Seduction And Sacrilege Rhetorical Power in Fray Gerundio De Campazas

Fray Gerundio de Campazas, Jose Francisco de Isla's hilarious and incisive satire of bad preaching, was a best seller in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, due to the novel's explicit parody of Don Quixote, its send-up of sermons, and its keen depictions of human foibles such as greed, vanity, and hypocrisy. However, twentieth-century readers come to Fray Gerundio informed by critical assessments of the novel as a text lacking psychological depth or plot. In Seduction and Sacrilege: Rhetorical Power in Fray Gerundio de Campazas, Rebecca Haidt performs a reading of Fray Gerundio that restores understanding of the narrative's trajectory and its compelling character portrayals. While ancient rhetorical theory held that only the "good man" (vir bonus) can be an effective speaker, Haidt traces the novel's plotting of the life of a bad -- that is, all too human -- man whose successful pursuit of a career in the pulpit involves a complex mix of naivete and political manipulation, ignorance and ambition, pleasure and perversion, seduction and sacrilege.