El romancero: De la oralidad al canon. Vicenç Beltran. Problemata Literaria 78. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2016. 208 pp. €34 (original) (raw)

2021, Renaissance Quarterly

her work, and a selected bibliography is included for the researcher who would like to know more about Martín's contributions to literary criticism on erotic literature, female literature and canon, and animal studies, among many other topics. The erotic, sensuality, and gender in the Golden Age were Martín's forte, and many of the articles are proof of that. Frederick de Armas's contribution centers on a revision of La Galatea from the point view of fainting characters that adds new perspective to gender stereotypes in the pastoral. J. Ignacio Díez goes deeper in the analysis of cats and the erotic in Cervantes; Ana Laguna expounds on the connections between horses, representations of women, and male friendship. The sensuality of food and music is covered by Carolyn A. Nadeau and Sherry Velasco. Focusing on linguistic connections between the use of terms in different registers, Velasco shows the multilayered value of words such as figs, peaches, fish, etc., in the context of the Cave of Montesinos and the Retablo de Maese Pedro in Don Quixote. Nadeau, departing from Martin's analysis of humor and violence in Cervantes, offers us her own views on "El celoso extremeño" of another sexual conundrum: winter-spring couples. Travesties (Jesús David Jerez-Gómez), unconventional beauties (Cartagena-Calderón), and mothers are also included as focuses in the collection. Mercedes Alcalá-Galán explores why married women and mothers disappear from plots, and then addresses the topic of Cervantes's mothers. Her tracing of the numerous mothers in Cervantes's work is a wonderful achievement that yields results: "mothers of Cervantes offer a unique and different complexity in a catalogue of portraits of women" that is surprising for its "dysfunctionality" (230-31). The book includes three essays under the rubric of "Cervantes' Feminisms." Catherine Infante gives an informative reading of the harem power structures and architecture in La gran sultana. Anne J. Cruz not only adds some historiography of Cervantes's feminisms but also brings to the fore the relation between subversion, destabilization, and sites of irresolution in Cervantes; and Rosilie Hernández delves into the implications of gender law in the reconsideration of Don Quixote as the first novel and a proto-feminist text. Hernández's point of focus is the Marcela-Grisóstomo pastoral episode.