Francisco Santos was a rather prolific and popular author in late seventeenth-century Spain. We do not have many details of his personal life, but we do know that Santos was born in Madrid in 1623 from humble origins and raised in the historically vibrant and ever-changing Lavapiés neighborhood. As García Santo-Tomás keenly notes in his introduction to this edition, poverty, social difficulties, and sickness were common denominators of Santos’s life that regularly filtered into his literary works.

The same sense of bitterness, disillusion, and despair that many of his contemporaries show in their prose is pointedly—and poignantly—present in several of his works, most notably in Día y noche de Madrid (1663) and La Tarasca de parto en el Mesón del Infierno (1671). Often characterized by the critics as a costumbrista writer and chastised for his tendency to steal ideas—and even complete sentences—from his illustrious precursors (most remarkably Baltasar Gracián, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, and Luis Vélez de Guevara), Santos has frequently been misinterpreted and undervalued across the broad scope of his literary and imaginative endeavors. Being a late Baroque writer with an obvious indebtedness to his predecessors did not preclude him from being original or enticing in his accounts of the city and its cultural and social life. Moreover, one of his defining traits as a writer is an ambiguous position regarding his view of Madrid, portrayed in his prose as both a dynamic and interconnected European city, but also as a cryptic and multifaceted social microcosm. Santos was the ultimate seventeenth-century madrileño: he loved Madrid city life, its combination of festivities and urban rites; but he also saw in it decadence, greed, and an abominable quest for excess and self-indulgence.

García Santo-Tomás’s excellent critical edition—an improvement over the pioneering but more constrained edition by Milagros Navarro Pérez (1976)—succeeds precisely because it enhances the imaginative connotations of such a double take on the Spanish metropolis. The editor excels at highlighting the contradiction between the ever-moralist Santos and the Santos that is, at the same time, captivated by the details and minutiae of Madrid’s hedonist and consumerist life. García Santo-Tomás’s commentary, notes, sources, and suggestions for further reading are consistently interesting and thought provoking. In fact, the novel is so well contextualized in this Cátedra edition that the editor not only succeeds at calling the reader’s attention to an understudied Spanish novelist, but also at making a very valuable contribution to the examination of a relevant late picaresque text. The meticulously detailed annotations throughout the entire book deserve separate praise since they are erudite, judicious, focused, and always stimulating. For instance, Santos’s mention of Baroque metaphors, use of Madrid’s slang language, and allusion to religious and biblical events are consistently clarified throughout the book. Instead of presenting an inscrutable collection of footnotes (geographic, historical, mythological, sociological, etc.), the editor’s criteria remain both careful and thoughtful, avoiding the overabundance of data and highlighting only the information pertinent to a better explication of the text’s most difficult passages. This is not a simple undertaking, since Día y noche de Madrid operates on many academic levels, engaging an overwhelming array of academic subjects. In this regard, the modern Santos reader will discover topics as varied as Madrid urban studies, material culture of the Baroque, gender studies, food studies, popular and religious festivities, history of cleanliness and sanitation, early modern medical history, animal studies, and domestic studies, among others.

García Santo-Tomás’s edition is based on the 1663 princeps edition of the text and it represents a big step forward in the modern dissemination and study of Santos’s work. The bibliography that closes this book is relevant to the material and capable of inspiring further explorations of Santos’s comprehensive overview of Madrid’s cultural topography. Scholars specifically interested in the picaresque genre and, more broadly, in the quotidian aspects of the late Baroque period will be indebted to this edition and its full scholarly apparatus. I am also confident that the editor’s careful research will achieve its explicit goal of encouraging some of us to investigate the inspiring topics evoked by such a cleverly disenchanted literary figure as Santos.