Spanish Renaissance literature

• 1. Introduction

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  Spanish Renaissance literature took shape under the shadow of a single transformative year: 1492. In that year alone, the last Muslim rulers were expelled from Granada, Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar ever written for any Romance language. Three seismic shifts, twelve months. What could possibly hold them together? The answer is a cultural movement that swept in from Italy, collided with Spain's tangled religious history, and produced writers who were simultaneously soldiers, mystics, and scholars. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a country defined by the Inquisition become a hothouse for humanist ideas? And why did two poets, one in Salamanca and one in Seville, end up pulling Renaissance verse in completely opposite directions?

• 2. Italy's Invisible Hand

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  Two popes changed Spanish intellectual life before a single Renaissance poem was written in Castilian. Calixto III, born Alfonso de Borja, and Alejandro VI, born Rodrigo de Borja y Oms, were both Valencians. Their papacies drew Castile, Aragón, and Rome into an unusually tight cultural orbit. From 1480, printers were already active in Spain, but the Spanish works that mattered most were published or translated in Italy, which was then the undisputed center of early printing. Amadís de Gaula went through that route. So did The Celestina and the poetic work of Íñigo López de Mendoza, 1st Marquess of Santillana. Traffic moved the other way too: the Jerusalén liberada of Torquato Tasso found Spanish readers in Spain. The crossing point that would prove decisive came in 1526, when the Italian diplomat Andrea Navagiero met Juan Boscán and encouraged him to try fitting sonnets and Italian strophes into Castilian. That conversation set the italianizing school in motion.

• 3. The Humanist Architects

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  Antonio de Nebrija was born in 1442 and died in 1522, and in between he reshaped the Spanish language. His Gramática Castellana, published in 1492, was the first grammar produced for any Romance language. At that moment Castilian became officially Spanish, displacing Latin as the prestige tongue of the state. The patron who gave humanist education its institutional home was Cardinal Gonzalo Jiménez de Cisneros, a man whose humble origins contrasted sharply with the austerity he demanded of others. He founded the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1498; that institution rose to rival every university in Spain except Salamanca. Cisneros believed that reform of religious orders had to flow from educational reform, and his program aligned closely with the ideas circulating around Erasmus. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, born in 1474 and died in 1566, took that humanist spirit in a more confrontational direction. He argued that war is irrational and contrary to civilization, that forced conversion to Christianity is reprehensible, and that religion must be spread only through peaceful persuasion. His contemporary Francisco de Vitoria, born in 1483 and died in 1546, was a Dominican theologian and professor at Salamanca who became one of the first thinkers to establish the basic concepts of modern international law, grounding them in natural law rather than metaphysical argument.

• 4. Garcilaso, Boscán, and the Italianizing Turn

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  Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1501 and died in 1536, and in those thirty-five years he produced a body of poetry that draws on three distinct masters. From Virgil he took the expression of feeling; from Petrarch, metre and the exploration of mood; from Sannazaro, artistic refinement. His external life is nearly impossible to reconstruct without turning to his verse, which was shaped in large part by his relationship with the Portuguese noblewoman Isabel Freire. He moved through jealousy at her wedding and later through grief at her death. Garcilaso was both courtier and soldier in imperial service, and that dual existence fed the contradictory impulses visible in his work: conformity on one side, the refuge of beautiful dreams on the other. Juan Boscán had already been writing in the courtesan tradition before his 1526 conversation with Navagiero pushed him toward Italian forms. His poem Hero and Leandro was the first Spanish poem to treat a classical mythological legend at length. His Epistle to Mendoza introduced the model of the moral epistle to Spanish literature. Boscán also translated Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528) into Castilian, demonstrating a mastery of the language in prose as well as verse. He died before he could edit Garcilaso's collected works; his widow printed the volume in 1543 under the title The works of Boscán with some of Garcilaso of Vega.

• 5. Two Schools, One Divide

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  Fray Luis de León anchored the Salmantine school, Fernando de Herrera the Sevillian, and the distance between them was not merely geographic. The Salmantine school favored concise language, simply stated ideas, realistic themes, and short verse. The Sevillian school moved in the opposite direction: grandiloquent phrasing, extreme polish, long and complex verse lines, an emphasis on meditation over direct feeling. Critics have noted that the Sevillian approach served as the bridge connecting Renaissance poetry to the Baroque movements of the 17th century. Both schools drew on the same theoretical well, the Petrarchan tradition imported from Italy, but they extracted completely different things from it. Running alongside both was the older castellano line rooted in popular song, the romancero, and the eight-syllable verse forms that had carried lyric poetry for generations. Cristóbal de Castillejo is the most prominent voice of that traditionalist resistance; his satires and love poems pushed back against the italianizing school and championed a literary nationalism that sought to absorb folkloric and colloquial energy rather than court imported elegance.

• 6. Mystics and the Interior Life

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  Fray Luis de León was born in Cuenca, Spain, in 1527 and died in 1591. In 1561 he obtained a chair in Theology at the University of Salamanca, and his subsequent career illustrated precisely how dangerous intellectual life could be in Counter-Reformation Spain. He translated the Song of Songs into Castilian. For that act he was denounced to the Inquisition and imprisoned for four years. His major prose works include The Perfect Wife, The Names of Christ, and a Commentary on the Book of Job, the last written to make Scripture accessible to readers without Latin. His most celebrated poems number twenty-three, among them The Life Removed and the Ode to Salinas, written for his friend Francisco de Salinas. San Juan de la Cruz was born in Ávila in 1542 and died in 1591. He studied philosophy at Salamanca and worked alongside Saint Teresa of Avila in reforming the Carmelite order. In 1577, after he refused to relocate following his superior's orders, he was jailed in Toledo before being freed. His two central poems are The Spiritual Canticle, an eclogue in which the soul searches for Christ, and The Dark Night of the Soul. Santa Teresa de Jesús, born in Ávila in 1515 and died in 1582, entered her monastery by leaving her parents' home in secret. Her most important writings include her Autobiography, The Way of Perfection, and The Interior Castle, in which she compared the soul to a castle with many rooms.

• 7. Prose Beyond the Poem

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  Amadís de Gaula by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo had its roots in a 14th-century original, but the printed version became a landmark of chivalric fiction in the 16th-century Iberian Peninsula. Dozens of sequels followed in Spanish, Italian, and German. Montalvo himself continued the story with Las sergas de Esplandián. Feliciano de Silva, who also wrote the Second Celestina, added four more books including Amadis of Greece. The reaction against this whole tradition eventually produced Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, which was conceived as a burlesque attack on the genre, though Cervantes and his protagonist retained high regard for the original Amadís. The pastoral novel arrived from Italy around 1558, when Jorge de Montemayor published La Diana, the first Spanish example of the form. That success drew in Lope de Vega with La Arcadia and Cervantes with La Galatea. Against both the chivalric and pastoral modes stood the picaresque, inaugurated in 1554 by the anonymously published Lazarillo, which narrates the life of a boy named Lázaro de Tormes from birth to a modest marriage in Toledo. The book's originality lay in its commitment to social reality: a protagonist from the lowest class, driven by hunger, serving masters who mistreat him, without the ideals that animated the heroes of chivalric romance.

• 8. Alonso de Ercilla's Long Road

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  Alonso de Ercilla was born into a noble family in Madrid and rose through the household of Prince Philip, the future Felipe II of Spain, before requesting assignment to a military expedition against the Araucanians of Chile. He distinguished himself in the campaign, but a quarrel with a fellow soldier led his general, García Hurtado de Mendoza, to sentence him to death in 1558. The sentence was reduced to imprisonment, and Ercilla was released quickly enough to fight at the Battle of Quipeo on the 14th of December 1558. He was then exiled to Peru and did not return to Spain until 1562. Out of that experience came La Araucana, an epic poem about the Spanish Conquest of Chile that was later considered the national epic of the Captaincy General of Chile. Ercilla's trajectory, from royal courtier to condemned prisoner to epic poet, traces the full range of experience that the Renaissance ideal of the courtier-soldier made both possible and dangerous.