Elizabeth R. Wright

Narrating the Ineffable Lepanto: The Austrias carmen of Joannes Latinus (Juan Latino)

In his two-book epic poem, the Austrias carmen, Joannes Latinus (Juan Latino) chronicles the Battle of Lepanto and asserts himself as a worthy heir to Virgil. Along the way, the poet grapples with the age-old poetic question of how to narrate heroic actions undertaken to build or buttress empires. A former slave who gained fame as a Latin professor in Granada, Latinus crafted his epic in a manner that both celebrates the Holy League victory over the feared Ottoman navy and mourns war’s steep human toll. Unsettling opening verses invoke a militant Spanish Catholicism hardened during Granada’s bitter civil war, the Second Revolt of the Alpujarras (1568–1570). Yet as the poem focuses on Lepanto, it looks past the militant Catholicism of the day, highlighting cultural reference points that link Christians and Muslims across the Mediterranean. In fact, the poem’s emotional highpoint centers on the death of the admired Ottoman admiral, Ali Pasha. Spanish troops display his severed head as a trophy on the captured Turkish flagship. At this point, narrated action pauses as the poetic voice records the moment Ali Pasha’s two sons see this horrific sight. In the poem’s longest passage of direct discourse, the brothers lament their father’s death and ponder their own future as slaves of their Christian adversaries. This elegy for the fallen Turkish commander prompts closing reflections about how Latinus positions the Austrias carmen within the epic canon.

Front Lines: Soldiers' Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World by Miguel Martí Nez (review)

The point of departure for charting a soldiers’ republic of letters is an epigraph taken from the Aeneid (9.774–77), which mourns the battlefield poet killed by Turnus. Crethus was “always singing / of cavalry, weapons, wars, and the men who fight them” (Fagles translation, qtd. 1). That is, stories of battles belong as much to the legions of anonymous soldiers as they do to famous commanders waging single combat. With this epigraph serving as a leitmotif from start to finish, Martı́nez explores the ways that soldiers’ writings reshaped classical literary forms, changed notions of truthfulness, and fomented new autobiographical subjectivities. Chapter 1 (“The Soldiers’ Republic of Letters”) unfolds as a catalogue of soldierpoets and -chroniclers whose texts and lives Martı́nez has pieced together in archives and rare book rooms. For instance, Miguel Piedrola epitomizes the tortuous paths to literacy for many soldiers, as well as the potential perils of their literary ambitions. Martı́nez documents how Piedrola used money earned while assisting a priest in alms collection to fund grammar lessons. But this literacy proved a twoedged sword. In time, Piedrola attracted Inquisitorial scrutiny after attaining fame for letters and prophecies that reached even the king and the pope. Another portrait is of Andrés Rey de Artieda, whose collected poetry records four decades of military service, offering an illustration of soldierly sociability and writing practices organized around the camarada, an informal unit of three to six men who shared lodging, meals, and, as Martı́nez shows, literature. In the final section of the chapter, Martı́nez compares two accounts of the Sack of Rome, where Spanish soldiers seized Paolo Giovio’s manuscript of the Historiarum sui temporis. Martı́nez hypothesizes that the raiding soldiers understood that the historian was preparing a critical account of Spanish imperialism. This surmise—that looting soldiers may have grasped the argumentative subtleties of Giovio’s humanist Latin—would require more sustained development and documentation (40). But the underlying point the episode proposes is convincingly developed and rigorously documented over the course of the book. That is, the