The Annales School and Maravall's La cultura del barroco

José Antonio Maravall's La cultura del barroco (1975) is an obligatory point of departure for any discussion of the Spanish Baroque. Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini assert the importance of Maravall as a historian of the period in a 1994 essay titled “The Changing Face of History,” associating him with the history of mentalities. I propose to reexamine these claims in light of recent critical debate and important new scholarship on the French Annales School of historiography.

In the years since the publication of his 1975 book, La cultura del barroco, Maravall has been the subject of debate and criticism, primarily over the degree to which his contention that the Baroque was a controlled, mass culture might have overshot the mark by ignoring the possibility for resistance to absolutism in the reception and staging of its more overt literary manifestations in the Spanish national theatre. George Mariscal and a number of others have eloquently addressed these concerns, with many recognizing that Maravall's concept of Baroque culture was not entirely monolithic. Diana de Armas Wilson has produced a most original corrective on still different grounds, pointing to the limits of Maravall's exclusively peninsular focus in his treatise on utopian discourse in the Quijote.

My response to these objections is to note, first, that various critics have suggested that Maravall's work should be understood as a response to the promotion of the overtly conservative message of many canonical Golden Age plays under Francoism (e.g. Portugal, Solich, Wheeler). Comedia scholarship has been in the process of questioning this conservatism for some time now. As John Beverley has pointed out, Walter Cohen in particular has elaborated an alternative view which highlights the paradoxical aspects of Spanish Baroque culture, “in which the strategies it deploys to repress and recontain modernity produce unintended or unmastered effects” (“Going Baroque?”34). Beverley himself summarizes the complexity of Baroque interpellation as “the paradoxical conjunction of the principle of submission to authority with the practical and theoretical ideal of the self-willed, independent individual” (“Going Baroque?”34).