A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain by Mary E. Barnard (review)

Abstract

In A Poetry of Things: The Material Lyric in Habsburg Spain, Mary E. Barnard studies poems “in which objects are endowed with agency to stage interactive performances with readers and viewers for mediating cultural and historical memory” and, more generally, poems that make “reference” to “concrete objects” in the work of four Spanish authors from the early seventeenth century (14, 129). Objects in these poets serve “as vehicles for exploring issues of moment in Philip III’s Spain: the preservation of humanist learning in the age of print; the collapse of empires, specifically of imperial Rome and implicitly of Habsburg Spain; the role of learned academies in the literary and artistic life beyond the court; the formation of subjective identities within distinct social spaces; and the role of religious objects in the tradition of spirituality of CounterReformation Spain” (13). The investment on the part of the court of Philip III (r. 1598–1621)— particularly his valido, the Duke of Lerma—in collecting and displaying lavish works of art warrants Barnard’s focus on poetry from his reign. A Poetry of Things builds upon her previous monograph, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of