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The analysis of economic exchanges shows that the notion of the pure symbol, in the sense of a disaffected substitute that can be perfectly arbitrary, conventional, and unmotivated, emerges of its own accord from circulation and thus from the intensification of social exchanges.Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies Estos fueron los versos que se pudieron leer; los demás, por estar carcomida la letra, se entregaron a un académico para que por conjeturas los declarase. Tiénese noticia que lo ha hecho, a costa de muchas vigilias y mucho trabajo . . . Miguel de Cervantes, Don QuixoteTo liferated Cervantes' in early likely modern satisfaction, Spain, the and academias which he literarias gleefully that paro-pro-liferated in early modern Spain, and which he gleefully parodied under the parochial rubric of the "Academia de Argamasilla," have been all but forgotten by modern academics. Aside from the research carried out by Aurora Egido, who has focused mainly on the Aragonese academies, the last major studies, by José Sánchez and Willard F. King, date back more than thirty years. While essential sources of the varieties of literary groups established throughout Spain, these studies in large part neglect the academies' affiliations and associations with the burgeoning centers of power and their competitive positionings during the period. Indeed, while King acknowledges the academies as "a powerful force in the background of the cultural scene," she perceives them as "private" despite their overwhelmingly public function and their patronage by major political figures ("The Academies" 367).In this essay I address the academies' historical and sociopolitical determinants in order to situate them within a more broadly construed cultural field, whose boundaries separating the public

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In this thought-provoking, comprehensive, well-researched and wellwritten book, Anne J. Cruz studies the divergent discourses that emerged in early modern Spain in response to increasing numbers of marginalized poor, equally focusing on fictional (picaresque) and non-fictional texts, on literary and extra-literary sources. The use of Foucauldian social paradigms allows Cruz to move not only beyond formalist parameters but also beyond strict sociological and moralist approaches as she views the picaresque's dialectical engagement with the multiple conditions that generated its appearance. In Cruz's own words, by analyzing the narratives as "cultural discourses rather than solely literary artifacts" she is able "to foreground the pressing questions of poverty, delinquency, vagrancy, and prostitution embedded in the novels" (xiii). Following along parallel lines the development of the genre and the evolution of the country, Cruz concludes that the end of the picaresque coincides with the decline of Hapsburg Imperial rule and that the "last"picaresque novel-Estebanillo González-"records both failed history and the failure of history" (xvii). Each chapter contains three sections that integrate penetrating discussions of specific literary texts (picaresque novels) with assessments of other documents and issues relevant to the book's main topic: poverty and social reform. Chapter 1 discusses Lazarillo as a tale that explores the relationship between society and its poor, in this case the growing numbers of vagabonds and beggars who invaded the emerging urban centers in sixteenth-century Spain and led to an increase in criminality as well as the "later conflation of the poor with the delinquent" (5). In the section entitled "Lepers and Liminality" Cruz states that, as the number of lepers began to dwindle at the end of the Middle Ages, their traditional role as "other" was taken by marginal groups-conversos, moriscos, loose women, pícaros, that is to say, the disenfranchised and dispossessed. The unrelenting poverty and persistent hunger that mark Lazarillo's narrative and contribute to its structural cohesion

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