Fray Luis de León is one of the greatest prose writers and poets in Spain. A general characteristic of his style is that he keeps the formal lexical aspects of Renaissance writing, and its standard naturalness, but he accentuates the artifice of the language. His prose lacks the geometric and easy-to-achieve resources of some of his contemporary writers. In his opinion, the good writer must choose the words that best suit him,  he must pay attention to how they sound and sometimes even count them, weigh and measure the letters that make up the verse so that it not only clearly says what the words intend to say, but that they also transmit the message in a sweet and harmonic way, often drawing a large part of his lexicon from semantic fields associated with nature, such as the sea, the wind, the night, the air, and the mountains.

The shallowness that usually permeates pastoral literature is never noticed in his writings. He achieves a particular harmony by establishing a perfect correspondence between what is stated and the way it is said. In his quest to achieve harmony and inner peace, he uses terms that work on a double plane, the real or objective meaning, and the figurative.s.His most important work,  De los nombres de Cristo, was written in prison between 1574 and 1575. The book reflects in a series of commentaries on the different names Christ is called in the Sacred Scripture: Lamb, Shepherd, Sapling, Beloved, Husband, Jesus, Prince of Peace, etc. The writer highlights the presence of Christ as a redeemer of nature and man in a vision exalted by love.

In 1583 he writes  La perfecta casada, a treatise on the virtues that Christian women must possess. Its starting point is that everyone pleases God by achieving perfection by working on the assigned role in life.  The married man pleases God in being a good married man, the friar in being a good religious, and the merchant in doing his trade properly. Despite its time, the book is made up of recommendations and comments of surprising modernity and understanding, far removed from the mocking and contemptuous spirit with which women were often written about in the Middle Ages, outside the troubadour tradition.

His work El libro de Job also stands out. It is a work that takes Fray Luis some twenty years to write, beginning it in prison and not finishing it until shortly before he dies. Accompanying this work, the author translates the book of Job into fragments, first in prose and then in verse, at the end of each chapter. Dejected in his harsh Valladolid prison, the Augustinian friar turns his eyes to Job, the biblical model of those who suffer. Through his comments, he relentlessly unleashes in his prose various states of mind: anger against injustice, despair, and, finally, compliance with adversity and forgiveness. The author advocates with his work for the active search for the spiritual path of mysticism,  rather than a physical distancing from temporal and material matters.

Cantar de los Cantares

La perfecta casada

De los nombres de Cristo

The poet escapes with this ode, where he compares the mundane life of the court with the simple life in nature, of the struggles within the University of Salamanca, where he is a full professor of Sacred Scripture, and those he maintained with various religious orders .

Fiction in Verse

Poetry

Religious

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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Poesía (1583)

By Luis de León

Time Period: Renaissance

Genre: Fiction in Verse, Ode, Poetry, Religious

Spanish Bites

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