Jeremy N. H. Lawrance

‘Une bibliothèque fort complète pour un grand seigneur’: Gondomar's manuscripts and the Renaissance idea of the library

‘To mind the inside of a book,’ remarked Lord Foppington, ‘is to entertain one’s self with the forced product of another man’s brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.’ In Charles Lamb’s Last Essays of Elia (1833) an ingenious acquaintance was ‘so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship’ that he ‘left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality’. GoldenAge Spain was no stranger to the commonplace that dandified or rusticated aristocrats regarded an aversion to reading as a mark of gentlemanly distinction, despite the example of such Renaissance paragons of ‘arms and letters’ as Garcilaso de la Vega, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, or the Counts of Villamediana and Salinas. In 1497 the scholar Gonzalo de Santa María lamented that a duke might regard the study of letters as a possible blot on his escutcheon. By the 1540s this attitude was being aped by social climbers lower down the scale, according to Cristóbal de Villalón’s dialogue El scholástico, in which the Salamancan savant Fernan Pérez de Oliva is made to complain that propertied nouveaux riches sought to fit their sons for noble estate by sparing them all forms of book-learning: