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By Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. 206 pages. Duke University Press. $21.95
Digging deep in some Spanish archives, two historians, Alexandra and Noble Cook, unearthed the outlines of a 16th-century potboiler that rivals a plot by Danielle Steele: a pile of court records and letters narrating the life of Francisco Noguerol de Ulloa, whose unwitting marriage to two women became a cause celebre in renaissance Spain. In "Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance," the Cooks have pieced together a remarkably juicy tale that opens a window onto daily life at the height of the conquest of the Americas.
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Like many young men living during Spain's age of discovery, Francisco sailed for the New World to do the king's work, and to get rich. But Noguerol, then 20, was also fleeing an arranged, unhappy marriage. In Peru, he so deftly shifted allegiance between the crown and the colonial power of the moment that he survived constant rebellions. He was rewarded for his loyalties with two estates replete with silver mines and Indian serfs.
One day, Noguerol received a letter from his two sisters, cloistered in a Benedictine convent and scheming to coax their errant brother back home. They told him that his wife was dead. Rather than go home, Noguerol took a new wife in a grand ceremony "among knights and people of much authority and quality." But when the happy couple did return to Spain, they were greeted with a royal slap in the face: not only was Noguerol's first wife not dead, King Philip II wanted him arrested for bigamy. So began a labyrinthine legal drama that wound all the way to the Vatican, where Pope Paul IV decreed that Noguerol could keep his second wife. As the story unfolds, we are treated to a dose of bickering lawyers and sexual intrigue--including a lengthy debate over whether Noguerol first had "carnal intercourse" with wife 1 or wife 2.
The Cooks never quite escape the shackles of academic writing, but they do construct a thoroughly compelling story that crosses the cultural barrier of 400 years. The authors explain that 16th-century Spaniards had a greater terror of dying in anonymity than of death itself. Only the most spectacular explorers have survived in the popular imagination. Fortunately for Francisco Noguerol, his accidental bigamy has piqued 20th-century curiosity, and rescued an otherwise unremarkable conquistador from oblivion.
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