Review: "The Bad Life in Spain during Philip IV's Reign" by José Deleito y Piñuela

The colorful Spanish society of the 17th century is the main focus of the charismatic work by José Deleito y Piñuela, The Bad Life in Spain During Philip IV's Reign. Deleito, author of a series of books based on expressing Spanish experiences during the Golden Age, was an historian and pedagogue from Spain. He also served as a professor at the University of Valencia until 1939, when he was purged and removed from his position due to political upheavals that plagued the country under Franco's regime. Also a member of the Royal Academy of History, after being removed from his chair, he dedicated himself to research during the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, when his studies on Spanish theater stood out.

The Bad Life in Spain During Philip IV's Reign transports readers into a myriad of social peculiarities characteristic of a period in Spanish history. However, we are accustomed to knowing it for its literary richness with authors like Miguel de Cervantes or Quevedo and the image of a country with pious religiosity; yet, reality shows an extended bad life across all social classes camouflaged under a golden facade known as the Golden Age.

The work is divided into three parts, preceded by a prologue written by Julián San Valero Aparisi and a section dedicated to preliminary warnings. It concludes with an epigraph of conclusions and a notes section. The entire work consists of 292 pages in which the reader will be immersed in extensive research richly documented on the world of crime, marginality, and Spanish picaros during the 17th century, based mainly on primary sources from the period, which will gradually unfold in the following lines of this study.

Regarding the prologue and preliminary warnings, they already alert readers to the content of the preceding chapters and introduce them to the social reality of the long 17th century in all its facets.

The Spanish Golden Age is known as an era for a future generation where literature and good living among social classes made Spain admirable to foreigners. The truth is that, as described in the first chapter of this work, there is a reality contrast that the author managed to capture very well. He describes how under that golden curtain lies an immoral society in which criminal acts, prostitution, libertinism, and adultery constantly occur, resulting from economic hardships that Spain was experiencing at the time, while also revealing a society with certain traits still of the 15th-century estate-based society when the Ancien Régime was at its peak. In this first part, we find stories of the struggles parents, husbands, and even people from higher classes went through to survive. Another very significant example is the mancebías (brothels), places that expanded throughout almost all of the Iberian Peninsula as a business for making a living and even gave rise to the press of the time, known as «Avisos» where numerous news about events happening within those «public brothels» were published, as an English traveler of the period, Henry Cock, called them.

All this invites us to see the background that hid behind the Golden Age, a society plagued by economic needs and to which we must add the enormous corruption existing at the time, which in turn incited people to lead such «bad life» as José Deleito, author of this work, makes good reference to.

Entering into the second part of this magnificent work, the author explains those consequences derived from what has been exposed so far. On one hand, continuous thefts to face economic shortages and that at the same time gave rise to extreme violence. Security was not a priority back then because, as we have already mentioned, corruption was not only present in lower classes but also among higher nobility.

The church is another key point to which the author dedicates an entire section of his work since despite the bad social life and atrocities that occurred, people were faithful believers.

The third part of the book is dedicated to picaresque. In this section, Deleito y Piñuelas describes how a society can develop certain skills to «make ends meet» as we would say today. The issue is that in some way, the precarious social situation at the time led people to take the easy route to survive; meaning any means were valid to have something to eat or support their family, which eventually turned into the lifestyle of lower classes and simultaneously developed certain strategies among them that over time acquired a professional character. Among these strategies, we find those of pícaros, one of the most common since it emerged with the aim of Spanish monarchies importing raw materials from outside Spain, resulting in numerous migrations of Spaniards to foreign countries in search of work. The term «picardía» that we know today contrasts with that of the 17th century when it was meant for describing idle people whose main goal was living off handouts and eating «the soup of fools», which they achieved by feigning disabilities, begging, hypocrisy among many other things and eventually turned into a way of life. This situation was also exploited by second sons of monarchs who did not have the same fate as their first-born brothers.

Regarding the conclusions that the author proposes as the last chapter of his work, he explains the harshness of the crimes and aberrations to which he had to face for writing his book at the same time that he narrates the need to suppress certain information due to containing too graphic descriptions for readers. In summary, the work The Bad Life in Spain During Philip IV's Reign, is a textual representation of the true situation that orbited during the 17th century.

José Deleito y Piñuela managed to express through this and other works that make up his series of books on Golden Age society, such as The King Has Fun, ...Also the People Have Fun. At the same time, he gave visibility to the importance that literature had and still has in Spain. Throughout the work, Deleito extracted rich information from primary sources of the period but not only official ones; at the same time, he was nourished by literary works such as The Swindler by Quevedo, Lazarillo de Tormes, Los Mariones y el Marión by Quiñones de Benavente and many others whose contents are nothing more than the sad reality of the time.

The works of José Deleito y Piñuela reflect at the same time the great dedication and passion that the author maintained regarding teaching, since all of them have as a main characteristic being aimed at an academic audience with the purpose of providing students a broad and deep study on Spanish society during the 17th century based on primary sources. Although it is true that from another perspective, the work maintains a popularizing aspect for lovers of knowledge about Spain's history; therefore, it is a book that in any case will open a door more to the reader's knowledge of the 17th century.

Bibliography

Deleito y Piñuela. J. (2014). The Bad Life in Spain During Philip IV's Reign. Madrid: Alianza Editorial S. A.