Jeremy Robbins, the Forbes Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, has written a highly ambitious, erudite, and intricate assessment of the Spanish Golden Age in terms of its imaginative literature (prose and poetry), architecture, paintings, moral polemics, and mystical theology. By “Spain,” Robbins means the peninsula: he does not extend his study to colonial Latin America because it possesses “its own dynamics, differences, influences and trajectories” (19). He also does not bring in Portuguese contributions to literary and artistic culture, though Spain and Portugal were formally united from 1580 to 1640. That being said, his sites and characters are significantly wide-ranging, among them two palaces and a convent – the Escorial, Buen Retiro, and Convento de las Descalzas Reales – as well as Velázquez, Cervantes, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Teresa de Jesús, Juan de la Cruz, Juan Bautista Maíno, María de Jesús de Ágreda, Juan Latino, Murillo, Antonio de Pereda, María Zayas y Sotomayor, and Zurbarán, a list which is not at all complete. Incomparable Realms is structured in three parts, with three chapters each. Its first section is devoted to royalty and palaces; its second, to encounters; its third, to journeys and reflections.

Robbins seeks to explore the mentality of the Spanish Golden Age. To that end, he invests his book with two concepts that recur often. The first is the adjective “incomparable,” meaning unmatched and unequaled. Robbins posits that Golden Age Spain was “an incomparable realm in its artistic and cultural riches, as well as in the legacies of the past [which it attempted] to eradicate” (308). He also finds that Spain over these centuries was incomparable “in the intensity with which it strove to engage with the heavenly realm” (ibid.) The second pivotal term is a noun, “incommensurability,” which connotes a state of no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison. Robbins highlights the ways in which Spanish artists, courtiers, and rulers attended to binaries that are not apparently combinational: key pairings are the corporeal and the spiritual, the day-to-day and the afterlife, inclusion and exclusion, openness and quarantine, appearance and reality, and practical flexibility and rigorous morality. Robbins’ point is that Spain’s Golden Age wove these disjunctive elements together, “entirely and utterly” (308), while simultaneously believing the same elements were antithetical.

Literary scholars as well as historians of early modern Spain have long highlighted the period’s investment in questions of truth and duplicity, but Robbins pushes that binary in a more subtle direction by stressing the fact that the disjunctions in play here were not a matter of either/or, but rather both/and (26). He explicitly wishes to avoid a “unitary narrative, a single interpretative vision” in favor of diverse narratives and perspectives (32). He consequently highlights deliberate hybridity on the part of cultural producers and their productions: some of the elements he focuses on include the new centrality of still life paintings, as well as nuns who try to find language to describe encounters with the divine and their bilocation to Mexico. Mirrors, prudence, courtiers, trompe l’oeil, skepticism, the permeable boundaries of convents: these are just a few of the subjects tackled in this expansive study, which will undoubtedly prove provocative to educated readers.

Nonetheless, for this reviewer, the impact of Incomparable Realms remains muted because the author did not entirely follow through on his objectives. Binary schemes have a remarkably long history when it comes to interpreting early modern and modern Spain, but despite Robbin’s efforts to disavow and complicate them, they are still here. Thus, it would be wrong for readers to think that Spanish people were homogeneous in their religious beliefs, and yet the realm suffered from a” virulent and almost visceral antisemitism” (204). Spain acquired a global empire but sealed its borders and experiences (249–250). Spain suffered restraint – intellectual, religious, artistic? – from a “strongly imposed, and often seemingly enthusiastically embraced, Catholic orthodoxy” (251). Spaniards were obsessed with finding and labeling the other (207), and so on.

When we combine this inconsistency with Robbin’s seeming lack of familiarity with current scholarly arguments about early modern Spanish history, the outcome is not ideal. Older truisms about Philip II – his control fetish, inability to delegate, refusal to change in real time – do not reflect what we now know about epistemological knowledge and mixed signals in the Spanish empire. Distance and self-interest had profound effects on monarchs and their ability to govern. Additionally, the most important recent arguments about skepticism in early modern Spain – I’m thinking here about Stuart Schwartz, Mercedes García-Arenal, and Stefania Pastore – have highlighted the crucial role that religious conversion (not expulsion) played in allowing early modern Spaniards to recognize varieties of redemptive possibilities, simply because they were now living in an environment, including an oceanic one, of nuanced and variable religious commitments. Finally, for a scholar whose ambitions included excavating the combination of material and spiritual values, it is somewhat startling that almost no attention has been paid to the changing norms, priorities, and challenges of Spanish Catholicism in the early modern period.