Disobedient Practices: Textual Multiplicity in Medieval and Golden Age Spain ed. by Anne Roberts, Belén Bistué

Abstract

Reviewed by: Disobedient Practices: Textual Multiplicity in Medieval and Golden Age Spain ed. by Anne Roberts, Belén Bistué Shon Hopkin Roberts, Anne and Belén Bistué, editors. Disobedient Practices: Textual Multiplicity in Medieval and Golden Age Spain. Juan de la Cuesta, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-58871-261-5. Anne Roberts and Belén Bistué’s volume provides numerous examples of subversive literary discourse from the Iberian Peninsula. The volume holds together nicely by focusing on literary works with purportedly veiled meanings [End Page 125] or redirections of purpose, even though the composite of the chapters ranges extensively over centuries of time and a variety of historical situations. The first section of the book gathers together examples of philosophical and religious multiplicity. Emilio González Ferrín analyzes Ibn Tufayl’s The Self-Taught Philosopher, written in the 1160s, as the first European novel. González Ferrín questions the characterization of Ibn Tufayl as one who supported rigidity and exclusivity in a time when Almohad fundamentalism held sway. For the author, Ibn Tufayl wrote carefully and subversively. Although Ibn Tufayl covered his novel with a veneer of Avicennism to make it acceptable in the eyes of the power structure of his day, he also showed an “ethical personalism” that ran contrary to the orthodoxy of his time. According to González Ferrín, Ibn Tufayl shows his true colors by quoting eastern authorities such as al-Gazali, a problematic figure due to his mystical tendencies. Ferrín also shows the influence that Ibn Tufayl’s work had on subsequent European novels (including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and The Jungle Book, among others) and on strands of philosophical thought. Michelle M. Hamilton provides the next study, “From Conversion to Consolation: Iberian Christian, Jewish, and Muslim takes on the Trinity,” which shifts the conversation forward over three hundred years from the previous chapter. Hamilton discusses the writings of the Mancebo de Arévalo, a Muslim who lived and wrote of a wise woman, the Mora de Úbeda, who used an allegory to teach a Nasrid prince how to focus on the eternal state of his soul and not on worldly affairs. In so doing, Arévalo used and repurposed a Christian concept that originated in St. Augustine and that had been used by Ramón Llull, Alfonso de Valladolid, Vicente Ferrer, and other authors to try to persuade Muslims, Jews, and Christians to believe in the Trinity. In the sixteenth century this fundamentally Christian allegory about Memory, Will, and Intellect (joined by Reason) had been transformed by the Mancebo into an allegory to strengthen Muslims in their own religious faith. The textual multiplicity analyzed by Hamilton thus demonstrates the existence of countercurrents against the push for unification in fifteenth-century Spain, and how an embattled group absorbed concepts intended to convert Muslims to Christianity and instead transformed those ideas into texts designed to strengthen the faith of Muslims. In chapter 3, Francisco Peña Fernández moves forward into the seventeenth century, demonstrating how a Spanish play, El justo Lot by Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón, reimagined the story of Lot to subversively push back against the authority [End Page 126] of the king. In the play, Aragón avails himself of the New Testament phrase that calls Lot a just man to position Lot as a hero. Lot’s actions no longer work against the will of God. Rather, Lot’s designs undermine and subvert the authority and power of a vicious king. Cubillo’s use of a biblical text and Christian reasoning allows him to give a seemingly moral, orthodox lesson—obedience to God, which sometimes implies disobedience to worldly powers—all the while offering a veiled critique of the current monarch. It should not be surprising that the majority of the play’s messages that push against earthly authority are uttered by biblical prophets, particularly since the Old Testament abounds with descriptions of unrighteous monarchs and includes stories like that of Esther, in which a righteous individual carefully manages a king’s attitude in order to protect her own people. In his discussion, Peña Fernández provides extensive and nuanced commentary on how to interpret the...