A Murder of Crows

“Erostratism” is a known term to label those maniacs who commit felonies to become famous, as Herostratus allegedly did by burning the temple of Artemis in 356 BC. Both Miguel de Cervantes and Luis Zapata noted in their respective works that “famous” had always carried negative connotations,1 but most texts favor the word “infamous”. Early modern cases of Erostratism are scarce, ­unless we count bandits who kill for no reason other than status, but don Juan de Espina, an avid collector of oddities, is said to have “owned the knives which from many centuries to nowadays had cut off the heads of the most famous of adverse fortune that declined from the prosperous”.2 Espina’s testament included the donation to the king of the “knife and bandage used in the execution of D. Rodrigo Calderón, and that he be warned when he held the knife, he did it by its handle, as the blade would threaten fatal ruin to a great head of Spain”.3 Behind Juan de Espina stands an invisible legion of crime fans. This book ­addresses, among other issues, their presence, patent in the care that writers put into conveying criminal acts through a “poetics of murder” of sorts, by selecting exceptional actions, creating rhetorical and thematic devices, and inventing an intellectual status for killers and their murders by modifying preexistent categories or creating new ones. Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain. Taxonomic and Intellectual Perspectives traces the cultural impact of murder, massacre, homicide, manslaughter, suicide, and other variants of killing in both writers and readership during the Spanish early modernity, allowing

1 A long passage in the second part of the Quijote is devoted to infamy, stringing a series of tales where a woman would rather be defamed than forgotten, someone who intended to commit suicide to be remembered, as well as historical accounts on Quintus Horatius, Caius Mutius, Marcus Curtius, Julius Cesar, and Hernán Cortés: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El inge- nioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha II.VIII, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona, 2015 [1615]), pp. 604–05. Zapata points to the original negative meaning of the word in Latin: “ ‘famoso’ en latín es siempre tomado en mala parte”: Luis Zapata, Miscelánea. Memorial Histórico Español XI (Madrid, 1859), p. 109. 2 “tenía los cuchillos con que de muchos siglos a esta parte habían cortado las cabezas a los más famosos de adversa fortuna que decayeron de la próspera”, including Don Rodrigo Calderón’s, who was involved in a high profile case: Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, Don Juan de Espina. Noticias de este célebre y enigmático personaje (Madrid, 1908), p. 46. 3 “cuchillo y venda con que degollaron a D. Rodrigo Calderón, y que le advirtiesen, cuando tomase el cuchillo, fuese por tal parte, porque siendo por otra amenazaba fatal ruina a una grande cabeza de España”: Cartas de algunos padres de la Compañía de Jesús IV. Memorial Histórico Español XVI (Madrid, 1862), p. 493.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004392397_002 2 A Murder of Crows advancement in the study of classification arrangements as ubiquitous and elusive as the exception and the series. The selection of primary sources tra- verses through a variety of texts, including private correspondence, gazettes, diaries, and chapbooks, as well as some legal allegations and miscellaneous judicial documents. Cases have been carefully selected from many criminal accounts under the criteria of the unusual, extraordinary and unique, a choice that might seem anti-taxonomic in itself, but constitutes the standard when dealing with exception, for a better understanding of the representation of criminal behavior during the early modernity. The construction and exploita- tion of such framework is the object of this monograph. The first part of Exceptional Crime takes a stance at how categories shift, split, compete, and work symbiotically against each other, so that the killer occupies its rightful place within exception. They all come to express a tension between the singular and the series, not only in terms of the production of cultural artifacts, but in the reader’s perception and expectations of such products. The first chapter, “The taxonomic axis of fatality. From series of monsters to serial murderers”, traces a path where series, once fulfilled by “monstrous races”, unveil a qualitative, categorical change that paves the way for the now overly familiar serial murderer. It exposes the leap that allows for modern killers to become a sub-species inside conventional teratology, preceding criminology by two hundred years before its formal establishment. As unique of an act as killing is, murderers occupy the space vacated by an ancient series, and become a trivial construct expressed by diagrams and produced in equal, coordinated successions, flexible but hard to evade. The second chapter, entitled “Sketching the face of evil. Pioneering serial killers”, deals with the formation of the assassin as a distinctive character and the creation of patterns that shape murder as something worthy of mercantile competition, establishing the bandit as the first serial killer archetype in Hispanic culture while cleaving the ancient beauty/good equivalency. Close examination of literary methods recurrent in broadsheets confirm that the relation between series and exception appeals to a taxonomic montage where the casus can simultaneously occupy both places. The third chapter, “On the edge. Living between suicide and madness”, defies the general perception of suicide as taboo by finding abundant legal and anecdotal evidence of a very prevalent discussion topic. The one who commits suicide (“el suicida”, which I will very freely refer to as “a suicide”, for lack of a better term, dodging the “victim” status and blending the action with the subject, where the individual may have committed suicide or may have attempted to do so) places himself permanently at the edge, segregating from the madman, and meeting early modern demands for intense contrast and rupturing behavior. Its development to form a proper category is traced