Interpretations of the Renaissance in Spanish historical thought: the last thirty years.

In the decades immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the question of the Renaissance, which had never attracted much scholarly attention even before the war, almost completely disappeared from consideration in Spanish historical thought. Concerned with seeking a psycho-historical explanation of the catastrophic event which had shattered the political and social fabric of their society, historians turned more than ever to the Middle Ages in search of those peculiar strains that presumably shaped the national character and which in turn would provide an answer to past and present events. The reappearance of this romantic search for the elusive "popular spirit" of the nation was nowhere more evident than in the teachings of two major historians who from their exile in the Americas were to exert for quite some time an exorbitant influence on a new generation of scholars both within and outside of Spain. I am referring to Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, who founded in Argentina the most important center of Spanish medieval studies in the Hispanic world, and Americo Castro, a scholar of literature whose ideas were to have a wide and lasting appeal in the United States.(1) Their bitter and protracted polemic, seemingly based on irreconcilable differences, did not rest in essence on conflicting premises or historiographical methods. Where they diverged, rather, was in determining which ethnic or cultural traits of which particular groups that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula were ultimately responsible for the formation of the Spanish spirit, and at what point in history these characteristics had become evident. Searching for a formula that would explain the national character and, consequently, the behavior of Spaniards throughout the centuries, they both came to overemphasize permanence over change and continuity over discontinuity. In their overall vision of Spanish history, the idea of the Renaissance did not pose any problem and did not need any further clarification, for it was traditionally subsumed under a loosely applied notion of a Golden Age (Siglo de Oro), a period during which the "national spirit" was viewed as having unfolded in all its potentialities.

Reacting to this somewhat sterile controversy - which served only to divide historians and literary critics into two opposing camps - a young scholar, Jose Antonio Maravall, sought to propose as early as the mid-fifties a new interpretation of Spain's cultural history and its evolution toward national identity. Aware of the untenable premises underlying the polemic over the homo hispanus, and more receptive to the history of mentality, a newly introduced methodological approach favored mostly by French historians grouped around the Annales, he discarded the quest for formative strains based on the ethnic composition of past inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula and began to explore, through a new reading of old documents and through the utilization of new sources, the emergence and progressive elaboration of the concept of Spain as a historical construct.(2)

Though this study did not have any immediate effect on younger historians - who were still under the overwhelming influence of Castro and Sanchez-Albornoz - it was only a question of time before Maravall's new approach would begin to bear fruit. In fact, the results of his investigation - in which he traced the evolution of the idea of being hispanus, of belonging to a community called Hispania, and of living in a territory often described as las Espanas in historiographical accounts and other written records of the late Middle Ages - still remain a point of reference in medieval Spanish studies. Shifting attention away from the factors supposedly contributing to the national spirit or genius allowed him to pursue new and more promising areas of inquiry. His analysis of the changes in people's mentality through the ways they described their own lives, their concerns and the events of their times could not but lead Maravall to examine the question of the Renaissance, a period when the mental outlook of Spaniards seems to have undergone a noticeable change, especially in relation to a new form of political organization - the Spanish empire - which marked the beginning of the modern era.

In a study that appeared in 1960, dealing with the historical figure of Charles V as Spain's emperor and as a major player in the political life of Europe in the sixteenth century, Maravall became the first Spanish historian to join the ongoing discussion concerning the nature of the Renaissance in Europe.(3) His emphasis on understanding the Spanish Renaissance within the European context - which constitutes one of the basic goals of his study - was motivated mainly by the need to better elucidate the meaning of Charles V's policies in Europe. Equally important was his determination to examine the effect of these policies on the Spanish people, whose support was crucial to the realization of the emperor's plans and ambitions. These objectives, however, were not to be considered in isolation nor were they to be disassociated from the living culture of the time. For this reason, Maravall viewed the historical reality of the Renaissance as an organic whole comprising political doctrines, economic practices, religious feeling, moral beliefs, artistic and scientific thought, and all other forms of cultural expression having to do with the actions and aspirations of the people.

Central to his analysis was the political thought underlying the new phenomenon of the empire and the conditions that allowed the Habsburgs to introduce this institution in Spain in the early decades of the sixteenth century. What Maravall believed may have facilitated the acceptance of the empire were certain fundamental changes that had either occurred or were currently taking place in the social and cultural life of the people. Without such a transformation in Spanish society, he argued, it would be difficult to explain the emperor's policies, his conceptualization of power or the influence he exerted over the rest of Europe; it would be equally hard to arrive at an accurate assessment of what the Spaniards felt about, or how they reacted to, the new political role they were asked to play. Maravall's study, of course, was not merely restricted to a simple explanation of certain actions taken by the emperor or to an identification of political concepts and categories espoused by some humanists and other intellectuals of the time. Political ideas were used, rather, as guidelines for clarifying more complex forms of historical thinking and events, and as a means of delving into the economic, social and religious life of sixteenth-century Spain.

Both in scope and content, this study represented a departure from the traditional way in which the Renaissance had been described in Spanish historiography. The Spanish Renaissance, usually considered a late historical phenomenon, had generally been characterized either as a period in which more medieval traits had survived than in any other country, or, in a few cases, as an entirely new age modeled after Burckhardt's interpretation of the Italian Renaissance. In order to counter these prevailing explanations, Maravall dedicated the initial part of his study to clarifying the fundamental differences that separated medieval from Renaissance civilization. The criteria he used, never clearly stated but implied, were man's view of himself and of the world during the Middle Ages as outlined by Huizinga and Gilson, and the new outlook on life he found in the written records of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. If medieval man thought and acted as a creature bound to universalist goals, constrained as he was by the absolute power of the Church and incapable of asserting his own existence, in the Renaissance his relationship to the Church, the world and past history had definitively been altered.

There is no doubt that Maravall's interpretation owes a good deal to the renewed discussions generated by the radical revisions as well as rejections of Burckhardt's account of the Italian Renaissance. As we know, most of the resistance to Burckhardt's conclusions came from historians of the Middle Ages who minimized the originality of the Renaissance by insisting on previous Renaissances or by blurring any difference between the two periods. In the case of Spain, these claims helped to reinforce an already strong belief in the survival of medieval culture well into the Golden Age period. The view that medieval elements constituted a determining factor in the intellectual and artistic life of the Renaissance - long maintained by venerated scholars of medieval history and literature such as Sanchez-Albornoz, Menendez Pidal, and many of their disciples - had never been seriously challenged.(4) Hence, given this prevailing interpretation and the acquiescence of most Spanish historians, it is to Maravall's credit that he argued for a new idea of the Renaissance characterized by a homogeneous and well-defined cultural identity, fundamentally distinct from the medieval as well as the Baroque period.

The novelty of his formulation can be partly explained by his acquaintance with some of the latest research by European and American scholars in the field of Renaissance studies, a remarkable endeavor considering the isolation in which Spanish historians were working during the decades of the 1940s and '50s. Though no particular school could be said to have shaped Maravall's views, it is certainly true that the works of a number of contemporary scholars did provide additional support for the line of investigation he was pursuing. His early interpretation of the Spanish Renaissance as part of a wider European phenomenon remained basically unchanged throughout his very productive scholarly life. Within this general framework, he continued to analyze the peculiarity and originality of Renaissance culture, primarily as determined by the historical tradition of the country and conditioned by specific circumstances such as the incorporation of the New World into the political and social order of the Old, or the colonization of the American continent and its overall impact on Spanish society. Though in later studies Maravall did make slight modifications in his initial concept of the Renaissance, the basic tenets of his interpretation remained the same and continued to provide him with new areas of inquiry that eventually resulted in a series of extensive works which offer, both in depth and scope, the best documented account of fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish letters and thought.(5)

Regarding the origin of the Renaissance in Spain, Maravall identified three fundamental components: the empire, which until the sixteenth century was alien to the Spanish tradition;(6) the influence of Italian humanism, beginning in the early years of the fifteenth century; and a number of innovations (novedades) brought about by a series of changes within the autochthonous culture of Castilian society. Most noticeable in his analysis was the recognition of the medieval elements in the cultural life of Renaissance Spain even as he downplayed their significance as possible factors in shaping the artistic and intellectual achievements of the time. He deemed irrelevant the arguments of those historians who believed in a previous medieval Renaissance or who questioned the uniqueness of specific aspects that had been ascribed exclusively to the Italian and later on to the European Renaissance, for he felt that too much was being made of cultural traits and beliefs that were commonly found among people of both periods. In stressing historical continuity, it seemed understandable to him that if the Renaissance was the logical outcome of the Middle Ages - an idea which he never abandoned - one would always find overlapping elements or socio-economic forms of life that were common to both cultures.(7) Whether there were medieval elements in the Renaissance or Renaissance elements in the Middle Ages what is ultimately more important were the innovative elements that pervaded every aspect of each period's culture.

In sixteenth-century Spain, the most important medieval legacy one can find is that of the empire, a political institution that Charles V, raised outside of the country, was called upon to administer over people of different nationalities. But even this institution, deeply rooted in the political and religious doctrines of the European Middle Ages, was soon to undergo significant modifications due to the historical circumstances in which it had to operate. In fact, it fell to the emperor and his Spanish advisers to plan and carry out the political reforms that an incipient modern state demanded. Their immediate task was to rethink the old notion of the empire and to structure "a new universal political order not only capable of joining together the empire's diverse nationalities but also able to accommodate in it an entire new continent."(8) It was clear that in this process both the framework and the notion of the medieval Christian world that had given rise to the empire were no longer adequate to sustain it in its present form.

To stress his point that medieval elements in Renaissance Spain were of no real consequence, Maravall further argued that the various kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula had always been "less medieval" than those of other regions of Europe. He attributed such an anomaly to the kingdoms' unbroken link with their ancient Latin past, their geographic marginality within the medieval world, and their internal socio-political development. Despite these peculiarities, he did acknowledge certain medieval traits which were similar to those described by Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages.(9) It should be mentioned here that Huizinga's work, translated into Spanish shortly after its publication, has had from the very beginning an enduring influence on Spanish historians and literary critics.(10) The exceedingly favorable reception of his views remains unequaled to this day, and it is not difficult to find echoes of his interpretation even in the latest works of young historians. Notwithstanding Maravall's different conception of the Renaissance, he did find a number of artistic, religious, and socio-economic ties between Spain and the regions of Burgundy and Flanders that eventually resulted in a kind of cultural assimilation that was to make Spain an equal participant in the famous "waning or autumn of the Middle Ages." Because of these commercial and cultural connections, he went so far as to assign the origins of such typical Spanish artistic and religious manifestations as portrait painting, realism or mysticism to Flemish influence. The consortial relationship between these two distant regions predated the return of Charles V to Spain since, according to Maravall, it could be traced to the late Middle Ages. But just when the predominant cultural influx from Italy was about to sweep away the last traces of the Burgundian and Flemish influence, the arrival in Spain of the emperor with his entourage rekindled the interest in Burgundian culture and assured its survival throughout the sixteenth century.(11)

Regarding the second factor - namely the Italian influence - responsible for bringing about the Spanish Renaissance, Maravall relied in general on secondary sources. The fact that he never dedicated a specific study to an examination of those Italian humanists or men of letters who might have exerted an influence on their Spanish counterparts or through what channels, led him to often overstate some untested notions about this subject. One of these was his attributing the early development of the Renaissance in Spain to the long cultural relationship fostered by the commercial and political interactions between the two regions - a dubious claim since Italy also had strong ties with other regions of Europe. Nevertheless, because of this supposed special relationship, the Spanish Renaissance was, in Maravall's opinion, the closest to the Italian model.(12) He placed its beginnings in the early years of the fifteenth century, a view that in later studies he would reject, when actually the idea had sufficient merit to warrant further exploration. Since in his view it was the Spanish Renaissance that most faithfully reproduced Italian cultural models, he presented it - though with hardly any supporting evidence - as a kind of intermediary that facilitated the reception of Italian humanistic currents in other parts of Europe.(13)

The reason that no other historian had ever taken into consideration such an early date for the initial development of Renaissance humanism in Spain was due to an unusual displacement of attention in modern Spanish historiography. As Maravall rightly pointed out, the focus on the artistic and intellectual achievements of the seventeenth century had shifted the attention of scholars away from the initial stage toward the most evolved phase of Renaissance culture in Spain. Such a preference among critics and historians led in turn to the exclusion of the fifteenth century, a period of lesser literary and intellectual accomplishment but one that was actually more characteristic of Renaissance culture. According to Maravall, all the elements that defined the Spanish Renaissance were already present in the fifteenth century. What is most debatable about Maravall's conclusion, however, is his related assumption that the culture of the seventeenth century, having clearly developed into new and different forms, should not be included within the Renaissance at all. The term he adopted in subsequent studies for characterizing this century was Baroque, a word coined at the turn of the century and first applied to the visual arts, but which was increasingly being used by contemporary scholars of literature to designate a particular literary style.

Though Maravall rejected Burckhardt's specific formulation of the Renaissance, he did claim to be seeking the meaning of the Spanish Renaissance along the same lines of investigation first proposed by the Swiss historian. He found, in fact, in Burckhardt's interpretation five fundamental components that seemed to make up the world not only of the Italian but also of the European Renaissance in general: a return to classical antiquity, the discovery of man, interest in nature, a secularization of life, and the application of rational thinking in pursuit of new objectives. Since these trends did not develop simultaneously, one would not expect them to be found together within a particular national culture at any specific time. Hence, the absence of one or more of these traits in the cultural development of a nation did not mean that the country had not experienced a Renaissance, as some European scholars with a limited knowledge of Spanish culture had often asserted regarding Spain.

In order to correct this and other false assumptions, Maravall was to dedicate an extensive study to the evolution of these cultural tendencies and to a careful assessment of patterns of change in people's mentality which he believed to be major factors in bringing about the Spanish Renaissance. Central to his new undertaking was the examination of a common thread running through many social and cultural changes which derived, in his view, from the new attitude of the Spaniards toward their historical past. Through an exhaustive and almost encyclopedic compilation of documentary evidence from different sources, he traced the emerging idea of historical evolution as it was slowly being articulated in the writings of humanists and other men of letters (letrados) who, aware of living in a new era, were beginning to define their relationship with both the medieval and the ancient world.(14) As they acquired a new awareness of the past, first through imitation and eventually through emulation of the ancient authors, they also began to elaborate the idea of progress in their historical discussions, a revolutionary concept that by the sixteenth century had already become part of the collective ideology.(15) It should be mentioned that the appearance of the idea of progress, usually discussed in conjunction with the issue of the querelle des anciens et des modernes, was viewed, at the time of Maravall's investigations, as an important component in the development of the Renaissance and a criterion for determining the advent of the modern age.(16)

Though he brought to his analysis supporting evidence from fourteenth- through sixteenth-century documentation, the focus of his investigation remained fifteenth-century Spanish culture, since he was convinced that this particular period- a kind of Spanish Quattrocento - had a well-defined cultural identity that set it apart from other periods of Spanish history. It was indeed a key century in which a static culture began to stir and set in motion an irreversible process in which old cultural forms began to decline and new ones were born.

While in his previous work he had heralded this period as the first century of the Renaissance, in this study Maravall seemed less confident; although he assembled massive documentation pointing to a new age, he was much more careful when defining its transitional character. Describing the century as having at times those features of the Middle Ages outlined by Huizinga and others as displaying the many attributes of the Renaissance, in the end he concluded that the uniqueness of this century lay in its unprecedented critical outlook. Though he now assigned the beginning of the Renaissance to the second half of the century instead of the first, he still seemed hesitant to consider this period truly part of the new era. This uncertainty, I would guess, may somehow have been related to his limited understanding of certain intellectual currents, especially humanism, which he did not see in all its complexities. He seemed, in fact, to be unaware of the renewed interest in this area of study and of the work being done around the time he was writing by a number of distinguished scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

His treatment of humanism was particularly striking in that he regarded it as a minor movement within Renaissance culture. In his view, fifteenth-century humanism or "prehumanism" (he used both terms interchangeably), was nothing more than a literary current from Italy which entered Spain at the beginning of the century and altered the traditional attitude toward the study and appreciation of classical authors who - he assumed on hardly any evidence - had never really disappeared from the Spanish literary tradition. Convinced that Italian men of letters, beginning with Petrarch, were only interested in restoring the classical world, he tended to underestimate the potentiality of their new scholarly orientation. Their antiquarian interest, which Maravall often dismissed as arqueologizante, contributed no more to the Renaissance than did the protest of those critics, by which I assume he meant scholastic theologians and moralists who denounced the new literary trends from Italy as obstacles to the realization of moral reforms.(17) In this regard, Maravall recalls Burdach's assertion that the very name Renaissance had its roots in the image of spiritual rebirth promoted by the religious currents of the late Middle Ages.

In Maravall's scheme both the humanists and their detractors were part - albeit a small part - of the same Renaissance phenomenon. The first, because they no longer thought of the classical authors as repositories of a vague knowledge but rather as historical figures working and writing in a well-defined culture that one could imitate; the second, for their active contribution to the critical spirit which characterized the new age. Humanism, which Maravall perceived as a literary current made up of grammarians and rhetoricians chiefly interested in the study of ancient literature, should not be confused or equated with the Renaissance. In fact, according to his simplistic and Manichean view of humanism, the only humanists genuinely imbued with the spirit of the new age were those who had become aware of the ills of their society and who looked to ancient authors for lessons with which to solve the problems of the present. It was this type of humanist, rather than the one who slavishly imitated the style of classical authors, that was more commonly found in Spain during the Renaissance. To illustrate this type of humanism - which in a later study he defined as a "humanism looking to the future" rather than to the past(18) - Maravall mentioned the widespread use of the vernacular language among most sixteenth-century Spanish humanists, along with their preference for contemporary scholars over long deceased classical authors, a cultural trait with which he ventured to explain Erasmus's popularity in sixteenth-century Spain.

What Maravall did not seem to realize is that the use of the vernacular had seldom been considered demeaning or antithetical to the writing practices of the humanists, who as early as the middle of the fifteenth century, at least in Italy, made vernacular language the object of serious inquiry. As for the marked interest on the part of Spanish humanists in the thought of contemporary scholars, one need only point to the innumerable collections of letters humanists have left us to realize that this trait was characteristic of humanistic culture everywhere. Especially dubious is the dichotomy Maravall established between the few socially aware humanists who contributed to the Renaissance and the more numerous imitators of the classics whose works were of little or no value. Unaware, perhaps, of the impact that the new educational program based on the studia humanitatis had on every aspect of the culture of the time, Maravall misconstrued the social and political context out of which humanism arose. Surprisingly, these views were expressed at a time when both Baron and Garin were exploring the "civic" foundation and social commitment of early Florentine humanism.(19)

Maravall's consideration of humanism, which was a secondary objective in an investigation chiefly centered on the Renaissance, depended a great deal on indirect information. Though difficult to justify, such a reliance may be explained in part by the inaccessibility of primary sources as well as the unavailability of the latest studies in the field of humanism that were being published outside of Spain. But whatever the case, his subordination of the meaning of humanism to his concept of the Renaissance had the unfortunate result, in an otherwise valuable study, of impoverishing our understanding of the role of humanism in Spain and of not doing full justice to the culture of the Renaissance he was trying to highlight.

Another of Maravall's more arguable conclusions regarding humanism was his insistence on the continuity of this movement from the medieval to the Renaissance period. In his view, the noticeable increase in the number of references made to ancient authors and their works in the writings of fifteenth-century men of letters did not constitute anything new nor should it have been construed as a break with traditional culture. What he failed to explain, however, was the conspicuous absence of classical authors in the extant body of writings of the two previous centuries and the often anecdotal nature of the references whenever they were mentioned. By conceiving of humanism as a purely literary current, he ascribed to the movement an aristocratic character, seemingly justified by the fact that many members of the nobility played a major role in the literary life of society. Though he was the first historian to point to the substantive participation of the nobility in the literature of the time, he did not take into account the fact that, since the thirteenth century and beginning with King Alphonse the Wise, the nobility had always been at the center of Castilian literary activity. If anything, it was precisely in the fifteenth century that university-trained members from other sectors of society, whose academic preparation made them more receptive to the new intellectual current being promoted by humanists, began to assert themselves in society. Hence some early treatises on what was believed to constitute true nobility and the proliferation of comments on the Aristotelian concept of individual nobility (eugenia).(20)

Also puzzling is the explanation Maravall gave for the reaction of early humanists against the "moderns." Unconcerned with the original scholastic designation of the term "modern," he could not understand how Petrarch, who had been called the first modern man by some Italian scholars, could have had a "progressive" outlook and be at the same time against the "moderns" of his time.(21) He argued that humanists, whose interest in antiquity was - echoing Huizinga - nothing more than a nostalgic feeling for the lost beauty of the past, displayed a conservative attitude. Not only did they disapprove of all that was new, but they even were opposed to a pre-capitalist ethics. There is no doubt that certain issues concerning the Spain of his day were somehow interfering with his perception of the past.(22)

While much of what Maravall had to say about humanism is highly questionable, his thorough examination of the appearance and gradual semantic evolution of the word "modern" in Spain is, without doubt, most valuable. He traced the term from its first occurrences toward the beginning of the fifteenth century through the end of the next century and beyond. The small number of authors who first made regular use of this neologism would invariably employ it to designate people and things of the present time. A century later, as the word began to be used in contrast with and, occasionally, in opposition to antiquity, its meaning began to acquire connotations of evolution, advancement or improvement.(23)

In the intervening years, between the study just examined and his last extensive essay that appeared in 1982, Maravall returned twice to the question of the Renaissance.(24) In both articles - which are better classified as occasional papers - it is evident that he had not kept up with the latest investigations regarding European humanism. He was still debating issues of the fifties at a time when the older scholars with whom he disagreed, along with younger historians, had moved on to new areas of investigation that provided a much more accurate understanding of individual humanists from all parts of Europe, and consequently of Renaissance humanism as a whole. One explanation for this lapse was that during these years he had moved away from the question of the Renaissance in order to explore further the origin of the modern state as well as the culture of the seventeenth century, the age of the Baroque, which - as we have said before - he never considered part of the Renaissance.

In the last study, in which he dealt with the Spanish and French models of the Renaissance, Maravall reconfirmed many of the views we have already discussed.(25) As he brought to their logical conclusion a number of assumptions he had previously expressed, he made further modifications in his earlier concept of the Renaissance. Since he increasingly identified Renaissance with the birth of the modern state, he found that the model developed in both Spain and France was considerably different from the one that evolved in Italy. Maravall tells us that the Renaissance was not an intellectual movement ("movimiento de ideas"), as defined by Chabod, but a mental state ("estado de mentalidad"), informing people's activities at this particular juncture in European history. He continued to voice strong objections to the belief, stated decades earlier by Chabod and Garin,(26) that there was a break with the Middle Ages brought about by the Italian Renaissance, and he questioned not only the validity of such a discontinuity but also their assertion that the Renaissance originated in Italy. Indeed, although he conceded that humanism may have initially been an Italian cultural phenomenon, he concluded that the same could not be said of the Renaissance. Granting that some of the elements of the Renaissance - which he left unspecified - could have originated in Italy, he still insisted that their potentialities did not unfold to the fullest until they spread to other parts of Europe, where they found the right conditions for their development.

Much of Maravall's disagreement was with those who had interpreted the Renaissance as a rebirth of arts and letters, when he felt the determining factors were to be found, rather, in other intellectual and practical activities. He attributed this misconception to Burckhardt, who influenced later historians. The trend, however, dates back to Vasari and to an even earlier time,(27) when mention of a rebirth of learning can be found in many parts of Europe and most certainly in fifteenth-century Castile. Disregarding the historical development of the concept of the Renaissance, he equated the Renaissance with the modern age, a period which in turn was characterized by the emergence of the modern state. From this reasoning he deduced that a more realistic measure for gauging the full scope of the Renaissance in a particular culture was whether there were signs of an incipient modern state.(28) In Maravall's view, the Italian Renaissance should not have been used as a model for other European countries, precisely because in Italy the strong influence of the humanists prevented the rise of a modern state. Obviously, such a simplified definition tends to limit even further the meaning of the Renaissance.

In this essay, Maravall restated his view of the humanists and again minimized their contribution to the formation of the Renaissance mentality. We are told, for example, that philology - the most revolutionary humanistic discipline to grow out of the Renaissance - was simply another inconsequential linguistic exercise. Similarly, Nebrija's concern for a new Latin grammar or for that matter the preoccupation of other humanists with classical literature, simply demonstrated their isolation from society, a state not conducive to the understanding of the new world that was evolving around them. In addition, he disputed Garin's assertion that there was a correlation between humanism and the advancement of scientific thought, and objected to associating the studia humanitatis with the sciences of man, taking the latter to mean the equivalent of such modern disciplines as anthropology or ethnography.

Though he carried the authority of one of the most prolific and well informed historians of this century, especially in questions of Golden Age history, Maravall's conception of the Renaissance has not always been embraced by other Spanish scholars. In a well-researched study that appeared in 1970, Manuel Fernandez Alvarez gave a more balanced assessment of the Renaissance in Spain.(29) Fernandez Alvarez's main objective was to present a cross-section of the society of that time, with its rural and urban ways of life, and the social and economic composition of its people, from the "old Christians" to the "new Christians" and from the peasants to the nobility. He viewed the Renaissance as a distinct stage in the historical development of Western Europe, having its origins in Italy and extending to other parts of Europe between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth. Within the framework of world history, the Renaissance was also the period when Western Europe surpassed all other civilizations due to the unparalleled development of arts and sciences and the direct application of these to cultural, economic and political ends.

According to Fernandez Alvarez, there were two notable forces at work in Renaissance Spain: the centralization of power, which made possible the modern state; and the prevailing humanistic education, which brought about a secularization of culture. In contrast with Maravall's opinion, he maintained that it was humanism that was ultimately responsible for promoting the renewal of learning and ideas and for stimulating the growth of arts and sciences, as shown in the artistic achievements and technological improvements of this period. In short, it was this pervasive intellectual movement which would transform all aspects of Renaissance culture and introduce a new aesthetic ideal, inspired by the humanists' conception of classical beauty.

Toward the last decades of the sixteenth century, however, notable changes were occurring in the socio-political and economic life of Spain which would alter the course of its development. According to Fernandez Alvarez it was during the reign of Philip II, in fact, that the country embarked on the long process of tibetizacion, a term coined by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset in the 1920s. Based on the word Tibet, it was meant to describe the isolation of Spain from the rest of Europe. Yet this supposed withdrawal - which would come to exemplify all that was wrong with Spanish society for a long time to come - was based more on intuition than on historical fact. While it does not explain the far more complex phenomenon of the decline of Spain, a general decadence that also marked the end of the Renaissance, this oversimplified interpretation has found approval among a number of critics. In recent years, however, the idea of an inward collapse, shared by Fernandez Alvarez and other historians, has come under closer scrutiny as part of the reassessment of this period. Not only is the idea of Spain's isolation being reexamined but so are certain issues relating to the so-called "black legend," involving the repressive policies of the state and the intolerant practices of the Inquisition, exacerbated by the Counter Reformation.

Fernandez Alvarez's coherent presentation of the Spanish Renaissance provides a useful picture of the life and culture of this period. It is unfortunate that in the last twenty-five years no similar synthetic overview of the Renaissance has been undertaken that would incorporate the latest research in this field.

An area of Renaissance studies that has continued to attract some scholarly attention during the last decades is the vast body of writings left behind by humanists and other intellectuals of the period. Apart from occasional monographic studies on specific works or thinkers of the time, there have also been a few attempts to group together authors representative of various currents of thought which have put some order into such an extensive and varied corpus of speculative thinking. Unfortunately, what is often sacrificed in this type of enterprise is an in-depth analysis of individual treatises, which would take into account, among other things, the author's method and intentions, the specific issues being addressed, or the work's reception.

Leaving aside old histories of philosophy and other general accounts often found in manuals of literature,(30) Miguel Battlori's concise assessment of Renaissance thought merits some consideration. It covers the Iberian Peninsula (including Catalonia, Aragon and Portugal) and represents an early attempt to arrive at a systematic account of the diversity of ideas circulating in the entire region over the span of almost three centuries. Written in collaboration with Ricardo Garcia Villoslada, it was originally meant to serve as an introduction to the Spanish section of the Grande antologia filosofica.(31) Though the presentation of such a broad spectrum of material is necessarily schematic, due to the nature of the publication, his study offers, both in content and organization, a number of points that are worth mentioning. First among these is his assertion that humanistic and Renaissance thought are one and the same, thus establishing an indissoluble link between humanism as an intellectual movement based on the study of the humanities and the Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon identified with a particular period of European history. And since he perceives the philosophy of this period as "an attitude more than a doctrine, a culture more than a system," it follows that the thought of Renaissance humanism in Spain reflected the problems of modern people in relation to the changing world around them.(32)

According to Battlori, humanism appeared rather early in the regions of Catalonia and Aragon. In his view, a clear break with the Middle Ages occurred toward the second half of the fourteenth century when a few learned men began to pursue humanistic goals in their scholarly works. Without specifying how widespread this movement was, Battlori indicates that there were scholars interested in Latin and Greek authors who translated or sponsored translations from the classics and even searched for ancient texts. Humanism continued to flourish throughout the fifteenth century, the period of its highest achievements, but began to decline toward the end of the century, as Castile increasingly became the dominant power of the peninsula.

Battlori's informative, though brief, discussion of Catalan and Aragonese humanism serves to illustrate how extensively the movement had spread throughout the Peninsula in the fifteenth century. What is questionable, however, is whether he is justified in drawing the inferences he does about a supposed early development of humanism in these regions during the second half of the fourteenth century, given the evidence on which he relies. In the first place, the approach of a Juan Fernandez de Heredia or a Bernat Metge to the study of the classics does not differ from the way in which medieval men of letters had traditionally dealt with ancient authors. And while it is true that there is an increase in the use of classical texts at this time, it is also true that there are no indications of the philological, historical or pedagogical concerns that we usually associate with the humanist movement. Equally unsustainable is his proposition that such an early manifestation of humanism was brought about by certain conditions, namely the contacts that these regions had established with Southern Italy, the Catalan conquest of Byzantine cities and the influence of the papal court at Avignon. None of these factors, which would necessarily be contingent on an advanced state of classical studies or on a preexisting humanist movement in these areas, taken separately or in combination, proves the existence of an early Catalan Aragonese humanism. Similarly unconvincing is his assumption that Juan Fernandez de Heredia's interest in the Greek language or in a few ancient Greek authors is grounds for speaking of a Hellenistic current or for asserting that in these regions a Hellenistic humanism preceded the Latin.

If there was an incipient humanism in these regions, one wonders why it did not have any influence on the neighboring kingdom of Castile where, according to Battlori, the first manifestations of the movement did not appear until a later date. In fact, he places the beginning of humanism in Castile in the early decades of the fifteenth century and the origin of the Renaissance at the time of the Catholic Kings, that is to say toward the last quarter of the century. Moreover, while he points to the importance of the Church Councils during the first half of the fifteenth century as the places where Castilian representatives began to formulate their concept of a Renaissance state, he does not call attention to the fact that these Councils also provided the opportunity for a number of early Spanish humanists to become acquainted with the works and ideas of humanists from Italy and other parts of Europe.

In Battlori's estimation, the cultural rebirth in Castile was not confined solely to the disciplines of the humanities, but was instead a much wider revival, encompassing philosophical and scientific speculation as well as religious thinking, both theological and mystical. What is notable in Battlori's study is his classification of the disparate currents of thought within each of the three regional cultures of the Iberian Peninsula - namely Catalonia-Aragon, Castile and Portugal. Regarding the Castilian Renaissance, he is the first scholar to include among the different schools of thought the Vivistas (followers of Vives) and the Erasmistas (followers of Erasmus).

But while the traits common to Vives and the Vivistas have remained largely unexplored, certain writings of Erasmus and the Erasmistas have attracted considerable attention to the point that Erasmus has come to be regarded, during the last fifty years, as the most prominent figure of the Spanish Renaissance. There is a certain irony in this, considering the fact that Erasmus, who never liked and perhaps even despised Spain, has now been made to represent all the positive aspects of its Renaissance.

There are, of course, historical explanations for the reevaluation and subsequent mythification of Erasmus in Spanish Renaissance studies. The process began with Marcel Bataillon's study Erasme et l'Espagne, published during the Spanish Civil War, in which he placed on one side of the scale a very influential historical figure - but still one man - and on the other an entire national culture.(33) The intent of his investigation was not so much to give an account of the reception of Erasmus's ideas in Spain, but rather - as the title Erasmus and Spain implies - to examine the interactions and ensuing conflicts between two contrasting spiritual ideologies. Bataillon's objective was to show how in the second decade of the sixteenth century, Erasmus's concept of inner spirituality - which represented the most progressive form of religious sentiment in the Europe of the time - came to confront the medieval spirituality of the Spanish tradition with its ostentatious forms of worship, its intolerance and its prejudice, all protected by a newly instituted Inquisition. Some of Erasmus's works, translated into Spanish, were widely read and his main ideas, whether they emanated from him directly or his followers, had a profound impact on the religious thinking and practices of the time. Though Erasmus's books were ultimately banned in 1559, the seeds of opposition he had planted during the previous forty-five years had taken root in the spiritual landscape of Renaissance Spain. Bataillon's emphasis on the novelty of the ideas introduced by Erasmus and on their rapid diffusion among the intellectuals of that time, led him to assume that all unorthodox forms of spirituality derived exclusively from this most influential humanist. This assumption was later challenged by Eugenio Asensio, a keen observer of the spiritual life of Renaissance Spain. In an extensive study that appeared in 1952, Asensio amassed a good deal of evidence showing that a number of spiritual movements - which the French critic attributed to the direct influence of Erasmus - were actually the outcome of certain religious trends that had originated within the Spanish tradition.(34)

Despite Asensio's more cautious assessment regarding the reception of Erasmus's ideas in Spain, it was Bataillon's initial perception of a pervasive Erasmian influence that was more widely embraced. In fact, by the 1960s his view had become an essential point of reference for a new generation of scholars of the Renaissance. What attracted these young scholars to Erasmus was the authority of his erudition, his alternative form of spirituality and, above all, the liberal values, in the modern sense, they associated with his learning and ideas. In essence, Erasmus came to represent the enlightened European thinking that was missing in the Spain of their day. For these and other reasons he was seen, therefore, as a precursor of intellectual dissent, his ideas taking on certain overtones of social and political opposition. Against the religious and political dogmatism of Church and State, Erasmus's beliefs became a source of inspiration for those who sought a reformed society.

The historian of ideas who best captured the significance of Erasmus's thought in the intellectual climate of the 1960s and '70s was Jose Luis Abellan. In formulating what Erasmus meant to him and his generation, he highlighted certain social and political elements of Erasmian thought which he believed other scholars had overlooked. To describe the enduring impact that the Dutch humanist had on Spanish Renaissance culture, he utilized for the first time the term erasmismo in a normative manner. The word, which had already been used when referring to the works and beliefs of Erasmus, thus acquired a new meaning, as it came to indicate a particular intellectual movement which, inspired initially by Erasmus's ideas, presumably underwent a peculiar evolution in Spain, to the point of becoming a permanent strain in Spanish historical thought.(35) That Abellan's study was aimed more at a recontextualization of Erasmus's ideas for present day readers than at a dispassionate examination of his influence in Renaissance Spain becomes quite clear from the very beginning. As he stated in the prologue to the first edition, it was inevitable that in writing the book he would find himself reflecting on the analogy between sixteenth-century attitudes and those of the present day. Even more telling was the hope he expressed that his study might serve as an inspiration to those who had been advocating the europeizacion of Spain, that is to say the construction of a modern democratic society along the lines of the most industrialized countries of Europe. Obviously, it was this particular concern that prompted Abellan to see sixteenth-century Erasmism as the last intellectual movement through which Spain participated fully in the cultural life of Europe before the so-called tibetizacion.

Though he asserted that "Erasmus was a Dutchman but Erasmism is Spanish" - a challenging proposition with which he summarized both the peculiarity and originality of the movement he set out to examine - Abellan's study turned out to be more descriptive than analytical. By limiting himself to a new reading of the preexisting evidence, he did not provide nor did he seek to provide additional documentation that would strengthen his contention that there was a well-defined and recognizable Erasmist movement in Renaissance Spain. In the end, this point remains, in my opinion, unsubstantiated. At best one can accept Abellan's concept of Erasmism as a metaphor for religious and even social dissent or for the yearning for a spiritual and intellectual way of life that one frequently finds in the writings of that time. Even so, the arguments with which he attempts to make Spanish humanists fit an arbitrary Erasmian model remain generally unconvincing. A case in point is Vives, a most important representative in his own right of both Spanish and European Renaissance thought, whom Abellan insisted on calling Erasmist. His conclusion was ultimately based not so much on Vives' works, which - as already mentioned - remain largely unstudied, but on his friendship with Erasmus, with whom he did share certain concerns, and on his being a converso (a Jew converted to Christianity), since it was believed that most followers of Erasmus came from this sector of Spanish society. But leaving aside these shortcomings - deriving mainly from his belief in a predominant Erasmist movement - Abellan's study does have the merit of discussing many other aspects of Spanish Renaissance culture, too numerous to comment on here. This study, in fact, is only an introduction to themes and issues he later explored at greater length in one of the volumes of his monumental history of Spanish thought devoted exclusively to the Golden Age.

In recent years we have been witnessing a new trend in Renaissance studies. Historians no longer seem particularly concerned with problems of interpretation, characterization or chronological demarcation. Their investigations are mainly directed, through the study of documentary evidence, at understanding every aspect of life in the past, dealing with a wide range of issues and questioning long established historiographical categories such as decadence, cultural isolation, cultural belatedness and even the role of the Inquisition. It is not surprising that in this general revision, more attention is also being paid to the discovery and colonization of the New World, which has hitherto been considered a somewhat marginal aspect of the Spanish Renaissance. Another area of Renaissance studies that seems to be undergoing a revival is Spanish humanism, as we gather from a number of studies that have appeared of late. In the near future, I hope to give an assessment of this renewed interest in humanism and of the contributions being made in this field by scholars of both literature and classical studies.

GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER, CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK 

1 The journal, Cuadernos de historia de Espana, founded in 1944, became the official publication of the Instituto de Historia de Espana of which Sanchez-Albornoz was the director. He had a wide influence among historians, while Castro had a similar impact on critics and historians of literature both in the United States and in Spare. The latter's emphasis on the Jewish and Arabic elements in the formation of the Spanish national character, the centerpiece of his historical interpretation, became a symbol of opposition during the Franco regime. Their opposing views are laid out in Americo Castro's La realidad historica de Espana (Mexico City, 1954) and in Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz's Espana un enigma historico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956).

2 Jose Antonio Maravall, El concepto de Espana en la Edad Media, 2d ed. (Madrid, 1964).

3 J. A. Maravall, Carlos V y el pensamiento politico del Renacimiento (Madrid, 1960). Some of the material included in this book had already appeared in articles or had been presented as papers.

4 These views, which Maravall rejects, are repeated and exaggerated by E. Curtius in a chapter specifically entitled "Spain's Cultural Belatedness"; see his European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W.T. Trask (New York, 1953), 541-43. It should be pointed out that when Spanish historians and literary critics speak of the survival of medieval elements as significant factors in the Renaissance, they are usually referring to the "popular" component which supposedly coexists, in all its ramifications, with the erudite culture of the time.

5 Of his many articles, collections of studies and books on this period, suffice to mention just a few of his works: Estado mode, no y mentalidad social: siglos XV a XVI, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1972); La cultura del Barroco (Barcelona, 1975); Utopia y reformismo en la Espana de los Austrias (Madrid, 1982); La literatura picaresca desde la historia social: siglos XVI y XVlI (Madrid, 1985).

6 Maravall, Carlos V, 9 ff.; see also El concepto de Espana, chap. 9.

7 Maravall, Carlos V, 18, where he extensively quotes Huizinga on this matter.

8 Ibid., 51, my translation.

9 Johan Huizinga, El otono de la edad media, Span. trans. J. Gaos, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1930).

10 Even Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, La idea de la fama en la edad media (Mexico City, 1952), may have been inspired by Huizinga.

11 Maravall, Carlos V, 18ff.

12 Ibid., 16: "En formas artisticas, literarias, politicas, de tecnicas literarias, de vida social la proximidad de la vida espafiola a la italiana es superior a la de ningun otro europeo."

13 Ibid., 16. To this effect, he quoted a French translation of Vitruvius published in 1539 from a Spanish version.

14 J.A. Maravall, Antiguos y modernos. La idea del progreso en el desarrollo inicial de una sociedad (Madrid, 1966). Maravall joins a host of other scholars who around this time are writing on this issue. He is particularly inspired by the study of G. Margiotta, Le origini italiane della 'querelle des anciens et des modernes' (Rome, 1953), which he tries, with great success one might add, to emulate.

15 Spanish Renaissance culture produced what, as far as we know, is the first treatise in which the ancient world is compared with the modern, an issue which toward the end of the sixteenth century was to become known as la querelle des anciens et des modernes. The dialogue, Ingeniosa comparacion de lo antiguo y lo presente (Madrid: Bibliofilos Espanoles, 1898), decidedly favors the modern world. A printed edition of the work, which has been attributed to Cristobal de Villalon, appeared in 1539.

16 For a thorough examination of this issue and how it has been seen by modern historians, see H. Baron, "The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Present Renaissance Scholarship." It first appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959) and was reprinted in a revised version in Renaissance Essays, ed. P.O. Kristeller and P.P. Wiener (New York, 1968); it is now included, with additional changes, in his collection of studies, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1988), 72-100. Evidently, Baron's study did not come to Maravall's attention.

17 Maravall, Antiguos y modernos, chap. 5.

18 See n. 24.

19 Though humanism manifested itself in different ways in accordance with the cultural tradition of each country, there are nevertheless certain underlying practices and aspirations that these manifestations share to some degree. It seems unlikely that Spanish humanism would be so radically different from its Italian counterpart. For the socio-political aspect of Italian humanism, see H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966; 1st ed., 1955); or the series of articles by E. Garin predating his Scienza e vita civile nel Rinascimento Italiano (Bari, 1965) or L 'educazione in Europa, 1400-1600 (Bari, 1966).

20 A treatise by Mosen Diego de Valera, Espejo de verdadera nobleza, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. M. Penna (Madrid, 1959) was translated into French with the title of Tresor de la noblesse and published in Paris in 1497.

21 Though no reference is made to any particular scholar, Maravall seems to point to E. Garin's "La cultura fiorentina nella seconda meta del Trecento e i barbari Britanni" which first appeared in Rassegna della letteratura italiana 64 (1960) and was later included in L'eta nuova (Naples, 1969), 139-66. Garin returned to the topic in his "Petrarca e la polemica con i moderni" in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bari, 1975), 71-88.

22 The blurring of present with past issues and concerns in nowhere more evident than in another study in which he proposes to shed light on the socio-economic background of a well-known literary work, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as La Celestina, composed sometime in the last decades of the fifteenth century. In El mundo social de la Celestina (Madrid, 1968), Maravall gives us a picture of the world of the time, in which certain social patterns of the clase ociosa (leisure class), resulting from the new economic forces of an incipient capitalism, are not much different from those described by T. Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1953). First published in 1899, Veblen's study, a critique of mature capitalism, is hardly analogous to the historical reality of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spare.

23 Maravall, Antiguos y modernos, see chapters in pt. 3.

24 J.A. Maravall, "Un humanisme tourne vers le futur: litterature historique et vision de l'histoire en Espagne au XVIe siecle," L'humanisme dans les lettres espagnoles, ed. A. Redondo (Paris, 1979), 337-48; "El Pre-Renacimiento del siglo XV," Nebrija y la introduccion del Renacimiento en Espana, Actas de la III Academia Literaria Renacentista (1981), ed. V. Garcia de la Concha (Salamanca, 1983), 17-36.

25 J. A. Maravall, "La diversificacion de modelos del Renacimiento: Renacimiento frances y Renacimiento espanol," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 390 (December 1982): 551-614.

26 The reference to F. Chabod is to a work which appeared in the Actes du Colloque sur la Renaissance (Paris, 1958), a colloquium held two years earlier, whereas Maravall's reference to E. Garin is to the "Interpretazioni del Rinascimento" from Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari, 1954), which dates back to 1950.

27 W.K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1948); and the later account by C. Vasoli, which includes a valuable assessment of the interpretations put forth during the intervening twenty years, Umanesimo e Rinascimento (Palermo, 1969).

28 For a detailed and analytical presentation of the latest interpretations regarding the question of the State and of the economic and social history of the Spanish Golden Age, see Jean-Frederic Schaub, "La penisola iberica nei secoli XVI e XVII: la questione dello Stato," Studi Storici 36 (1995): 9-49; and Bartolome Yun Casalilla, "Cambiamento e continuita. La Castiglia nell'impero durante il secolo d'oro," ibid.: 51-102.

29 M. Fernandez Alvarez, La sociedad espanola del Renacimiento (Salamanca, 1970).

30 Not considered here are J.A. Maravall's Estudios de historia del pensamiento espanol. El Renacimiento (Madrid, 1984), which is a collection of studies of an eclectic nature on topics and issues of the time, including the articles we have examined and Jose Luis Abellan, Historia critica del pensamiento espanol. Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1979), vol. II, which is clearly an improvement, both in accuracy and organization, on M. Solana's Historia de la filosofia espanola. Epoca del Renacimiento, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1941). Abellan's El erasmismo espanol, referred to above, is a separate study which he later included in his Historia critica.

31 The introduction first appeared in Italian, Miguel Battlori, "Il pensiero della Rinascenza in Spagna e Portogallo," Grande antologia filosofica (Milan, 1964), 7:280-337, later translated and revised in his Humanismo y Renacimiento (Barcelona, 1987), 1-51.

32 Ibid., 3ff.

33 Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (Paris, 1937). I am using the Spanish translation, Erasmo y Espana. Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, 2d ed., trans. A. Alatorre (Mexico City-Buenos Aires, 1966).

34 Eugenio Asensio, "El erasmismo y las corrientes espirituales afines," Revista de Filologia Espanola 35 (1952): 31-99.

35 Jose Luis Abellan, El erasmismo espanol (Madrid, 1976). The study was later included in its entirety in the second volume of his Historia critica del pensamiento espanol, op. cit.