This is a remarkable book on a remarkable individual and his work. In character with its subject, it is also erudite and ambitious, written by a scholar who has searched many archives and libraries and obviously has read widely in various languages and on many topics as he followed the travels and thoughts of Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (Madrid, 1606–Vigevano, Lombardy, 1682). Caramuel, who wrote books on subjects ranging from theology to mathematics, typography, and linguistics, is best known, especially among architectural historians, for his three volumes of Architectura civil, recta y obliqua (a fourth volume was never published and is lost), the focus of this publication. However, Caramuel and this treatise probably have not been understood so well in our times as they are in this volume.

Caramuel was a Spanish subject at a time when that could signify many identities. His own identities had their origins in his having been born in Madrid, the son of a royal guard from Luxembourg at the court of Philip II and a Bohemian mother who was born in Antwerp. He studied at the Jesuit Colegio Real in Madrid and then at the University of Alcalá. Before he reached the age of twenty, his religious vocation took him to the Cistercian monastery of Santa María de la Santa Espina at Castromonte (Valladolid) and to other monasteries in Castile. Always in the Spanish Habsburg sphere, he subsequently traveled to Flanders, the Palatinate, and Prague, then to Rome and the Spanish kingdom of Naples, and finally to Lombardy. Fernández-Santos examines all of these movements in detail because he believes that they are key for understanding Caramuel, and especially the Architectura civil, published in Vigevano in 1678 …