The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain by Elizabeth R. Wright

Reviewed by: The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain by Elizabeth R. Wright Susan Byrne KEYWORDS Juan Latino, The Song of Juan of Austria, Epic, Lepanto, Granada, Race, Religion, Spanish Empire elizabeth r. wright. The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain, U of Toronto P, 2016, 288 pp. Elizabeth Wright begins her study of Juan Latino and his epic poem about Lepanto with a full historical-literary contextualization centered on a geographical locus, Granada, that serves to both frame and deepen the poet’s life story as well as his work. The volume is divided into two overarching sections, with the first, “From Slave to Freedman in Granada,” comprised of two chapters: one that considers Latino’s birth, education and situation in Granada, and a second that [End Page 139] concentrates on the Civil War that marked, as Wright clearly and convincingly explains, both the city and the man. Here, Wright explains her choice to use the contemporaneous phrase Civil War, which she takes from Ginés Pérez de Hita, rather than what scholars today call the Second Revolt of the Alpujarras, or the Morisco Revolt. Her reasoning is sound, and provides a marker for her approach throughout the volume: she studies the poet and his work from within the time frame, not only including but also trusting the multiple voices from historical and archival sources that enrich her study. Wright’s portrait of Juan Latino is a welcome refutation of the later “distorted image” or “canonization in caricature” of him that, as she points out, came about due to another set of social currents operative in the early seventeenth century (178). Although some details of the poet’s life remain unknown, Wright’s study reveals many fascinating subtleties, connections, and coincidences that, without overplay or exaggeration, she states clearly so as to allow a reader to draw their own conclusions. In chapter 2, for example, Wright measures the full impact of the Civil War on all aspects of daily life in Granada, then uses this basis, in turn, as foundational material to inform relevant details of the poet’s epic portrayal of the subsequent Holy League victory at Lepanto. This solid structural approach is edifying on many levels, one of which becomes even more evident in chapter four’s further study of the Christian-Muslim background of the city leading up to the 1568–70 Civil War, to be followed immediately by news of Lepanto in 1571. As her title promises, Wright explores the poet’s life, work as a teacher of Latin, and epic in an ample context that affords the reader much to consider in regards to race and religion. The second section of Wright’s volume, titled “The Epic of Lepanto,” is a richly detailed three-chapter social, historical, and philological study of Latino’s epic poem, Austrias Carmen (The Song of John of Austria), along with the poet’s proem elegy to King Phillip II. Following these chapters, Wright includes two appendices: the elegy itself, titled On the Birth of Untroubled Times, with the original Latin followed by Wright and Andrew Lemon’s prose translation, and a helpful chronology of the life of poet Juan Latino sketched out alongside salient historical moments. A recent translation of the full Austrias Carmen is included as one of twenty-one neo-Latin poems written by Italian and Spanish authors to celebrate the Battle of Lepanto, all recently published in a bilingual LatinEnglish edition in Harvard’s I Tatti series (The Battle of Lepanto, 2014). Wright and Lemon, along with Sarah Spence, are the translators and editors of that volume. More attention to the era’s neo-Latin writings, as recommended by Chris Celenza in his The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (2004), a volume not included in Wright’s otherwise impressive bibliography, has in this case yielded a fascinating portrait of Juan Latino, his work, and the Granada of his day. From the start of The Epic of Juan Latino, Wright recognizes and addresses the difficulties inherent in attributing ideas about race, which she openly identifies as “the most mutable of...

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