"Un maravilloso tapiz": Luis de Aranda, the Renaissance Glosa, and Its Readers

Abstract

The verse glosa emerged in sixteenth-century Spain as an important means of shaping the Renaissance reception of late medieval poetry, with the composition and publication of glosas on ballads and can- cionero verse. Building on recent scholarship, which has increasingly considered the verse glosa as an intertextual process, this article seeks to sketch out further lines of inquiry into the form's relationship with early modern concepts of authorship and poetic creativity. An examination of the Renaissance glosses composed by Luis de Aranda on key works of cancionero verse, along with their print and manuscript transmission, reveals that the glosa was understood as an authorial, and marketable, print product, as well as a creative, and often ambiguous, process through which the medieval poets of the past were canonized and the glossator might fashion himself as an author. The article concludes by considering how contemporary readers may have engaged with the glosa.