AMAZING BOOK, BUT not easy to describe. It purports to be a scholarly polemic by Don Antonio de Guevara (1480-1545), a bishop attached to the court of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. Don Antonio really did exist and wrote a few books, including a very well-known one on Marcus Aurelius, but so far as I can find out he never wrote a work explaining that the whole so-called “New World” was simply a self-interested fiction imposed by an unscrupulous few upon a gullible public—and that is what Senges’s book is. Its argument is addressed to Charles, hoping to persuade him not to fall for this scam.
The whole presentation is deadpan—there is even a scholarly endnote explaining some of the arguments for attributing the text to other authors, one scholar’s theory being that it was written by Juana la Loca, “Joanna the Mad,” one time queen of Castile and Aragon and Charles's mother, whom he had tucked away in a nunnery.
The whole thing is Senges’s invention, though. Within my own reading, its only rival as a faux-scholarly presentation of a fictitious artifact is Pierre Michon’s Les Onze, about a fictional portrait of the Committee of Public Safety (see LLL post for May 30, 2022).
Senges does an astonishingly persuasive job of capturing the tone of 16th century argumentation. If you have ever sampled the feistier pieces of Erasmus, Melancthon, Calvin, or Luther, or the pamphlet wars from the period right before the Civil War, you will recognize it immediately: learned, contemptuous of its opponents, flattering towards its main intended audience, and, once you start accepting its premises, surprisingly convincing…
…the surprisingly convincing part being the cream of the joke here, since we know Don Antonio is as wrong as wrong can be. Oddly enough, though, his scholarship is so impeccable, his insight into the ways of scoundrels so piercing, his style so elegant, that I started pitying the poor fools who had bought into the whole “New World” bubble. What idiots!
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