Spanish Books in the Europe of the Enlightenment (Paris and London): A View from Abroad

摘要

Reappraisal of the Enlightenment as a multi-nodal, networked phenomenonhas long served as a welcome corrective to accounts of centres and peripheries,welcomed especially by scholars working on and in ‘peripheral’ languages and terri -tories. For book historians, this shift suggests transnational and diasporic perspec -tives, a mass of ancillary narratives enmeshed in phenomena (exile, emigra tion,commerce, tourism) that saw people and books move. For the study of, say, Englishprint in Spain, this raises issues of mediation; of whether the ecclesiastical controlof print could extend effectively to a lesser-known language; and of the routes-often social-by which a reading knowledge of English spread among alreadycosmopolitan readers. Nicolás Bas Martín’s Spanish Books in the Europe of theEnlightenment takes a different tack: he likewise offers a limitation narrative, inwhich a potentially fruitful development is thwarted, but the restraining factor isnot state or ecclesiastical control, nor the absence of networks facilitating the flowof Spanish books in Great Britain and France, but rather dated, prejudiced notionsof Spain, ignorance of its Enlightenment, and a fixation on the Spanish Golden Age.