After thought. Devotion, Teresa de Jesús, and Miguel de Cervantes

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex landscape of devotion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, comparing the legislated Christian-only history of Counter-Reformation with the various alternative strands of belief, faith, and devotion present in a variety of areas of cultural production. The article first examines representations of devotion—and methodologies of reading such representations—in areas of production such as architecture, dictionaries, literature, and the arts; at the end of this first section, it coins the concept of “After Thought” as a reading tool to better comprehend and possibly experience devotion in ways particular to early modern Spain, not merely en cristiano but in multiconfessional forms. “After Thought,” both the tool and the article, follow intellectual engagements with Andalusi (not merely Andalusian) past, present, and future environments in early modern Spain. They also engage alternative somatic dimensions of a different “entendimiento” of Christianity, as described by Teresa de Jesús and practiced by both her and Cervantes. Finally, in reviewing the six ducal chapters of the second part of Don Quijote as a rewriting of Castillo interior, the apocryphal condition of this segment of the novel mobilizes yet another wheel in the Trojan horse of fiction, one that exposes the way in which Cervantes refigures Teresa de Jesús, thus yielding two interactive models of “After Thought” in early modern Spain's arts, religion, and spirituality.

KEYWORDS:

• al-Andalus
• Miguel de Cervantes
• multi-confessional devotion
• the novel
• Teresa de Jesús

Notes

1. As the present study will see from other angles, the work of these artists as spokesmen for the various crowns they were hired to represent was not unqualified; instead, they articulated a variety of contradictory subject positions that contribute to making the history of Spain's “Golden Age” quite interesting. A number of studies have demonstrated this point. George Mariscal's “Tracking the Subject,” an overview on contradiction and subjectivity during this period in early modern Spain, remains indispensable reading for this purpose. Santiago Arroyo and Elena Vázquez have analyzed an important collection of documents in the Biblioteca Marqués de Valdecilla with which they have traced the representation of regia majestad in the courts of Carlos V and his son, Felipe II. Fernando Bouza has established the link between image and propaganda in the court of Felipe II. Magdalena Sánchez has argued that personal networks run by women, fashioning female models, and the power of image contributed significantly to the objectives of the crown of the Prudent King's son, Felipe III. In that same court, Antonio Feros has seen the importance of the valido system, or favoritism as a new political turn in this art of spokesmanship. Laura Bass traces the development and power of portraiture alongside that of the comedia or first professional theater of Spain (1590s–1640s). Finally, John Elliott and Jonathan Brown examine the splendid correspondence between politics, architecture, and the arts in the court of the last of the Hapsburg Kings after 1621.

2. Speaking of the “decoración pictórica del Alcázar” in Madrid (destroyed by fire in 1734), Carl Justi notes that the inventory published at the time of Felipe II's death listed all the paintings found in the Casa del Tesoro in two categories: “cuadros de devoción” (primarily triptychs and altarpieces “de la primitiva escuela flamenca e imágenes votivas, de las que Isabel la Católica ya había reunido un importante tesoro”) and “retratos” by Tiziano, Moro, and Sánchez Coello, the latter depicting “a miembros de la casa real, a príncipes emparentados con ella o a otros famosos de la época, además de algunos generales y bufones”) (186). As we shall see, however, painting, like the rest of the arts, was a much more complex affair than what this binary taxonomy may suggest, and it played other roles in the powerful space that the Alcázar came to be: about the magnificent tapestry collection, primarily Flemish, “cualquier necesidad estaba cubierta: había representaciones religiosas simbólicas, morales, alegorías, episodios de la Pasión y de los apóstoles, historias de patriarcas y de romanos, escenas erótico-mitológicas” and, lastly, the great achievements of the great house of Hapsburg in Tunisia (185). The walls of the Alcázar, on the other hand, held marvelous murals of the “Cuatro Elementos” by Gaspar Becerra, among others destroyed by the fire in the early eighteenth century. On the diversity of the art of painting and devotion, Justi also notes that these “fondos pictóricos” served further agendas, such as the functional goal of “animar los corredores y galerías del Alcázar cuando en verano se retiraban las tapicerías” (arranged according to their content, be it war, triumphant processions, hunting, cityscapes, or “curiosidades”) or to decorate the “cuadras” located by the Emperors' Garden, where they painted a coherent pagan landscape with the figures of Venus, Adonis, Perseus, Andromeda, Europe, and Danae.

3. See, for instance, Javier Herrero's review of devotion in Don Quijote (“Dulcinea and Her Critics”), faithful reflection of this kind of heuristic Christianocentrism, linked to a heightened sense of nationalism: “The symbol of eternal glory is Dulcinea, the creation of Don Quijote's faith. Such faith, as the root of Man's search for eternity, is a religious one. Don Quijote's yo vivo y respiro en ella is the equivalent of St. Paul's ‘Christ lives in me.’ This effort to seek (which is, also, an effort to create) a reality which goes beyond mortality, beyond earthly aims, towards the immense expanse of eternity (so the naked landscape of Castile gazes at the blue expanse of unclouded sky) is, of course, the symbolic expression of the Spanish spirit” (25).

4. Quotes from both Don Quijote and Castillo interior are drawn from the Spanish editions cited in the bibliography; the numbers in parentheses signal the chapter and “verse” number instead of the page number from the cited edition. Readers using English translations will thus be able to locate the quotes more efficiently.

5. As María Judith Feliciano has recently argued, the study of rich textiles labeled “Islamic” and favored by “Christian” users in medieval Iberia has been constrained by the binary engagement of these two religiously aligned categories: “The focus on religious difference and the use of the nomenclature that aids it have limited our approach to the study of Iberian medieval textiles and have rendered them oddly indefinable” (47). To address this methodological shortage, Feliciano considers the multifaceted functions and location of sumptuous cloths—as church altar ornaments, as wrapping of saintly relics and regal and noble bodies, and as complements to sultry objects such as ornate woods, ivories, and metalwork—and reads them from “the premise that meaning was generated by the cultural forces that transformed widely coveted transnational goods into local signifiers” (47). The present study considers devotion, analogically, a texture negotiated, rendered symbolic or functional and, in the end, deployed locally to create meaning, regardless of its compliance, or not, with the legislative frame established by Trent and Felipe II's edicts of promulgation of these religious laws.

6. Terms such as tolerance, convivencia, and hibridity have been deployed in order to read the on-and-off encounters (more often than not violent, as David Nirenberg has argued) between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the geopolitical spaces that have come to be known as al-Andalus and Sepharad. Besides Nirenberg, see the studies by Richard Fletcher, María Rosa Menocal, Jerrilynn Dodds, and Vivian Mann (et al.).

7. Milan Kundera, like Leo Spitzer and Anthony Cascardi before him, speaks of multi-perspectivism and relativity as key components of the novel.

8. As Jesús Maestro has argued, metatheater is key to understanding the referential palimpsest of the novel in the second part of Don Quijote. Ryan Prendergast analyzes the centrality of performance in “acts of faith” such as the autos de fe, and their relation to the composition of the novel by connecting “specters, stages, and spectacles” (89–116).

9. Yates has argued that the classical art of memory linked to traditions of architecture, rhetoric, mnemotecnics, and science entered a phase in the Middle Ages in which the ancient buildings used by rhetoricians to remember speeches became filled with Christian images (93–114). After a threshold in which theatricality played a key role, the Art of Memory linked the Hermetic tradition with the emergent scientific discourse (135–74, 355–74). A future study would further analyze the ways in which the triad of theater, Hermetism, and science, mobilized in Europe as stages of development of the art of memory, inform the representation of devotion by de Jesús and Cervantes, and their articulation of a historical memory of al-Andalus. For them, devotion plays a multiple of role of performance and phenomenon, an art of transformation and a science of discovery.