The Spanish guitar — how an instrument the lexicographers despised acquired a nationality

In 1611 Covarrubias called the guitar "no more than a cowbell", so easy to strum that "there is no stable boy who is not a guitar player", and mourned the vihuela it had displaced. In 1674 Gaspar Sanz printed at Zaragoza why Europe called the thing a Spanish guitar, and a method teaching it as literate art. Both pages are read here directly, and together they tell no triumph: the instrument became national because it was popular, and the men who wrote it down disagreed about where it came from.