“Más no lo saben todo los letrados / ni todos son ydiotas los soldados.” Francisco de Guzmán’s <i>Digression de las armas y letras</i> (1565). (2009)

ALTHOUGH SIGNIFICANT CRITICAL ATTENTION has been directed at identifying the classical and Italian Renaissance sources of Don Quijote's curious Discourse on Arras and Letters that occupies parts of chapters 37 and 38 of the first part of the novel, I am aware of only a passing reference to a more contemporary model available to Cervantes in Spanish. Antonio Bernat Vistarini has pointed out: un interesante parangon, no detectado aun, entre el 'Discurso de las armas y letras' de don Quijote (I, 38) y la 'Digresion de las armas y letras' de Francisco Guzman en sus Triunfos morales (32). The present study consists of a review of prior criticism to date, an introduction to Guzman's verse rendition of the debate between arms and letters, and a transcription of it. Much has been written about the popular literary tradition of the debate between arms and letters. Eric Haywood provides a compendious description of the genre of the of Arms and Letters: As an independent genre, the querelle was then [the early 16th century] still in its infancy. It was descended from the querelle of Knights and Doctors, a debate initiated by the Glossators of Bologna in the twelfth century about the relative claims to supremacy and precedence of a man of law and learning (doctor) and man of war (miles). The debate was then taken up by subsequent generations of Roman lawyers (often as a form of 'school exercise') and soon became rather trite. In the fifteenth century, however, when under the aegis of humanists learning was aggressively poised to take control of the world, the debate gained new vigour [...] and knights and doctors gradually gave way to arms and letters, as various attempts were made to infuse it with a more universal significance. The work which contributed most to giving the debate its new form and to creating a vogue for it was the very popular commentary to Petrarch's Trionfi by the philosopher-physician Bernardo Ilicino. (64-65) The uniquely Spanish take on the debate between arms and letters has been studied in some detail by a number of critics, including Peter E. Russell, who argues convincingly that the opposition between sapientia et fortitudo takes on social and cultural dimenions in the peninsula that derive from the medieval Spanish belief that the separation between caballero and letrado is of divine origin, and the superiority of the former over the latter is a manifestation of providential will (221). A further peculiarly Spanish angle on the problem identified by Russell is the fact that professional men of letters in early modern Spain, both inside and outside the Church, were largely of converso origin, and therefore any attempt to put letters on a par with arms was met with skepticism and suspicion (222). In his provocative study of the debate on arms versus letters in the works of Cervantes, Michel Moner posits that one important register from which it must be viewed is the opposition between poverty [arms] and wealth [letters] (77-85). Francisco Rodriguez Marin is one of the first Spanish critics to weigh in on the early sources of Cervantes in a lecture delivered to the Academia de la Poesia in 1911, affirming that the dispute of the superiority of arms or letters is very ancient, and that Ulpianus, Casiodorus and Felino, among others, gave the advantage to letters (368). Americo Castro, in El pensamiento de Cervantes, first published in 1925, reminds us that Pietro Bembo, as a character in Castiglione's El Cortesano, also declares that letters are far superior to arms (215). Castro also cites Erasmus and his preference for letters in the Elogio de la locura (217), and then quotes briefly the conciliatory attitudes towards arms and letters espoused by Juan de Mal Lara and Pero Mexia (217). Castro adds in his notes to the chapter on Las Armas y las Letras a bibliography of earlier works dedicated to the theme that includes: Flavio Biondo, De litteris et armis comparatio (1460); Cristoforo Lafranchini, Tractatulus seu Quaestio utrum preferendus sit miles an doctor (Brescia, 1497); Castiglione, Il Cortegiano (Venice, 1528); Juan Angel Gonzalez, Pro equite conttra litteras declamatio. …