Lazarillo De Tormes Research Articles

:Approaches to Teaching "Lazarillo de Tormes" and the Picaresque Tradition. Approaches to Teaching World Literature

:<i>Approaches to Teaching "Lazarillo de Tormes" and the Picaresque Tradition. Approaches to Teaching World Literature</i>

The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (review)

GILES, RYAN D. The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. 197 pp.In the twenty-second book of The City of God, Saint Augustine dedicates a section to the eternal happiness of the saints. He speculates that they keep an intellectual remembrance of past ills and sins while being protected from them in sensible experience. The view of the physical expression of happiness is shattered in many hagiographie narratives and its variations in medieval literary tradition where figures cloaked in sanctity are represented and reinvented through the expression of a risus paschalis, which, as Mikhail Bakhtin explains in his text Rabelais and His World, operates in the form of a licensed yet apparently transgressive laughter. There is a marked difference between expressions of happiness and laughter, and the saint is not a literary or religious figure traditionally associated with laughter.However, Ryan D. Giles in his book The Laughter of the Saints productively traces the ways in which the medieval and early modern secular literature of Iberia reappropriates the figures of saints through the strategy of comical inversions. Throughout the five chapters that comprise this book, the author interprets the manifestation of this strategy as a tradition that ranges from Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Senora and other hagiographie works to Don Quixote. Along the way, the book makes productive stops to read passages and fundamental aspects from El libro de buen amor, El Lazarillo de Tormes, Carajicomedia, La Celestina, La lozana andaluza, and Guzman de Alfarache.According to the text, in the tradition of the comic inversion of the saints, they are not the ones who do the laughing; rather, they are transformed into ambiguous sources of laughter. The comic inversion of the saints and their narratives produces an ambiguous attitude toward the sacred, thus rendering the clear-cut distinction between the sacred and the profane flexible and porous. In order to approach the humorous «interpretation of the saints, Giles turns his attention to the notion of the antisaint: a term first used by modern scholars in the context of legends featuring a double who falsely mimics a bona fide holy man or woman, in keeping with the contrast between the divine miracles of St Peter and the demonic magic of Simon Magus, or the Antichrist's apocalyptic impersonation of Christ (13). Giles reformulates this definition of the antisaint by using it to designate the festive overlapping of the saint with his antitype that brings together images of piety and impiety, virtue and vice (13). This redefinition of the antisaint seems to conform to Bakhtin's notions and identification of strategies that belong to his notion of the carnivalesque.Interestingly, though, Giles distances his reading of comical inversion in hagiography from the tradition of Bakhtin's carnival. He chooses not to fully explore Bakhtin's medievalisms because he feels the concept is misleading and because the qualification of the and the is conflictive and contradictory according to some scholars (5-6). In contrast to his opinions, other scholars might read Bakhtin's views on the relationship between the official and the popular as less constrained by tension and disagreement; perhaps they might even be interpreted as impossible to separate, as Bakhtin's interpretation of the image of Janus suggests.At the same time, Giles revisits Julio Caro Baroja's folkloric study El carnaval, which serves as an interesting source of folkloric and ethnographic information on the forms of carnival in Spain. Giles's attention to Caro Baroja's text points to an interesting route of reflection that invites a comparative reading with Bakhtin's work as both scholars attempt to decipher the system ruling the notions and practices of carnival in different ways. Throughout the text, the celebration of carnival as a sometimes church-sponsored celebration, and its particular manifestations in Spain, provide information and guide the interpretation of some of the strategies of the comical inversion of the saints. …

Violence and the Trajectory of Early Modern Subjection in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades

Francis Barker's work, The Tremulous Private Body, provides a useful theoretical framework for the examination of violence and subjection in three canonical texts of Spanish Golden Age literature: the anonymously written picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes; Lope de Vega's play, Fuenteovejuna; and Luis de Góngora's long lyric poem, the Soledades. While Fuenteovejuna affirms hegemony by incorporating the rebellion of peasants and women, the Soledades does so obliquely by incorporating the critique of the agrarian aristocracy who were Góngora's patrons. In contrast, the Lazarillo stands out as the most radical of the three in its subversion of the official discourse of church and state. All are contradictory works of transition that depict a common violence toward the body—the violence toward the older sacramental body that Barker saw as a marker for the development of early modern subjectivity—and anticipate creatively both the birth of the modern subject and its negation.

Figuring Gender in the Picaresque Novel: From Lazarillo to Zayas

The picaresque genre's narrations of the misadventures of rogues have tended to privilege the masculine gender of its protagonists, and the male-centered plot of these canonical novels is further evinced not only in the maternal abandonment suffered by the young boy and his contact with a series of amoral father figures, but through the mature picaro's failed amorous relations with women. While most critical studies have diminished the significance of women's roles in these novels, aptly calling her la gran desconocida [the great unknown], Julia Martinez-Gonzalez points out that the picaro's mother in particular has received little attention. Yet, while the female figures are often overlooked by critics and repressed by the male protagonists, they assume a key part in the novels and their function takes on overt significance in those whose protagonists are picaras. Indeed, a major issue addressed by both the female and male picaresque is the representation of gender difference, since the genre, due both to the homosocial economy of its canonical male exemplars (Davis, Breaking 138) and to the numerous novels with female protagonists, illustrates the many theories that circulated regarding the behavior and treatment of women in the literary and moral discourses of the early modern period. Thus, no matter how devalued, the feminine element refuses to disappear from this new genre. Lazarillo de Tormes sets up one of the genre's main characteristics by drawing attention to the child's degraded family origins: born to a thief and a prostitute, Lazarillo attempts to cover up his parents' behavior by ironically portraying them in the best possible light. The father's death is ambiguously ascribed either to his service in the war against the Turks at Djerba or to his desertion of his post as muleteer, a job traditionally assigned to moriscos, who often sided with the enemy. His widowed mother takes up with Zaide, a Moor who feeds the starving family by stealing from his employer. By handing over the young boy to the blind man, she launches Lazarillo on his picaresque career, Hijo, ya se que no te vere mas. Procura de ser bueno y Dios te guie. Criado te he y con buen amo te he puesto; valete por ti (25). Her illicit relations with the heretic Moor, a thief like her previous partner, further corroborate her debased nature, significantly prefiguring all women's dissoluteness. The mother's negative portrait, in fact, is mirrored in the novel's last tratado in the image of the Archpriest's servant and lover, whom Lazaro takes as his wife, as the picaro's desecrated marriage to the adulterous servant ensures the novel's circular structure by linking her with his own prostitute mother. Lazaro's faithless wife substitutes metonymically for Lazarillo's absent mother, since the adult picaro receives from the former the food and shelter that as a child he had been denied by the latter. (1) It is well to remember, however, that his wife had previously abandoned three children (133). By conflating the wife's sexuality with her desertion of her progeny, the narrative retraces the mother's behavior: both women assume the dual roles of prostitute and unnatural mother. Because the wife's continuing service at the Archpriest's house ensures the picaro's welfare, when he is interpellated by Vuestra Merced, Lazaro shields her false honor by swearing on the holy host that she is virtuous (134). Yet Vuestra Merced's interrogation--the letter on which Lazarillo's case is famously centered--is meant to uncover the truth about the ongoing sexual liaison between his wife and the churchman. The shadowy inquisitor is scarcely interested in a humble town crier's cuckoldry. To the degree that Vuestra Merced wishes to investigate the cover-up the marriage provides for the Archpriest's illicit sexual transgressions, Lazaro's purported innocence will nonetheless be seriously questioned by him. The wife's misconduct, as well as Lazaro's corrupt complaisance, threatens to return the picaro to his original status by replicating the mother's early abandonment. …

Pikareskni pisec: kaj lahko branje Apulejevih Metamorfoz razkrije o Lazarčku s Tormesa (in obratno)

Članek obravnava Apulejeve Metamorfoze in španski pikareskni roman Lazarček s Tormesa. Posveča se podobnostim v zgradbi obeh romanov, ki so: prvoosebni pripovedovalec, retrospektivna pripoved o življenju v službi različnih gospodarjev, Fortuna kot ključni pripovedni mehanizem; poleg tega pa tudi manj očitnim vsebinskim podobnostim, temam govora in pisanja ter literarnih ambicij.

A French Lazarillo : Translation and Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France

The first installment of Louis Viardot’s translation of the sixteenth-century Spanish novel El Lazarillo de Tormes appeared in Le Siècle in the summer of 1836, weeks before the publication of Balzac’s Une Vieille Fille inaugurated the age of the serial novel in France. Viardot’s reading of the picaresque novel, inscribed both in his introductory comments as well as in the fabric of the translation itself, reinserts the text within the outlines of a new, socially and politically engaged literature for a broader readership. At the same time, the translation’s incongruities reveal the contradictions inherent to debates over the question sociale . This article situates Viardot’s translation among the changing socio-cultural discourses and practices that both informed and were informed by the emergence of a modern popular press and literature. ( bl )

Anonymous Author, Reformist Writer: Ultimate Reality and Meaning in the Lazarillo De Tormes

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

PASSING COUNTERFEIT WHITENESS AND MULATTA WEALTH IN LOS MISTERIOS DE BARCELONA

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I would like to thank Ed Vermue of the Special Collections at the Oberlin College Library for his crucial assistance in making available to me a copy of this rare book. Elisa Martí-López provides a full summary of all the subplots in the appendix to her book Borrowed Words. See pp. 139–42. 2. For example, when discussing probable fathers for Carolina, the novel's characters disqualify the deceased Juan Bardisa because he believed that (Spanish) men should marry the black and mulatta women in Cuba with whom they have children. That is, it is clear to these characters that Carolina's father is white and her mother is not. 3. This reading of the novel does not imply that in historical terms Spain was or is free from “racist” sentiments—dehumanizing attitudes, words and actions—towards others whose bodies are seen as physically different. 4. See The King's Two Bodies for an analysis the medieval foundation of this idea. For a list of legal cases regarding “passing counterfeit coin” in the USA during the nineteenth century see McKinney McKinney , William M. The Federal Statutes Annotated: Containing All the Laws of the United States of a General and Permanent Nature in Force on the First Day of January . Northport, NY : E. Thompson , 1903–1906, 1918. [Google Scholar] VII, 722–6. 5. See Schmidt-Nowara, Chapter 3 “Free Trade and Protectionism”. 6. Although it is obviously a stereotype, the 1852 Real Academia Española .. Diccionario de la lengua castellana . 10th ed . Madrid : Imprenta Nacional , 1852 . [Google Scholar] Diccionario de la Real Academia Española Real Academia Española . Diccionario de la lengua castellana . 9th ed. Madrid : Imprenta de D. Francisco María Fernández , 1843 . [Google Scholar] includes ‘‘avaro, usurero’’ as an acceptable use of the word ‘‘judío’’. Up to and including the previous edition of 1843, metaphorical use of the word is limited to a ‘‘voz injuriosa y de desprecio de que suele usarse en casos de cólera y enojo’’. 7. For example, in Gloria, the narrator speaks of the ‘decaimiento de la raza española” (35) but also the difficulty arising from the fact that it cannot be regenerated via Catholicism but from within Spaniards themselves. Here we see the beginning of the idea that Spanish race is something other than wholly based on religion. Donoso Cortés Cortés , Juan Donoso . “Discurso sobre Europa.” Obras completas. Recopiladas y anotadas, con la aportación de nuevos escritos . Dr. don Juan Juretschke . Vol. 2 . Madrid : Editorial Católica , 1946 . 299 – 315 . [Google Scholar] identifies the source of contemporary crises in the race of Spanish statesmen to be the conflict between the “raza borbónica” and the “raza austríaca” (“España” 328); similarly, he defines “razas eslavas” according to their religion. In both examples he bases his theories of race on “civilization”. (See also Colas Colas , Dominique . Races et racismes de Platon à Derrida: Anthologie critique . Paris : Plon , 2004 . [Google Scholar] 344.) 8. Among the best-known examples are La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, Llibertad! by Santiago Rusiñol, El amigo Manso by Benito Pérez Galdós, the aforementioned La febre d'or and, from the early twentieth century, Alberto Insúa's El negro que tenía el alma blanca. The anxiety of whiteness in Misterios is a wholly modern one, but the idea that Spaniards may not recognize their African heritage dates to the era of extensive peninsular slavery. In the Tratado Primero of Lazarillo de Tormes, the narrator recalls his mother's “Moreno” friend who would spend the night at their house and his stepbrother, born soon after: a “negrito muy bonito”. This young boy, accustomed to seeing only his white mother and brother, shrank from his father's blackness without knowing that he, too, was what he most feared (5–6). 9. See Vindication of the Rights of Women, especially Chapter 9, and Sab. Not coincidentally, many years later, the founder of the Sociedad abolicionista, Rafael María de Labra, would also found the Sociedad para la Abolición de la Prostitución Legal o Tolerada to criminalize prostitution in Spain (Fernández Fernández , Pura. Mujer pública y vida privada: Del arte eunuco a la novela lupanaria . Woodbridge : Tamesis , 2000 . [Google Scholar] 233).

Stultitia loquitur: Fiction and Folly in Early Modern Literature

In the first edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, after the Greek title of the work, Encomion Morias, the European public of 1511 could find a brief designation of the character in charge of the speech: ‘Stultitia loquitur’ – ‘Folly speaks’. Halfway between the theatrical indication of the entrance of Folly as a dramatis persona and the rhetorical game of the orator opening a declamatio, and playfully showing his public the mask that the writer only pretends to assume, this phrase presents the reader with a particular problem: that of the special ability of ironic discourse to create fiction. This is a problem that, from the Renaissance to the early modern period, in France as in England, Italy or Spain, is linked to the development of a general theory of fiction, concerning representational as well as figurative forms of literature, whether narrative or dramatic. Folly does indeed share with fiction the capacity of creating alternative representations of the world – and thus of re-figuring the world depicted by reason or history. But their discourses also share another feature, whose importance is best seen in such experimental forms of narration in the Renaissance as the Utopias of Giacopo Sannazaro and of Thomas More, the first novels of Rabelais in France or the Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain. This feature would be their paradoxical structure, and hence the instability of their speech acts, which deny, suspend, or do not seriously guarantee the truth of their statements. The merging of folly and fiction in the creation of the literary fool by Cervantes, and the lasting influence of the Quijote’s imaginative or imaginary madness, for instance in the French seventeenth-century tradition of the ‘anti-roman’, lead these two different means of reformulating the world effectively to coincide; inventing and animating the character of the Fool nearly always brings out the heuristic and epistemological potentialities of this coincidence. Nevertheless, this extensive use of fictional or fictive folly, from the fury of Ariosto’s

Hide-And-Seek: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Art of Deception

Lazarillo de Tormes has been often interpreted by contemporary criticism as the first modern novel, due to the alleged complex personality of its protagonist and the structural unity of the work. However, Lazarillo was understood by Golden Age readers as primarily a funny and amusing book. Analysis of the rhetorical devices employed by its unreliable narrator allows a new contextualisation of the work in the light of the text's exploitation of witticism, deceit and parody.

Lazarillos bekendelse

Lazarillo’s ConfessionIn Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Letter on the Novel’ Fielding is opposed to Sterne, i.e. vulgar realism as opposed to spiritual form and inward imagination. The short anonymous novel about Lazarillo is here taken as an early specimen of novelistic realism and thus as part of the origin of the trend in the history of the genre, which is the object of Schlegel’s elitist scorn. At the background of depictions of contemporary poverty, Lazarillo de Tormes is read along the line of Humanist Christianity, represented by Vives. Various implicit references to the Bible are highlighted. At the level of form the autobiographical first-person narrative is seen in the light of confession and juridical testimony in a period strongly marked by the Inquisition.

An Early Bourgeois Literature in Golden Age Spain: Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache and Baltasar Gracián

Tracing the beginnings of a bourgeois literature in Golden Age Spain, Francisco Sanchez examines works by Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), major picaresque texts--particularly Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache (1599-1604)--and contemporary writings in which political economists and jurists look at new economic and political circumstances. Using the term republica to describe an economic sphere of social life under the constrictions of both the monarchy and the privileges of the seignorial system, Sanchez investigates notions of person, culture, and life in these texts. He also analyzes the formation of a private sphere of social action and the emergence of a literary sphere to represent early bourgeois values and sensibilities. Sanchez argues that this literature represents culture as intellectual and verbal skills for the social and economic advancement of a Christian but secularized person. |Tracing the beginnings of a bourgeois literature in Golden Age Spain, Francisco Sanchez examines works by Baltasar Gracian, major picaresque texts, and contemporary writings in which political economists and jurists look at new economic and political circumstances. Sanchez argues that this literature represents culture as intellectual and verbal skills for the social and economic advancement of a Christian but secularized person.

Revisiting the Circuitous Odyssey of the Baroque Picaresque Novel: Reinaldo Arenas'sEl Mundo Alucinante

IT IS A CRITICAL COMMONPLACE that Lazarillo de Tormes's appearance in 1554 engendered a literary tradition, usually referred to as the (be that the picaresque novel, genre, mode, frame, style, or strain), that played a dominant role in Hispanic letters during Spain's Renaissance (here, chiefly designating the sixteenth century) and the baroque period (mainly the late sixteenth and entire seventeenth centuries).' However, the picaresque has not remained restricted to the Peninsula during the peak of its empire. Rather, we shall find that the picaresque novel-specifically one written in a decidedly baroque fashion-has resurfaced as recently as 1969 in the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas's El mundo alucinante (Hallucinations).2 In this transtemporal, trans-Atlantic investigation, I first demonstrate that the baroque picaresque is a Hispanic literary constant or, at a minimum, that it cyclically reappears. I examine how El mundo alucinante engages in dialogues with two canonical baroque picaresque novels of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Spain: Mateo AlemBnn's Guzman de Alfarache (1599/1604) and Francisco de Quevedo's El busc6n (The Scavenger, 1626). I also briefly examine how Arenas employed his primary historical source, Fray Servando's Memorias (The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier). Ultimately, I attempt to explain why Arenas, a Cuban who reached maturity un-

Diálogo y picaresca en el Coloquio de los perros

Dans cette étude nous analysons la parodie des pratiques rhétoriques dans le Coloquio de los perros et pour ce faire nous prenons en compte le rôle joué par certains dialogues humanistes. Cette parodie, qui remet en question la proposition esthétique et idéologique du Guzmán, implique cependant une nouvelle approche de la poétique du Lazarillo. D'autre part, l'utilisation de la perspective autobiographique dans le Coloquio, opposée au point de vue implicite de l'auteur, se rattache à l'ambiguïté, au perspectivisme et à l'ironie du Lazarillo; ces traits, auxquels Mateo Alemán substitue l'exploitation doctrinale du discours rhétorique sont introduits par Cervantes dans le but de restituer les possibilités expressives de la proposition originale.

:Challenges to Authority

The Renaissance, both as a concept and a period, continues to generate lively controversy not only among academics but also among the general public. Ever since the publication, in 1860, of Jacob Burckhardt's classic study of the Renaissance in Italy, scholars have disputed the origins of the movement and its subsequent influence on European culture and thought. This sequence of three course texts and two anthologies, published in association with the Open University, explores the Renaissance from the interdisciplinary perspective of history, literature, drama, religion, the history of art, philosophy, music and political thought. It provides students and general readers with an unprecedentedly thorough analysis of this absorbing stage in the development of Western civilization. The evolution and reception of Renaissance culture was mediated by developments in various other spheres of early modern life and culture. Foremost among these were the religious changes initiated by the Protestant Reformation which form the basis of the first three chapters. Religious and cultural developments in Germany are contrasted with sixteenth-century Spain and further explored through the study of the picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. Alongside the Reformation, the place of Renaissance science or natural philosophy is subjected to critical evaluation. New approaches in this field are illustrated by case studies on the anatomical revolution, Galileo and court patronage, and Paracelsus. Subsequent chapters explore the Renaissance fascination with witchcraft and demonology, in both learned discourse (Pico's Strix) and popular drama (The Witch of Edmonton). The volume concludes with a study of one of the most influential and provocative writers of the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne, whose Essays provide stimulating material for a reassessment of the impact of the Renaissance on contemporary thought.

Where Does the Prologue of Lazarillo End

It is now reasonable to assume that the rubrics in the three earliest surviving editions of the sixteenth-century, anonymous La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades are apocryphal. This article stresses that, if so, the first tractado epigraph no longer necessarily marks the division between prologue and letter. The prologue probably in fact ended a paragraph earlier. Scholars have long sought to reconcile what now appear as the prologue proper and a factitious extension. The new structure proposed, while by no means abolishing problems in this area, may nonetheless enable us to take a more relaxed view of them.

Discourses of poverty: social reform and the picaresque novel in early modern Spain

Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque in Early Modern Spain. By Anne J. Cruz. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. 297 pages. This study aims to provide a new understanding of picaresque fiction by reading it against the reports, controversies and (mostly ineffectual) legislative programs for the relief of poverty and control of vagrancy, and the debates on whether the poor should be enclosed along with the sick, or given outdoor relief. This richly documented material, and Professor Cruz's Foucauldian theorization, form the principal substance of the book. Beginning with Lazarillo de Tormes, Professor Cruz picks up the allusion (lazar-leper) in the protagonist's name and briefly traces the history of leprosy as a social phenomenon, noting that the marginalization of lepers shifted in the mid-- sixteenth centrury to vagrants, prostitutes, conversos and moriscos (16). Of all the fictions that carry the label `picaresque,' Guzman de Alfarache is the one that most directly and insistently presents the experience of poverty, both real and feigned, and also meditates upon begging and vagabondage as corrosive elements in society. father-shady Genoese financier of vaguely east Mediterranean origins, bisexual seducer of women, twice renegade,-transgressed all the norms of Spanish society. So Guzman's bastard status fails to define an essential or even specific ethnic, social or economic category. His is, instead, an status, one that encompasses all the dubious circumstances of the `other' (100). In a Spain beset with racial and religious, and other anxieties, the overdetermined discourse ... points to the picaro as the expiatory element in the narrative, as the scapegoat that must be sacrificed to safeguard the nationstate (106). This is interesting speculation; it presupposes knowledge of the subject position of readers, their response to the protagonist's strategies of survival, and their attitude to the real world of the poor and the vagrants. Aleman was close to Dr Perez de Herrera and other proponents of organized relief. After a century of debate, little had been achieved, and his frustration is evident in a letter to Herrera and in his novel. What did the readers of novels know about those high level discussions? How many saw poverty as a fact of Nature and shared the common prejudice that beggars were either lazy or criminal? Cruz's book focusses with great thoroughness on the activists; it does not acknowledge inertia in the shared world of readers. …

Policing the picaresque:Lazarillo de TormesandEl buscónon trial

Abstract What is the picaresque? In our era, one typical response to this question has been provided by R. Bjornson in his The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction. Bjornson, speaking about Lazarillo de Tormes, claims that the book represents the fusion of two literary conventions, ‘the pseudoautobiographical perspective and the panorama of representative types’, which although ‘not necessarily associated with the picaresque myth ... almost invariably appear in subsequent picaresque fiction’. For Bjornson, the success of Lazarillo lies in the author's ability “'to shape traditional or folklore elements into a cohesive, aesthetically satisfying unity based upon the illusion that they constituted parts of the same life'”. (Italics mine) Conflating author with narrator, Bjornson constructs a posteriori a ‘unifying perspective ... [which] ... focuses upon a recurrent human situation and often reconciles the traditional opposition between the comic and the serious’.1 In this analysis of one text ascribed to the...

ThePicaroin Fact and Fiction

Abstract Lack of opportunity for advancement and religious unrest characterized the lower orders in sixteenth-century Castile. Rather than explore any permanent solutions to these vicissitudes, Charles V, and to an even greater extent Philip II, preferred to give increasing powers to the Inquisition, which attempted to preserve order by prosecuting for many of the minor offenses committed by this class. The anonymous author of the Lazarillo de Tormes, the first entry in the new picaresque literary genre, catalogued the problems, not only of the picaresque or delinquent class, but of that poor as a whole, whom he showed as victims of that society's exclusionary economy and perverted values. Hie author successfully blurs the lines between fact and fiction. In examining the trial records for the inquisitional tribunals for Cuenca, Siguenza and Cordoba, as well as Petitions submitted to various Cortes, I have sought to demonstrate that the heroes and villains of the Lazarillo de Tormes were drawn from real-li...

The Squire as an Incarnation of Pride in "Lazarillo de Tormes"

The Squire as an Incarnation of Pride in "Lazarillo de Tormes"