Introduction

Curiosity and Modernity offer an inevitable pairing. In defining curiosity, Vladimir Nabokov remarks that “curiosity is insubordination in its purest form” (Benedict 2001). By making this statement, he is recalling with his typically laconic irony the Premodern—indeed Biblical—injunction against curiosity as the sin of Eve. Her misappropriation of knowledge belonging to God rather than His human creations has been construed for centuries as an illegitimate, impious activity, while curiosity in the Modern period is seen as the currency of cultural progress. Blumenberg and Freud have famously theorized this association.

Curiosity denotes the human desire to know. The perennial lure of this impulse has been described since Antiquity in a variety of ways, and, not surprisingly, 21st-century researchers of philosophy, religion, science, and the arts continue to grapple with it. A mark of its complexity is clear in that curiosity is both a subjective and objective field of study, involving both mental attitudes and/or physical objects of contemplation.

In his influential study, Blumenberg equated the evolution of Modernity as the result of the progressive rethinking of curiosity from a vice to a constructive epistemic virtue (Blumenberg 1985). It is this change in attitude that made possible the Scientific Revolution, philosophical and artistic exploration, and advances that we identify as hallmarks of our Modern world. And, as a result, it is no wonder that the 17th century is frequently called “The Age of Curiosity”.

What has emerged more recently from the study of curiosity by scholars such as Foucault, Greenblatt, Kenny, Daston, and Park, to name a few, is the diversity, ambiguity, and even contradictions at issue. In fact, as Evans and Marr affirm, a meaningful study of curiosity during the Early Modern period must necessarily take into account “How curiosity… changed or remained stable over time and in different contexts from place to place” (Evans 2006).

The essays included in this volume reflect the diverse vantage points at issue in defining curiosity in Early Modern Iberia and the New World.

“Curiosity has always been a chameleonic quality”, in the words of Susan Byrne. Her analysis begins with two ancient narratives: Plotinus’s 3rd-century belief that overweening curiosity led to the creation of time and to chaos and his supposed contemporary Hermes Trismegistus, who viewed curiosity as a function of Narcissism. Byrne explores two Spanish rethinkings of these curiosity stories by two of Early Modern Spain’s most illustrious writers—the mystical poet San Juan de la Cruz and the brilliant prose stylist Baltazar Gracián. After her review of speculative curiosity is these two authors, Byrne demonstrates how “curiosity begat Modernity”.

Acknowledging the polysemy of the concept labeled as “curiosity”, Javier Patiño Loira focuses on the two distinct meanings that it represented in Early Modern sources and Modern attempts to reconcile their differences. Basing himself on the writings of the famed Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nirenberg, Patiño departs from our contemporary notions of curiosity, recontextualizing them in way that “what might strike us today as two different and largely unrelated concepts haphazardly clustered in ‘curiosity’ were in fact perceived as two sides of the same reality”.

During the early Modern period, as definitions of curiosity were being rethought, so were literary genres. The miscellany is a case in point. Mercedes Alcalá explores this narrative form that offers its readers a wealth of information on unconventional topics—from the arcane to the folkloric. Julián Iñiguez de Medrano’s unique La silva curiosa (1608) was written, among other reasons, to help the French Queen and author of the Heptameron, Marguerite de Navarre, perfect her Spanish language skills. Its context is surprising, sometimes Gothic in its gruesome subject matter, casting “the curious as synonymous with the bizarre, extraordinary, marvelous”.

Curiosity in the context of the Inquisition is also central to Ana Gómez Laguna’s investigation of Teresa de Cepeda y Fuente, also known as Teresa de Ahumada, the first Carmelite nun in the New World, the first female poet from Ecuador and St. Teresa of Avila’s cousin. In her autobiographical Vida, Teresa first admits that she was “a very curious adolescent”, thereafter deleting all references to her curiosity. Ironically, however, her impressive ability to reform the Carmelite Order could only have been accomplished, as Laguna explains, by “the conscious cultivation of a praxis-based curiosity of a reflective rebel able to defeat the inquisitorial injunction to female silence and restriction”.

An unexpected codicological curiosity is at issue in Kathryn Phipps’s study of what she terms “archival impertinence”. Though it seems paradoxical, the manuscript confession known as the “Escrito curioso” by an unnamed archivist is aptly deemed “curious” for two striking reasons. Amid the sprawling script of Inquisitorial confessions, this manuscript is included by the archivist for its “valor caligráfico”, including both poems and several pages of intricate illustrations. Submitted to the Mexican Inquisition in 1754, its departures from the confessional tradition reveal a fundamental tension between the Inquisition and the formal orthodoxy it demands.

Impertinent curiosity in different—gendered and racial—contexts is the focus of Catherine Infante’s perspectives on North African borderlands and their representation by Miguel de Cervantes. Numerous Iberian writers were understandably obsessed by Muslim identity given the ongoing and problematic relationship with North Africa. Cervantes’s interrogation of female Muslim stereotypes in Iberian texts is developed in his play titled Los baños de Argel (1615), particularly in the “curiosa impertinente” Zohara, who is based on a historical figure who is also a key figure in the intercalated narrative of “El curioso impertinente” in the Quijote. Her constructive female curiosity seriously challenges the prevailing attitude famously voiced by Juan Luis Vives regarding the perils of uncontrolled female curiosity.

Curiosity and its relationship to desire in text as well as film is the subject of Bruce Burningham’s essay in both written and visual media contemplated from the perspectives of Girardian and Lacanian theories. Beginning with the intercalated “Tale of Impertinent Curiosity” in Part I of Don Quijote, he turns to a consideration of Pedro Almodóvar’s film, Carne trémula, which is itself an adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s novel, Live Flesh and Luis Buñuel’s film titled Ensayo de un crimen. Burningham’s analysis illustrates the fundamental role “not just of curiosity in early Modern Spain, but also in the representation of modern (and Postmodern) sexuality.”

Curiosity in the domain of desire and sexuality is the focus of Frederick de Armas’s investigation of María de Zayas’s tragic novella, Tarde llega el desengaño. His original reading reveals a dense rendering of the plot by means of ekphrastic curiosity that Zayas elicits from both her characters and her readers, with attention paid to the powerful visual impact of her descriptions. Inspired by Apuleius’s narrative of Cupid and Psyche, in which curiosity is the prime motivation of the plot, Zayas dramatizes the dangers of extreme amorous curiosity but also the perils threatening a lack of curiosity by means of a meticulous analysis of colors in eight ekphrases by which Zayas demonstrates that she is writing for the curious reader’s “chromatic eye”.

With a different perspective on curiosity, in this case its relationship to politics, Marta Albalá Pelegrín’s essay charts the potentially disastrous social consequences of extreme weather catastrophes. A series of calamitous occurrences, specifically the devastating floods of Rome in October of 1530, an earthquake in Lisbon a few months later, and a tsunami as well led to prophesies of doom in the “end of times” recorded in the Book of Revelation. Albalá analyzes the intense curiosity fueled by these violent natural events in politicians and citizens alike who debated whether these were natural or divinely sent disasters “in order to advance political and religious calls to action”.

A different type of curiosity, a Modern view of it that is not only epistemic but escapist, is provided by Steven Hutchinson’s exploration, recalling the type of curiosity referenced by Michel Foucault in the 20th century, recalling this type of curiosity articulated by Montaigne in the 16th century, that is the author’s “straying afield of himself”. In this connection, Leo Africanus, author of the expansive Cosmographia de l’Affrica (1526), chronicles the plethora of unknown and exotic places and people he encounters. However, though his curiosity is paramount, not once does he use the word “curiosity”. His unconventional travel writing, the “desire to see, engage with, experience, know and comprehend especially human life in its many aspects, contexts and variations”, provides a stunning example of socio-anthropological curiosity.

As Julia Domínguez explains in her chapter, travel curiosity in connection with exotic humans, animals, and objects is also closely linked in the Early Modern period to “cabinets of curiosities” or Wunderkammern, proto-museums of sorts that wealthy Europeans constructed in their private houses. The collecting of objects from the natural world as well as man-made objects, including artworks and technology, was a means by which wealthy owners fashioned “a microcosm of the world”, driven by their curiosity but also their desire to project their wealth to visitors. The missionary Diego Valadés (1533–1582) returned to Spain from Mexico, celebrating the material world of the indigenous people with whom he had lived. This mestizo with a curious mind offers his readers a surprising “textual cabinet of curiosities” in his Rhetorica Christiana.

The essays in this volume provide a panorama of curiosities, its new uses in Early Modern Spain, and some of the many motivations that its use implies.