The Libro Verde: Blood Fictions from Early Modern Spain
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Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9731534 Copyright 1997 by Beusterien, John L. All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9731534 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Titic 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SBBBBBBHBaBaaBSaaBaBSKBBBBSBHBBBaaaaOBMlHB A dissertation entitled T h e L i b r o v b r d b x Blood fictio n s from Early modern Spain submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John Beusterien Date off Final Oral Examination: July 9, 1997 Month & Year Degree to be awarded: December May August 1997 Approval Signatures off Dissertation Readers: Signature, Dean off Graduate School U(A Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The L i b r o VERDE: Blood F ictions from e a r l y m o d e r n Spain Toy John Beusterien A dissertation suhmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Spanish) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 1997 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. G Copyright by John Beusterien 1997 All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission Acknowledgements This study has been read and commented by Professors Steven Hutchinson, Catherine Connor, and Jacques Lezra. Professors Catherine Jagoe and David Hildner also formed part of the committee. I am grateful to all of them for their comments and suggestions. A special thanks to Carmenchu who occupies the blank space before it begins, who fills the empty spaces on every page, and who takes the place of the void that begins after the very last word. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ii Table of Contents Introduction...................................... 1 Chapter 1: One's Name, One’s Blood.................... 18 Chapter 2: The Economy, The Physician, and Impure Blood.... 78 Chapter 3: Medicine, Blood, and the Menstruating Jew...... 119 Chapter 4: Bloodletting, the Jewish Blood Libel, and Consuming Blood............................... 153 Chapter 5: Accusatory Blood, Healing Blood, and Conspiratory Jews....................................... 210 Conclusions............................................. 255 Bibliography............................................ 2 62 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iii List of Figures Fig. 1. A list of those burned in Zaragoza through 1574 by the Inquisition as recorded in the Libro verde ............................... 47 Fig. 2. Frontispiece from 1623 pamphlet published in Zaragoza and signed by 147 scholars condemning the existence of "el Verde. ".......................... 55 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Introduction The Circular Problem: Ink and Blood If it is to be "used" at all, one use of human blood, although a bit gruesome and unusual, can be paint. While "blood" typically hid behind the language of family honor, in the seventeenth-century play, El pintor de su honra, Calderbn de la Barca puts human blood on display. The play concludes with the artist showing the body of his murdered wife. He wants his spectator to convert the image of the bloody body into an artistic creation: "el dibujo es, / que ha dibujado con sangre" (196, Act III) . Why does Calderbn portray a man who conceives human blood as paint, the artist's fundamental medium for representation? Calderbn's overt display of blood invites a more subtle inversion of this question that is not quite so easy to visualize: what does it mean to use paint as a medium of representation instead of blood? One of the most marvelous and poignant moments in Spanish Golden Age literature, found in the opening pages of La picara Justina, a picaresque novel written in the early seventeenth century by Francisco Ldpez de Ubeda, deals not with the problematics of the substitution of paint for blood, but ink for blood. The novel opens in the following way: Justina begins to write her auto-biography, but is tantalizingly Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 stifled by a hair that has fallen on the tip of her pen that causes her to put a spot on the page. Ubeda has Justina explain that she ends up not writing anything but the ink blot. Her preoccupation with the inks tain, in fact, mimics her preoccupation with her stained blood, her blotted family genealogy. In this fictional autobiography, Justina's inability and incapacity to write, to create an identity for herself, is at once the subject that has given her a reason for writing and is her writing. She spends the opening pages of her autobiography getting nowhere, trapped in an inksplotch that I would argue that Ubeda suggests replaces a blood stain. Ubeda's description of the stain paradoxically becomes a wonderful simultaneity: his character creates her identity by not being able to create one. A legendary belief about blood informs Ubeda's creation of the Justina character: one's being is one's blood, and to write, to truly communicate and bond oneself to a reader, one must write not with ink, but with blood. In the Dr. Faustus story, a legend that found Spanish versions in such works as Gonzalo de Berceo's story of Tedfilo (Milagros de nuestra seSora) or Calderon de la Barca' s El mdgico prodigioso, when the protagonist wants to join the devil, he signs the soul-granting contract with his blood.1 We could say the same about the 1 For more on the history of signing in blood see Crow 230 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 contract that the fictional writer, Justina, makes with the reader: the precious guarantee of the writer's soul, the authentic communication of her essence, is sealed for the reader when that guarantee is made in blood. When Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century saint, wrote, she understood her ink as metamorphisizing into Christ's blood: "I write to you in his precious blood...." (Bynum, Holy 176). Ubeda suggests, then, that if that blood is impure as in the case of Justina, then the communication, the author-reader bond is tainted and the writer can not get beyond the ink. The subject of writing, then, becomes the thwarted writing process itself. In the seventeenth-century semantics of blood in Spain, other examples existed that substituted ink for blood. At the end of Baltasar Gracian' s Criticdn, when the characters reach the end of the world, they find themselves in a sea of ink— a transformed version of the image from the end of the Biblical Apocalypse where the waters of the earth turned to blood (16:4) . Might the nature of blood as understood in seventeenth-century Spain provide a window into how literary works from the time may be read? I propose that navigating a blood-sea maps out and descries the nature of the sea of ink of seventeenth-century and Hsia 9. Inquisitional cases against witches often reported that the witch had signed her contract with the devil in her own blood (BleLzquez Miguel 104) . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 literary production or, put the other way around, the sea of ink spilled at this time reveals a sea of blood. The picara Justina substitutes ink for blood: Ubeda conscripts Justina's identity through the conflation of botched blood and ink. Like the indelible spot of Clytemnestra's blood that time could not erase in Aeschylus' s Oresteia or the one which Lady MacBeth could not wash out in Shakespeare's Macbeth, so Justina can not be rid of her spot. For the reader, Justina comes into existence through the description of an inkstain. Her bloodlike ink spoke out and communciated like the bloody wounds that converted into mouths in Calderdn de la Barca' s La vida es sueSo (106, Act III). Identity and Blood I would suggest that many seventeenth-century Spanish authors found themselves immersed in this problem, feeling the reciprocal problematics between ink— the writing about the attempt to write— and a preoccupation with impure blood. Ubeda depicts a character who struggles to create an identity for herself despite her recognition of her impure blood.