The sixteenth century saw both a revolution in the science of anatomy and an intense preoccupation with interiority. In Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain, Enrique Fernández examines the intersection of these two inward turns, proposing the category of “dissective narratives” for texts that use the vocabulary from the new science of dissection for spiritual or psychological interiority. Each chapter focuses on a different author whose texts reveal an “anxiety of interiority”: a tension between the promise of a new ability to scrutinize bodily interiors and the fear of the depths within, an ambiguous desire for and fear of interior exposure.

Chapter 1 summarizes the spread of anatomical science in Europe and the particular Spanish preoccupation with and efficacy in “policing this interiority” (34). Chapter 2 looks at Fray Luis de Granada’s works on interior prayer and martyrologies. Granada seeks to assuage anxiety about hidden and disordered interiors; for Granada, the human is essentially transparent, and the harmony or iniquity of the interior always manifests itself externally. Granada uses a vocabulary of modern anatomy, yet, Fernandez concludes, his outlook “epitomizes an old form of religious interiority” tolerated by the church since antiquity (66). Nonetheless, Granada’s faith in the correspondence between inner and outer creation was shaken by the revelation that a would-be saint he had championed was a fraud. His last work, in which he confessed his role in the scandal, betrays a new anxiety over deceptive exteriors.

Chapter 3 considers various works by Quevedo as dissections of the “body politic.” Fernández analyzes the abundant language of physical dismemberment and disorder in Los Sueños and El Buscón. The violence to physical bodies does not here suggest anxiety about human interiority, but instead an anxiety over the “lower members” of the body politic (80). The chapter ends with a close reading of Quevedo’s Visita y anatomía de la cabeza del Cardenal Armando Richelieu, a satiric journey into the mind of the villainous prelate. The link between the physical, psychic, and political bodies here is clear, although it is worth noting that the “anatomy” of this mind is purely allegorical.

In chapter 4, Fernández reads fiction: he sees Cervantes’s El coloquio de los perros and El licenciado Vidriera as warning “how close human beings are to machines” (121) and that tinkering with interior mechanisms can reduce people to “accidental automata” (123–24). To this reader, the connection seems a bit tenuous to support treating these stories as “dissective narratives.” Zayas’s Desengaños, on the other hand, are full of dismemberments and anxieties about female interiorities. Fernández compares such scenes to the spectacular corpses of the operating theater and anatomical engravings. He concludes that Zayas is exposing the injustice of a patriarchal “honour system unable to cope with subtle issues of free will and intent” (157). Yet Zayas’s staging of spectacular dismemberments would seem to ally her more with anatomist than corpse, a possibility Fernández does not explore. Fernández recognizes his terms are broad, and in an epilogue he seeks to show that not “any text dealing with interiority through anatomical tropes could be classified as a dissective narrative” (158). He proposes Baltasar Gracián as author of a “categorically different” interiority: one “perceived as a well-delimited, fully conscious entity, the mastery of which is central to the personal quest for influence and power” (158). However, the difficulty of achieving such mastery produces plenty of anxiety, and in the end it is hard to see any categorical difference. Still, this rather strengthens the book’s larger argument about the prevalence of anxiety in the period.

The book is well written and researched. The history of bodily metaphors and practices in each chapter is rich, as is the integration of visual material. All quotations are provided in original and translation, although these translations are oddly inexact, in most cases without affecting overall meaning. In general, the looseness of the thesis — the argument for a suffusive “anxiety,” without a specific narrative about what that anxiety means or how it is manifested — could be seen as both the strength and weakness of this book. The thread unifying these chapters is a loose one, but each chapter is an insightful reading of a group of texts.