(A) Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque. David R. Castillo
suffering intolerable insomnia and wandering the halls of the palace "with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out" (185). Kamen calls his book "a short, personal biography" and disclaims the ambition "to offer a history of the reign" (viii). Nonetheless, this biography does provide an overview of the war and diplomacy of the period, and of the incipient Bourbon reorganization of Spanish government. Kamen concludes with a chapter offering a largely positive evaluation of the reign as an era of economic stability and burgeoning intellectual life, and — without downplaying the tensions that would arise frpjn the abolition of regional privileges in Catalonia and elsewhere — as a crucial stage in the development of the Spanish state. Both as biography and history, Philip Vmight have benefited from greater authorial and editorial care. For example, readers will not be able to ascertain from Kamen's conflicting assertions whether Philip ever learned to speak Spanish (e.g., 9, 219). His discussion of Bourbon governmental reforms never clarifies whether the Habsburg conciliar structure was suppressed or simply weakened and made redundant. Some authorial judgments are startling, and indefensible without further elaboration, as when he argues that eighteenth-century naval reforms meant that "for the first time in its entire history the country [Spain] was now a serious military power" (174), a conclusion that would have surprised the king's Bourbon ancestors, among others. Elsewhere the analysis is contradictory and confusing: on page 231 we learn that Philip V's wars "had the positive consequence of stimulating the economy," in part because they were "paid for . . . without raising exceptional taxation"; five pages later, by contrast, Kamen cites with approval the contemporary criticisms of Cardinal Belluga, that "the war policies of the government had raised taxes and worsened the economic situation of the country" (236). Despite its frustrating flaws, though, this book provides the best English account of the life of a troubled king who ruled — or attempted to rule — Spain for nearly half a century. JAMES M. BOYDEN Tulane University