Note The Education of Josep Faust de Potau (1700–1711)
1986; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1475382862000363257
ISSN1469-3550
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: EDUCATION IN SPAINFAUST DE POTAU I FERRAN, JOSEP (1685–1732)LIBRARIES & THEIR ARCHIVES/COLLECTIONSLITERACY/READERSHIP — SPAINMANUSCRIPTS/CODICESSPAIN — CULTURE & CIVILIZATIONSPAIN — HISTORY — 18th–19th CENTURIESSPAIN — LITERATURE — 18th–19th CENTURIES — GENERAL Notes 1. A(rxiu) H(istòric) M(unicipal de) B(arcelona)/Ms. A-30, Llibreta de Comptes de D. Joseph Fausto de Potau y de Ferran, Ensenañt-los hi lo Mestre Francesc Francí, Mestre de Estudi de Escriure y Comptes y Llegir, en la Ciutat de Barcelona, ab Gran Aplauso de Tots, y sent lo Millor de los Demes Mestres de Barcelona, Vuy als 12 de Novembre de 1700. Pp. 1–109 contain arithmetical and accounting exercises; pp. 141–179 consist of a partial list, arranged in alphabetical order, of various persons Potau met throughout Spain from 1705 to 1709. Pp. 181–223 are devoted to a Memoria de las Danças que D. Joseph Fausto de Patau y de Ferran apren ab Mestre Francesc Olivelles en Barcelona, beginning 8 April 1701. Pp. 233–36 contain the Relacion de las Comedias que a leydo D. Joseph Fausto de Potau y Ferran desde el 1 de agosto de 1701, y las que a Visto Representar desde el Año 1703 Señaladas. A list of books read and owned beginning in 1705 follows on pages 241–53. He resumes the list of plays read and seen in pages 271–90; the rest of the book (pp. 291–357) is devoted to excerpts from contemporary plays and poetry, virtually all in Spanish. 2. A.H.M.B./Ms. A-32, Libro de Differentes Poessias compuestas por Diversos Authores recogidas por mi Don José Fausto de Potau y de Ferran V.I.D. a los 14 de Henero de 1704. The 53 folios of this notebook contain copies of poems and short verses, the great majority in Spanish. Later additions include a sonnet on the death of his brother-in-law Pau Ignasi de Dalmases (1718), and some interesting political doggerel, for example: ‘España el culo del frayle / sus fueros la limpiadera / la esclavitud necessaria / y toda la Liga mierda’ (f. 50r). 3. There are few such sources for the history of education in early modern Barcelona. By coincidence, the author of the only other student notebook I have been able to locate was Potau's cousin, Don Joseph de Potau i Olzina. See A.H.M.B./Ms. A-78, Liberi Notationum, scriptu labore mei Nob. Domini. Josephi a Potau et Olzina, anno 1693. This ‘libellus notarum ... de Instituta et Iure’ contains notes on a variety of points in law, arranged in partial alphabetical order. 4. A.H.M.B./Ms. A-30, 233–34. For the history of Jesuit education in early modern Barcelona, see Antoni Borràs, S. J., ‘El Col·legi de Santa Maria i Sant Jaume, dit vulgarment de Cordelles, i la Companyia de Jesús’, Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia, XXXVII, 1965, 399—466; and his ‘El Col·legi de Nobles de Barcelona durant el Segle XVIII, in Albert Manent et al., eds. Contribució a la història de l’església catalana (Abadia de Montserrat: 1983), 51–89. In the school's ‘literario concurso’ of 1696, Potau's contribution garnered the special distinction of publication as a separate pamphlet. See the Loa con que Don Josef Fausto de Potau y Ferran Dará Principio al Literario Concurso que Forman los Señores Colegiales del Imperial Colegio de Cordelas (Barcelona: Martín Gelabert, 1696), 4ff. 5. A.H.M.B./MS. A-30, 181 and 219. 6. Ibid., 233–90. 7. Other contemporary sources confirm the popularity of Calderón's works in early eighteenth-century Barcelona. The local cleric Francesch Tagell noted that in 1720, professional actors played scenes from Darlo todo y no dar nada, La hija del ayre, and La vida es sueño in aristocratic Carnival celebrations; see B(iblioteca) U(niversitária de) B(arcelona)/Ms. 5, Descripció dels Dotze Celebres Festins, passim. Scenes were also acted out from Moreto's El desdén con el desdén, and Antonio de Cardona's El más heroico silencio; Potau copied the final passages of the latter in his notebook on pages 295–302. A surviving list of plays performed at the Teatre de Santa Creu during the season of 1729 also shows a clear preponderance of Calderonian works; see Alfons Par, ‘Representacions teatrals barcelonines en 1729’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, XIII, (1927–28), 156–57. 8. The cryptic Anales (number 79 on the list) may have been a reference to Feliu de la Penya's three-volume chronicle published in Barcelona in 1709. 9. These were Juan Pérez de Moya's Philosophia Secreta and Baltasar de Victoria's Theatro de Dioses de la Gentilidad. 10. Agustí Duran i Sanpere, ‘Testimonis de la vida escolar a la Barcelona del Segle XVIII’, in his Barcelona i la seva història (Barcelona: Curial, 1975), vol. 3, 518–19. 11. I am presently preparing a study of over two hundred private libraries in seventeenth-century Barcelona. A preliminary overview of their contents indicates that by far the majority of books owned by lawyers (who were the proprietors of some two-thirds of the libraries under examination) were legal texts. 12. For a more detailed study of the castilianization of the ruling class of early modern Barcelona, see the author's Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations 1490–1714 (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1986), chapter 8. 13. Anales de Cathalunya (Barcelona, 1709), 3 vols. 14. See for example his Disertación Histórica por la Patria de Paulo Orosio, Discípulo y Amigo de los Dos Claros Lumbreras de la Iglesia, San Gerónymo y San Agustín (Barcelona: Rafael Figueró, 1702). The purpose of this ineffably boring treatise was to prove that Orosio was a native Catalan, and not Portuguese, as the Marquis of Mondéjar had claimed. For the history of the ‘Academia dels Desconfiats’, founded by Dalmases in 1700, see Amelang, Honored Citizens, 171–80. Virtually the only academic exercises delivered in Catalan within this important cultural forum were those dealing with ‘low’ and ‘comic’ themes. Not surprisingly, the only work published by the Academicians in Catalan was their edition of the Rabelaisian poetry of Vicens Garcia (number 75 on Potau's list). Despite the strong Catalan nationalism of both Feliu and Dalmases, I know of no work written in that language by either author. 15. It is interesting to note that all the plays witnessed by Tagell in the Carnival celebrations of 1720 were performed in Spanish (see note 7 above). For some remarks on the role played by theatre in the castilianization of early modern Valencian culture, see Joan Fuster, ‘Plantejaments històrics del teatre valencià’, in his La decadència al país valencià (Barcelona: Curial, 1976), 27–113. 16. The most thorough study to date on reading habits in early modern Spain limits its attention to published sources, and makes no use of the wealth of records available in notarial archives. See Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la España del Siglo XVI y XVII (Madrid: Turner, 1976). For an interesting case-study in the use of manuscript inventories, see Albert Labarre, Le Livre dans la vie amiénoise du 16e siècle: L’enseignement des inventaires après décès 1503–1576 (Paris-Louvain: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Paris-Sorbonne, and Béatrice Nauwelaerts, 1971). 17. Carlo Ginzburg makes this and other cogent points in the preface to his The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), especially xxi–xxii. For different assessments of recent studies based on the contents of private libraries and bookshops, see Robert Darnton, ‘Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature’, in Historical Studies Today, eds. Felix Gilbert and Stephen Graubard (New York: Norton, 1972), 238–50; and Raymond Birn, ‘Livre et Société after Ten Years: Formation of a Discipline’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLI (1976), 287–312.
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