The twofold objective of Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain is to engage “an archeology of real and imagined objects” from the Spanish world on both sides of the Atlantic, and to analyze the authorial appropriation of objects for aesthetic, political, religious, and colonial purposes. An impressive array of objects is studied in the fourteen essays, including books, furs, buildings, paintings, tarot cards, and even the absence of objects — their silence or their excess is taken into account. These literary objects interact with the reader, confirming or disrupting the represented reality through their movement, absence, scarcity, excess, silence, and reappearance.

In the first part of the book, “Objects and Luxury and Power,” there is an enriching discussion of objects in early modern Spanish culture as networking items in a society where gift giving was a fundamental way of reaffirming social bonds (Mary E. Barnard). Paintings, very abundant in Madrid, one the biggest art markets of that era, appear in a tarot-based analysis of “El curioso impertinente” by Frederick De Armas. In Christopher Weimer’s essay, paintings convey meaning to structures and contents in privado plays. The visuality of architecture is invoked by Martha S. Collins in her analysis of pastoral novels.

The material objects of art from the first part of the book become ethereal, verbal, and absent in the second section, “The Matter of Words.” And yet these erased and silent objects acquire a decisive meaning. Since objects in literature need the mediation of words to be represented, words can convey the presence of objects of silence in Sor Juana de la Cruz’s mystic writing (Emile L. Bergman), or simply the lack of a European object of transfer of knowledge (Heather Allen). Since the material world is the crux of the picaresque, wherein rogues hope to rise from life’s nadir, the picaro’s rise happens through the excesses of their rhetoric, a materialized word, which fulfills the emptiness of their state (Edward H. Friedman). The materiality of the support of patrons led to the construction of poetic buildings that rivaled architectural ones (Robert ter Horst).

Yet, as shown in the last segment of the book, “Objects against Culture,” items can disrupt. In the auto noveno of the Celestina, the banquet is not a mere representation of social ills, but “the textual centre for Rojas’ examination of a repressive power structure and social injustice”; it stands in stark contrast to Neoplatonist works discussing love and beauty in the context of a banquet (Caroline Nadeau, 223). Ryan Giles gives new depth to our understanding of several key conversations throughout Lazarillo by analyzing the subtext of la emparedada, and finishes his article connecting the recurrent allusions to la emparedada, amulets, and ropes, with discursive miscarriages in the light of Erasmus’s De lingua. In the Numancia by Cervantes, as Luis F. Avilés argues, objects are at the heart of motivations, deceptions, actions, and critiques of this war of conquest. The meaning of objects evolves during war, since the anticipation of death is present, and gifts can be transformed from food to poison (261, 268). From Timothy Ambrose comes the assimilation of the Sierra Morena in Don Quixote to a labyrinth (289). Through the labyrinth metaphor in Don Quixote, the Dionysian and incomprehensible facet of the human psyche is revealed. Goretti González shows the antagonism between the concepts of containment, sosiego, and the uses of clothing in Guzmán de Alfarache. Protean textiles, excesses, effeminate embellishments, and cross-dressing pepper this novel, over a historical subtext of necessary composure and solemnity to articulate the nation, which ends up dismantled by the picaro’s uses of clothing.

There are other books on the topic of material culture in the Spanish Golden Age, but this one adds to them the triptych representation of luxury, signified, and disrupting objects. Fashioning, semiotics, and disruption conform a unique point of view of the interactions between the material world and the study of networking, patronage, friendship, gift exchange, works of art, clothing, mysticism, and ekphrasis. Furthermore, Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain offers a mise à jour of Spanish-literature criticism on a large variety of genres, authors, and critical schools. The essays are based on a deep knowledge of the previous criticism, and Objects of Culture provides an insightful perspective on the connections between the use of objects and the category of genre.