On the Matter of Imitation: Spanish Petrarchism, Boscán and Garcilaso

Abstract

This essay revisits and reassesses the first major renewal of Spain’s lyric tradition led by Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega. While not pretending to discover or disclose new revelations, it regards anew the historiography of the reception by both these poets of Petrarchism, a cultural project that has by now entered the mythology of Spanish poetry. I reflect on earlier Spanish literary histories, rereading their texts alongside late twentieth-century theories of imitation and recent critical and theoretical studies of early modern poetic production to sketch a brief trajectory of the shifting contours of Spanish Renaissance poetry and poetics.