ABSTRACT
For all the Spanish miscellanists’ insistence on unbounded variety and the associated appeal of their books to a potentially unlimited audience, we observe within the tradition of the miscelánea in the Golden Age certain recurrent topics, not least among them the natural world, as well as two notably under-developed themes, religion and the New World, but, before moving on to an examination of some of the most important types of matter which feature in the miscellanies, we should rst explore the intellectual approach taken towards the material that they house. We have seen that the miscellanist is a selector and a synthesiser of abundant and eclectic information on numerous subjects; Fernández de Oviedo, in the most valuable contemporary assessment of Mexía’s Silva de varia lección, and in comments which can be applied to some degree to every Spanish miscellany, describes his peer’s method as ‘cogiendo la or de tanta e tan suaves memorias de tan notables leciones, [para que] viésemos en breves renglones lo que muchos e grandes volúmenes contienen’ [‘gathering the essence of such numerous and pleasing reminiscences of such notable readings, so that we could see in just a few lines the materials that many great volumes contain’].1 We can detect in this assessment, with its reference to Mexía’s having taken the ‘or’, literally ‘the ower’, of the works he has read, an allusion to one of the most enduring images relating to the assimilation and re-presentation of material, that of the bee collecting nectar from different owers. The analogy is popularised in Antiquity by Seneca, and re-purposed by Macrobius in his miscellaneous Saturnalia, with one of its most notable appearances in the Spanish miscellany tradition occurring in Cascales’s Cartas filológicas.2 We hear in the preliminary materials of this text, as the author explains the suitability of the epithet which heads his epistolary miscelánea, that ‘philology’ for Cascales is an eminently broad term, qualifying one of three types of ‘materia docta’, ‘learned topics’; this sub-section encompasses ‘cosas de humanidad, curiosas y llenas de erudición’ (‘curious and erudite things relating to human letters’), and is anked by two more restrictive categories, ‘lósofa’ and ‘teóloga’, ‘philosophical’ and ‘theological’ materials.3 While all three types contain ‘ciencia y sabiduría’ (‘wisdom and knowledge’), ‘philological’ matters are more suited to the miscellany form, as Cascales makes clear
when he describes the compositional process in the twenty-fourth chapter of his work: ‘La lología tiene los brazos muy largos; pues se pasea por el campo de todas las ciencias y de todas las artes, no ya con aquella perfección que cada una pide, pero a lo menos chupando, como hacen las abejas, lo más dulce de las oridas plantas’ [‘Philology has an extremely wide embrace; with it one delves into the eld of every science and every art, not with the perfection proper to each of them, but at least extracting, like bees, the sweetest part of their owering plants’].4 The broadness demanded by a miscellany, therefore, entails the sacrice of intellectual ‘perfection’, but that this should not be considered a shortcoming is emphasised by the recourse to the apian metaphor, with which Cascales expresses his belief in the value and pleasure of judicious compilation from numerous sources.
