Casuistry and Early Modern Spanish Literature: A Neglected Relationship

The title of this volume has an unspectacular, perhaps even ingenuous ring. And yet, it addresses complex relationships that were fertile with the production of cultural meaning. Early modern Spanish narrative encompasses an amazing variety of highly innovative literary forms. Labelling Don Quijote as the first modern novel has become a commonplace. Yet this is not the only original “Spanish” discourse. Although seemingly exclusively embedded in everyday life (and misery) of 16th and 17th century Spanish society, the genre of the picaresque immediately sweeps across Europe. Another case in point is the Spanish comedia as a hybrid dramatic form that transgresses Aristotelian norms for the sake of a changing public taste and need, as Lope de Vega elaborates in his Arte nuevo in 1609. And even well-established genres like the Italian novella become thoroughly refashioned to reemerge in bespoke Spanish clothes. As is to be expected, the attempts to elucidate the extraordinary dynamics of literary and artistic cultures in the Siglo de Oro are myriad. One widely accepted hypothesis argues for the emergence of a specific “modern” subjectivity: a characteristic habitus that permitted reflection upon the tensions that were inherent to a society exposed to the ideologies of the Counter-Reformation, colonialist nation building and the fraught heritage of the three monotheistic cultures (Gumbrecht). This is the period in which casuistry as a religious, legal, medical and literary practice gains momentum. Although its origins are conventionally associated with medieval penitential books and the practice of applying verdicts pronounced by church authorities in judging the severity of sins during confession, casuistry also has deep roots in legal and medical traditions, including Judaic and Islamic law and theology. Under the terms of the printing revolution, changing knowledge cultures spawn a sophisticated mingling of these threefold origins of casuistry. The spread of casuistry in early modern Spain is vast, from the strict sense of resolving penitents’ “cases of conscience” to broader political, economic, legal and scientific issues. Yet, perhaps owing to its image as a sophistical justification of suspect behavior and political expediency – a perception promoted by the Jansenist Pascal’s famous denunciation of Jesuit “laxism” in his Lettres