Journey to felicia:La Diana as pilgrimage a study in symbolism

Abstract

Within the Christian context, a universal experience of humanity is the pilgrimage of life, a theme omnipresent in the Spanish literature of the Gol den Age'. In the literature of that time the theme took on several interpre tations, including a wandering in exile from Paradise, a journey for the purpose of purging oneself of the sins incurred in one's disorderly life, and a movement away from urban society to a place of idyllic solitude by a disillusioned lover. Antonio Vilanova, in his study of the peregrinatio of the lovelorn youth in the pastoral poetry of G6ngora, has found that it forms part of a tradition of Italian and Spanish Renaissance poetry. His findings point to the existence in literature of a fictional character, who is a model of the errant lover, who is weary of the world and overcome with disillusionment, and searches for consolation and oblivion in the solitude of nature. This character, which appears in an uninterrupted succession throughout the Renaissance until his reappearance as the protagonist of G6ngora's Soledades, is the ?peregrino de amor 2. In Montemayor's Diana virtually every character is a pilgrim of love futilely seeking relief from his amorous torment in the realm of a seemingly sympathetic nature.