Conversaciones en verso: La epístola ética del Renacimiento y la construcción del yo poético by Clara Marías

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conversaciones en verso: La epístola ética del Renacimiento y la construcción del yo poético by Clara Marías Mary-Anne Vetterling Marías, Clara. Conversaciones en verso: La epístola ética del Renacimiento y la construcción del yo poético. Peter Lang, 2020, pp. 368. ISBN 978-3-63180-487-2. This book on sixteenth-century Spanish epistles is a revision of the first part of Clara Marías’s award-winning doctoral dissertation and is intended for advanced scholars of Spanish literature. Quotations in Latin, Portuguese, Italian and French are left untranslated, inasmuch as it is assumed that the reader is familiar with those languages. There are extensive bibliographies of primary and secondary sources and of internet resources. The book’s chapters have frequent subheadings that facilitate navigation through the text, which is densely filled with numerous (653) footnotes. In chapter 1 of Conversaciones en verso: La epístola ética del Renacimiento y la construcción del yo poético, Marías informs us that she has chosen to focus her book on a corpus of epistles written in poetic form in Spanish that are both ethical and autobiographical and whose authors were born before 1534. She also includes Portuguese poets writing in Spanish, well-known and obscure writers, and items available only in manuscript form. She even categorizes other epistles written in Spanish that are contemporaneous with those in her corpus, but which she chooses not to analyze. In addition, she alludes to the vast amount of world-class scholarship done on epistles, especially in France and England, but saves further analysis for future work. Her knowledge of this topic is impressive and her research (which includes recent dissertations, conference presentations and unpublished manuscripts) is extensive. In her next chapter, Marías gives an overview of her corpus of thirty-four epistles by a total of fourteen different authors that she has chosen to focus on in her study, providing relevant background information on these documents. The authors are: Baltazar del Alcázar, Juan Boscán, Gutierre de Cetina, Tomás Gómez (who is not listed in the “Bibliografía primaria”), [End Page 512] Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, Jorge de Montemayor, Alonso Núñez de Reinoso, Diego Ramírez Pagán, Eugenio de Salazar, Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, Cristóbal de Tamariz, and Garcilaso de la Vega. Marías does an astounding job of describing in detail the intricacies of these epistles and at the same time gives us a number of biographical details about the authors and the recipients of their epistles. In the second part of chapter 2, Marías examines the connections among the fourteen authors in her corpus. She has done a thorough job of investigating the lives of these poets, using not only scholarly investigations but manuscripts, unpublished dissertations and conference papers. She gives us a good idea about how these writers not only endured the whims of their (sometimes royal) patrons but also were subject to scrutiny from the Spanish Inquisition. Details (such as Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s classical coin collection, his burlesque poem addressed to a carrot, and Titian’s painting of him) help enhance the thorough picture Marías has painted for these authors and their times. In chapter 3, Marías analyzes five of the epistles in her corpus for which she does not have any responses and then seven pairs of epistles where we have both the initial document and its reply. She writes about the “yo poético,” the psychological state of the authors, and their ethical stances, in addition to detecting their influences from Horace and other Classical writers. Not only does she carry out a thorough analysis of each epistle, quoting relevant passages word-forword with line references, but she also adds even more information about the lives and other writings of these poets and offers comparisons among these nineteen epistles. The entire text of one of these epistles is included in “Anexo 1” where we find an exciting account of how Marías discovered it. There are amusing snippets from these documents, such as when...