Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age Open Access

This extremely readable book has been put together largely from the writings of contemporary observers and from secondary sources. Its aim is partly description: the brilliance and discomfort of life in the great cities of Madrid and Seville, the backward state of the provinces. The technique of the eye-witness account perhaps raises more problems than it solves. The author is inclined to blame the feudal regime for much of the misery in the Spanish countryside; yet the historian is still in no position to contradict Lope de Vega’s portrayal of the independent and self-respecting peasants of Fuenteovejuna. Quoting one author against another will not get us very far. The chief merit of this book seems rather to lie in its exploration of the psychology of the restless, violent society that was Spain in the Golden Age. It was a society which combined the highest ideals with the most cruel realism in its religion, its festivals, its study and its warfare, a society whose highest literary manifestation was the pícaro. In a final chapter the author considers the problem of picaresque literature as a social document. This is a vexed topic, on which historians and lettrists have not worked out a common formula of interpretation. Whether or not picaresque literature had much social content, society certainly had much of the picaresque. The problem of Spain’s decline has been too long treated in terms of economic causation, with no very satisfactory results. Perhaps it is time the historian paid more attention to the question of social values and recognized, for example, that negative attitudes to marriage and the family may have played as significant a role in the decline of Spain’s population as any plague, war or tax. Prof. Defourneaux’ book could be a pointer on the road of historical reorientation. The translation is good, but there are rather a lot of misprints or mis-spellings.