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ABSTRACT
This article shows that the Spanish court was an experimental pedagogical space oriented toward cultivating women as political subjects. In order to do so, I will examine Pedro de Guevara’s Nueva y sutil invencion, en seys instrumentos (1581), a primer containing a Latin grammar game written in the vernacular, designed for Philip II’s daughters, Isabel Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela. The novelty of the game is that it is built around a series of circular paper mechanisms, called instrumentos, that allow the player-student to learn Latin as a combination of grammatical elements present on a wheel, as opposed to the rote memorization of canonical passages. In this article, I will show that Pedro de Guevara based these instrumentos on the fourth figure of Ramon Llull’s Art and that this adaptation is linked to the work of a Lullist circle with royal sponsorship. Guevara’s role as preceptor and, thus, supervisor of the education of the infantas Isabel and Catalina shows that Philip II’s Lullism had both public and private implications that the king assumed as a natural part of his interest in the Art. The creation of the instruments in the form of wheels in Guevara’s primer elucidates how early modern authors transformed a medieval tool of knowledge through conceptual debate and material alterations.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Lexie Cook, Margaret Scarborough, Jesús R. Velasco and the editors and reviewers at the JSCS for their contributions to this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Noel Blanco Mourelle is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focuses on theories of religious conversion and universalism, political theology and the history of the book. His current book project examines medieval and early modern pedagogical innovations associated with material archives and book technology. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1 Anguissola’s painting is also of great relevance to the history of chess. It documents the increase in interest in the game as a consequence of the enormous transformation in its rules in late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Italy. This transformation inaugurated the so-called new chess, speeding up the game considerably. According to these new rules, pawns can advance two spaces, bishops can move an unlimited number of spaces diagonally and the queen becomes the most powerful piece as it can move an unlimited number of spaces in a single direction (Eales Citation1985, 90).
2 There has been a long historical debate about Sofonisba Anguissola’s activity as an artist in the court of Philip II based on the fact that the archives hold documents referring to gifts and payments for many of the other court painters (Antonio Moro, Alonso Sánchez Coello, Juan Fernández de Navarrete), whereas her presence is minimal. Biographer Orietta Pinessi proves that she was an active artist for the court (Citation2008, 33), while art historian Michael Cole considers her work at the court of Philip II a crucial piece for a history of the Spanish-Italian early modern artistic networks (Citation2013, 44). Recently, Cole (Citation2020, 118–145) has produced the best review of her artistic activities during her time at the Spanish court.
3 John Stevens translated cartilla as “primer” in his dictionary (Citation1706): “Cartilla, the first book children in Spain learn to read in, like our primer”.
4 The edition that I follow appears in Madrid in 1581, under the imprint “herederos de Alonso Gómez”. According to Wilkinson (Citation2010, 397–398), Guevara was also the author of a Nueva y sutil invencion de aprender gramática, of which there are no remaining copies but which it is fair to assume was related to the primer for the infantas; a Latin rhetorical treatise titled Brevis et compendiosa de invention, dispositione, et eloquutione methodos: Tante arte et industria; and a prior edition of the Nueva y sutil invencion, en seys instrumentos, which appeared in Sevilla in 1577. Pedro Madrigal’s printing house, founded in 1584, issued all of Guevara’s other Lullian works: Breve y sumaria declaración de la Arte general: Nuevamente compuesta por el mismo autor (1584), Arte general y breve, en dos instrumentos, para todas las sciencias, recopilada del arte magna y Arbor scientiae del doctor Raimundo Lulio (1586) and Escala del entendimiento, en la qual se declaran las tres artes del licenciado Pedro de Guevara de gramática, dialéctica, retórica y la universal para todas las sciencias, dedicada a la sereníssima infante de Castilla doña Ysabel Clara Eugenia de Austria (1593). The last of these was dedicated to Isabel Clara Eugenia only, as Catalina Micaela married Duke Charles Emmanuelle I of Savoy in 1585, leaving the Spanish court for Turin where she died in 1597.
5 There is no register of his birth, and Simón Díaz (Citation1976, 401) places his death in Madrid, in 1611.
6 Guevara states in the dedication to Philip II of his translation of Llull’s Art, Arte general y breve (1586, f. 3v), that he wants people studying the sciences in the newly created Academia Real Mathematica, sponsored by the king and created by Herrera, to study the Art as a master model for learning all the sciences:
Mayormente auiendo V.M. en sus felicisimos dias hecho vna merced tan señalada en establecer en esta corte, vna Academia donde se leã todas las Mathematicas y Philosophia, poniẽdo para ello maestros tan eminentes, y de tanta erudicion y experiencia. Puselo en nuestra lengua castellana por se la voluntad de V.M. que en vuestra Academia se lean todas las sciencias en esta lengua, para que tanto bien sea de todos mas facilmente aprendido con el favor de Dios y de V.M.
7 The language of Llull’s works, like Vita coetanea, crucially roots his ideas in his lived experience. His status as an unscholarly layman and self-fashioned missionary is inseparable from the genesis of his ideas (Rubio Citation2017, 15). It is with all this in mind that one needs to understand the divine inspiration that led to the Art.
8 A philosophical system like Llull’s, claiming a universal epistemology, might seem outdated, even outlandish, in the eyes of twenty-first-century readers. However, it is important to remember that Llull’s Art stood in defiance of two well-established academic truths of his time: the first is Aristotle’s proposition according to which there can be no universal science; the second is the idea that theology is the superior discipline, whose principles are revealed by divinity (Bonner Citation2007, 53).
9 My explanation here closely follows Bonner (Citation2011), who explains the functioning logic of the simplest of the different formulations of the Art, the one contained in Llull’s Ars brevis ([ca. 1308] Citation1985).
10 From a pedagogical point of view, Ramon Llull insisted that missionary schools be created where young priests could learn Arabic, Chaldean and Hebrew. Vernet (Citation2006, 58) has pointed out on several occasions the importance that Quranic rhetoric had in several of the works of Ramon Llull, particularly because the Quran represented the word of God unmediated and inimitable by human writing. In 1311, the Council of Vienne issued the decree Inter sollicitudines including Llull’s recommendation to implement the learning of eastern languages in Rome, Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca (Compagno Citation2013). The pope (Bologna), the King of France (Paris) and the corresponding regional churches (Oxford and Salamanca) committed themselves to funding these chairs (Domínguez Reboiras Citation2016, 83).
11 According to Gil Fernández (Citation1997, 9–15), in spite of efforts such as Guevara’s, the Council of Trent never allowed a class of patrons to emerge in support of the humanist project in the same way that happened in Italy, France or Germany. And yet, the fact that the studia humanitatis did not proliferate in Spain is not contradicted by the fact that, by the sixteenth century, wealthy families sought out tutors of Latin, Greek and the liberal arts (Kagan Citation1974, xxi).
12 Partially influenced by the scholarly rediscovery of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, a group of authors known as modistae generated speculative grammar methods based on logic (Ridruejo Citation1977, 47). Ramon Llull developed his Art and the linguistic reflection derived from it independent of this school (Johnston Citation1996, 94), yet clearly both Llull and modistae serve as a precedent for Guevara’s combinatory game.
13 Commentary and imitation of famous passages was the primary method for learning grammar and rhetoric during the Middle Ages and the early modern period (Bartolomé Citation1993, 498–504).
14 In fact, the only other piece of information that we have about Guevara’s life is related to the displeasure and resentment that Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas felt toward him. Sánchez de las Brozas points to an edition of a work by Juan de Mena that he had expected to publish with Guevara’s help. El Brocense complains of Guevara’s lack of attention or even response in this matter (González Rolán and Saquero Suárez-Somonte Citation1993, 29–30). For an overview of El Brocense’s pedagogical innovations in the field of grammar, see Hernando Cuadrado (Citation1997).
15 This push to use visual instruments to make logical classifications clearer was a feature of Llull’s works. Incorporating the liberal arts, grammar being the first one, and the mechanical arts into his visual devices of knowledge (Higuera Rubio Citation2013, 77) did not necessarily challenge existing classifications such as Hugh of Saint Victor’s and Domenicus Gundisalvus’s, but explored new forms of the social circulation of said disciplines (Imbach and König-Pralong Citation2013, 123–146; Costa Citation2005).
16 According to Yates, Llull’s Art was not conceived as an art of memory. It became one because of the special role that it granted memory in the Trinitarian structure of the potencies of the soul: intellectus, memoria and voluntas (Citation1976, 174). The aforementioned early modern appropriations of its visual forms (Agrippa von Nettesheim, Bruno) only helped to further this interpretation.
17 Joan Segui, one of Llull’s early modern biographers, states that Philip II asked his humanists to collect Llull’s books in the library of El Escorial. Furthermore, the king himself annotated these books while reading them: “y en prueva desta su devocion, se hallan en la Librería de San Lorenço el Real muchos libros deste Santo, rubricados de la Real mano del dicho Santo Rey y Señor nuestro” (Citation1606, 4r).
18 This book presented a new design for the trivium according to which the Nueva y sutil invencion would provide the grammatical foundation for the student, the Escala del entendimiento would then offer a rhetorical one and the translation of the Arte general y breve would replace dialectics (Guevara Citation1593, 3).