Images of Baetica. The ambivalent hispanic reception of Les Aventures de Télémaque

Abstract

In a crucial passage of Les Aventures de Télémaque, Fénelon identified Baetica with a form of sociability highly reminiscent of the Golden Age. Destined to leave a deep and controversial mark in the political and moral debates throughout the 18th century, that evocative image of the most elevated status of a material civilization removed from and impervious to luxury, the spirit of conquest and the logic of despotism, also mobilized the reflexive capacities characteristic of the Hispanic cultural order. In a steady and lengthy sequenced, analysed in the light of the corresponding epistemological uncertainties, of the morality of luxury, or of enquiry into origins, Fénelon’s Baetica was the object in Hispanic literature of very diverse and even contradictory readings. A diversity that illustrates the complexity and volatility of the relationship established at the time by that cultural order with the intellectual approaches disseminated and projected from the République des lettres.