No. 08 (2019)

Between 1589 and 1590 two prints of La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla were made in the printing press of Pedro Madrigal, and they constitute the last version of the poem. During the process of composition of both books, variants between editions and copies were produced, that we could consider as adiaphora and author’s variants. The analysis of these variants – equally valid for the history of the text – is an essential step to face the critical edition of a fundamental work in the Spanish Golden Age Literature.

The unpublished correspondence between two renowned Golden Age writers and diplomats reinforces the view that intense political and intellectual networks and circles reigned in the diplomatic corps and the cultural milieu in the seventeenth century. Juan Antonio de Vera, Count of La Roca, and Diego Saavedra Fajardo, a diplomat from Murcia, needed each other as information hubs, intellectual control points and transmitters of cultural goods. They engaged in professional debates about the foreign policy of Madrid. La Roca repeatedly treated the diplomat with disdain and condescending superiority. A note on the Empresas Políticas casts a shadow on its first edition and highlights a puzzle.

The charges on the armorial shield of the characters in 35 Spanish romances of chivalry (libros de caballerías) printed in the XVIth century are analysed in detail. These charges are equally distributed into two groups: 1) Conventional heraldic signs, occasionally used with a symbolic intention, and 2) Realistic representations of diverse events (“scenes”) used with allusive or symbolic purposes, derived from those introduced in real Castilian heraldry from the last third of the XVth century and widely accepted along the XVIth century. A considerable number of those charges were utilized with similar purposes in the royal grants of arms and the fiction arms, pointing to a common source of the heraldic imagination of their inventors. The adoption of fiction arms by real individuals, and the reverse phenomenon of transference of authentic ones to literary characters was specifically studied.

This paper describes the work process of digital edition and the markup of categories of analysis of paratexts contained in the works of female Spanish writers of the Early Modern Age, from the first recorded printings to works of the late eighteenth century. The initial part of this work is devoted to the analysis of the research methodology used by the BIESES project research team to define the categories of analysis that describe female writing of this period, considering the concepts of author, work, and receiver. In the second part, the phases of the digital edition work of the paratextual corpus, TEI markup, and the design of a search engine to recover these categories of analysis are described. The results of this research project consist of a virtual work environment that offers the research community open access, analysis tools, texts, and a methodological proposal for literary analysis in the digital humanities.

Ufano’s treatise is the best book about the 17th century artillery. Nowadays, it is a key source of knowledge about the armament of this period. Undoubtedly, the editorial process was one of the reasons of the books’ immense success. The main objective of this article is the study of the Tratado de la artillería (1612-1613) as a cultural product, and especially the crucial role played by the Flemish printer Jan Mommaert.

The cervantine encomium of Venice in The licenciate Vidriera is a small corography that includes a comparison with Mexico, according to a similarity forged in a chain of Indian chronicles. So, this passage constitutes a good example of Cervantes’ interest of America and its historiographical tradition, while it allows to explain the offered image of the city in contrast of other negative contemporary opinions.

This review concerns a book in which Antonio Cortijo and Miguel Zugasti offer a study and edition of the complete text of the Comedia de la invención de la sortija, written and represented in Monforte de Lemos in 1594 to entertain Cardinal Rodrigo de Castro.

Review of the critical edition of Baltasar de Céspedes’ Discurso de las letras humanas. The importance of the Discurso in the history of Spanish Humanism and the labor done by Comellas Aguirrezábal as editor of the text are analyzed.

The device of King Alphonse V of Portugal (1432–1481), of the Avís dynasty, known as Afonso The African, has so far been poorly understood due to a bad reading of the motto, as well as a misinterpretation of the pictorial motif. This paper provides the true motto of the device or impresa and an interpretation of the set of the two elements (motto and pictura) in line with the habits and practices of Emblematics in fifteenth century.

Spanish chivalry romances represent one of the largest archives of chivalry devices yet to be catalogued and studied. In this occasion twenty devices with lyrics exhibited by some knights in the jousting of Clarisel de las flores by Jerónimo de Urrea are analyzed. Its production mechanisms are studied, along with the origin of its chosen motives and its symbolic significance, the conjunction of image and word, its communicative function and its individual character. Conceptual parameters used in the database Symbola: Historic devices or imprese is taken into account and the similarity between these chivalry devices and the historical ones used for kings and knights is highlighted.

Taking the symbolic representation displayed on the medieval military insignias into account and knowing that Portuguese dynasty of Avis made use of personal devices, this study aims to show that the display of “letras” and “cimeiras” (verses and images) in the royal festivities continued that historical legacy. The Cancioneiro Geral (1516) and some contemporaneous chronicles provide evidence of that practice, which can be related with the heraldic systematization led by Lusitanian monarchs in the 16th century. Besides, it will be discussed whether or not Camões was acquainted with the emblematic language, considering the way he deals with the concepts of “mute poetry” and “speaking painting” in his epic poem entitled Os Lusíadas. Additionally, this study seeks to divulge a set of devices attributed to Camões, apparently composed during his stay in Goa. Through the analysis of this material, some conclusions will be drawn on the parodic approach to emblematic gender proposed by Luís Vaz, comparing it to posterior adaptations. According to this perspective, new light will be shed on the importance of Camões’s contribution to the flourishment of emblematic gender in Portugal.

This work offers, in this first part, a biographical and literary profile of the Prussian writer Salomon Neugebauer (ca. 1574 - † 1625?); we propose the current Czech city of Kadaň (lat. Cadānum; germ. Kaaden) as his native town, and we outline the structure of the glosses (subscriptio) of his Symbola heroica.