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The rebellion of the moriscos of Granada in 1568–70 was a turning point in their history. It led initially to their dispersal throughout Castile, and eventually to the decision in 1609 to expel all the moriscos from Spain. These events have been studied by Trevor Dadson in a series of remarkable articles and books that have changed how we understand them. The present chapter, written in his honour, concerns a poem of Fray Luis de León (Ode XXII: La cana y alta cumbre) that takes the Granada uprising as its subject. Fray Luis observed the rebellion at a distance, from his teaching post in the University of Salamanca, but it engaged him closely nonetheless because of its impact on the life of his friend and patron, Don Pedro Portocarrero, who was at the time a canon in the cathedral of Seville. The Portocarrero family had long-standing connections with the region, and Don Pedro's brother, Alfonso, took part with distinction in the military defeat of the rebels, under the leadership of Don Juan of Austria. This chapter considers how the ode of Fray Luis presents the uprising, its suppression, and its implications for Portocarrero and his family. It examines in particular how its themes are mediated not only by direct statement, but by Classical and biblical allusions, symbolic images and the poem's overall structure.
Ode XXII
The studies of La cana y alta cumbre that have appeared in print have raised several questions about its interpretation that remain unresolved. One of them has to do with its tone. The poem has been called a skilled but formal exercise in rhetoric (‘pese a ciertas virtudes, es un hábil y brillante ejercicio retórico’), written dutifully in honour of a friend, but lacking passion, and in this respect it has been likened to another ode of Fray Luis, Virtud, hija del cielo (Ode II), also dedicated to Pedro Portocarrero: ‘para los gustos actuales […] parecen un poco frías y de encargo […] puesto que en su origen y fundamento son […] meros elogios, si bien sinceros, del destinatario’. It is true that the poem is in one sense conventional: praise of an absent friend, already present in the odes of Horace, was cultivated in neo-Latin poetry of the time.
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Our understanding of the ‘Ode to Juan de Grial’ has been deepened in recent years by research into the sources on which it draws. In 1979 Fernando Lázaro Carreter showed that the model Fray Luis had foremost in his mind was a neo-Latin poem written in Florence by the humanist Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano (1454-94) to mark the start of the academic year. This Fray Luis adapted, in accordance with the precepts of mixed imitatio, blending into it further elements, both classical (mainly from Horace, Virgil and Ovid) and Italian (Bernardo Tasso), in order to produce a distinctive poem of his own. Subsequent scholars have built on the approach that Lázaro Carreter pioneered, and the detailed knowledge of its Latin context that we now possess may be seen in the dense notes that accompany it in the edition of the poems by Antonio Ramajo Caño. Less attention, however, has been paid to how Fray Luis ordered the material of which his poem consists in order to induce in the reader a particular experience of the text.
The analysis of the poem's structure followed by Lázaro Carreter has been accepted, on the whole, without demur. According to this reading the ode falls into four parts: Stanzas 1-3 describe the onset of autumn; Stanza 4 notes that the season invites one to study; Stanzas 5-7 exhort Grial to accept the invitation and write; and Stanza 8 evokes the poet's inability to join him in the task.
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
Edited by
Jean Andrews, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham,Isabel Torres, Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation. Los catorce ensayos de este volumen conectan de una manera perceptible con el tema del movimiento en la poesía española del siglo de oro, sin limitar la dialéctica de la estasis y movimiento a una sola esfera o manifestación única. Entre los multiples enfoques cabe destacar: el cuestionamiento de la interdependencia de la tradición e inovación, de la poesía, del poder y la política, de los significantes que se transforman, de los espacios que conectan y cruzan con los tiempos 'desviados'; análisis de las tensiones entre lo sagrado y lo secular, del conflicto centro-periferia y del complejo sistema de producción, circulación y recepción de los manuscritos; el diálogo con el eco poético a través de los siglos y de los continentes y la construcción creativa del sujeto escritor y/o lector. Al abrir la noción central de Helgerson del "movimiento conspicuo" más allá de la poesía nueva secular, este libro propone un entendimiento más completo de las coordinadas espacio-temporales de la poesía en un periodo de circunstancias históricas extrao. Jean Andrews is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham. Isabel Torres is Professor of Spanish Golden Age Literature at Queen's University, Belfast. Contributors: Jean Andrews, Dana Bultman, Noelia Cirnigliaro, Marsha Collins, Trevor J. Dadson, Aurora Egido, Verónica Grossi, Anne Holloway, Mark J. Mascia, Terence O'Reilly, Carmen Peraita, Amanda Powell, Colin Thompson, Isabel Torres.
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