The reading and writing of poetry was perhaps the single most cultivated and important cultural activity in Spain during the fifteenth century. Between the last quarter of the fourteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century more poetry was written, and has survived, in Spain than in all of France, Britain, Germany, and England combined. Thanks to the persistent efforts of the late Brian Dutton, who meticulously transcribed and electronically indexed this vast poetic corpus in the early 1990s (see his monumental El Cancionero del siglo XV [c. 1360–1520] [1990–91], 7 vols.), we now have the work of some 700 poets whose names and compositions have come down to us. Ana María Gómez-Bravo’s book, Textual Agency, represents the first sustained effort to approach methodically, analyze, connect, and theorize the origins and nature of this corpus in its social matrix. The book examines the communal, political, and material circumstances that propitiated this surfeit of poetry, focusing on the crucially important yet little-known body of verse generally called cancionero (songbook) poetry.
Gómez-Bravo places the different forms of poetry and document production fostered by shifting political and urban models alongside the rise of lay literacy and access to reading materials and spaces during the fifteenth century. The core of her study comprises a detailed examination of both the materials of writing and how human agents used, negotiated, and transformed these materials, creating a textual agency that pertains not only to writers, but even to the inscribed paper itself, almost fetishized by the poets and the society in which it was produced and circulated. The author also explores how authorial and textual agency were competing forces in the midst of an era marked by vast social turmoil: the institution of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the advent of the absolutist state, the growth of cities, the rise of the urban classes, and, ultimately, the constitution of the early modern Spanish nation. She discloses how writing, beyond being a physical and intellectual enterprise, entailed legal, economic, and historical consequences that point to complex human networks in a vast, interconnected cultural system, a veritable ecology or interrelated universe of the written word.
Among other subjects, the book emphasizes the key role of conversos (mostly Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants) in the culture and politics of the period, and the role played by the writing of poetry in shaping their public profile and social mobility. Conversos were the human mainstay of letrado culture, a society whose power, influence, and prestige derived specifically from literacy and the ability to domesticate and exercise the power of the written word. Powerful enough to destabilize the traditional notion of nobility by emphasizing intellectual activities as equal or superior to hereditary noble prerogative, letrados undermined the traditional economies of power in fifteenth-century Castile as they sought to exercise their skills to confront newly emerging social and political circumstances. Textual culture in this way proved both a socially equalizing and subversive space, where all manner of groups could express themselves effectively with relative liberty. For the conversos in particular, the new textual universe provided a medium for the expression of cultural choices, the shaping of group identity, and the development of an idea of ethnic and racial difference.
Beyond the specific elements of her analysis, there are large consequences implicit in Gómez-Bravo’s study, as it discloses how the textual practices traditionally associated with sixteenth-century humanistic culture, as outlined by scholars like Fernando Bouza, were already extant — indeed, well entrenched — in fifteenth-century Castile. Her study thus makes problematic questions of historical taxonomies and issues of periodicity as it denies clear breaks with the past and confirms explicit continuities with it through the sixteenth century and beyond.
In sum, this is an important book that opens the door to formulating a broad synthesis leading to a deeper understanding of how cancioneros came into being, the social role they and poetry in general played in the construction of authorial personas in fifteenth-century Castile, and the crucial place of both in the history and development of vernacular lay literacy in early modern Europe.
