Studies which deal with British, Irish, and Iberian relations in the early modern period have traditionally been characterised by the dichotomic lens of an inescapable Anglo-Spanish enmity which developed alongside a steadfast Anglo-Portuguese friendship. As the editors, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and Berta Cano-Echevarría, remind us in the introduction, much of the scholarship surrounding British-Iberian relations has uncritically followed the conclusions of contemporary polemicists. Using philological, historiographical, and cultural approaches, the authors in this novel and exciting interdisciplinary volume seek to bring nuance and to provide texture to our understanding of a complex topic. Without neglecting the relationships between England and the Iberian kingdoms, the book also treats Ireland’s place within this network independently, rather than as an English or Spanish sidekick. The work, which deals with the concept of the ‘other’ and the process of ‘othering’ in the early modern British-Hiberno-Iberian contexts, provides a colourful and fascinating account of the multifaceted aspects of exchanges, collaborations and conflicts between subjects and exiles from England, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, whilst staying aloof of the binary approaches traditionally employed in their study.
The book is divided into three parts, each of which comprises three chapters. The first part is devoted to ‘Encountering the Other’ and opens with an enlightening contribution by Glyn Redworth surveying the battle of St. Quentin in 1557, which took place during Philip II’s reign as king of England through his marriage to Queen Mary I. If previous approaches assumed that the English had played a limited and reluctant role, Redworth has discovered precisely the opposite. Philip’s English troops enjoyed a prominent position in his army, which bears out Redworth’s conclusion that ‘500 years ago, the English were prepared to accept a European destiny’ (p. 30). Focusing on Anglo-Iberian networks of exchange, Susana Oliveira explores Thomas Wilson’s diplomatic mission to Portugal in the 1570s, a period in which Queen Elizabeth I seemed bent on irritating her Iberian neighbours in equal measure, an attitude which resulted in both kingdoms imposing embargos on commerce with England. Another assumption that is successfully challenged is the smoothness of Hispano-Hibernian relations. Although Spaniards and Irish Catholics were often natural allies against English Protestantism, Thomas O’Connor qualifies this widely held notion through a fascinating exploration of Irish renegades processed by the Inquisition in Spain between 1580 and 1760 and how they were perceived to be a double threat as natural subjects of a heretical monarch and converts to Islam. Far from the neat and uncomplicated categories often present in works devoted to the topic, the first part of the book shows human encounters in all their complexity, challenging many of the assumptions that scholars have made with regards to the friendships and enmities produced among the English, the Spanish and the Irish.
The second part of the book surveys ’Narrating the Other’. It commences with Berta Cano-Echevarría’s exploration of the construction and deconstruction of English Catholicism in Spain. Through the equivocations and mental reservations present in different sources (Miguel de Cervantes, Joseph Creswell, and others), Cano shows that in the early seventeenth century, the renewed period of friendship between England and Spain called for new and unexpected attitudes, as authors in Spain made paradoxical efforts to present England and the English as Catholic. Rui Carvalho Homem’s illuminating piece explores notions of identity and difference in Tomé Pinheiro da Veiga’s Fastigínia (c. 1607-8), set in Valladolid during Prince Philip’s baptismal celebrations in 1605. This satirical work, through an account of the festivities to mark the prince’s baptism and Holy Week, as well as a commentary on the attitudes and mores of men and women at the court of Valladolid, forces us to reassess and challenge pre-conceived ideas about Anglo-Iberian understandings of the other. The Fastigínia is full of captivating and humorous episodes, including one involving two Spanish ladies who decide to crash a party at the home of the English ambassador and do so successfully, to the amusement (and bemusement) of all nations involved. Episodes such as this one provide the context for Carvalho Homem to explore notions of identity in a specific Anglo-Iberian literary context. Moving on from courtly narratives and into the realm of historical writing is Tamara Pérez Fernández’s piece, which surveys English reactions to and retellings of the fall of Granada in 1492 in Hall’s and Holinshed’s chronicles, taking as the background for her exploration the increasingly contested meaning of the term ‘reconquista’. In England, the conquest was widely celebrated and through these chronicles the powerful propaganda apparatus of Ferdinand and Isabel’s regime becomes apparent. The episode was presented as a ‘reversal in the fortunes of Christendom’ (p. 133), which was still aching from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and as an historical development of extreme importance which was not understood as a local matter but one which ‘concerned the whole of Christendom’ (p. 147). Through explorations of different narrations of the ‘other’, these three essays remind us that binary oppositions will not do and that it is imperative, instead, to make an effort to understand how these nations perceived and described each other.
The last section of the book concerns itself with ‘Reading the Other’. Although it is widely assumed that there was no possible dialogue in the well-defined trenches carved up by Protestants and Catholics, Ana Sáez-Hidalgo convincingly challenges this myth through her exploration of a ‘fluid orthodoxy in Anglo-Spanish book collections’ (p. 163). If, for instance, the Protestant Edmund Bunny appropriated and retold the Jesuit Robert Person’s Resolution (1582), this ‘use and reuse’ of books comes full circle when Bunny’s work is in turn customised by a commentator who re-Catholicises it. Marta Revilla-Rivas seeks to understand which books at St Alban’s College Library in Valladolid were used as ‘tools for the English mission’. Although, in Spain, Protestant works were usually relegated to a forbidden section known as infierno (hell), English missionaries needed to engage with Protestant ideas if they were to succeed, so forbidden and condemned works were often amended for this purpose. In this way, works by Protestant authors, appropriately expunged, may well have served as inspiration for Catholic English missionaries. Finally, Mark Hutchings offers an evocative exploration of diplomacy as theatre. Focusing on Robert Treswell’s account of the earl of Nottingham’s journey to Spain in 1605, Hutchings encourages us to think about the roles of diplomats and heralds as embedded in the theatrical. The practice of diplomacy was anchored in a conscious staging of performance and enacted, not only in the physical display of the diplomatic mission, but also in how these encounters were retold and disseminated among domestic audiences. These three chapters remind us that early modern books contained many different layers of meaning that can tell us a great deal about the multidimensional ways in which the English, the Portuguese and the Spanish read and understood each other.
This volume is a fresh and welcome reinterpretation of a field that has traditionally been confined to axiomatic interpretations of Anglo-Spanish enmity and Anglo-Portuguese and Hiberno-Spanish amity. It is undeniable that those tendencies were there, but the present work allows us to picture Anglo-Hiberno-Iberian relations in all their variety and complexity. In exploring the transnational dimension of these relations from different angles —encountering, narrating, reading —Exile, Diplomacy and Texts succeeds unambiguously in its aim to counter some of the oversimplified narratives that have at times characterised the field. This collection of essays, intelligently put together, beautifully written, and thoughtfully edited, is an example of multidisciplinary scholarship at its best and is sure to make an impact in the multiple fields to which it contributes —religious, political, diplomatic, military and literary history. This book is, without a doubt, a prime example of generative British-Hiberno-Iberian collaboration and a much-needed breath of fresh air in a subject which continues to bear fruit.
