This is quite simply one of the most phenomenal books I have read in the last decade. Professor Giles’s analysis is brilliant, not just in patches, but in a consistent manner that is sustained throughout the discussion. The topic is fresh and original. This book will force us to read medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature in new ways. I cannot overstate my enthusiasm about this volume. Allow me to elaborate.
In 2011 I reviewed Giles’s The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain in the pages of this journal, and the assessment was largely favorable. A glimmer of his future intellectual trajectory was already visible in that work, which described saints as ambivalent due to their ability both to bless and to curse. That book focused on specific saintly figures invoked in picaresque texts such as the Celestina, Lazarillo, Lozana andaluza, and the Libro de buen amor.
Dr. Giles’s latest achievement concentrates on some of these same titles, but with a very different emphasis: his work has taken a turn toward material culture and book history to consider amulets as cultural artifacts and explore their incorporation (often in a literal, bodily way) into works of both canonical and extra-canonical Spanish literature. Amulets, also known as nóminas, are defined as “brief documents or ‘cédulas’ consisting of holy names and prayers in Latin, Romance, or combined with words from foreign languages” (18). They were often sewn shut and believed to lose their power if read aloud or even unsealed. They were condemned by the Catholic Church and eventually the Inquisition as superstition, i.e., “baseless observances wrongly added to (super) institutionally prescribed forms of devotion” (19). Nonetheless they were wildly popular, in manuscript form and later in print, appearing both narratively and in pictorial illustrations incorporated into editions of the texts being cited. The aspect of book history which is most intriguing here is these texts’ consumption: often these textual fragments were worn on the body for protection against evil or, inversely, for calling up demonic spirits to do one’s bidding. The literal corporeality of these texts could not be more exquisite: one manuscript amulet used by midwives to place on the abdomens of young women giving birth to babies contains residue of actual blood from the birthing process! These are physical traces of textual consumption not normally considered even by book historians.
This study is fascinating. Chapter 1, “Amuletic Manuscripts,” centers around a lyrical text known as Razón de amor as well as King Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María (ca. 1250–80) to show how a previously understudied exorcistic prelude to the former work functions as a “physical, textual presence in the codex” (30) and how el Rey Sabio himself left indications in his songs to Mary of his own healing by means of a codex brought to his sickbed during a near-death experience. Chapter 2, “Naming God,” considers the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre (Book of Alexander the Great) in light of Jewish and later Christian prohibitions against uttering the sacrosanct name for God known as the Tetragrammaton; it then moves on to another amuletic device, the Scutum fidei (Trinitarian Shield of Faith), and explores its connections to the Libro de buen amor. Chapter 3, “Amuletic Voices,” begins with a medieval clay tile containing amuletic inscriptions which was discovered in an abandoned hermitage in Spain only fifty years ago and relates its contents to the thirteenth-century Libro de Apolonio before returning to the Libro de buen amor. Chapter 4, “The Bawd’s Amulet,” crosses the threshold to the Renaissance with highly innovative and utterly convincing readings of the Celestina and Lozana andaluza, both written by known conversos (one of the most pleasing characteristics of Giles’s study is his careful attention to Spain’s complex religious diversity). Finally, Chapter 5, “Outlaw Prayers,” comes back around to one of Giles’s favorite genres, the picaresque, to round out the discussion with examples from the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and Quevedo’s El Buscón (ca. 1604).
In light of Giles’s spectacular findings, I can honestly say that I will never teach these texts the same way again. His own text is amuletic in its dual function of blessing the world of scholarship but cursing anyone who might dare to try to surpass it.
