Utopía y reformismo en la España de los Austrias is a compilation of five previously published articles, now revised and expanded, to which the author, José Antonio Maravall, has appended a number of short essays, also previously published, and written an introduction. The pieces included cover a wide, but essentially harmonious, group of topics that range from an examination of the essential differences separating medieval fable from Renaissance travel literature, to a general survey of Western European utopian thought, along with the analyses of particular variants of this thought in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish America. Among the Spanish thinkers whose ideas are highlighted, the principal figures are Bartolomé de Las Casas, Fray Juan de Robles (for his writings on poverty and poor relief), and Pedro de Valencia (for his advocacy of agrarian reform).
The theme that ties together these various studies is Burckhardtian in tenor and scope. Maravall makes a clear and absolute distinction between what he regards as essentially medieval and what he sees as modern. Like Burckhardt, he identifies the period of transition from medieval to modern with the Renaissance, but Maravall’s Renaissance corresponds more exactly with Braudel’s “long-sixteenth century” than with Burckhardt’s quattrocento. The reason is obvious. For Maravall, the locus of change was Atlantic Europe and the catalyst was the discovery of America. Among the products of this transition were Thomas More’s Utopia, the utopianism that Maravall regards as permeating sixteenth-century Spanish progressive thought, and the essentially social and economic reforms proposed by such “humanist” thinkers as Las Casas and Juan de Robles.
This theme is not as rigorously argued as one would like. Maravall goes to great lengths to distinguish medieval from modern modes of thinking. For example, he rejects Phelan’s view of the Franciscans in New Spain as millenarianists and similarly discounts the importance of millenarianist elements in Las Casas’s thought. He does not, however, make a clear enough distinction between sixteenth-century utopian and reformist thought. Such a distinction is needed in that one is hard-pressed to equate such practical-minded reformers as Pedro de Valencia with either such bold experimenters as Las Casas or with such impractical dreamers as Thomas More.
Part of the problem derives from the very nature of this book. Compilations of essays, even when the essays share a broad common theme, inevitably lack the sustained line of argumentation and the coherence that one expects of monographic studies. Maravall in this book has gathered together essays that are individually stimulating and informative. His insights into sixteenth-century Spanish intellectual history and his command of the literature are unsurpassed. But in the final analysis, the parts are more than the whole, and the whole raises questions that are not adequately addressed.
