Luis Vélez de Guevara was a prolific poet and playwright in Spain, having completed nearly 400 plays between 1600 and 1644 in addition to his satirical novel El diablo cojuelo (The Crippled Devil) (1641). Marina Martín Ojeda and C. George Peale’s new volume, based on and including extensive archival documentation about Luis Vélez de Guevara and his family, positions itself to be the most exhaustive resource on the playwright to date. The pairing of Ojeda’s archival expertise in her role as municipal archivist of Écija with Peale’s dedication to the work of de Guevara—publishing over thirty-three critical editions of plays since 2002—makes it no surprise that the volume is a comprehensive and meticulously constructed scholarly resource.

The volume consists of a critical introduction followed by a collection of transcribed documents, including over 253 entries, with a wide variety of material including wills, baptismal records, inventories, personal correspondence, and poems. The materials pertain not only to the playwright, but also to his extended family, spanning from 1529 with documents pertinent to de Guevara’s grandfather Diego de Santander to 1646 with records of sales made after the playwright’s death by his widow María de Palacios. This collection is significant not only for unearthing new details about the life of the playwright, but also for its ability to make visible a dynamic genealogy, providing a wealth of information about private and public spaces that certainly shifted the playwright and his worldview. Records are sourced from a number of archives across Spain including ones in Écija, Seville, Granada, Salamanca, and Madrid. The transcriptions are exacting and modernized according to clearly standardized norms set out by the editors.

Scholars interested in Vélez de Guevara’s life and work have been indebted to early scholarship undertaken in the early twentieth century by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, as well as some of the key historiography produced around the 1970s by scholars including Ruth Lee Kennedy and Mary G. Hauer. Ojeda and Peale’s new volume makes widely accessible for the first time extensive archival material not covered in these early sources. This variety of new material, the editors argue persuasively, allows contemporary readers to reconsider some of the basic premises commonly accepted about the playwright’s life. Three topics are of particular importance: social class (the editors use primary sources to move de Guevara out of poverty and into middle-class life); education (reconstructing his educational history to dispute the conventional understanding about its so-called mediocrity); and Jewish ancestry (challenging descriptions of past historical methodologies that may have distorted the place of his Jewish roots and impacts on his writing). Given the major historiographic shift these changes promise, this volume is certain to generate significant scholarly conversations.

Luis Vélez de Guevara en Écija is a tremendous scholarly accomplishment and will be of enormous value to scholars interested in the life or works of Luis Vélez de Guevara, scholars of comedia or early modern theater and history in Spain or elsewhere, as well as historians of Iberian middle-class life. This volume will also be an asset in classroom use, as the extensive primary sources would make excellent resources for graduate and undergraduate students.