No. 12 (2023)

This article proposes the study of a corpus of twelve relaciones de sucesos of disasters in romance from a rhetorical-poetic perspective. Through a wide range of the texts considered, analysed in their essential components (exordium,narratio, argumentatio and epilogus), the aim is to define the thematic, formal and structural rules leading the blinded copleros and the poets of the popular poetry in the composition of these informative and persuasive texts throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

The documental sources that contain the Quevedo’s correspondence that has reached us can mainly be found in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo in Santander. The incorporation, over two years ago, of a new manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, has made this institution the one with the largest and of the highest quality collection of Quevedo’s letters: those addressed to Sancho de Sandoval (mostly holographs), to the Duke of Medinaceli and to Francisco de Oviedo, and now, those written to the Jesuits Pedro Pimentel and Juan Antonio Velázquez. There is a copy of these last letters in a manuscript of the Hispanic Society of America that was part of the library of Gregorio Mayans. According to the testimony that precedes these letters, they were copied from another manuscript. The incorporation, after going through two auctions, of a new manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional de España with copies of these letters has risen the possibility that this new manuscript served as a model for that copy. The aim of this paper is to analyze this possibility by collating the content of both documents.

This article analyses the places in which Quevedo contributes one or more Virgilian quotations in his commentary on the "Trenos" and explores the function that the author assigns to them in each case.

In Peralada’s Palace Library –created by the Majorcan noblemen the brothers D. Antonio and D. Tomás de Rocabertí Dameto in the last quarter of the 19th century and, from 1923 on, continued by the bibliophile D. Miguel Mateu Pla (1898-1972)–, are preserved copies that belonged to bibliophiles and collectors from different parts of Spain and Europe. On this occasion, are unveiled eight loose sheets from 17th first decade, acquired by Miguel Mateu; unique pieces with unknown whereabouts for some of them until today, which belonged to the extraordinary library formed by the English banker and collector, Henry Huth (1815-1878) and, on his death, preserved by his son Alfred Henry Huth (1850-1910). For a better knowledge of its origin, it is contextualized with a biographical synthesis of the protagonists, the study of their bookplates, the division of its bibliographic collections and, finally, current locations of relevant works from the paradigmatic library preserved in national and international institutions are provided.

This essay presents and contrasts the Epístola al virrey de Azanza and the collection of poems Tiernos afectos..., by Manuel de Quiroz y Campo Sagrado, a New Spanish Baroque poet from the late viceregal period, which contains examples of poems of a visual nature; the communicating vessels that these works and poems establish among themselves, and with other similar ones by the same author are outlined.

This paper studies the allusions to the method of mail used in a 17th century letter with negative comments about Quevedo´s Buscón. After a brief review of the different epistolary transport systems at the time, the analysis of the letter shows the use of a private messenger to send it to a noble recipient. This fact is important to rule out a hypothesis that dates that letter in 1625, a year before the first edition of Buscón, presupposing that it was sent by the public mail service (the ordinario).

Interpretations of St. Teresa's cultural heritage have taken various forms over time, from the analysis of its historical and religious value, to its undoubted status in the industry of objects and relics. However, in this article we propose to review another part of his legacy, reflected in his challenging epistolary, corporal and pedagogical authority, and to endow it with value, while these three spaces, the communicative, the intimate and the communitarian, were part of the elaboration of his own model of holiness and of his inexhaustible and effective cultural and formative program.

This article aims to probe that Juan de Valdés is the most likely author of Lazarillo, a hypothesis already proposed by specialists such as Manuel J. Asensio and, most recently, Mariano Calvo. By analyzing linguistic recurrences, biographical data, and intertextual connections between El Lazarillo and Valdés’ writings such as Diálogo de la doctrina cristiana and Diálogo de la lengua, the conclusion is reached that, if the author of Lazarillo was not Valdés, that writer was, in fact, someone uniquely close to Valdés’ biography, personality, thought and literary trajectory.

We describe the incunabula preserved in the Diocesan Library of Córdoba and identify the lost ones that had belonged to the old Episcopal Library and to the school libraries of the Society of Jesus of Córdoba and Montilla.

We offer the study of a set of poetic texts copied in the endpapers of a copy of the Hypotyposeon, by Martínez de Cantalapiedra, from 1582. Among them is the sonnet "Hermano Lope, bórrame el soné" (which has been attributed to Cervates, Góngora and Julián de Armendáriz), a new testimony very close to the date of composition and with some variants. Another sonnet, hitherto unknown, presents a satire against a poet named Blasco. Various data allow us to defend the attribution of both compositions to the writer born in Salamanca Julián de Armendáriz.

We gather information about short satirical plays printed in Cordoban printing houses during the 18th century. They had been preserved in different Spanish and foreign libraries and show an unprecedented aspect of the editorial output of this city. Thirty-two titles have been located among the bibliographic material consulted. Each work is analyzed and described individually with its bibliographical references and location of the copy.

This paper sets forth the relation established between two Digital Humanities projects: FactGrid, a database for Historians, and PhiloBiblon, a biobibliographical database created in the 1970s. The technical details of both projects are specified as well as their use of DH for development. In addition, it updates the steps that have been taken to integrate all PhiloBiblon data in the FactGrid environment. The future is attractive and promising for the relation between both HD projects.

Review of Tirso de Molina's La santa Juana. Tercera parte edited by Isabel Ibáñez, Blanca Oteiza and Cristina Tabernero, the first critical and annotated edition of the third comedy that Tirso de Molina dedicated to the Franciscan nun Juana de la Cruz.

Review of this book

Introduction to the monograph La novela corta interpolada en el Renacimiento y primer Barroco. The forms of diffusion of the short narrative throughout the Spanish Golden Age are synthesized and the different degrees of integration of short novels in larger works are studied. Following this analysis, the main contributions of each of the insights to the monograph are highlighted.

The present study aims at showing a wide vision on the development of the aureus novel, in the light of the usual incorporation of short novels in its narrative structure. According to the principle of variety in unity, practically all novel-based models of the time included, in different ways, this genre. This increases, undoubtedly, its importance and underlines how its presence in aureus literature went beyond the exclusive field of collections.

This study analyzes the purpose of Antonio de Guevara with his famous episode of the villain of the Danube. The main objective is to study, on the one hand, the author’s claim with the reworking of this brief narrative inserted in the Relox de príncipes (1529), oriented to the correct administration of justice according to the gestation of Charles V’s empire in Europe and his government in Spain, and, on the other hand, the meaning of the episode in the text itself, marked by the reflection of mirrored political philosophy and the author’s literary originality.

This article offers a proposal for the generic definition of the novella according to three basic features that, at least in its Renaissance origins, combine the predominance of the adventure, the purpose of entertainment and the adaptation to the framework where it is interpolated. According to the previous hypothesis, several interpolated novels are analyzed, such as that of the Moorish sisters in the Coloquios de Palatino y Pinciano, El Abencerraje and the novel of the buldero interpolated in the Lazarillo, among other composed since the mid-sixteenth century.

This article explores the historical, editorial and literary circumstances that propitiated the elaboration of a 'pastoral' version of El Abencerraje for its interpolation at the end of Book IV of La Diana by Jorge de Montemayor. After analysing the incorporation of the Moorish tale into the editorial sequence of the pastoral text, its literary genesis, the mechanisms of composition and its function in the structure of La Diana, the work offers a reasoned hypothesis about what happened that would justify the preparation of a new critical edition of both works.

In chapters I-II of La Arcadia, Lope de Vega includes the fable of Alasto and Crisalda. This second-degree fiction, arises as a strategy to divert the conversation of a group of shepherds. It is articulated around the concepts of improvisation, interruption and dissimulation, with a good dose of erudition. This article examines how, through them, Lope tries new ways of telling stories.

El viaje entretenido not only provides information for the history of theater in Spain, but also, in its peculiar structure, a short and fragmented novel is inserted. The novel is divided into three parts within a very measured organization, in a book where the structure is a rigid scaffolding. Rojas projects in the novel his desires of a cultured author, in open contrast with the dialogue of the four characters that fills the journey. The novel also functions as a break in the narrative on which the four-voice dialogue is based, as a written and rhetorical story in contrast to the conversational tone of the book, as a serious and complex story, as an interrupted tale that recovers the readers' interest when the dialogue between the four traveler characters lapses or has been prolonged, as a literary manifestation of an "author" who also wants to be an author.

The article analyses the four novelists inserted in Guzmán de Alfarache from a functional perspective in terms of the work as a whole and individually in terms of the significance of each one of them within the narrative that includes them. The aim is also to interpret both their function and their meaning within the synchronic rhetorical framework offered by the work itself, obviating diachronic interpretations.

A study of the interpolation of El curioso impertinente in the first part of Don Quixote is proposed, taking into account the context of the prose of golden fiction, the narrative approaches of Cervantes throughout his literary career, and the metaliterary reflection in his work. It explores the connections of the novel with the text that contains it, not only with the main plot of Don Quixote and Sancho, from the reality-fiction and truth-lie axes, but also from the connections established with the rest of the interpolated episodes.

After considering the fact that Cervantes, in writing the famous phrase: "yo soy el primero que he novelado en lengua castellana”", did not mean to make a generic reference to what is generally referred to as a “short novel” but rather to a specific literary genre, of Italian origin, which bears the name of novella, through a contrastive examination between a novella by Masuccio Salernitano and the tale of Bonifacio and Dorotea in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, it is concluded that in Alemán’s text the axiological dimension is superimposed on the ludic one, thus determining a more intense adherence to traditional and autochthonous models than to the molds of the Italian and Boccaccian novella. While Cervantes, engaged in this comparative game with the novel of the Curioso impertinente, demonstrates his clear inclination towards a new art of writing novels inspired by the lesson of Boccaccio. And in this sense, it can be said that Cervantes was truly the first to "novelar en lengua castellana", if it were not that...

This study deals with the different strategies of textual superimposition which characterize the structure of Tirso de Molina’s Cigarrales de Toledo. It will be shown that the imbricated novelistic segments are part of a narrative construction of a coordinative type, whose plot variety is homogenised precisely by the exercise of novelising, a cardinal component of the whole structure.

This article studies the mode of novelistic insertion in which a written text is read aloud, with the appearance of being a true fiction, produced by a literary subject fully aware of the art of novelizing. However, as a comparative reference, some cases of oral narrations of novels or their reading in the present tense are also taken into account. In the first place, we will deal with the inserts written in exempt narrations during the chronological stretch that goes from the Guzmán (1599-1604) to Don Quixote and its apocryphon, passing through the Novelas ejemplares. Then, we will proceed to the study of some collections of novels with interpolation of written stories. In this sense, several collections by Salas Barbadillo and Castillo Solórzano will be analyzed in a chronology that would cover from 1615 (coinciding with the second Quixote) to 1626. We will conclude with the case of an interesting example by Castillo, La garduña de Sevilla, from 1642.