Vincent Barletta's exemplary translation of Enrique García Santo-Tomás's 2015 La musa refractada bridges two troublesome gaps in early modern European studies. García Santo-Tomás's monograph considers the interplay between Spain's literary production during the seventeenth century and significant scientific discourses, discoveries, and controversies of that period; discerning the connections between treatises and texts requires an interdisciplinary familiarity with both, which few scholars command. In turn, Barletta makes this ambitious, fascinating book accessible to scholars and students who may be less likely to add critical work available only in Spanish to their own bibliographies.
The Refracted Muse’s focus (no pun intended) is the impact of the science of optics and of the lens-based technologies its early modern advances made possible, including those utilized in eyeglasses, spyglasses, and, of course, telescopes. Due to Galileo's vigorous efforts, the latter circulated swiftly throughout European political and intellectual circles. Such magnifying devices became gifts exchanged among the wealthy and powerful, even as they allowed scientists and natural philosophers to observe the cosmos more closely than ever before, sometimes contradicting existing beliefs concerning, for example, the moon's surface or the orbits of planets. While ground lenses in telescopes enabled examination of the heavens, in spyglasses and eyeglasses they also provided new perspectives at closer range. At all distances, innovations in optics rendered visible the previously unseen and imperceptible; long accepted and confidently taught theories were discovered to rest on optical illusions deceiving the naked eye. These inventions also offered new metaphors of vision and sight to writers of the Spanish Baroque, a period preoccupied with the convergences and oppositions of appearances and truth.
García Santo-Tomás begins his study with the journey of Galileo's telescope to Spain and the initial reception of his ideas there, providing valuable descriptions of Spanish intellectual court and university cultures at that time and of their prevailing scientific assumptions. He then follows the reverberations of optical discoveries through a web of literary sources ranging from Don Quijote and La vida es sueño to numerous works rarely read today. Though space does not permit a full recapitulation of the extensive conceptual and textual genealogy the book traces, one rewarding and essential emphasis is satire. The Refracted Muse began, García Santo-Tomás notes, with his research into the appropriation by Spanish satirists of Boccalini's occhiali politici (political lenses) motif, in which eyeglasses are used to scrutinize society and perceive its hidden or unspoken truths; such lenses are intended to correct both the wearer's vision and the vices they reveal. In some Spanish texts these became anteojos de larga vista, telescopic spectacles that enabled their users to survey and dissect corrupt urban panoramas from elevated vantage points, while in other works eyeglasses mocked the myopia or the vanity of those wearing them. The telescope itself appears in various satires, among them El diablo cojuelo and Quevedo's critique of Spain's colonial project in La Hora de todos.
The Refracted Muse is by necessity densely packed with information, particularly for readers more familiar with literary than scientific history, but García Santo-Tomás maintains a commendable clarity of argument and skillfully guides his readers through the era's paradigm shifts and their ramifications. Particularly refreshing is his reassessment of Spain's intellectual relations with the rest of Europe, primarily Italy, in the early modern period. The Refracted Muse does much to dispel the still-widespread stereotype of Counter-Reformation Spaniards as scientifically backward and ideologically reactionary. García Santo-Tomás's textual analyses instead reveal many Spanish thinkers to have been more receptive than is often assumed to the new ideas circulating throughout Europe, not to mention more ingenious in their incorporation of such ideas into their works under the watchful gaze of institutional censorship. This book sheds welcome light on the oscillations García Santo-Tomás discerns in the period's texts, “between the ancient and the modern, between the familiar and the known, between the inherited and the new” (3).
The Refracted Muse’s intersection of early modern sciences and literatures yields admirable scholarship: García Santo-Tomás's study explores intriguing questions many readers will not have previously considered and invites further inquiries into this neglected juxtaposition of discourses.
