Poderoso caballero: Money, coins, and value in Francisco de Quevedo's poetry

The present study proposes a rereading of the theme of money in the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo (1580--1645), arguably the leading poet of the Spanish Baroque. It does so through a close textual analysis of individual metaphors in three sonnets and a detailed reconstruction of the socio-economic, historical, and conceptual references that frame the specific manifestations of money that these metaphors invoke---gold coin, copper coin, and gambling chip. I argue that in Quevedo's poems, money acts as a code to represent the profound conceptual transition taking place in early modern Europe: the reformulation of money as value. Gold coin, copper coin, and gambling chip set the foundation to examine the individual links in the trajectory of money's ascent as value: (1) money's conflation with honor, the source of the feudal elite's social and moral authority, and its concomitant appropriation of honor's authority; (2) money's conflation with a lie, its appropriation of the authority of deception, and its rise as a token whose value is sustained by circulation; (3) money's conflation with truth, a fundamental category through which early modern society defined itself, and its appropriation of the authority of truth. In tracing money's metamorphoses, I present stages in a process perhaps best described as the "economization" of being. As moral and philosophical categories are compressed together with money, they essentially become aspects of the economic sphere. The proposed analysis of money in Quevedo's poetry suggests a rethinking of the Baroque as a period that finalized the modern world's complete disassociation from the Greek and Roman civilizations. The transition towards a market economy and acknowledgment of money as value occurs at the cost of breaking away from the traditions of the non-monetary economies and the loss of the ability to understand the cultures that created them.