Diego López de Cortegana was, according to the eminent Hispanist Marcel Bataillon, the most interesting literary figure among the select ecclesiastics of sixteenth-century Seville. Cortegana was, after all, responsible for the first Spanish version of Erasmus’s Querela Pacis and, probably more important still, his was the first Castilian translation of Apuleius’s Asinus aureus (The Golden Ass), a metamorphosis story widely read and crucial for the development of a new kind of fiction in Spain: the picaresque novel. However, he was not only a man of letters. Cortegana was deeply imbued in the turbulent political and religious conflicts of his time, including the conflictive establishment of the Inquisition in the Sevillian area. This collection of essays successfully approaches such a fascinating figure. It not only summarizes and updates existing research on Cortegana’s political, religious, and literary endeavors, but it also ends up offering a compelling, multilayered cultural history of Seville between 1480 and 1525.
The first chapters deal with education, publishing, and translations in Seville at the time of Cortegana. One persuasive idea in most of these essays is that humanism had a singular appeal in Seville because it was either instrumental or congenial to domestic debates about diversity within a city marked by religious tensions. We are reminded that the humanist embrace of classical antiquity entailed a rejection of the Middle Ages and a disdain for the Arabic culture, and that this “not very flattering facet of Renaissance humanism” fit perfectly and gave cultural support to the process of “liquidation of the cultural plurality characteristic of the mudejar period” (Solís de los Santos, 54). Also, we are enticingly told that Seville was a pioneer in the translation and publication of Erasmus in the peninsula because “the debate about tolerance and the value of dialogue,” so central to the thought of the Dutch humanist, was also pivotal for important sectors of the Sevillian ecclesiastical élites (Pérez García, 83).
The same cluster of essays also dwells on the emergence of a new reading public in Seville at the time. Aristocrats and a new urban middle class not particularly proficient in Latin but drawn to the classics became interested in adapting “the examples, themes, forms, and even the language of the Latin classics” to their cultural milieu (Lazure, 91). And they did so mainly through translations that they could now finance and consume. This context helps to understand why a book such as The Golden Ass was translated and so warmly received.
García Pinilla focuses on Cortegana’s agitated political life in the Inquisition and the Cabildo of Seville. Here we behold a Cortegana deeply immersed in the political disputes of his time and we also see how his alliances (mainly his dependence on the archbishop De Deza) were key in his rise and fall. What is important for his literary endeavors, which gained impetus when he was dismissed from the Inquisition in 1509, is his acquaintance with Italian humanism during his stays in Rome while working for the Holy Office. Even though we have information about Cortegana’s participation in the Inquisition, we do not know entirely the extent of it. Though it is never stated in this way, however, one gets the impression from these essays that Cortegana’s political involvements, including his keen participation in the Inquisition, were driven by opportunism and by the sheer will to secure for himself a steady income.
The rest of the book offers a broad analysis of Cortegana’s works. Both García Pinilla and Escobar Borrego pay close attention to Cortegana’s 1520 translation of Erasmus’s Querela Pacis. Both agree that this work should not be read, as it has often been, as the work of an Erasmian humanist. Erasmism, they contend, did not yet exist in Spain in 1520 and it also implied a commitment to Eramus’s spiritual ideas, which they do not find in Cortegana. However, they affirm that the Querela Pacis laid “the basis for the subsequent adaptation of this spiritual tendency” in Spain (Escobar Borrego, 147).
Cortegana’s least-studied literary endeavors — such as his translations of two treatises by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, and his emendation of a chronicle of King Ferdinand — are also interestingly addressed. But it is his Castilian translation of the Asinus aureus that attracts the most attention. The last chapters remind us of the thematic and structural traits that make this translation one of the decisive steps toward realist fiction in Spain, as they identify the readers and books that most significantly assimilated Apuleius’s model, and also pause to describe Cortegana’s style. Last but not least, all these essays tackle the controversial question of whether Lucian’s Ass had a comparative role in the development of the picaresque novel in the peninsula. The conclusion seems unanimous: even though Lucian’s work was also widely read in humanist circles, Apuleius’s book (through Cortegana’s translation) was far more important for the emergence of a new kind of literature.
The book also includes an appendix with unpublished documents (frontispieces, letters, pages with annotations by Cortegana, etc.) that will surely encourage and facilitate new research on such a fascinating figure. Intellectual and cultural historians as well as literary critics of early modern Europe will surely welcome this rich volume, full of information and insight.
