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Patrick Williams, Al hilo del tiempo: Controles y poderes de una España imperial, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1088–1089, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem244
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Extract
The author of these nineteen essays is a career diplomat who describes himself as ‘a Sunday historian’; he is currently Spanish ambassador to Indonesia. Dr de Lario is too modest; he has a doctorate in Spanish seventeenth-century history, and these essays, written for senior Spanish historical journals over thirty years, strongly suggest that working on one day a week is not necessarily a disadvantage for a historian if the other days involve some imaginative thinking about the discipline. Certainly, essays on major historians, Rafael Altamira and Joan Reglà, provide powerful—and, indeed, moving—reflections by a man of affairs on the historian's vocation and profession. The core of the book lies in six essays which deal with the Spanish parliaments (cortes) and nine which analyse the development and importance of the seven élite university colleges (colegios mayores). In a pioneering essay published in 1980 (‘Monarquías y Parlamentos’), de Lario ranged over the relationships between the Crown and the representative institutions of the kingdoms of Spain; this succinct and suggestive essay paved the way for the great advances that were made in the study of Spanish parliaments in the 1980s. Three specialised essays on the cortes of the kingdom of Valencia fill important gaps in reminding us of the tensions and fissures that were never far below the surface of Valencian life and which all but burst forth into disorder and even rebellion when Philip IV and Olivares demanded that the kingdom contribute to the ‘Union of Arms’. This is confirmed in a fascinating essay on Mosén Porcar, who provided the most informed account of the response of the city of Valencia to the crisis of 1625–6 and by a detailed chronology of the incidents that might so easily have led Valencia into a rebellion such as that made by Catalonia in 1640. Chief among the essays on the educational system of seventeenth-century Spain is an important piece on the networks of patronage (‘Mecenazgos y burocracía’) which demonstrated how the colegios mayores gained a stranglehold on advancement within the burgeoning bureaucracy of the Habsburg state. De Lario writes with particular authority about the Colegio Mayor de San Clemente de los Españoles which was established in Bologna in 1369 and which provided the template for the six Castilian colegios mayores which were founded in the years 1401–1525. The essays on the Bologna college make a substantial contribution to the development of educational structures and to the loss that Spain suffered when it prevented students from travelling abroad to study. The government of Philip IV brought the golden age of the colegios mayores to an end when it cynically took advantage of internal disorders in the Colegio Mayor de San Clemente de los Españoles to crush its independence and when it seized control of appointment to professorial chairs in the Castilian colegios mayores.
