Garcilaso de la Vega is the prototype of the Renaissance knight, heroic soldier, exquisite courtier, avid reader, and refined poet. He begins his literary career in the manner of the 15th-century poets, but his friend, the Barcelona poet Juan Boscán, makes him see that the best poetry is the one cultivated by Italians after the style of Petrarca. To accommodate the formal and thematic break in poetry from the Middle Ages, he introduces Italian stanzas and meters following the Petrarchan literary fashion. During his lifetime he set a new course for Spanish poetry, no other poet having exercised such a considerable influence on the Castilian lyrics.

Garcilaso soon surpasses Boscán in talent, imprinting an extraordinary personality to his works, with elegant sobriety and meaningful verse,  in contrast with the sometimes monotonous and cliché of the Petrarchism style. Garcilaso feels and transmits pain in his poems, he expresses life in a natural way that brings him closer to a  modern person. In a sense, he is the first modern European poet,

perceiving a split in the medieval conception of the world, from postulates where the natural and the supernatural were perfectly differentiated, to the emergence of a prevalent individualism of the  Renaissance era.

Garcilaso, in accordance with a more mundane perspective, opts for expressing in his verses only earthly love, although still a firm believer. Almost all his work consists of long verses on love poetry, which greatly separates it from the typical religious poetry of the Middle Ages. He utilizes mainly short verses poems to reflect on earthy love. The long verses, also called major art, were reserved for solemn poetry, also manifesting a remarkable taste in the selection of vocabulary, fixing his attention on a courtly language that avoiding rustic terms and archaisms.  Truly with him begins the language that will be considered literary to this day.

Sonetos

Coplas

Elegías

Epístola a Boscán

Églogas

Canciones

The ecloge expresses different aspects of love feelings through the dialogue of two shepherds, Salicio, who laments the contempt and coldness of the beautiful Galatea, and Nemoroso, who mourns the death of his beloved Elisa.

Poetry

During the 16th century, the medieval vision of the world enters into crisis. The Renaissance was defined by a substantial and absolute division between Nature and Spirituality. The world of the senses and the world of the spirit was intimately fused in the man of the Middle Ages, to the point that there was one and the same thing. The Renaissance, with its radical individualism, signified a revolutionary change of position that separated the human being from the omniscient spirituality of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance proclaimed that the Middle Age was only a dark period between Antiquity and its time. In this sense, the Renaissance is not a mere cultural period, but a new conception of life that manifests itself in aspects such as politics and science, as well as literature. There is a conscious search for a language full of natural elegance, with a predominance of the novel in different types, chivalry, pastoral, Moorish, and the picaresque among the most popular ones.

During the Renaissance, an enormous effort was made to clearly delimit the world of the individual, separated from the spiritual realm. The independence of the human being was proclaimed on the basis that God and man are two incommunicable entities.  Following Calvin's thought, the creature could not influence the behavior nor the inscrutable decisions of the Creator, the first one predestined from birth.  It was the task of the Spanish theologians at the Council of Trent who fought such a doctrine, proclaiming an intimate connection between God and man. The consequences of Trento were incalculable for the world of culture in Spain, the country exempt from heresy by the council but its cultural future was also determined by it. As the sixteenth century progressed towards its end, the natural and the supernatural world tended to draw closer together for the Spaniards, with the scientific pursuit, and the mere intent of rational thinking viewed with deep suspicion.

Notwithstanding, there is also in Spain an advance in science and discoveries are made, accompanied by a development of urban life and incipient capitalism. The reign of the Catholic Monarchs and later during the  Empire there was a development of humanism, man becoming the center of the universe, with the courtier as the ideal Renaissance man, and a renewed interest in the study of the authors of Antiquity.  The discovery of the printing press in Europe triggered movements of reform, propitiating in Spain a response with the development of particular religious literature known as mysticism. 

Renaissance

Cancionero musical de palacio

Cancionero General, by Hernando del Castillo

Propaplladia, by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro

Retrato de la Lozana andaluza, by Francisco Delicado

Diálogo de la doctrina cristiana, by Jan de Valdés

Relox de príncipes, by Fray Antonio de Guevara

Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, by Fray Antonio de Guevara

Obras from Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega

Vida del lazarillo de Tormes (anonimous)

Publication of Indice de libros prohibidos by the Spanish Inquisition

First edition of Diana, by Jorge de Montemayor (Abencerraje include)

First part of Araucana, by Alonso de Ercilla

The  Inquisition jails fray Luis de León for translating The Song of Songs into Spanish

Obras, by Cristobal de Castilejo

La vida es sueño, by Calderón de la Barca

Soledades, by Góngora

Empresas políticas, by Saavedra Fajardo

Civil wars of Granada (first part), by Ginés Pérez de Hita

El Parnaso español, by Quevedo

Las Meninas by Velazquez

Edition of the first French encyclopedia. Diderot's work, although widely criticized, can be considered the first modern encyclopedia.

Samuel Johnson publishes the Dictionary of the English language, with uses, customs and definitions of the words that make up the English language. Includes terms that appear in Shakespeare and other great authors of British literature.

The Tempest, by William Shakespeare

Aminta, by Tasso

The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare

Spanish Bites

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Égloga I (1542)

By Garcilaso de la Vega

Time Period: Renaissance

Genre: Poetry

Spanish Bites

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