Las polemicas literarias en la Espana del siglo xvi: a proposito de Fernando de Herrera y Garcilaso de la Vega

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Las polemical literarias en la Espana del siglo XVI: proposito de Fernando de Herrera y Garcilaso de la Vega. By Bienvenido Morros Mestres. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1998. 338 pages. It is by now truism to assert that every generation of scholars judges the of its predecessors from different perspectives. Twentieth-century specialists have gone through several phases in the appreciation of critical works written in the Renaissance. Studied first as historical documents, they were dismissed as unreliable and methodologically defective. From the perspective of modern philology, the humanists' reconstruction of classical literature and culture appears uninformed; their use of sources, at times unacknowledged, foreign to present concerns for accuracy of bibliographical reference. Thus R. Pring-Mill defined as plagiarism Herrera's unacknowledged borrowings from J. C. Scaliger's works. Yet in his erudite and thought-provoking book, Morros prefers to deal with these aspects of Renaissance scholarship from an historicist perspective. His goal is precisely to discover upon which sources Herrera based his annotations to the of Garcilaso, in order to reconstruct the particular understanding of classical literature, philosophy and science that humanist could have had in Seville in the decade of the 1570's, when Herrera, probably annoyed at the publication of El Brocense's edition in 1574, decides to distance his own philological work, which appeared in 1580, from that of the famous humanist in Salamanca If El Brocense had preferred to emphasize questions of textual criticism, of emendatio in particular, producing series of brief notes with only cursory identification of Garcilaso's sources, Herrera would write collection of scholia according to traditional techniques. Thus he combined the accesses ad auctores with the enarratio, which encompassed not only lexical observations (verborum interpretatio) but also information about contextual matters (historiarum cognitio). He also included some digressions on disputed topics, transforming his scholia into small paideia about poetry and poetics, in the tradition of other Renaissance treatises, upon which he actually relied to write his own short essays. In Chapter I, Morros discloses Herrera's sources and its particular use in the Anotaciones, a polyphonic work built by means of contaminatio of Greek and Latin, ancient and modern texts. Morros proves that imitatio was the main mode of production not only of literary texts but also of exegetical discourses in the sixteenth century. Herrera's fluid prose results from the combination of discrete segments of discourse, which Morros, showing solid knowledge of classical and Renaissance literature, and acting as true detective, is able to identify in the of his predecessors. We now confirm which precise sections derive from Scaliger's works and which derive from undisclosed sources, such as De deis gentium varies et multiplex historia and Historia poetarum tam Graecorum cum Latinorum, of the Italian humanist Lilio Gregorio Giraldo, an influential author that Quevedo still quoted and argued with in his own Anacreon castellano (1609). …