This volume brings together thirteen previously published essays; ten of them, which originally appeared in English, are here ably translated into Spanish. Covering topics as diverse as Hamlet’s demons, pornographic adaptations of La Celestina, costumes in autos sacramentales, Morisco medical practices, and Don Quixote’s madness, the essays demonstrate the breadth of Kallendorf’s interests and the depth of her erudition. Together they reflect a commitment to the idea that Renaissance literature is enriched when we become more fluent and more sympathetic readers of the period’s religious discourses.
Readers unfamiliar with Kallendorf’s work might well start with her superb essay (later developed as a monograph) “‘¿Qué he de hacer?’: La comedia como casuística” (What am I to do? The Comedia as casuistry). A few critics had touched on casuistry in works by Calderón de la Barca, but before Kallendorf no one had called attention to the great number of Golden Age plays that include casuistic monologues that begin with some version of the phrase “What am I to do?” The comedia was popular, she concludes, not simply because it offered escapist entertainment but also because it provided a forum—outside the confessional—in which to observe “el espectáculo de una conciencia en acción” (“the spectacle of conscience in action,” 167). This argument adds one more nail to the coffin of José Antonio Maravall’s thesis that the comedia was above all an instrument of social and political control.
Another essay that deserves a place on graduate reading lists is “La retórica del exorcismo” (The rhetoric of exorcism). Here Kallendorf turns her attention to an important compendium of exorcism manuals, Thesaurus Exorcismorum (1608), arguing that exorcism owed its structure to the three branches of classical rhetoric: the judicial, the deliberative, and the apodictic. Exorcism, in other words, was imagined as a divine tribunal in which demons were tried, sentenced, and ritually expelled. In addition to providing a lucid mini-course in rhetoric, this essay offers a dramatic example of how Christian humanists succeeded in deploying classical rhetoric in the service of a Christian moral universe.
In the three essays on Cervantes, Kallendorf urges readers to take his demonological discourse seriously, that is, to consider that Cervantes’s allusions to possession and exorcism are not strictly metaphorical. In “Las aventuras diabólicas de don Quiojte, o el auto-exorcismo y el surgir de la novela” (The diabolical adventures of Don Quixote, or self-exorcism and the rise of the novel), for example, she argues that Don Quixote’s madness is represented as a kind of demonic possession from which he ultimately frees himself. Should we read Don Quixote’s liberation from his obsessions (or personal demons) at the end of the novel in a metaphorical key, or in doing so are we imposing our own indifference to the supernatural on Cervantes? Kallendorf suggests the latter, while I am more inclined toward the former interpretation. Similarly, in “La inquisición, ¿por qué deshace la cabeza encantada” (Why does the Inquisition dismantle the enchanted head?), Kallendorf posits Cervantes’s serious interest in Neoplatonic theories regarding objects possessed by demons. Readers will remember that in part 2, chapter 62 of Don Quixote, a wealthy Barcelona gentleman constructs an elaborate hoax. Don Quixote, Sancho, and his other guests are invited to pose banal questions to a supposedly enchanted talking head, to which the head provides equally banal answers. I would suggest (as does Sancho) that the apposite allusion is not to Ficino but Pedro Grulla—a legendary figure famous for making prophesies about things that were ridiculously obvious. I am fully in agreement with Kallendorf’s assertion that we need to place Cervantes within a wider network of cultural references—including the kinds of demonological and hermetic texts she explores in these essays—but I would counter that his engagement is seldom free from some degree of critical distance (in this case, ridicule). Like his contemporaries, Cervantes surely believed in the devil’s power to influence human thoughts and actions, but also like some of his contemporaries, he was willing to entertain alternative etiologies for bizarre behavior.
In short, this is a welcome addition to the Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica series. It will introduce nonanglophone Hispanists to the work of an erudite, accessible scholar and invite anglophones to revisit her thoughtful essays.
