), 198, 200–2, 204, 300, 344–5n57, 345n60 Soto, Domingo de, 39 soul, sensitive, 195–6 Sousa Coutinho, Manuel de, 220–1 Sousa Sepúlveda, Manuel de, 220–1 sovereignty, popular, 54 Soyinka, Aké, 321n18 Spadaccini, Nicholas, 336n39 Spanish Conquest: Amadís de Gaula’s role in, 153; Antonio the younger and Costanza’s integration into Spain as challenging, 339n70; barbarism of, 39, 58, 320n13, 325n59; and the noble savage, 149–51

404

Index

Spanish Inquisition, 163, 261, 322n21, 335n24 Spanish literature, 13, 15, 315–16n62. See also specific genres state of nature as Barbaric Isle, 39, 53–4 Stoics/neo-Stoics, 18, 56, 136, 188, 194–5 Stoopen, María, 338n58 St Peter’s Basilica (Rome), 268 Suárez, Francisco: De legibus, 53 Suárez de Mendoza y Figueroa, Enrique, 310–11n8; Eustorgio y Clorilene, 6, 50, 209, 311n9 Symposium (Plato), 185 Tacitus, Publius: Germania, 151, 294 Talavera, Hernando de, 39 Tasso, Torquato: Aminta, 343n45; Discorsi del poema eroico, 14, 19–20; Este patronage of, 87; Ethiopica promoted by, 9, 14–15; on literary marvels, 26–7; on love vs. war in epic, 31. See also Gerusalemme liberata Tatius, Achilles: Leucippe and Clitophon, 310n8 Theodosius, 268 theology, 32, 105, 121–4, 147, 188–9, 217–18, 242, 286, 289. See also Paul, Saint Third Order of St Francis, 293–4 Thomas, Keith, 348n44 Thompson, Stith, 320n16 Thule: as limit of Roman Empire, 70–1; in Seneca’s Medea, 71–3; in Vergil’s Georgics, 69–71. See also under Persiles – geography Timaeus (Plato), 195 Toledo, 296–302

Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, 167 Tomás y Valiente, Francisco, 347n33 Tonantzin, 126 Torquemada, Antonio de: Coloquios, 176–7; Don Olivante de Laura, 21; Jardín de flores curiosas, 20–2, 51, 67, 127–8, 317n78 tourism, 332n4 translatio imperii (westward flow of authority), 59–60, 67–8, 73, 270 transubstantiation, 118, 321n21. See also Eucharist Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano (Ribadeneyra), 208 El trato de Argel (Cervantes), 52 travel literature, 332n4 Trent. See Council of Trent Trionfi (Petrarch), 177, 341n16 True History (Lucian), 18 Tudors, 68 typology: Christological, 32, 280–1, 283–9; definition of, 281; of Exodus/Promised Land, 145, 281–2, 354n112 (see also under Persiles – religion); figural, 281, 283, 285, 287–9; narrative invention via, 280, 289; Old and New Testaments linked by (exegesis), 135, 205, 277, 280–6, 354n107; popularization of, 286; vs. prophecy/allegory/eschatology, 283 tyranny, 257, 260, 264–5 Ulysses (Joyce), 304 universal monarchy, 66, 68 universities, restrictions on, 163 Urban II, Pope, 267

Index Uslar Pietri, Arturo, 360n23 Utopia (More), 18 Valdés, Alfonso de: Diálogo de las cosas occurridas en Roma, 95–6 Valdés, Juan de, 116 Valdés Index, 30, 117, 163 Valla, Lorenzo, 116 Valladolid, 57, 163–4 Valois, 68 Vargas, Tamayo de, 345n60 Vega, Garcilaso de la: courtesy associated with, 299–301; death of, 300; Egloga I, 300; Malón de Chaide on, 31, 359n17; on Mars and Venus, 168; as soldier-poet, 300, 302; Sonnet X, 198, 200–2, 204, 300, 344–5n57, 345n60; stature as a poet, 198, 202, 344n54 Vega, Inca Garcilaso de la, 45, 187; Comentarios reales, 53, 321n19, 323n29 Vega, Lope de, 102, 171, 310n8, 330n112, 350n69; Arte nuevo, 15, 56–7, 71, 343n45; in the Congregación de los Esclavos del Santísimo Sacramento, 294. See also El peregrino en su patria Vélez de Guevara, Luis, 294 Venus, 125–6, 185, 187, 189, 194, 196 Venus and Mars, 168, 191 Vergil: cursus honorum of, 314n36; in Dante’s Commedia, 140; Fourth Eclogue, 66, 322–3n25, 350n64; Georgics, 59, 69–71, 73; influence on Policarpo’s Isle passages, 9, 314n36. See also The Aeneid verisimilitude: as function of knowledge/sensibility, 22; neo-Aristotelian conception of, 19–20, 22,

405

81, 178, 195; and wonder literature/paradox, 22, 164 Viaje de Turquía, 18 La vida es sueño (Calderón), 4, 62, 209 Vidoni, Mariarosa Scaramuzza, 333n10 Vilanova, Antonio, 332n4, 334n12 Villalba y Estaña, Bartolomé de: El pelegrino curioso, 332n4 Virgin of Guadalupe (Mexico), 126, 235, 336n39 Virgin of the Apocalypse, 279 virtues: four cardinal, 259–60, 350n71; and vices, 184, 189 Visigoths, 84, 95, 218, 242, 295–9, 302, 356–7n7, 358n11, 359n18 Vitoria, Francisco de, 39, 53, 77; De Indis, 56–8 Wardropper, Bruce, 15, 152 Weber, Max, 128 werewolves, 80–1 Whitenack, Judith, 351n86 wild man motif, 324n48 Williams, Raymond, 27–8 Williamsen, Amy, 312n26 Wilson, Diana de Armas: on amorous theme of Persiles, 17; on androgyny of relation between Periandro and Auristela, 168; on the Barbaric Isle, 29, 34, 66, 74, 325n59; on Barbaric Law, 34; on barbaric shouts, 235–6; on the black staff, 186; on female protagonists in Persiles, 137; on ideological complexity of Persiles, 12; on Leonor and Sosa’s story, 212; on New World as stimulus for Persiles and Don Quijote, 313n32; on proto-feminism informed by androgyny, 313n31; on revenge

406

Index

killings, 78; on Rome in Persiles, 33; on unity in Persiles, 325n62; on virtues/vices’ moral economy, 184 Xenophon: Cyropaedeia, 208

Zárate, Francisco López de: Cruz y Constantino, 265–72, 351–2n87 Zayas, María de: ‘Estragos que causa el vicio,’ 57 Zimic, Stanislav, 312n26 Zion. See Jerusalem/Zion