Blackwood’s “Horae Hispanicae” and the Conservative Construction of Spanish Literature

A series of essays on Spanish literature entitled “Horæ Hispanicæ” began appearing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in February 1820, a mere few months after the launch of its “Horæ Germanicæ” (November 1819). The man behind both series was Walter Scott’s son-in-law and major Edinburgh intellectual John Gibson Lockhart. While in his German essays he tended to examine recent works and authors, in the Spanish series he followed a different approach by concentrating on earlier literature, starting from the medieval romances. Though less numerous and frequent than the German ones, these essays made a significant contribution to determining a literary-historical and ideologically weighted interpretation of medieval and early modern Spanish literature in English-language culture of the Romantic period. Specifically, this chapter explores “Horæ Hispanicæ” in light of Lockhart’s engagements with Friedrich Schlegel’s work on ancient and modern literatures, which he translated as Lectures on the History of Literature: Ancient and Modern from the German of Frederick Schlegel (1818). In doing so, it illuminates how, in “Horæ Hispanicæ,” Lockhart promoted a construction of Spanish literature that was deeply attuned to the cultural, ideological, and political climate of Britain and the European continent during the post-Napoleonic Restoration.