Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (review)

Abstract

Castillo, David R. Baroque Horrors: Roots of Fantastic in Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010. 177 pp.David R. Castillo's Baroque Horrors aims to trace roots of fantastic to Iberian Renaissance and Baroque. The group of works brought into discussion ranges from exemplary and baroque novelas of Miguel de Cervantes and Maria de Zayas to earlier works by Antonio de Torquemada (Jardin de flores curiosas, 1570), Miguel de Luna (Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo, 1592), Julian de Medrano (La silva curiosa, 1583), Juan de Pina (Casos prodigiosos y cueva encantada, 1628) and Cristobal Lozano (La cueva de Hercules, 1667). Underlying book's arguments are notions that fantastic springs from tension between rational and analogic views of world during early modern period (46) and that fantastic is used to subvert social codes.Chapter 1 analyzes a host of miscellanies written in Spain, as this successful genre reflects not only curiosity of Renaissance readers also transformation into material- literary curiosities- of numerous myths and stories inherited from classics and from folkloric sources (40). Castillo, completing Giovanni Allegra's work on Jardin de flores curiosas, asserts that folkloric tales included in miscellanies are a more convincing origin of fantastic than classical myths and histories, but miscellanies often come closest to unsettling quality of modern fantasy when they incorporate contemporary folkloric material (40). The second connection between miscellanies and fantastic is the oscillation between acceptance of marvelous and rational analysis of case (42). The third link is fact that early modern culture of curiosities relates to forms of epochal melancholia and profound anxiety about openness and chaotic structure of universe (43). Castillo invokes notion of vacuum in Giordano Bruno's work and in Galileo's nocturnal horror as two early modern products of such visions of chaos. But, according to Castillo, all this unsettled thinking became productive in fantastic ways: Galileo brought with it not just new walls of reason also new windows of imagination and, with them, brand new vistas of nightmarish landscapes as well as Utopian dreams (46). To prove his point, Castillo studies folkloric tales included in three miscellanies Jardin de flores curiosas, La silva curiosa, and La cueva de Hercules.In chapter 2, Castillo links sensationalistic representation of awesome forces (whether natural, preternatural, or supernatural) to exaggerated moralism and moral uncertainty in Baroque (92). One of most exciting points of this chapter is Castillo's observation that some morbid baroque stories, told through devices of epistemological relativism and ethical uncertainty, address fact that raw life content ... makes no sense (95). As a result unjustified violence and macabre express anxiety caused by new scientific epistemology and knowledge.In chapter 3, author explores interconnections between household, female horror, physical violence, subversive pornography, and body politics in Maria de Zayas's Desenganos amorosos (1647). …