Re-Placing the Holy Land in Lope de Vega's Isidro: poema castellano (1599)

Abstract

Lope de Vega's Isidro: poema castellano (1599) includes an extended episode in which the protagonist journeys to Jerusalem. This episode has been widely ignored by critics, who have discarded it as symptomatic of Isidro's problematic hybridity (i.e. its heavy-handed erudition and uneasy engagement with epic conventions, in a poem still read as a fundamentally intimate, lyrical paean to the Castilian countryside). This paper argues, on the contrary, that Isidro's eminently political programme of constructing an encomium of the new Court capital, Madrid, hinges precisely on manipulating models of sacred geography and history established during Isidro's extended Holy Land ekphrasis, models that are subsequently appropriated throughout the poem in a bid to sacralize national territory. Far from constituting an onerous distraction from the poem's eminently local interests, then, I propose to rehistoricize the Holy Land voyage, arguing that Isidro's journey—and particularly its centrepiece, an ekphrastic description of the biblical East—is in fact central to advancing those very interests. I further argue that the poem's Holy Land description draws on popular iconographic and cartographic traditions, as embodied in the work of Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal and mapmaker Christian van Adrichem.