Thesis Submitted to the University of Nottingham for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
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1 THE REPRESENTATION OF CULTURE IN GOLDEN AGE MADRID: BETWEEN ATTRACTION AND REPUGNANCE. CAMILLE CLYMER, MML. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. DECEMBER 2014. 2 ABSTRACT. This thesis will examine literary representations of the city of Madrid from the late sixteenth to seventeenth century, with a specific focus on the period of 1600-1650. My analysis incorporates a multi-genre approach that will include historiography, ephemeral text, festival books, poetry, entremés and prose fiction in order to provide the widest consideration of early modern Madrid through the literature it produced. Several scholars of Golden Age Madrid, such as García Santo-Tomás, Elliott, and Romero- Díaz, have highlighted the need to move away from the static Maravallian dichotomy of power and resistance by which the Baroque has been characterised, and towards an approach that instead examines it from a point of view of its dynamism. The literature of early modern Madrid presents a conflictive image of both attraction and repugnance. On the one hand, there is an ‘official’ discourse of the city that looks to the court as its frame of reference, representing a powerful court capital. However, on the other hand, the same literature projects an ‘unofficial’ discourse, a dystopian nightmare where people starved to death in the streets, alienated and alone. The literature of early modern Madrid illustrates this crisis of representation between the two ‘worlds’ of the city that simultaneously narrate a city of extremes. This thesis will analyse the way in which this dual image of the city, its culture and the experience of living in it is produced with such a high degree of intensity within this period of urban development. It will also consider how the experience of the city is revealed through the literature it produced, demonstrating how representations of the city transcend concepts of power and marginalisation. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. It would not have been possible to write this doctoral thesis without the help and support of specific individuals around me, some of which I will mention here. Foremost, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Professor Jeremy Lawrance for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Golden Age, as well as his experience, enthusiasm, energy and inspiration. I would also like to thank my second supervisor Professor Jean Andrews for her patience, encouragement and intuitive mentoring throughout the doctoral process. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the University of Nottingham and its staff, and the AHRC, without whose funding I would not have had the resources to complete this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Kieran and my family for believing in me, keeping me going, and for their unconditional love, support and generosity. 4 NOTE. When citing texts that are manuscripts or published before the nineteenth century, I have edited them using the following criteria: the accentuation and punctuation have been modernised according to current academic standards, and abbreviated words have been cited in full (for example: q = que). Original spelling has been preserved. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS. Introduction. ...................................................................................................................6 Current Research.......................................................................................................................9 Literary Methodology........................................................................................................... 13 Theory......................................................................................................................................... 17 Chapter Structure................................................................................................................... 25 Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 27 Chapter One. Creation: History, Historiography and the Creation of City Image. ............................................................................................................................. 29 Ambrosio de Morales, Las antigüedades de las ciudades de España, 1575.. 34 Enrique Cock, Mantua Carpentana, heroice descripta, 1582 .............................. 36 Gil González Dávila, Jerónimo de Quintana and Alonso Núñez de Castro ..... 40 Statistics of Urbanisation.................................................................................................... 43 The Urban Locus Amoenus................................................................................................ 46 Madrid Versus The World: Urban Contemporaries ................................................ 48 ‘Illustrious Madrilenians’: The Noble Corpus ............................................................ 50 The Naming of Madrid: Mantua Carpetana................................................................. 51 San Isidro and the Quest for a Patron Saint................................................................ 61 Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 64 Chapter Two. Transformation: The New Babylon and Polysemy of Urban Space. .............................................................................................................................. 67 The Consciousness of Urban Change............................................................................. 69 The Plaza Mayor ..................................................................................................................... 72 The Calle Mayor ...................................................................................................................... 79 The Prado .................................................................................................................................. 87 The Coach .................................................................................................................................. 95 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................104 Chapter Three. Projection: The Court, Power and Urban Space...............107 The Palace................................................................................................................................110 The Royal Hunt......................................................................................................................124 The Church and Religious Foundations......................................................................130 Court Fiesta and Procession............................................................................................135 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................143 Chapter Four. Alienation: Distorted Bodies and Social Destruction in the City.................................................................................................................................147 Urban Contamination and the Parasites of Madrid...............................................148 The Darkness of the City ...................................................................................................159 Alienation ................................................................................................................................166 The Distorted Corpus of the City...................................................................................169 The City as Hell......................................................................................................................175 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................180 Conclusion...................................................................................................................182 Appendix A..................................................................................................................187 Bibliography...............................................................................................................188 6 INTRODUCTION. In 1561 when Philip II chose to settle the Spanish court in Madrid, it set into motion a ripple effect that changed the infrastructure of the city, the people and the culture it produced in an explosive and profound way. In the space of just one year after the announcement to settle the court in Madrid, the population had increased by 250% to an estimated 25,000.1 In the space of forty years, the population exceeded 80,000 people.2 Alongside this meteoric demographic rise, Madrid became a space of culture and the centre of artistic production. In the same streets where Luis de Góngora and Francisco de Quevedo traded their famous acerbic verses in a game of literary fisticuffs, and insults directed at one’s large nose were parried by jibes at the other’s myopia, there blossomed a glut of literary representation that mirrored the monstrous growth of the city. Madrid not only became a producer of culture with an unusual concentration of writers and poets vying for attention and patronage and a backdrop for this new literature, but also, increasingly, its protagonist, and what Pedro Ruiz Pérez terms as ‘el marco comunicativo de toda