126.

]
theories and
methodologies

AS FEW HISPANISTS HAVE FAILED TO NOTICE, EARLY MODERN SPAIN

Golden Age or Early

Modern: Whats in
a Name?

IS MORE OFTEN APPEARING AS AN ALTERNATIVE TERM FOR WHAT WE

used to call the Spanish Golden Age. University catalogs still advertise
courses on Golden Age poetry, but lectures are more apt to bear titles
such as The Crisis of the Gift in Early Modern Spain. Although
some recent booksInventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition,
and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Keitt),
Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (Taylor), and An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (Martn)display Golden Age in their
titles, they share shelf space with offerings such as The Drama of the
Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (Bass),
Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain
(Middlebrook), and Family and Community in Early Modern Spain:
The Citizens of Granada (Casey). The preference for early modern is
showing up even in genres in which traditional usage might be expected. An anthology by Barbara Mujica, published in 1991, is subtitled Renacimiento y Siglo de Oro, but the cover of an anthology edited
by her and published thirteen years later reads Sophias Daughters:
Women Writers of Early Modern Spain. Similarly, the heading chosen
for the section on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature in
The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature is Early Modern Spain:
Renaissance and Baroque (Gies). Notably, Golden Age is not reserved
for studies on literature or art (Keitts and Taylors books, for example,
treat religious and legal history, respectively), and, by the same token,
early modern is deemed an appropriate rubric for studies of poetry
and drama. We are left wondering if the two terms are essentially
interchangeable. If we attempt to differentiate usage more sharply,
what are the repercussions for how we conduct research and teach?
What are the consequences for how or whether we reach particular
audiences? In posing these questions, I am mindful that postmodern
theory has challenged the very legitimacy of periodization as an intellectual enterprise. My position here is one of pragmatic skepticism.
I hold that periodization is historically constructed, ideologically

[ 2011 by the moder n language association of america ]

alison weber

ALISON WEBER , professor of Spanish at

the University of Virginia, is the author of
Teresa of vila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton UP, 1990) and the editor of
Approaches to Teaching Teresa of vila and
the Spanish Mystics (MLA, 2009). Her essay
Lope de Vegas Rimas sacras: Conversion,
Clientage, and the Performance of Masculinity appeared in PMLA 120.2 (2005).

225

theories and methodologies

226

Golden Age or Early Modern: Whats in a Name?

laden, cognitively necessary, and provisionally

useful for teaching and research.
Long before early modern gained currency, Golden Age was a problematic appellation. Let us start with the definition of siglo
de oro (golden century) in Mara Moliners
ubiquitous Diccionario de uso del espaol:
Cualquier perodo considerado de esplendor,
de felicidad, de justicia, etc. Especficamente,
poca de mayor esplendor de la literatura espaola, que abarca parte de los siglos XVI y
XVII (Any period considered one of splendor, happiness, justice, etc. Specifically, the
epoch of greatest splendor in Spanish literature, which includes part of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries). The first problem is
chronological. How does a golden century last
a century and a half? Should the chronological
bookends be moments of cultural or political
significance? Does the age of splendor begin
when Juan Boscn and Garcilaso de la Vega
decided to try their hand at the languorous
Italian hendecasyllable and finally grasped
the concept of the volta in the Petrarchan
sonnet? If we choose political markers, does
the Golden Age begin in 1516, when the first
Hapsburg assumed the throne as Charles I of
Spain; in 1519, when he was elected Emperor
Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire; or in
1525, when he defeated the Comunero rebels
and pacified Castile? The terminus ad quem
is similarly debatable. The year 1681, which
marks the death of the prolific and long-lived
playwright Pedro Caldern de la Barca, is a
popular choice in literary handbooks. But
for the historian Bartolom Bennassar, the
Golden Age had definitively come to an end
by 1648, when Spain, weakened by plague and
famine and on the verge of economic collapse,
abandoned its claim to the Netherlands and
signed the Treaty of Westphalia (1116, 330
35). In sum, there is little agreement about
which events mark or even contribute to the
beginning and ending of the Golden Age. Is
cultural stagnation brought about by political
or economic decline? How closely can the ex-

PM L A

haustion of an age be linked to the demise of

a prolific genius? Ironically, whether the perspective is literary or historical, the question
of defining the Golden Age seems inextricable
from the question of decline.
This brings us to another problematic aspect of Moliners definition. For whom was
the Golden Age an epoch of splendor, happiness, and justice? Clearly not for the soldiers,
peasants, slaves, prostitutes, and indigenous
peoples pressed into labor on New World
encomiendas. Even Don Quijote was acutely
conscious of living in an iron age. As he declaims to Sancho and an assembled crowd of
mystified goatherds, Dichosa edad y siglos
dichosos aquellos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos
el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto
se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa
sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que
en ella vivan ignoraban estas dos palabras de
tuyo y mo (Fortunate the age and fortunate
the times called golden by the ancients, and
not because gold, which in this our age of iron
is so highly esteemed, could be found then
with no effort, but because those who lived in
that time did not know the words thine and
mine; Don Quijote 121; Don Quixote 76; pt. 1,
ch. 11). From this perspective, Bennassars
definition of the concept is surely an improvement over Moliners: la memoria selectiva
que conservamos de una poca en la que Espaa ha mantenido un papel dominante en el
mundo, ya se trate de la poltica, de las armas,
de la diplomacia, de la moneda, de la religin,
de las artes o de las letras (the selective memory we keep of an epoch in which Spain maintained a dominant role in the world, whether
in terms of politics, arms, diplomacy, wealth,
religion, arts, or letters; 10; my emphasis).
This selectivity was used effectively during
the Franco regime, which claimed to have
resurrected the Golden Age values of austerity, militarism, and Catholic piety. Writing
from exile in the United States, Amrico Castro famously jettisoned the term and coined

126.1

How did the early Jesuits, about whom I was

writing a book, fit the categories of Counter
Reformation and Catholic Reformation? I
gradually came to the conclusion that those
two terms, the most widely used, were inadequate and sometimes misleading as designations for what the early Society of Jesus was
about. . . . I came to see, moreover, that such
terms, even when accompanied by disclaimers, were not simple labels, for they acted as
implicit questions and implicit categories of
interpretation. They thus subtly directed attention to some issues and away from others,
highlighted certain phenomena and cast others into the shadows, admitted some evidence
but filtered out the rest.
(23)

If we accept the idea that labels act as conceptual filters, what issues are highlighted
and what phenomena recede to the margins
of our attention when we use early modern
instead of Golden Age?
We might begin with beginnings. While
Golden Age focuses our attention on the rediscovery of classical learning, early modern
favors other precipitating factors for demarcating a new age: political (the consolidation
of monarchical power), social (urbanization
and demographic growth), and technological (the introduction of the printing press).
The analogies between our own experience of
an information revolution and its fifteenthcentury counterpart go a long way in explaining the recent boom in studies on printing,
literacy, readership, and libraries. With good
reason, medievalists have objected for some
time to the view that the sixteenth- century
Renaissance in Spain marked a sharp break
with the past; a shift in focus from cultural
rediscovery to technological innovation, however, will do little to correct the tendency to
overlook continuities with the practices and
productions of the late medieval period.1
But endings can have even more significant implications. Golden Age, as suggested
earlier, ironically reverberates with a teleology
of crisis and decline: after becoming a great
artistic and political power, Spain declined,
first politically, then artistically; the society
that enthusiastically embraced Erasmism, humanism, and critical inquiry closed itself off
(at a disputed chronological moment of crisis) from the northern winds of religious tolerance and reason; the expansive confidence
of the Renaissance gave way to the zero-sum
game of the baroque; and the experimental
freedom of the Renaissance was replaced by
the disciplinary propaganda of the state.2
Early modern comes with its own implicit
categories of interpretationnamely, that the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were preludes to modernity. As Jeremy Robbins explains,
this idea is sometimes met with resistance:

227
theories and methodologies

la edad conflictiva (the age of conflict).

The preference for what might be called the
French solutionidentifying periods with
centuriesis understandable (e.g., Garca
Santo-Toms; Parr). Interestingly, the Library
of Congress and the Biblioteca Nacional de
Espaa use neutral subject terms: Spanish
literatureclassical period15001700 and
Literatura espaolaS. XVI y XVIIHistoria y crtica (Spanish literaturesixteenth
and seventeenth centuriesHistory and
criticism). Nomenclature for divisions in the
Modern Language Association coincides with
that of the Biblioteca Nacional.
But is the issue simply one of finding an
acceptable alternative for a term with disputed chronological brackets and uncomfortable ideological baggage? In his introduction
to Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism
in the Early Modern Era, John W. OMalley
muses on an analogous problem: Whats in
a name? Sometimes very little. A rose still
smells as sweet. Even designations for historical phenomena like the Middle Ages that
were once loaded with prejudices lose them
through repeated usage. They become the
equivalent of dead metaphors, where the image loses its punch (1). He goes on to describe
how he came to change his mind about the
importance of names for historical periods:

Alison Weber

theories and methodologies

228

Golden Age or Early Modern: Whats in a Name?

The designation early modern implies a view

of Spain during the Golden Age not always accepted, especially by non-Hispanists, namely
that it was undergoing a decisive move toward
modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. It is undeniable, however, that the
culture of Golden Age Spain was produced
during a protracted period of intense transformation which saw intellectual, social, and
religious certainties gradually challenged and
eventually changed by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the scientific
and philosophic revolutions of the seventeenth. This process may have been slower in
Spain than in some countries, but it occurred
nevertheless.
(Renaissance 13738)

Such a view can be tough to sell to nonHispanists (and even to some Hispanists)
if they are accustomed to thinking of Spain
as a culture locked in the grip of CounterReformation Catholicism. But standing out
in Robbinss elegant statement are two concepts that might encourage such readers to
see Spain in terms of an early modernity sui
generis: uncertainty and protraction. Robbins
asks us to see in Spain not the stubborn clich
of Spanish belatedness (according to which
the fires of religious fervor were not tempered until the dawn of the nineteenth century) but a protracted response to religious
and epistemological uncertainties. Ironically,
developments in eighteenth-century studies
outside Spain may have made it easier to see
a seventeenth-century Spanish move toward
secularization. In the last fifteen years, the
traditional consensus that equated modernity with secularism and secularism with
the abandonment of religion has been seriously challenged. It is now widely accepted
that religion was an essential component of
intellectual and social life in the period of the
Enlightenment (Sheehan; Midelfort). If we
think of secularization not as the rejection of
religion but as the acceptance of a world less
permeable to supernatural intervention (but
spiritually porous nonetheless), then new pat-

PM L A

terns of thought become visible. It is possible

to read Cervantess hagiographic indifference
and thaumaturgic skepticism not simply as
remnants of a defeated Erasmism but as signs
of a stronger barrier between the natural and
the supernatural.3 We can begin to approach
Calderns casuistry or Baltasar Gracins notion of prudence from a new perspectivenot
as a vestige of an exhausted scholasticism but
as an anticipation of a worldview in which
God is more distant and his designs more
inscrutable.4 Another irony is that interdisciplinary scholarship on the supposedly more
culturally belated periphery of the Spanish
empire has brought to light an array of developmentsin cartography, economics, natural
history, and philosophythat, if they do not
constitute scientific revolutions per se, represent epistemological transformations with
important implications for how we understand the enigmas of secularization and modernity (see Padrn; Vilches; Ewalt; and Hill
on these respective topics).
If the bimodal, Renaissance- baroque
Golden Age is encumbered with a narrative of
rebirth and decline, early modern entices with
a different kind of teleological temptation. The
move toward modernity may have been decisive in Spain, but it was also uneven and beset
by detours and retreats. As is true for other
European cultures (but perhaps more so for
Spain), the narrative of a lockstep march from
a religious to a secular worldview is not convincing.5 How do we reconcile Philip IVs pen
pal Sor Mara de Jess de greda, who allegedly exhibited bilocation on two continents,
with a narrative of seventeenth-century secularization or the development of early modern feminism? Janet Todds caveat regarding
the history of feminism is apropos here: we
must resist the temptation to avoid listening
to a past that might be annoying through its
resolute refusal to anticipate us (46).
Thinking like an early modernist instead of a Golden Age specialist also has repercussions for the way we teach and design

126.1

tional surveys, which treat peninsular and

Latin American literature in separate courses,
with a team-taught transatlantic survey, but,
deterred by the usual obstacles involved in
team-teaching, we have not yet implemented
this proposal. Other departments have undoubtedly found different ways to negotiate
curricular change, taking into consideration
the intellectual interests, expertise, and composition of their faculties.
The last of the three questions posed at
the beginning of this essay is whether replacing Golden Age with early modern will attract
a broader audience of non-Hispanists. I doubt
I am alone in grumbling when I pick up a
monograph or collection of essays claiming
to treat a topic in early modern Europe and
discover that Spain is mentioned only glancingly or not at all. It would appear that the
slogan of the Franco-era tourism boardEspaa es diferente (Spain is different)has
been all too successful. Golden Age advertises
Spains difference, but at what cost? Does an
air of exoticism attract readers or give them
permission to ignore our subject as peripheral? (Given the lack of a clear rationale for
using Golden Age or early modern in current
book titles, there seems little consensus on
this matter in the marketing departments of
university presses.) It is doubtful, however,
that a wider use of early modern in itself will
attract a new audience to Hispanism. Others
probably have shared the frustration I have
experienced when after deliberately organizing a panel around three complementary national perspectives, I have seen the discussion
period devolve into separate conversations
on the speakers subspecialties. For good or
ill, people seem most interested in subjects
they already know something about. I predict
that Hispanism will have a better seat at the
table when non-Hispanists know more about
Spain. This may happen, ironically, because
of the reputation of Spanish as the practical,
as opposed to culturally prestigious, language
for students to study. But Spanish is no longer

229
theories and methodologies

curricula. Early modern implies a broader

chronology, extending from the late 1470s
to the late 1700s; it calls for familiarity with
trends in history, anthropology, religion, and
economics; it requires a more capacious definition of culture; and it asks for a geographic
range commensurate with the Spanish empire.6 How can we incorporate this expanded
range in the same fourteen-week semester
without sacrificing the time we now dedicate
to exploring the aesthetic achievements of
specific texts? What would it mean to begin
an early modern course reading Celestina
(1499) not as the crowning achievement of
medieval literature but as a masterwork at
the threshold of modernity and then to close
the semester with Benito Jernimo Feijoos
1739 essay debunking demonic possession
(De mo na cos [Demoniacs]) or Josefa
Amar y Borbns 1786 Discurso en defensa del
talento de las mugeres (Discourse in Defense
of the Talent of Women)?7 With such revised
syllabi, would we risk trading a narrative of
splendor lost for an equally skewed Whiggish view of history? Some will find such
challenges exhilarating while others will find
them dauntingor see them as an invitation
to dilettantism. In my department, a colleague and I have accommodated ourselves to
this dilemma by wearing two hats. As Golden
Age specialists, we teach courses on Don Quijote and Golden Age drama in which we give
precedence to close reading and discussions of
structure and themes, without excluding contextual issues. But as early modernists we also
teach courses that cross traditional chronological, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries: 1492 and Its Aftermath, The World of
Cervantes, The Inquisition in Spain and Latin
America, and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, 14501800. Our anxieties about
venturing into new disciplinary territory have
been eased somewhat since colleagues from
other departments have generously accepted
invitations to lecture on areas of their expertise. We have considered replacing the tradi-

Alison Weber

theories and methodologies

230

Golden Age or Early Modern: Whats in a Name?

the default language for the mediocre or reluctant student. When I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the early
1970s, students petitioned to do away with the
language requirement because, they argued,
learning a foreign language was irrelevant.
We have come a long way since then. When
I began teaching at the University of Virginia
in the early 1980s, we had around 17 Spanish majors; now over 150 majors graduate
each year in the department. More students
are beginning their university careers ready
and eager to take courses beyond the foursemester language requirement. And it is not
just courses such as Translation or Business
Spanish that are oversubscribed; students also
vie to get into courses on Islamic Iberia and
modernist poetry.
A similar transformation may be occurring in history departments. A friend of mine
recounted that when he was an undergraduate
at Brown in the late 1970s and enrolled in a
course on medieval history, Spain appeared nowhere on the syllabus. When he asked the reason for this omission, the professor apologized
by saying that it was because he didnt know
anything about medieval Spainno courses on
the topic had been offered during his years in
graduate school. But again there are signs of a
change. The history department of the University of Virginia recently hired its first Hispanist since Julian Bishko, one of the pioneers of
Spanish history in the United States, retired
in 1977. Now that there are more undergraduates studying Spanish, more bilingual students
in colleges and universities, and more PhDs in
Hispanism, one can hope that more history departments will consider early modern Iberia an
important area of specialization.
Students are also much more cosmopolitan than they were twenty-five years ago: they
are more likely to have traveled abroad and to
have Spanish-speaking friends. Most of our
majorsand a good number of nonmajors
spend at least a summer, but more often a semester, studying in Spain; they return with

PM L A

firsthand experience of Spain as a modern,

post- Catholic, European democracy, and
they are often curious to learn about its nondemocratic, imperial, Catholic past. It is to be
hoped that some of these students will go on
to become, if not scholars of European history
and literature, at least informed readers with
the inquisitiveness necessary to make Spain
part of the cultural and historical framework
of educated Americans.
As Hispanists we must do our part. At
a time when comparative literature departments are in danger of elimination, we must
be prepared to take up the slack by offering
comparative perspectives. We might include
more books and articles on European history
and other literatures in our graduate syllabi,
ask students to read a play by Shakespeare
alongside one by Lope de Vega, contrast the
idea of prudence in Blaise Pascal and Gracin, think about the question of honor in
Pierre Corneille and Caldern, or compare
the feminism of Laura Cereta, Marguerite de
Navarre, and Teresa of vila. We might encourage graduate students to take at least one
course outside the department.
I do not advocate abandoning Golden
Age entirely. Its continued use is reasonable in
certain contexts: when the study focuses on
the formal qualities of a writer, a school, or a
literary genre; when the writers under examination raise questions regarding Spains role
in the transfer of classical learning and imperial power; when a narrative of rebirth and
exhaustion is more convincing than one of
transformation and modernization.8 But when
the object of study requires attention to popular as well as elite cultural expressions, to the
production of literature in its social and material contexts, or to mentalities of the longue
dure or hints at responses to the uncertainties that portend secularization, early modern
is a more appropriate designation. It would
be unfortunate, moreover, if Golden Age became a dead metaphor of the kind OMalley
describes above or an anodyne synonym for

126.1

NOTES
I am grateful for comments and suggestions from Ricardo Padrn, Michael Gerli, Anne J. Schutte, Daniel
Wasserman, and Eric Graf. Unattributed translations in
this essay are mine.
1. Space does not permit a more detailed consideration of how the concept of early modernity reinforces
the questionable notion that a great divide separated the
Middle Ages from the sixteenth century. Crucial discussions include Bennett and the essays in the special issue
of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies edited
by Summit and Wallace. Scholars have also found that
topics in womens history and gender history such as
queenship and regency, female monasticism, mysticism,
the querelle des femmes, and marriage and the family
require more flexible chronological brackets than those
implied by Golden Age and early modern. The essays in
the volume edited by Earenfight offer a good example of
how womens history has challenged the idea of a chasm
between medieval and early modern mentalities.
2. The work of Maravall has been influential in promoting baroque as a period appellation for the seventeenth
century. For this historian of mentalities, the baroque represented a conservative backlash against the egalitarian
developments of the previous century. Among historians,
Ka men has led the way in consistently challenging the
notion of Spains benightedness (esp. ch. 5, The Myth of
the Inquisition [12649], and ch. 7, The Myth of Perpetual Decline [172205]). Robbins similarly deplores an
intellectual black legend that has resulted in the neglect
of Spains seventeenth-century contributions to the philosophical revolution of early modern Europe (Arts 3).
3. On Cervantess modernity, see Graf.
4. For a recent study on casuistry in the comedia, see
Kallendorf. On the secularization of prudence in Gracin, see Robbins, Arts, esp. 14256.
5. Robbins (Challenges and Arts) and Elliott provide
excellent examples of scholarship that successfully incorporates inconsistent and nonlinear developments into a
narrative of modernization. Such uneven developments
also occurred north of the Pyrenees, where the culture of
the Enlightenment did not put an end to witch hunts or
exorcisms. See, e.g., Midelfort.
6. Despite the fact that between 1580 and 1640 this
empire also included Portugal, the implications of an
Iberian (as opposed to a Spanish) early modernity have

yet to attract extensive scholarly attention. Fox is a notable exception.

7. Celestina and the Threshold of Modernity was the
title of a summer seminar for college teachers at the University of Virginia in 2009, led by Michael Gerli and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
8. Ironically, in the two genres of this period most
studied today there is a marked irreverence toward classical culture. The picaresque novel turned auctoritas on
its head, and Lope de Vega famously quipped that if playwrights wanted to be successful, they needed to lock away
the classical unities (133).

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