White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals by Eva Woods Peiró (original) (raw)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2014

Abstract

(often with images, particularly of saints) affixed in public spaces, and collective reading and discussion in the street. Different kinds of texts were displayed in different areas, their context conditioning their reception (street and merchant signs, self-promotion of services, theater handbills). Castillo Gómez illustrates the case of “the Flemish illusionist Juan Rogé” with a reproduction of the printed handbill from his 1655 tour from his Inquisitorial proceso, and cites Jerónimo de Barrionuevo’s encouraging news that “todo esto hace [Rogé] por medios naturales y aprobados por la Inquisición, donde ha estado dos veces y salido libre” (citing Avisos (1654-1658), BAE 221, I:219b; 17 November 1655). Castillo Gómez turns now to mentideros, even more ephemeral texts in urban spaces, whether metropolitan or provincial, public spaces in which people gathered in various (often professional) subgroups for the rapid diffusion of news, gossip, and lies, and for public reading of current ephemera. Heretofore, these materials have largely been studied only as manifestations of the early popular press or “minor literature,” or have escaped attention altogether as administrative or ephemeral and not “literary,” but they form a significant part of the complex interplay of all materials read in a given society and moment. Histories of (literary) reading generally omit this wider horizon, even though Cervantes himself describes it in Don Quixote I:9 (which initiates Castillo Gómez’s analysis), confessing that he is “aficionado de leer, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles,” doubtless bearing verses, canciones, pasquinades, and pamphlets very like these. Within the context of the traditional privileging of the literary, the canonical, and the elite, Castillo Gómez’s insistence on a readerreception approach to these materials and their appropriation makes perfect sense, even though he also freely uses more canonical evidence. He offers not only rich accounts of specific cases of reading in the sixteenthand seventeenth-century Hispanic world, but also models the use of a broad array of evidence to construct a cogent and compelling argument. Of particular interest for cultural studies is his reconstruction of the personal and collective experience of reading at all levels of society and including groups that were excluded from full literacy, and he convincingly portrays the range of possibilities across classes, genders, and communities of belief in appropriating and using texts of all kinds, the widest social horizon of reading practices. He thus provides a much-needed understanding of these modalities of reading in themselves, and an equally needed depth to our understanding of the “literary” and “canonical,” constructed categories into and out of which texts move, as well as of the common world that they represent and in which they participated. A review can’t include the compelling and fascinating details supporting his argument, but these details may well change our understanding of everyday early modern interactions with texts, and even of the Inquisition itself, making the present book highly recommended for those working in any aspect of Spain’s late medieval and early modern culture.

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