Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature by Ryan Giles

Reviewed by: Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature by Ryan Giles Grant Gearhart Giles, Ryan. Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2017. 307 pp. ISBN: 978-14-4264-607-1. Ryan Giles's aptly titled Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature analyzes the function and meaning of prayers, divine names, and rejuvenating messages imprinted on a variety of objects from medieval and early modern Spain. The author considers examples from medieval manuscripts, early printed books, and picaresque novels, aiming to illustrate how the perceived power of these prayers and the objects on which they were written impact imaginative literature from the Iberian Peninsula. In the "Introduction," Giles begins by telling the story of Egeria, a pilgrim in possession of a copy of correspondence between Christ and the Edessene King Abgar. The document's words and its physical presence exhibit apotropaic properties as Egeria travels, and it is representative of similar material texts that were circulated widely throughout medieval Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula, the focus of Giles's study. In Chapter 1, "Amuletic Manuscripts," the author discusses two texts: the Razón de Amor, and the Cantigas de Santa María. In the Razón de Amor, the inscriptions on objects yield defenses against demonic tempests. This is also observable in Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa María, particularly in cantiga 209. Here Giles surmises that Alfonso relied on the Cantigas as a written amulet, which ties the conversational agenda present in cantiga 209 to the Cantigas collection as a whole. In Chapter 2, "Naming God," Giles reviews the manners in which God's name is conceived as well as written down on amulets and in literary works as a Tetra-grammaton, or the Hebrew name of god composed in four letters as YHWH or JHVH, in the Libro de Alexandre and the Libro de buen amor. Chapter 3, "Amuletic Voices," considers the significance of the Villamartín tile, which bears an inscription of poetic gothic script whose verses coincided with a prayer appearing in the Poema de Fernán González. Giles studies the similarities between other objects and this tile in three works: the Libro de Apolonio, the Poema [End Page 163] de Fernán González, and the Libro de buen amor. Specifically, he focuses on how the object and its inscription were "intended to conjure divine protection or healing through its material presence —a presence that can be accessed visually and verbally, as well as through touch" (90). Chapter 4, "The Bawd's Amulet," focuses on two works: Fernando de Rojas's late fifteenth-century La Celestina and Francisco Delicado's early sixteenth-century Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza. "Both works," argues Giles, "create a sense of fatalistic dread by inserting amuletic texts and images into the modernizing world of the printed book" (152). As part of her duties, Celestina performs a hex with a textual amulet and thread, a spell that links midwifery and female healing with the power to treat Melibea's amorous wounding. Lozana suffers an "amorous wounding" that leaves a visible scar on her forehead, and the author notes that the mark "could be viewed as a damning curse or a kind of amuletic inscription, consistent with the character's role as a carrier and healer of syphilis" (139). The final chapter, "Outlaw Prayers," examines the function of banned amuletic prayers in two canonical picaresque novels —Lazarillo de Tormes and El Buscón—demonstrating how certain invocations contributed to the development of narrative structures of the picaresque novel. Giles derives an intertextual connection between the Oración de la Emparedada and Lazarillo's domestic quandary as a cuckold at the conclusion of the text. Building on this, Francisco de Quevedo's El Buscón satirically applies amuletic prayer to expose the misuse of devotional objects as well as "the broken state of the judicial system in seventeenth-century Spain" (181). The book ends with a brief "Postscript" that contextualizes the centuries of amuletic objects and concludes that these objects "demonstrate how magical ways of thinking are always being reconfigured to persist alongside and even be interwoven with...

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