Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II.

Ronald W. Truman, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II 

(Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 95.) Leiden: Brill, 1999. viii + 414 pp. $129.50. ISBN: 90-04-11379-7.

This volume examines twelve sixteenth-century Spanish political treatises by as many authors, most of which have been little discussed in English before. Truman's aims are modest; disclaiming any intention to study "an area of political thought in the more systematic and professional sense" (10), he offers instead a compilation of twelve methodical close readings, varying in length from ten to forty-five pages, evidently written over many years. Wary of any ambitious interpretative scheme, he describes as much as analyzes his texts, and defers consistently to the acknowledged experts on fundamental questions. One will not find here any bold revisions to established orthodoxies about sixteenth-century political thought or Spanish history. In some chapters, biographical and bibliographical details even threaten to crowd out the main argument. But such details will be of considerable interest to specialists. Overall the twelve essays are erudite, fastidiously researched, and written in thankfully clear prose. Re aders who prefer to read them selectively will be grateful for the meticulous tripartite index.

An introductory chapter surveys the history of the "mirror of princes" genre from Carolingian times to the Renaissance, highlighting the problems Christian writers faced in balancing classical with Christian notions of virtue, and in weighing the claims of "moral and religious principle on the one hand and political expediency on the other" (30). While such an introduction suggests that the twelve treatises discussed in subsequent chapters all belong to this genre, in fact only half of them do. The twelve authors, with one chapter devoted to each, are grouped into four subdivisions. The first comprises three princely advice books by Spaniards writing in the Netherlands: Sebastian Fox Morcillo, Felipe de la Torre, and Fadrique Furio Ceriol. (Unlike the other nine works treated, these were never published in Spain.) The second subdivision discusses three advice treatises for the civic officials known as regidores and corregidores, by Joan Costa, Juan de Castilla y de Aguayo, and Jeronimo Castillo de Bobadilla. A third is devoted to Aragonese authors Tomas Cerdan de Tallada, Jeronimo Merola, and Marco Antonio de Camos y Requesens. The final section treats the Jesuit writers Juan de Torres, Pedro de Ribadeneyra, and Juan de Mariana. While the works in the first and last subdivisions are indeed princely advice books, the six in between deal with a wider range of questions of social and civic order, jurisdiction, and civic duty.

While Truman's analytical focus varies somewhat from chapter to chapter, his most constant interest throughout the book is in such traditional themes as the tension between classical and Christian moral theory. One frequently recurring quest is for the influence of Machiavelli and Erasmus, both overt and implicit. Truman's exaustive source-hunting confirms, in the tradition of Marcel Bataillon, that Spanish writers were far from isolated from mainstream European intellectual discourse. Truman shows authoritatively that his authors were well read in the classics; that secular (particularly legal) learning and practical wisdom were as important in Spanish political discourse as natural law; and that the Inquisition's control over sixteenth-century printing was wholly imperfect.

Truman's tendency to place these texts in the broadest possible historical context does not do equal justice to all of them, for many deserve to be understood in a regional and national political context as well as an international academic one. The three Aragonese treatises, for example, Truman presents mainly as discourses on the theory of society informed by the "Great Chain of Being," saying nothing about the debates over regional privilege and constitutionalism that concerned all Aragonese political writers at this time; all three treatises he discusses were, after all, written within a decade of the 1591 uprising of Aragon against the Spanish monarchy, which he does not mention.

Many choice historical observations arise from Truman's careful textual research, especially concerning the Inquisition. For instance, Joan Costa, writing in the 1580s while Professor of Rhetoric in Salamanca, suggests that there was no regular Inquisitorial inspection of bookshops, despite stringent legal mandates (148). And Truman's close attention to Inquisitorial censorship yields a fascinating description of how censors could dutifully delete the name of a proscribed author from a text while leaving untouched the expression of that same author's ideas (181-82). More details like these, and Truman's abundant citations, will be of great interest to scholars ad early modern Spain.