In 1996, construction workers in the Spanish town of Barcarrota in Extremadura discovered a bundle of books and a nómina or paper amulet that had been concealed in a wall for over four and half centuries. Intended to be carried or worn on the body, the nómina is inscribed with a prayer and blessings meant to heal and protecting against evil forces and ill fortune.1 During the sixteenth century, Spanish reformers like Pedro Ciruelo sought to restrict the use of such objects and expose superstitious abuses (1978, chap. 4). The Barcarrota nómina was hidden together with equally controversial literary works, including Antonio Vignali’s homoerotic Cazzaria, the satirical poetry of Clément Marot, and a previously unknown edition of the picaresque masterpiece Lazarillo de Tormes (from Medina del Campo dated 1554).2 Only one book discovered at the site can be directly linked to both the story of Lazarillo and the power of textual amulets, and for this reason will be of primary concern in the pages that follow: a Portuguese translation of the popular prayer entitled Oración de la Emparedada [Prayer of the immured nun].3 As we will see, it provides evidence of how the presence and supposed efficacy of amuletic texts can be used to interpret the kind of narrative structure that led to the picaresque novel, a topic that has not been considered in studies of literature and material culture during the early modern period.
The Oración is a sixteenth-century printed amulet that begins with the legend of an immured or “walled-in” woman living in a mountain retreat outside of Rome, who fervently prayed that the number of wounds Christ received during his Passion would be known to her (see fig. 1).4 This unnamed nun was associated with St Bridget of Sweden, a widow who experienced visions of the five stigmata wounds suffered during the Crucifixion (in the hands, feet, and side) that are reflected in her calls to prayer: “say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys in remembrance of the wounds of our Lord … say this prayer … ‘I ask you, gracious Jesus … by your five wounds … deign to keep me safe’” (Birgitta 2008, 155, 167).5 The elaboration on St Bridget’s formula in the Oración consists of fifteen petitions for mercy and reflections on the suffering of Christ meant to be read every day of the year in conjunction with the same number of Ave Marias and Pater Nosters, forming a kind of threefold or Trinitarian representation of the Five Wounds. Because this number was used to factor the Measure of Christ’s body (the mensura or longitudo Christi), and the drops of blood shed during his martyrdom, multiples of fifteen were believed to possess apotropaic power and widely used in the production of textual amulets (Skemer 2006, 142–3, 178).6 The Saviour promises the immured woman that this symbolic formula will liberate fifteen souls from purgatory in the hereafter, and in this world protect and bring happiness (“prazer”) and the good life (“boa vida”) to any mortal sinner who freely confesses (2008, fols 2–3).7 Like the Barcarrota nómina and other examples from the period, the amuletic powers of the Oración are derived not soley from the inscribed efficacy of prayer, but from its material presence: “E o que a rezar … ou a trouxer consigo … onde quer que esta oração estever … eu guardarei aquella casa e livrarei aquella companha … por pouco trabalho haverás grande galardão” [He who prays or carries it with him … wherever this prayer is … I will protect that house and deliver these people … and with little work you will obtain great gifts] (2008, fol. 4v). The conclusion of the Oración explains how a hermit transcribed the text of the Oración, shared it with the abbess of a convent, and finally witnessed a raucous company of demons being tortured by the incessant praying of the walled-in woman, who is now described as an “encantadeira e mui palavreira” [sorceress and chatterbox] (2008, fol. 15r).
Figure 1 Title page of the mid sixteenth-century Portuguese translation of the Oración de la Emparedada found at Barcarrota. Biblioteca de Extremadura – FA 263.
Scholars have noticed a reference to this prayer in the 1554 Alcalá de Henares edition of Lazarillo de Tormes. The rogue’s first master is a blind man who partly makes his living by reciting prayers for women of ill-repute, “mesoneras y por bodegoneras y turroneras y rameras, y ansí por semejantes mujercillas, que por hombre casi nunca le vi decir oración” [wives of innkeepers, tavern keepers, confectioners, prostitutes, and other such lowly women, as I almost never saw him saying prayers for a man] (1987, 37).8 In a crucial scene that foreshadows Lazarillo’s final destiny as a wine-peddling town crier and a domesticated cuckold (who is provided for by his wife’s lover, the archpriest of Sant Salvador), the blind man comes to Escalona, where horns are mounted on the wall of an inn:
Iba tentando si era allí el mesón adonde él rezaba cada día por la mesonera la oración de la emparedada, asío de un cuerno y con un gran sospiro dixo … “algún día te dará este que de la mano tengo alguna mala comida y cena.” (1987, 37)
[he was feeling if this was the inn where he recited the prayer of the immured woman every day for the innkeeper’s wife, and took hold of one of the horns (a symbol of duped husbands) and said with a great sigh … “one day this thing that I’ve got in my hand will give you an ill-deserved day’s meals.”]9
While the scene is traditionally viewed as one of four interpolations, Manuel Ferrer-Chivite has more recently suggested that these could have been removed from the author’s original text (2000).10 Whatever the case, critics like Jack Weiner have found that the Alcalá version creates a more tightly connected structure in which the blind man’s Escalona prophesies are comically fulfilled through the corruption of Lazarillo, ultimately leading him to consent to a dishonourable marriage. In this essay, I will show how connotations of the amuletic prayer of the walled-in woman in sixteenth-century Spain contribute to this narrative sequence.
Like Lazarillo de Tormes, the Oración de la emparedada was placed on the 1559 Index of Forbidden Books compiled by Fernando de Valdés (Reusch 1961, 237). Not surprisingly, the pamphlet found in Barcarrota was not just hidden in a wall, but also rebound in a liturgical folio so that its contents could not be readily identified.11 Inquisitors continued to condemn the Oración for what the later 1581 Index of Gaspar de Quiroga classifies as its “promesas y esperanças temerarias y vanas” [vain and reckless promises and hopes], not to mention the inclusion at the end of the prayer of an apocryphal indulgence attributed to “Nicolao papa v” claiming to reveal how many drops of blood were shed during the Passion (Reusch 1961, 383).12 Even more problematic, as María Cruz García de Enterría has pointed out, the prohibited text likens meditations on the Passion to exorcizing “conjuros” or incantations. Scholars have found that vernacular versions first appeared in fifteenth-century books of hours of the kind that were also listed in the Index of Valdés: “Mandanse quitar las Horas siguientes porque contienen muchas cosas curiosas y supersticiosas” [It is ordered that the following Hours be removed as they contain many strange and superstitious things] (Bujanda 1984, 5:671). From the 1520s on, printing houses continued to disseminate the prayer throughout the Peninsula as “cordel” literature, or cheaply reproduced broadsides that could be sold by street vendors and tied with string to be hung around the neck like nóminas.13
Lazarillo de Tormes provides evidence of how the Oración also circulated in sixteenth-century Spain as part of the oral repertoire of blind men who supported themselves by reciting such popular prayers. Additional evidence of this tradition can be found in other satirical texts from the period, some of which García de Enterría lists in her introduction. For example, in Sánchez de Badajoz’s Farsa del Molinero [Farce of the miller, ca. 1550] a blind man calls out “¡Ayudá, fieles hermanos / al ciego lleno de males! … si mandáis rezar, christianos / ¡Dios os guarde pies y manos, / vuestra vista conservada! / la oración de la enparedada” [Help faithful brothers, the blind man full of maladies! … if you would have me pray, good Christians / May God bless your feet and hands, and your sight be preserved! The prayer of the immured woman] (1886, vv. 249–55). It would seem that the blasphemous street performer in this way associates the stigmata commemorated in the prayer with “males” representing his moral failings and bodily maladies.14 Other literary citations are more concerned with the problem of superstition than the disrepute of blind men. In the Crónica burlesca del emperador Carlos V [Burlesque chronicle of the emperor Charles V, ca. 1528], a nobleman crossing a flooded river is said to carry seven nóminas and a copy of the Oración (Zuñiga 1981, 120–1).15 The scene can be compared to the second chapter of Juan de Luna’s Segunda parte del Lazarillo [Part Two of Lazarillo, 1555], when the protagonist of the sequel recites the same prayer after being cast into the sea – bringing to mind the superstitious prayers exposed in Erasmus’s Colloquy of the Shipwreck.16 Even more striking is Alejo de Venegas’s earlier Erasmian satire in Agonía del tránsito de la muerte [Agony of the passage to death, 1537]: “los llevan en el sermón … dicen que tienen bulas … la oración del la emparedada. Item, traen consigo una nómina” [they trick them during the sermon … they say they have pardons … the prayer of the immured woman. Also, they have with them a textual amulet] (1571, 165; 156).17 The Alcalá Lazarillo de Tormes includes a similar scene in which the rogue helps a pardoner sell phony indulgences, “con cinco paternostres y cinco avemarías … aun también aprovechan para los padres y hermanos y deudos que tenéis en el purgatorio” [with five Pater Nosters and five Ave Marias … they will even help your parents and brothers and sisters and other relatives who are in purgatory] (1987, 123).18 As Weiner has noticed, this is the first time Lazarillo actively participates in such a deception, and it thus anticipates his complicity in a materially beneficial ménage à trois. The episode also recalls the Oración evoked in the scene of the blind man’s prediction, with its sequence of Our Fathers and Hail Marys in amuletic multiples of fives and its promise to release family members from their purgatorial sentence.
The comic efficacy of the Oración in the life of Lazarillo cannot be fully understood without also considering how female characters invoked the walled-in visionary. For instance, in Feliciano de Silva’s Segunda comedia de Celestina [Second Celestina, 1534], the go-between offers to teach a girl named Poncia the prayer of the “Emparedada” (1988, cena 20, p. 314). Poncia becomes alarmed at the suggestion that she wall herself off from the world: “madre, nunca tuve desseo de ser emparedada; por tu vida, que no me lo muestres” [mother, I never had the desire to be immured; on your life, swear you won’t teach it to me]. The wordplay continues as Celestina responds with a peal of devious laughter, realizing that the girl has not yet learned how to disguise carnal desires in sacred language: “Hija, pues demparedar has tu voluntad para yr al cielo, que la vía de salvación estrecha es” [Well, daughter, to get to heaven you must unwall your will, for the way of salvation is narrow]. Just as the old bawd’s joke is lost on Poncia, Lazarillo fails to see how his blind master’s prophesy and recitation of the Oración de la emparedada at the inn can be interpreted as a premonition of the “unwalled” sexuality of his future wife. She is, in this sense, comparable to what Particia Parker has characterized as the “dilatory” woman overcoming the “partitions” of Renaissance society and narrative discourse – so that her eroticized verbal and corporal uncontainability “stands as figure” for the deferred closure of the text (11–13).19
This connection between the immured woman and uncontrollable wives can be most clearly seen in a surviving fragment of Juan Lorenzo Palmireno’s Comedia Octavia (Comedy of Octavia, 1564). In the Latin play, a husband is beaten and publicly humiliated after his wife Marcelia insults him, “coniugalem thorum fugiat” [flees from the wedding bed], and arranges for cloistered virgins to celebrate a novena in which they pray for her freedom from the obligation of marital sex by intoning a novena prayer “quæ uulgo de la emparedada uocantur” [that is vulgarly called de la emparedada] (Palmireno 1566, 117). In this way, promises in the Oración of a happy life and the release of souls from purgatory are reinterpreted as a plea for deliverance from the unhappy confines of marriage. Instead of contemplating the Passion, Marcelia’s novena celebrates the suffering of an unworthy husband. In addition to the Oración text, her revenge humorously counteracts the traditional threat of husbands consigning unruly brides to confinement. For instance, the medieval historian Gregorio Cavero Domínguez documents the case of a Valencian “casa de reclusión que un caballero mandó construir para encerrar a su esposa y que hiciera penitencia por la vida licenciosa que hasta entonces había llevado” [house of reclusion that a gentlemen had constructed to enclose his wife so that she would do penance for the licentious life that she had led until then] (2006, 110).20 In Lazarillo de Tormes, the blind man’s clientele of “wives of innkeepers, tavern keepers, confectioners” and “other such lowly women” might have requested this Oración for much the same reason as Marcelia. More important, the inversion of prayer in the Comedia Octavia sheds light on the characterization of the rogue’s unruly spouse in the preordained conclusion of the Alcalá edition. The rumour has spread that she abandons her wedding bed to spend the night with the archpriest, and Lazarillo remembers the horns of the innkeeper in Escalona whose wife paid the blind man to recite the Oración de la emparedada (1987, 132). When the cuckold brings up the subject of her adultery, she responds with a barrage of oaths and curses that he fears will bring down the walls of their house, reminiscent of the duplicitous efficacy of the pardoner’s oath-taking. Also reminded of the archpriest’s generosity, Lazarillo then promises to be content with her coming and going as she pleases: “Entonces mi mujer echó juramentos sobre sí, que yo pensé la casa se hundiera con nosotros; y después tomóse a llorar y a echar maldiciones … y había por bien de que ella entrase y saliese, de noche y de día” [Then my wife swore such oaths that I thought the house would cave in on us; and after that she broke into tears and curses … and I was content that she could go in and out of the house, night or day] (1987, 134). In accordance with the power of the Oración de la emparedada, to protect the “home,” and bestow a happy life with “little work,” and plenty to eat and drink, Lazarillo ironically claims to have arrived at “la cumbre de buena fortuna” [the height of good fortune] in the last tratado – in fulfilment of the blind man’s prediction of an “ill-deserved day’s meals” (1987, 135, 137). This parody at the same time implicates the inversion at the end of the Oración mentioned above, as a demon portrays the petitions of the immured woman as the cursed incantations of a “sorceress and chatterbox.” When the blind man’s prediction at the inn “where he recited the prayer” finally comes to pass, the blessings of the bride of Christ in the Oración are transformed into the oaths, curses, and extramural sexuality of Lazarillo’s wife.
Such an association reflects medieval and early modern anxieties over controlling the speech and sexuality of walled-in women, leading to what Peter Stallybrass has identified as the “topos that presents woman as that treasure which, however locked up, always escapes. She is the gaping mouth, the open window, the body that transgresses its own limits” (128). These kinds of preoccupations can already be seen in Gonzalo de Berceo’s thirteenth-century Poema de Santa Oria (Poem of St Aurea), where an anchoress shuts herself off from the temptations of fallen language and the urges of the flesh, and her body becomes an enclosure worthy to receive the Bridegroom: “ovo con su carne baraja e contienda … que non salliessen dende vierbos desconvenientes … un rencón angosto entró emparedada … esta reclusa vaso de caridat” [with her body she clashed and battled … to hold back indiscreet words … she entered a narrow corner to be walled-in … this enclosed vessel of God’s love] (1981, stanzas 16c, 18d, 20b, 25a). Julian Weiss has shown how Berceo portrays St Aurea as at once physically confined and spiritually opened up.21 It is also worth noting that this contrast is reflected in the dual meaning of the term reclusum in medieval Latin as clausum (closed) and / or apertum (open). In the fourteenth-century Revelations that informed the Oración de la emparedada, St Bridget similarly identifies herself as an enclosed sponsa Christi receiving the espousals of the Saviour prefigured in the Song of Songs: “I have chosen you and taken you as my bride … you ought to be ready for the wedding to my divinity, in which there is no carnal lust but the sweetest spiritual delight” (2008, 1.2.3–4, 1.20.7). According to Alfonso of Jaén, the Spanish anchorite who recorded and defended her Revelations – and seems to have inspired the unnamed hermit in the Oración – Bridget’s detractors were sometimes punished with horrible afflictions.22 Nonetheless, denunciations persisted into the fifteenth century, when Jean Gerson casts doubt on the visions of ascetic women who engage their confessors in “continual conversations” and “lengthy accounts,” displaying what he views as an “unhealthy curiosity which leads to gazing about and talking, not to mention touching,” indicative of a “harmful love toward God or toward holy persons, rather than being moved by true, holy, and sincere charity” (Sahlin 2001, 165).23 During the same period, Spanish penitential writers and church synods repeatedly warned against the scandal of emparedadas breaking their vows of silence, receiving frequent visitors, and brazenly entering and leaving their cells.24 As Stallybrass puts it in his study of feminine enclosure, “the mouth, chastity, the threshold … these three areas were frequently collapsed into each other” (126). It is in this context that demons in the Oración depict an immured scandalizer, the bawd in the Segunda Celestina describes an unwalling of female desire, and Lazarillo relates the story of the unconfined libido and unleashed tongue of his wife. Her carnal relationship with the aptly named archpriest of the “Holy Saviour” can be understood as a travesty of the divine love that Christ visits upon his sponsa in the alleged visions of saints like Bridget of Sweden and her legendary, heterodox offshoot, the emparedada.25
During her lifetime, Bridget was repeatedly accused of witchcraft and threatened with prosecution for heresy. Sixteenth-century Spanish women who followed her example could expect to face the same kind of suspicions, and were in some cases punished with ecclesiastical confinement. For instance, the nun Magdalena de la Cruz claimed to have experienced visions after making an opening in her cell wall to contemplate the sacred host, later confessed to having carnal relations with a demon, and was sentenced by the Inquisition in 1544 to “emparedamiento … mandamos que esté encerrada perpetuamente en un monasterio” [immurement … we order that she be perpetually confined in a monastery] (Imirizaldu 1977, 61).26 The same condition of enclosure or reclusum that had enabled her to open up to the Divine, and helped give credence to her revelations, was ultimately used to shut off and silence her. Later mystics were also subjected to this penance or murus strictus, as in the case of María de la Visitación, who was condemned in the 1580s for falsely claiming to have received the five stigmata from her Bridegroom for fifteen days – the same talismanic number used in the Oración de la emparedada and other amuletic texts. Such rulings bring to mind the demonic characterization of the walled-in woman as a scandalous conjurer, as well as the revelations of her prayer. A particularly revealing example can be found in proceedings brought against the early seventeenth-century prophetess known as Juana de la Cruz or the “Enbustera” or Trickster, denouncing her as a heretic:
Tocada de los herrores de los alumbradoss, engañadora, escandalossa … diçiendo que a tenido muchas pláticas con … Jesús … es mentira aver dicho que es doncella y que avía hecho boto de castidad y tanbien su marido y que la verdad es averse comunicado carnalmente y confiesa … mentirossa, enbelecadora. (Imirizaldu 1977, 97, 104, 111)
[Influenced by Illuminist errors, a scandalous deceiver … saying that she has often spoken with … Jesus … she lies by claiming to be a maiden and having made a vow of chastity, as does her husband, for the truth is they have had carnal relations and she confesses … she is a liar, a fraud.]27
These kind of investigations suggest that early audiences could have interpreted connotations of the emparedada in Lazarillo de Tormes as alluding to the adultery of Lazarillo’s wife in a parodic vision of mystical marriage. The idea of immurement might have also brought to mind the Inquisitorial penalization of women, whether for masquerading as visionary brides of Christ, or for other crimes.
The sentence passed against María de la Visitación orders the walled-in penitent to fast on bread and water, receive further unspecified mortifications, and recite the Psalm “miserere mei” [Have mercy on me] (Imirizaldu 1977, 196).28 Consonant with the treatment of other false visionaries, the Inquisition mandates that all writings and relics related to her cult should be gathered and burned in public. The penance of this visionary is distinctly reminiscent of the penance of St Thais, a popular reformed sinner in late medieval and early modern hagiographic collections that present her vita eremitica as the mirror image of her former life, when she was closed off from faith and open to the world. Thais confessed to an abbot who entered the innermost chamber of her brothel to convert her, an enclosure where no man had ever been received and only God could see her sins. She expresses her contrition in the public square, throwing all of the goods earned from her sin into a bonfire. The abbot then mandates that Thais immure herself in a “cella pequeñuela,” the entrance of which is sealed with molten iron, leaving only a small opening to receive “un poco de pan e de agua” [a little bread and water] (Beresford 2007, 135). When the repentant prostitute asks where she should relieve herself, the confessor harshly chastises her: “¡aquí en tu celda como tú lo meresciste! … tú no eres digna de rogar a Dios nin de tomarle en tu boca suzia … mas solamente … di muchas vezes esta palabra … ‘ave mercet de mí’” [here in your cell as you have deserved! … you are not worthy to pray to God or speak his name in your filthy mouth … so only … say these words repeatedly… miserere mei] (Beresford 2007, 134–5). Following a vision of three virgins on a celestial bed representing the immured woman’s fear of God, shame for her past life, and newly found love of virtue, the abbot releases her and Thais lives for a period of fifteen days, a number that associates her triumph over evil and purified body with the apotropaic mensura Christi.
By the time Lazarillo de Tormes was published, this long-standing connection between visionary reclusion and the punishing and absolving of prostitutes and other promiscuous women had become something of running joke. In the Lozana Andaluza (1528), a prostitute known as the “emparedada” seems to be making a burlesque allusion to the filthy cell of St Thais when she asks her madam, “¿por qué no entró? … ¿pensó que estaba al potro?” [Why didn’t you come in? … Did you think I was on the pot?] (Delicado 1985, 312). An earlier commentary in the Carajicomedia (1519) portrays a walled-in prostitute known as Cáceres who remains in her chamber for thirty years: “es su costumbre estar a su puerta muy devota enclavijadas sus manos cantando lamentaciones muchas vezes, recibiendo el precio de su persona” [she is customarily found at the door with her hands crossed and nailed, very devoutly singing lamentations over and over, receiving a price for her person] (1981, st. 73).29 As I have shown elsewhere, the Carajicomedia parodies Ambrosio de Montesino’s 1514 translation of the Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony, in addition to the fifteenth-century Laberinto de Fortuna.30 In the gloss on Cáceres, the poet appears to be subverting Montesino’s depiction of “una venerable matrona emparedada … que desseava saber el cuento de todas las llagas de Jesú Cristo e que por este desseo avia gastado muchos tiempos y lagrimas” [a venerable walled-in matron … who wished to know the number of all the wounds of Jesus Christ and for this desire spent long periods in tears] (Ludolph 1551, fol. 40r). While the Cartuxano goes on to describe a numerological revelation and the prayer found in the Oración de la emparedada, the Carajicomedia features an unrepentant sex worker who, instead of praying for the visitation of her mystical husband, continues to receive customers and moan mournfully within the walls of her enclosure. Instead of imitating the wounds of Christ, she graphically exhibits the stigma of a fallen woman. In keeping with these precedents, Lazarillo de Tormes links the immured woman with prostitutes and female clientele of the blind man, along with a wife whose adulterous affair with the archpriest of San Salvador marks the high point in a life of wounding humiliation.
Significantly, this affair occurs at a time when the Spanish church was redoubling its efforts to enforce discipline among the clergy, partly in reaction to dangerous reform movements that, as Thomas Hanrahan notes, proposed “the abolition of clerical celibacy” (1983, 335). Lazarillo’s precarious situation is first mentioned in the prologue as the “caso” or matter that he has been asked to relate “muy por extenso … por que se tenga entera noticia de mi persona” [very extensively … to have a full report of who I am] for an audience identified only as “Vuestra Merced” [Your Honour] (1987, 89, 130).31 Lazarillo responds by justifying and incriminating himself with a tongue-in-cheek account that conceals and exposes, alternating between reflections on his formerly naive point of view and his cynical perspective in the final tratado. David Gitlitz has compared the narrator’s strategies to Inquisitorial confessions in which conversos or new Christians were compelled to give reports of their own experiences, as well as the lives of others, and appear to have engaged in comparable “rhetorical techniques of disclosure and evasion” (2000, 54).32 Other scholars have emphasized the narrator’s use of euphemism and preterition in anticipation of the sexual corruption of his “caso,” as when Lazarillo takes refuge with spinner “mujercillas” [little women], “wears out his shoes” and other “cosillas” [little things] with a lecherous and apparently bisexual Mercedarian, and “grinds colours” for a painter of tambourines (Thompson and Walsh 1988, Shipley 1982; Lazarillo 1987, 93, 110–11, 125). I have found that the Oración de la emparedada invoked in the Alcalá edition plays into this sort of pseudo-confessional rhetoric. In sixteenth-century Spain, the prayer was linked with transgressions of the flesh and the Inquisitorial menace that Gitlitz and others have shown to be moulding and casting a shadow over the narrative. The banned Oración raised suspicions by offering the kind of “happiness in this world” that Lazarillo seeks, together with extravagant promises of perfect contrition, confession, redemption through the Eucharist, and deliverance from evil forces and the pains of purgatory:
Ho que a rezar ou a fezer rezar ou ha trouxer consigo … darlhej … a comer o meu sanctisimo corpo, o qual o liurara da fome pa sempre. E darlhej a beber ho meu precioso sangue con o qual nunca auera sede … darlhey a beber hũ singular beber da fonte da minha diuindad. Outrosi, qualquer pessoa que esteuer em pecado mortal ainda que aja trinta annos que se nan aja confessado, e se confessar con amarga contriçam e esta oraçam conprir, lhe perdoarey todos seus pecados, e o liurarey do poderio de justiça e do diabo. (“A muyto devota oração da Empardeada em linguagem português” 2008, fol. 3)
[He who prays it or has it recited or carries it with him … I will feed him with my holiest body, which will free him from hunger forever; and I will quench his thirst with my precious blood, so that he is never again thirsty … I will give him an incomparable drink from the fountain of my Divinity … whosoever finds himself in mortal sin, though he has not confessed for thirty years, if he confesses with bitter contrition, and fulfills this prayer, I will pardon all sins, and I will free him from the forces of judgment and the devil]
These benefits can be meaningfully contrasted with the decidedly uncontrite disclosures and quasi-Eucharistic redemption that characterize Lazarillo de Tormes. In fact, the narrator first recounts his early experiences of thirst and starvation as a kind of parodic excommunication in which the blind man bashes his head with a wine jug, deprives him of its “fuentecilla” [little fountain] – and, while cleaning his wounds with the fruit of the vine, entertains the innkeeper’s wife and her friends by predicting that the same substance that now heals his wounds will someday bless him (1987, 31, 42–3). In the next tratado, a miserly priest refuses to share a store of bread that the starving rogue worships like the Corpus Christi: “por consolarme, abro el arca, como vi el pan, comencé de adorar, no osando rescebillo … contemplar en aquella cara de Dios” [to console myself, I open the trunk; as I looked upon the bread, I began to adore it, not daring to receive it … contemplating in it the face of God] (1987, 58). As we have seen, Lazarillo finally arrives at the “height of all good fortune” promised in the Oración, and foretold by the blind man, by earning an “ill deserved day’s meals” as a town crier selling wines and profiting from his wife’s extramarital affair with a salvific archpriest – though he swears to her honesty “sobre la hostia sagrada” [on the sacred Host] (1987, 135, 37, 134).33 In this way, the conclusion to the Alcalá narrative with its “happy ending” comically subverts the alleged efficacy of the prayer to grant even the most obstinate sinners absolution and admittance to the Lord’s Supper.
The promise of forgiveness and penance made in the blind man’s heterodox Oración can be fruitfully compared to Inquisitorial proceedings against walled-in women. These sinners could be readmitted to the Coena Domini only after confessing and receiving their sentence at an auto de fé where they were often expected to wear nooses around their necks and face a range of other public humiliations. For instance, when Magdalena de la Cruz was sentenced to immurement for a series of alleged crimes – including the earlier-mentioned use of sorcery to view the blessed sacrament through a hole in her cell – the tribunal specified that she appear with “una bela encendida en las manos y una mordaza a la lengua y una soga” [with a lit candle in her hand, a gag in her mouth, and a rope around her neck] (Imirizaldu 1977, 61). Juana the Illuminist “Trickster” was similarly paraded with “una bela de çera en la mano y una soga a la garganta y una coroça en la caveça … sea sacada en una bestia … con voz de pregonero que manifeste su delito” [a wax candle in her hand, a rope around her neck, and a conical hat on her head … may she appear on the back of a beast … with a town crier’s voice declaring her crime] (Imirizaldu 1977, 118). The practice of condemning prisoners to murus strictus, escorted by town criers and wearing esparto collars and gags corresponds to another prophecy that the blind man makes just before arriving at the Escalona inn, when he touches the “sogas” that hang at a shoemaker’s shop: “mochacho, salgamos de entre tan mal manjar, que ahoga sin comerlo … según las mañas que llevas, lo sabrás y verás cómo digo verdad” [boy, let us flee from such bad fare, for it suffocates without even being eaten … with all of your tricks, you will come to know and see how I speak the truth] (1987, 37). In the Alcalá text, Lazarillo reflects on this divination after finding work as a town crier who, apart from peddling wines, accompanies criminals through the streets of Toledo:
Tengo cargo de … acompañar los que padecen persecuciones por justicia y declarar a voces sus delictos, pregonero … En el cual oficio, un día que ahorcábamos a un apañador … llevaba una buena soga de esparto, conoscí y caí en la cuenta de la sentencia que aquel mi ciego amo había dicho … Teniendo noticia de mi persona el señor arcipreste de Sant Salvador … procuró casarme con un criada suya … y hasta ahora no estoy arrepentido … tengo de mi señor arcipreste todo favor y ayuda … mas malas lenguas … no nos dejan vivir diciendo no sé qué y sí sé qué de que ven mi mujer irle a hacer la cama y guisalle de comer … y habido algunas malas cenas por esperalla algunas noches hasta las laudes, y aún más, y se me ha venido a la memoria lo que mi amo el ciego me dijo en Escalona, estando asido del cuerno … Mi señor … me habló un día … delante de ella … “quien ha de mirar a dichos de malas lenguas nunca medrará.” (1987, 129–32)34
[I am charged with … following those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice and calling out their crimes, a town crier … one day we hung a thief … he wore a course noose, and I recognized and fell under the sentence that that blind master of mine had pronounced … The reverend archpriest of the Holy Saviour having heard reports of me… arranged a marriage for me with a servant of his … and I have repented to this day … I have all the favours and help from my lord the archpriest … yet malicious tongues … will not leave us be, saying I don’t know what, and I do know what about having seen my wife go and make his bed and cook his food … I have had some bad meals waiting up for her some nights until morning prayers, or even later, and I recalled what my master the blind man said to me in Escalona, when he was holding the horn … My reverend Lord … spoke to me one day … in her presence … “you’ll never get on in life if you take notice of malicious tongues.”]
In keeping with the oracular horns and prayer of a walled-in “chatterbox” at the Escalona inn, the meaning of the shoemaker’s ropes becomes increasingly clear in subsequent episodes. First, when Lazarillo wears down the soles of his shoes – presumably made of esparto – in the company of the errant Mercedarian. This link between sexual corruption and worn out ropes anticipates the rogue’s role in promoting the wines of his wife’s lover while at the same time proclaiming the misdeeds of criminals bound with sogas. The rogue at once speaks as a town crier announcing his own crimes along with those of his associates, and as a haltered criminal gagged and suffocated by what the blind man calls “bad fare.” The narrator’s discourse is stifled, euphemistic, marked by preterition and passing allusion, and yet it has the effect of loudly disclosing unsavoury truths in spite of the threat of censorship and the spectre of Inquisitorial punishment. He claims to have put a lid on the scandal of his wife by blasphemously swearing to her honesty, but instead succeeds in amplifying the clamour of “malicious tongues”: “desta manera no me dicen nada, y you tengo paz en mi casa” [this way they tell me nothing, and I have peace in my house] (1987, 135). His pronouncement brings to mind the last words of benediction, “in pace,” from the Ordo Inclusorum or ritual of immurement, that were also used by the Holy Office to designate the walled-in chambers of penitents.35 While Lazarillo’s unfaithful, cursing wife cannot be contained, he remains trapped. The “peaceable” confines of his house are ironically foreshadowed by the Oración de la emparedada’s power to protect the home of “he who prays or carries it with him,” and also recalls the tomblike quarters that Lazarillo shares with the squire, “tener cerrada la puerta con llave ni sentir arriba ni abajo pasos de viva persona … Todo lo que yo había visto eran paredes” [having the door closed and locked without a sign of any living person above or below … All I had seen were walls] (1987, 73). Later in the same episode Lazarillo hears a widow in a funeral procession crying out that her husband must now live in a dark and mournful dwelling, and becomes convinced that the dead man will be brought to his house to rest in pace.36 Like recurrent noose imagery, the squire’s sepulchral dwelling takes on an especially ironic significance in the Alcalá narrative.
As I hope to have demonstrated, this version of Lazarillo de Tormes invokes the Oración de la emparedada to reveal key elements of the prophesized “matter” of the rogue’s marriage and ultimate occupation. The amuletic prayer correlates with the pardoner’s appeal to say five Hail Marys and Our Fathers for relatives in purgatory, and how the “unwalling” of the immured woman in other literary texts coincides with the revelation of the archpriest of Sant Salvador’s “dilatory” lover. She too parodies visions of mystical espousal, wounds of the Passion, and vows of silence taken by walled-in female saints, subjecting her husband to a cuckold’s martyrdom in the tradition of unruly women punished with immurement. Accordingly, the benefits of the prayer are comically fulfilled through Lazarillo’s adulterous arrangement: material contentment is granted, the palate quenched, the belly filled, and an incorrigible sinner’s confession leads to a mock Eucharistic supper. Denied the bread and cup of life by a string of abusive earlier masters, the town crier’s meals and the wine he sells are now provided by the concubinary archpriest. Finally, we have seen how the apotropaic potency to safeguard the houses of those who say, hear, or wear the Oración is inverted by the “peace” of Lazarillo’s house, and the connections between worn ropes, lost innocence, and the noosing and muzzling of prisoners condemned to murus strictus.
These findings suggest that the Lazarillo character is, in a sense, bound by the amuletic text that the blind man recites, as it seems to exert an ironic force over the course of his fictional life, equivalent to the binding physical presence of a nómina or cordel prayer hung around the neck or otherwise carried on the body. The stakes of the proleptic, intertextual relationship between Lazarillo and the Oración that has concerned me can be further illuminated by turning to one last work from the Barcarrota cache, De Lingua (On language, 1525). A Spanish translation of the text went through several editions during the first half of the sixteenth century, until “Lengua de Erasmo, en Romance y en Latin” was placed on the 1559 Index, along with the two books from Barcarrota discussed in this study. In this treatise, Erasmus takes on his detractors by contrasting an uncontrolled torrent of printed books, many of them full of “indiscreet chattering, headlong lying” and the product of a “beguiling, impious and blaspheming tongue,” with the restrained “new tongue” of true Christianity curing “men’s souls with holy incantations” and offering “instead of accusation against our neighbor, confession of our own evils” (1989, 403–10). As Carla Mazzio points out, this torrent of escaping words can be related to “genital and lingual dilation” as an “analogue to the activity of narration itself … to spread abroad or make large, to amplify, to tell” (101). Lazarillo demonstrates that he cannot control his tongue and speak the lingua nova any more than demons can understand the prayers of the immured woman as anything other than incantatory chatter. His story both denies and verifies the allegations of “malas lenguas,” illustrating what Erasmus sees as a linguistic duplicity that breaks through the bounds of propriety represented by the tongue’s natural, censoring enclosure behind its barrier of teeth. In spite of the rogue narrator’s gestures of discretion and dissimulation, he remains incapable of controlling or walling-in his own tongue.37
1 This prayer was known as the Trisagion or sanctus. The nómina is also inscribed with a blessing from Christ’s apocryphal letter to Abgarus, promising to cure the king of Edessa of an illness (see Skemer 2006, 96–104). Inside the circle is the word “thethagramathon” signifying the ineffable name of God, as well as an anchor cross and a star of David.
2 The other sixteenth-century texts found in the wall are two works of chiromancy (Super Chyromantiam and Chyromantia del Tricasso), two polemics against conversos and Muslims (the Alborayque and Confusione della Setta Machumetana translated from the work of Juan Andrés), a manual for exorcism (Exorcismo mirabile da disfare ogni sorte di maleficii), a collection of prayers in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (Precationes aliquot celebriores, e sacris Biblijs desumptae, ac in studiosorum gratiam lingua Hebraica, Graeca, & Latina), and a treatise that will be discussed later, Erasmus’s Lingua. Marot’s work is often anticlerical, and one of his more well-known poems concerns a wily servant or “valet.”
3 It is clear that the prayer was translated from Castilian (Carrasco González 2005, 51–2) to the 1500 Portuguese version that appears in a book of hours; it has been studied by Arthur Askins, and closely relates to the later Barcarrota text.
4 In the Oración, Jesus appears and reveals that his wounds totaled 6,676, a number symbolically linked to exorcism (the belief that 6,666 demons comprised the legion in Luke 8:36), the Apocalypse (three sixes as the number of the Beast), subsequent prayers in memory of the Seven Wounds (the Scourging and Crown of Thorns combined with the five stigmata), and the Seven Last Words or utterances of Christ (Mark 15:34, Matt. 27:46, Luke 23:34, 43, 46, and John 19:26–30). Other versions of the so-called Quindecim Orationes (The Fifteen Prayers or “O’s”) give the number as 6666, or multiply fifteen by the number of days in the year (either 365 or 366) to arrive at the total number of wounds, as in the case of Ambrosio de Montesino’s sixteenth-century translation of the Vita Christi of Ludolph of Saxony (the 1514 Cartuxano), and the examples discussed by Robin Flowers.
5 Translation by Denis Searby. Subsequent translations in this discussion are mine unless otherwise noted. This fivefold formula is repeated elsewhere in the Revelations (Birgitta 2008, 154). A striking description of Bridget’s visions of the stigmata can be found earlier in the text: “I felt almost comforted to be able to touch his body as it was taken down from the cross, and take it in my arms, and explore his wounds” (2008, 127). Graphic representations of the wounds and drops of blood also appear in amulets and were believed to increase their power (see Skemer 2006, 143, 248, 265).
6 Uses of the number fifteen to calculate the length of Christ’s body were based on the measurements of the Golden Cross relic in the Hagia Sophia and specifically believed to protect “against evil, misfortune, and sudden death,” in keeping with the promises of the Oración (Skemer 2006, 143). Fifteen Mysteries were sometimes used in rosary prayers (consisting of Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious sets of five), though this was not yet standardized during the period (see Winston-Allen 1997). Fifteen can also refer to the number of steps of the Temple, or the cubits needed to build the ark – the latter was interpreted by Ambrose as a threefold (Trinitarian) product of the five senses (Hopper 1938, 1115–16). See also Arthur Askins, who notes fifteen is “the talisman number in a variety of legends,” and thus frequently used in these kind of prayers (2007, 243). Fittingly, the number is twice associated with healing in Lazarillo de Tormes, after the rogue is beaten by the priest (1987, 70, 71).
7 “Sejam livradas das penas do purgatório quinze almas … Outrossi, qualquer pessoa que estever em pecado mortal ainda que haja trinta anos que se não haja confessado: e se confessar … será outorgada … boa vida … darei em este mundo prazer” (2008, fols 2–3).
8 In my translation of Lazarillo, I have consulted the English text of Michael Alpert, “Lazarillo De Tormes” and “The Swindler”: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2003). Spanish citations of Lazarillo are from the edition of Francisco Rico.
9 The prayer is to be said every day, presumably, to arrive at a numerological formula for the counting of Christ’s wounds (see note 4).
10 As opposed to scholars and editors like Alberto Blecua (Lazarillo 1974, 58), Ferrer-Chivite wonders whether the interpolations were not expurgated parts of the original text. The Alcalá printer, Salcedo, specifically presents the book as follows: “nuevamente impresa, corregida y de nuevo añadido en esta segunda impresión … a veinte y seis de Febrero” [newly printed, corrected and again amended in this second edition … on 26 February] (Lazarillo 1987, 13). In addition to this reissue, and the newly discovered Medina del Campo, 1554 versions were published in Burgos and Amberes. While Rico and others have proposed a plausible stemma, the sequence remains impossible to definitively determine, as Jesús Cañas Murillo has pointed out (92–3). The authorship of Lazarillo also remains a mystery, although candidates continue to be proposed. Mercedes Agulló has most recently found suggestive evidence supporting the theory that Diego Hurtado de Mendoza contributed in some way to the 1573 expurgated edition of Lazarillo.
11 María Cruz García de Enterría notes that such prayers first appeared in books of hours, and Askins discusses versions dating prior to the association with St Bridget. García de Enterría documents a manuscript possessed by María de Aragón in the mid fifteenth century, mentioned in an inventory as “De la dona emparedada” (1997, xi).
12 The prayer had already been banned in the 1551 index (García de Enterría 1997, xv). While the indulgence of Pope Nicholas V is particular to the Barcarrota prayer, the amuletic count of blood drops spilled during the Passion can be found in versions outside the Peninsula. Unlike the Trinitarian number given in the Oración, 39,330, Skemer notes that the count was sometimes calculated using multiples of 365, similar to the totals of Christ’s wounds (2006, 143).
13 García de Enterría notes early printed copies of Oracions de la Emparedada listed by book dealer in Barcelona in 1524 (1997), and Askins documents a number of other sixteenth-century editions in Catalan and Castilian (2007, 238).
14 The sightless performer could also be equating his condition to the blindfolding of Christ during the Passion, as an image that is evoked in such prayers.
15 This text was composed by the court fool of Carlos V, Francesillo de Zúñiga. The character of the fearful nobleman is on his way to the king’s wedding, together with a catalogue of other satirized figures.
16 The prayer – showing how the sequel attributed to Juan de Luna drew on the Alcalá version of Lazarillo – is listed in a litany of others supposedly taught to him by the blind man, “tienen virtud contra los peligros del agua” [because they had power against the dangers of water] Luna 1988, 55). This claim correlates with the alleged promise made to the immured woman to protect against sudden death, “como livrey a são pedro das ondas do mar” [like I saved Peter from the waves of the sea] (“A muyto devota oração da Empardeada em linguagem português” 2008, fol. 3v).
17 Marcel Bataillon has related this text to Erasmian thinking, in particular the Modus orandi (Manner of Prayer). The nómina has an inscription reading “si ergo me quaeritis” [if therefore you seek me]. This phrase is from the Gospel of John, a favourite source for textual amulets due its hymn to the word (Skemer 2006, 87–9). When Jesus is about to be arrested he says: “I have told you that I am he. If therefore you seek me, let these go their way that the word might be fulfilled” [dixi vobis quia ego sum si ergo me quaeritis sinite hos abire ut impleretur sermo] (1994, 1941, 18:8–9)
18 Lazarillo also helps stage a fake exorcism in this episode, and, as Weiner points out, the Alcalá interpolation stresses his complicity when the pardoner asks him not to reveal the deception of the burning cross (1985, 828; Lazarillo 1987, 123–4).
19 Her subversion can also be compared with that of later female rogue characters or pícaras. In her discussion of Francisco López de Ubeda’s Pícara Justina (1605), Anne Cruz points out that early modern manuals such as Fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada explicitly compared the virtue of a wife’s “closed mouth” with the “enclosed state in which she should ideally remain” (1999, 154).
20 In the fifteenth-century Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho, a wife complains that her controlling husband would have her immured (Martínez de Toledo 1970, 128). Centuries later, the idea of immuring unfortunate brides provides the subject matter for “La inocencia castigada” in María de Zayas’s 1647 Desengaños amorosos (1989).
21 In accordance with the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas, the legend demonstrates how visions properly come to Christian women in private (1948, II–II, Q. 177, art. 2). Shari Horner has examined a hagiographic “discourse of enclosure” in medieval English works (2001).
22 For example, a warden is described by Alfonso of Jaén as suffering from a painful swelling of the groin after making false accusations against Bridget (Sahlin 2001, 155).
23 Three of Gerson’s works deal with the discernment of divine versus malevolent spirits, including De distinctione verarum revelationum a falsis [On distinguishing true and false revelations, 1401], De probatione spirituum [On testing the spirits, 1415], De examinatione doctrinarum [On investigating teachings, 1423]. On the question of discretio spirituum, see the study of Rosalynn Voaden (1999).
24 For example, in the Libro de confesions Martín Pérez urges “enparedadas” to maintain their enclosure at all times, so as to avoid the grave scandal that arises from “las entradas a ellas o de las sus salidas” [entering to visit them or their leaving] (2002, 416).
25 As Rico notes in his edition, the Sant Salvador parish in Toledo had no archpriest (1987, 130). This suggests that the title was meant to allude to the unsavoury reputation of archpriests, legendary by this time, in contrast to the meaning of “Holy Saviour.”
26 Henry Kamen points out that, in such cases, perpetual sentences could be shortened considerably (1998, 88, 201).
27 Prior to her condemnation in 1588, the cult of María de la Visitación had spread far and wide, to the extent that Luis de Granada penned an account of her life (see Imirizaldu 1977, 122–75). Another visionary sentenced to reclusion, Lucrecia de León, was linked with the court of Philip II and brought before the Inquisition for prophesying the defeat of the Armada and collapse of the Empire (Imirizaldu 1977, 63–9). On the story of Lucrecia, see Richard Kagan’s Lucrecia’s Dreams (1990).
28 The sentence specifies “cárcel perpetua … en una celda o apossento … cada semana saldrá para recibir una disciplina que durará en quanto dixere un miserere mei” [perpetual imprisonment … in a cell or chamber … once a week she will emerge to receive a discipline that will last until she says a misere] (Imirizaldu 1977, 196).
29 This poem appeared at the end of an expanded reprint of the Cancionero de obras de burla provocantes a risa and was published in Valencia. It recently inspired the title of a novel by Juan Goytisolo.
30 See The Laughter of the Saints (25–32).
31 “Your Honour” refers to an authority figure identified in the text only as a “friend” of the archpriest (1987, 130).
32 This view is also supported by sixteenth-century proceedings against heretical women, like the case of Juana the “Trickster” discussed above, that investigate husbands and other men found to be complicit in the concealment of illicit activities (Imirizaldu 1977, 104).
33 Elsewhere I have linked this imagery to Lazarillo’s simultaneous, parodic imitation of the life of John the Baptist and festive aspects of his cult (2009). See also Javier Herrero’s study of this water and wine pattern. Not surprisingly, the rogue’s final oath was censored from expurgated editions printed after the appearance of the 1554 Lazarillo on the Index.
34 The image from the Beatitudes, “los que padecen persecuciones por la justicia” [those who suffer persecutions for the sake of justice], recalls the arrest of Lazarillo’s father, “confesó y no negó, y padesció persecución por la justicia” [he confessed and did not deny, and suffered persecution for the sake of justice], evoking the biblical phrase applied to John the Baptist, “confessus est et non negavit” (1987, 129, 14; Matt 5:6, John 1:20).
35 The phrase forms part of the Office of the Dead. The association of the quarters of walled-in visionaries with tombs can be seen in an account of the fifteenth-century mystic María de Toledo, “tomó un aposentillo tan estrecho y oscuro que ‘más parecía sepultura de muertos que aposento de vivos’” [she took a small room so narrow and dark that “it more closely resembled a tomb for the dead than a room for the living”] (Cavero Domínguez 2006, 117).
36 The rogue complains: “‘¡Oh desdichado de mí, Para mi casa llevan este muerto!’” (“Oh woe is me, they are taking this dead man to my house!”) (1987, 73)
37 Eliciting the question: “Tongue, where have you gone?” (22). This aspect of Erasmus’s Lingua has been studied by Shane Gasbarra. The final Alcalá interpolation hints at Lazarillo’s continued chattiness (inviting a sequelization of “casos”), “de lo que de aquí adelante me suscediere, avisaré a Vuestra Merced” [concerning what has happened from here on, I will give Your Honour notice] (1987, 136).
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