1—
Introduction

For more than a century, Petrarchism was the driving force in Spanish lyric poetry, as poets and theorists from Juan del Encina to Francisco de Quevedo pondered and exemplified the generic, thematic, stylistic, and even ethical ramifications of imitating an Italian poet who had been dead for more than 150 years. Petrarch was the great model for Renaissance poets throughout Europe, thanks partly to his canonization in Italy as the model poet for vernacular lyric poetry; in Spain, as elsewhere, the imitation of Petrarch was an aspect of the larger phenomenon of copying Italian styles in painting, architecture, education, and even courtiership. Petrarchism was a particularly vital force in Spain, however, for the combination of Spanish political domination over Italy, and a continuing sense of cultural inferiority, led Spanish poets to respond to perceived crises in the national lyric tradition by continuously rereading, reinterpreting, and reappropriating Petrarch's work. For successive generations of Spanish poets Petrarch became an alternative model, and a defense against the overwhelming stature of national predecessors who were thus reduced to the status of siblings. As such, although there is continuity in his influence throughout this period, there occurred major changes in the nature of that influence. He was consistently a source of poetic renewal, so it is those poets most concerned with transforming Spanish poetry who were the ones most self-conscious about the conflict between their role as imitators of Petrarch and their differences of age, nation, and temperament.

Yet the importance of Spanish Renaissance lyric goes beyond literary history and aesthetic value. Petrarch's power to engender Spanish imitators was not due to the strength of his poetry alone, nor to Italianism as a literary fashion. Belatedness was inherent in Italian Petrarchism, its endowment as the vernacular heir to the humanist tradition, but it was compounded by uniquely Spanish concerns about national cultural backwardness and competition with

Italy; the determination to claim the European heritage for Spain resulted in a metonymic association between Petrarchist lyric and the Spanish empire. Lyric poetry thus played a unique role in the Spanish struggle for cultural self-justification. Although Spain was the first powerful and unified nation-state in Europe and had the first self-conscious national literature, its poets spent more than a century trying to create a body of literature that befitted its imperial stature, and in particular that matched the cultural achievements already attained in Italy. In classical theory the epic was more noble, but it was also contingent on military achievement. Lyric poetry, as the most nonmimetic genre, became the arena of the struggle for a modern cultural legitimacy independent of military conquest, which paradoxically gave the lyric a social dimension: poetry was not just a pastime for amateurs or an expression of emotion but a vocation ultimately parallel to that of the warrior, and one calling for equal dedication. The concern with national backwardness was a consequence of what Ernst Robert Curtius diagnosed as, but mislabeled, Spain's "cultural belatedness" (541), which more recently has been called the "Spanish difference" and which casts an important sideways light on literary developments throughout Europe.

The remainder of this introduction first examines the ideology of Petrarchism in Italy, particularly the consequences of Bembo's appropriation of the historiographical models of the classical humanists and their application to the vernacular; when examined in the context of Petrarch's theories of history and of imitation, we see how Bembo both crystallizes Petrarch as a unique model and provides a degree of freedom by subjecting him to what Thomas Greene (88–93) called the humanist hermeneutic. Second, I look at the rise of indigenous Spanish forms of vernacular humanism and cultural belatedness as they develop in the eulogies written after the death of the marqués de Santillana, and which come to a head in the linguistic and literary treatises of the Salamanca circle in the 1490s. There, we see the translatio studii as the key trope explicating the stillemergent state of Spanish literature, and the inexorable connection between imperial rule and cultural dominance. Finally, the introduction briefly addresses questions about methodology, particularly the ways in which I qualify and historicize Harold Bloom's theory of poetic belatedness in order to make it useful for this study, and the

relationship I see between his revisionary ratios and issues of inter-textuality and hermeneutics.

Bembo, Petrarch, and Renaissance Belatedness

In its strictest sense, Petrarchism is the result of the transfer to the vernacular of models of literary history originally elaborated within the context of an attempt to ameliorate composition in Latin through the imitation of Cicero. The figure most associated with this transfer, both during the Renaissance and today, is Pietro Bembo, who in his landmark dialogue-treatise, the Prose della volgar lingua , proposed the strict imitation of Petrarch and Boccaccio as a solution to the problem of creating a national literary language for Italy. Bembo in his youth developed a reputation as a strict Ciceronian in matters of Latin style, and his theory of imitation was first worked out in an exchange of letters with Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, in which he rejected the eclectic approach promoted by earlier generations of Renaissance writers, particularly those associated with the Florentine Neoplatonists. To Bembo, imitation involves copying not only the style but "if you please, the same organizing principle which he has used whom you have set before you as an example" (Scott, 11); hence copying stylistic details alone, an inevitable consequence of eclectic imitation, would only result in a travesty. Imitation also gives a work a certain resonance; describing his own early attempts to avoid imitation, he concludes, "It pleased me and I experimented in it as far as I could, but all my thought, care, and study, all my labor was vexatious and void; for I invented nothing which could not easily have been drawn from the old writers; and when I tried to avoid that, it lacked the charm, the propriety, the majesty of those ages" (Scott, 13). Cicero and Virgil themselves attained this majesty by imitating their Creek predecessors, and they thus showed the way for Bembo and his contemporaries who, if they are diligent in their imitations, may someday hope to surpass their classical models. But for now this is only an elusive hope, as "it is not so arduous to surpass the one whom you equal as to equal the one whom you imitate" (Scott, 16).

As Ferruccio Ulivi pointed out, Bembo and the other humanist partisans of a strict Ciceronianism nourished a phenomenological

concept of literary creation that emphasized process, as opposed to that metaphysical one which lay at the heart of Ficinian thought, which emphasized the emanation of ideas (23).^[1] Thomas Greene, elaborating on Ulivi's distinction, focuses on the conflict between "inventio and elocutio , or res and verba , or expressionism and formalism, between creativity as spontaneous nature and creativity as discipline, between impulse and method, or between beauty as variety and beauty as unity, between color and purity" (175). He thus identifies the dispute over Ciceronian imitation with perennial aesthetic issues in the history of literature, though at the cost of the historical specificity of the issues involved. Although he correctly sees Pico, an advocate of the eclectic approach, as grounded in humanist historiography—that is, emphasizing the difference between antiquity and the sixteenth century and the freedom of the modern writer to pick and choose—he overlooks that it is Bembo who locates a writer in the historical process of reading and writing, and who has no illusions about the easy restoration of antiquity.^[2]

As Greene further notes, between Bembo's letter to Pico and his discussion of poetry in the Prose , "his theoretical outlook did not significantly change" (175). Yet this consistency is in itself remarkable, for the Prose contains the first overt application of imitation theory, previously reserved for the more exalted area of Latin prose composition, to the vernacular. In order to transfer his ideas, Bembo had to preserve not only his phenomenological outlook but also the humanist conception of history as divisible into a tripartite structure comprising classical achievements, medieval decline, and Renaissance renewal. The process by which Bembo establishes Petrarch as a model therefore deserves closer scrutiny. To appropriate the humanist scheme of history, Bembo begins by justifying the use of Italian rather than Latin; the Romans, he argues, composed in their own language, even though they valued the literary accomplishments of the Greeks more highly than their own. Had they ignored the rule of composing in the native language, they would have written in Creek, while the Greeks themselves would have written in Phoenician, and they in turn in Egyptian, and so on. In this way, Bembo describes each culture's sense of inferiority to a preceding one, which is itself largely forgotten as the new cultures arise.^[3] Thus language, and with it literature, are at any moment of time caught in an uncomfortable position of feeling inferior to the past and anxious

about the future. Moreover, this cycle occurred not only in antiquity but in the recent past as well: Bembo declares that the scuola siciliana of thirteenth-century Italian poetry is only a name to him, and that although the Provençals were extremely influential and worthy of study, their language is as good as dead. This discussion of Provençal, in the Prose , directly precedes the statement of the questione della lingua —considering all the dialects spoken in Italy, which should a writer employ?—and therefore Bembo places the discussion about contemporary language in a context of past literatures that have come to grief. Bembo thus implies that this fate may hang over Italian as well, and that the Prose represents an attempt to ward it off.

As alternative solutions to the language problem, Bembo entertains two possibilities. The first is the lingua cortegiana , the common language spoken by courtiers throughout the peninsula. This however is rejected as being too unstable and lacking in uniformity. Moreover, speakers alone cannot guarantee immortality to a language:

Né la latina lingua chiamiamo noi lingua, solo che per cagion di Plauto, di Terenzio, di Virgilio, di Varrone, di Cicerone e degli altri che, scrivendo, hanno fatto che ella è lingua. (110, Prose 1.14)

Not even Latin would we call a language, were it not for Plautus, for Terence, for Virgil, for Varro, for Cicero, and for the others who, by writing, made it into a language.

Here Bembo moves from arguing that writers insure that a language will be studied in ages to come to asserting that only writers make up the language. He concludes that Tuscan must become the literary language of Italy, for it was the principal heir to the Provençal tradition and, more importantly, because it is the most developed dialect in Italy:

Perciòche se io volessi dire che la fiorentina lingua più regolata si vede essere, più vaga, più pura che la provenzale, i miei due Toschi vi porrei dinanzi, il Boccaccio e il Petrarca senza più. (110, Prose 1.14)

Thus if I wished to say that the Florentine language is clearly more ordered, more beautiful, and more pure than Provençal, I would put before you my two Tuscans, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and no more.

Petrarch and Boccaccio, however, lived almost 150 years before the composition of the Prose . By citing them rather than more contemporary Tuscans, Bembo underlines the endangered state of Italian poetry, courting the same fate that had earlier befallen the Sicilians. Yet by positing this gap, and turning to Petrarch and Boccaccio as models, Bembo saddles the vernacular with the same sense of cultural inferiority with which the humanists had earlier burdened Latin composition. By turning away from Latin (in the Prose at least), Bembo rejects the humanist ideal; but his method for improving the vernacular was derived from humanist practice. Again and again as Bembo repeats his key point—that Petrarch and Boccaccio have never been surpassed and that Italian literature in fact has decayed since the time they wrote—he appropriates for the vernacular the key elements of the humanist tripartite division of history: the notion of a dark age, and the practice of scholarship and imitation as the only means to recuperate the level attained by long-dead predecessors.

Ultimately, Bembo concludes the discussion of vernacular imitation with a nearly necromantic model of imitation, a description of artists in Rome disinterring ancient monuments and dutifully sketching the paintings, sculptures, and buildings. Reversing Petrarch's description of strolling through Rome and imagining what lay beneath the ruins, Bembo presents a city in the course of recovering its ancient cultural artifacts in such a way that modernity begins to merge with the predecessor that formerly lay underneath. This process of recovery, by providing adequate models, is responsible for the achievements of Michelangelo and Raphael, both of whom have become so proficient in their art that it would be difficult to tell their work from that of their antique models. If imitation can accomplish such results with the plastic arts, it should be able to accomplish far more for literature, "così leggiadra e così gentile" (so graceful and so noble, 184). While there is now an overabundance of books in Latin, however, the vernacular is most in need of development: the many vernacular writers have produced few works in prose or in verse worthy of preservation, and only the same process of imitation can lead to the restoration of poetry. Thus Bembo establishes a heuristic equivalence among Latin literature, the architectural and artistic monuments of ancient Rome, and the state of modern Italian letters. All three are subject to the same his-

torical model adopted by Petrarch to define the humanist movement, yet while the first has been fully recovered through a plethora of books, and the second is now literally being exhumed for study, the necessary archaeology for the restoration of the vernacular has scarcely begun.

Bembo's understanding of Petrarchist imitation is primarily linguistic and stylistic, and his appreciation of Petrarch's phonetic structure led Cesare Segre to characterize it as "linguistic hedonism." Yet even if his precepts were not easily transferred outside Italy, and were often resisted within it, he was tremendously influential in other ways. By displacing to the vernacular realm the theoretical foundations of Ciceronianism, he provided an ideological framework that justified the effort to illustrate the languages of contemporary Europe. From Ciceronianism, however, he also brought to the realm of the vernacular the tripartite historiography of the humanists, and the attendant sense of deficiency, which made Petrarchism the truest form of Renaissance vernacular lyric poetry, for it reflects the idea of decadence and rebirth inherent in the idea of a renaissance. Thus his theories were self-serving, for from the Prose there emerge two sets of linguistic heroes, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century as the original illustrators of the language, and Bembo himself as the vanguard of its restoration. Moreover, his fame as a Tuscan scholar brought his poetry a canonical status second only to Petrarch's, further increasing his influence abroad (see Cruz, Imitación , 24–34). Bembo's popularity, like that of contemporaries such as Sannazaro and Ariosto, may partly have been due—as Curtius argued (34 n. 44)—to a fashion for things Italian; but his legacy was a model of literary history and of Petrarch's place within it as the only modern classic, the standard against which lyric poets, both Italians and foreigners, must measure themselves.

To appreciate more fully Bembo's position in the development of vernacular humanism, we can situate him in a context that includes Petrarch's own views on literary history and imitation, and the subsequent history of what we might call the trope of the continual Renaissance. In his history of the Renaissance as a historical concept, Wallace Ferguson credited Petrarch with conflating models drawn from civic and sacred history to posit the tripartite division of time into the ancient Greco-Roman world, an intervening "dark age," and the contemporary, incipient revival.^[4] Moreover, by re-

jecting any continuity with ancient Rome through the Holy Roman Empire (an idea still held by Dante a generation earlier), Petrarch was free to see the end of the republic, rather than the collapse of the empire, as the first step in a decline that included the cultural as well as the political spheres, while conversely the recovery of civic virtue would entail not only the founding of a new republic, but also the exhumation of culture through the cultivation of Latin and the study of Roman literature, particularly Cicero. Beginning with Petrarch, the two major tools for the humanist restoration of ancient standards of literary culture became scholarship, for the purification of model texts, and imitation, as a guide for the development of the moderns (see Ulivi, 9). Ferguson's view of Petrarch as the source of humanist theories of alienation from antiquity is echoed by Greene, who sees Petrarch as the founder of the "humanist hermeneutic," the recognition that classical texts had a meaning in ancient times that can be recuperated only through scholarship, not through the atemporal allegorical and anagogic modes of interpretation practiced during the Middle Ages. Greene takes as paradigmatic Petrarch's description of a stroll through Rome, in the course of which he evokes the historical associations of the mounds and ruins he encounters. The passage echoes the eighth book of the Aeneid in which, as Aeneas walks through the site of the future Rome, the poet cites the buildings and monuments that will some day stand in the same locations. But Petrarch's retrospective tour, by emphasizing the decayed state of the scene, also underlines the fact that Rome is gone for good, and that its former magnificence can only be imagined. Thus even as he imitates Virgil, Petrarch recognizes the gulf of radical discontinuity that separates them and locates in that gulf his own freedom, his alterity from both antiquity and the middle ages. Thus as we have already seen in Bembo, archaeology—whether literary or architectural—would become the model science of the Renaissance: like the robbing of tombs, it entails the violation of taboos, and sometimes a little necromancy as well, to achieve its ultimate goal of bringing the dead back to life (Greene, 88–93).

Yet if Petrarch was responsible for the tripartite view of history through a self-representation as the one who began the revival of antiquity, subsequent generations often denied him that honor. As Ferguson shows (22–24), a succession of later humanists excluded

Petrarch and Boccaccio from their ranks, relegating both of them to the benighted middle ages while fixing the beginning of the revival in their own generation. This continual, rhetorical postponement of the "renaissance" allows them comfortably to predict future achievements that will equal the ancients even as they emphasize their own attempts to begin to make up for the defects of the past. Ferguson's account of the history of humanist self-consciousness makes several important points. First, it recalls the connection established by Petrarch himself between politics and culture, which led later writers such as Bruni to remark on the lag between the rates of political and cultural development, and which was to have important consequences outside Italy. Second, it points out the overt sense of deficiency by comparison to antiquity, constantly cited as the standard; although there is contempt for what the humanists saw as the dark age that followed the collapse of Rome, there is also an implicit feeling of insecurity about their own age, only tenuously distinguished from that which preceded it. Third, it emphasizes that the beginning of the restoration of letters was variously dated, with the proclamation of a revival attaining the status of a trope. By constantly reappropriating Petrarch's idea of a renaissance as a defense against antiquity, the later humanists betray their chronic feeling of insecurity about the present when compared to the ancient past, and to the true pioneer humanists whom they attempt to ignore; by bringing forward the time of the rebirth, it is made to seem as if the moderns have had less time to catch Up.^[5] But why did the humanists feel a need to deprecate their own forebears? I argue that this tendency represented an attempt to excuse their own shortcomings, their own failure to achieve according to the antique standards that they themselves had reestablished, and the desire on the part of the later humanists for a degree of priority. How to account for the seeming inability to compose literary monuments on a par with those of antiquity? One way was to pretend continually that they lived at only the beginning of the revival, that they were the pioneers, and thus that they were only laying the groundwork for future generations.

Naïve attempts to recreate antique literature, however, were doomed to failure. Greene draws our attention to what he calls heuristic imitations that—like Petrarch's stroll through Rome—underline the gap between cultures, and he quotes extensively from Pe-

trarch's letters on imitation, in which the poet emphasizes the need to process ancient texts and make them one's own. Borrowing from Cicero, Petrarch advises an imitator to be like a bee, tasting from various flowers but transforming the nectar into a honey all its own.^[6] This apian model is then transformed into the famous digestive image, which has a prehistory going back to Seneca and which recurs throughout the Renaissance in discussions of imitation:

I have read Virgil, Flaccus, Severinus, Tullius not once but countless times, nor was my reading rushed but leisurely, pondering them as I went with all the powers of my intellect; I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening, I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind. (3.212–13, Familiares 22.2; see Greene, 99)^[7]

Here Petrarch stresses the transformatory aspect of imitation and the need to be true to one's personal style. Elsewhere, he warns against slavish imitation, comparing it with wearing someone else's clothing; in contrast, he claims to prefer his own "garment," however rude and ill-cut. To Greene this passage constitutes evidence of Petrarch's strong sense of the self, and of its expression through an individual style; the successful assimilation of models along these lines characterizes the best poetry of a humanist period that extends to the eighteenth century (97–99).

Summarizing Petrarch's contribution to the development of humanist inferiority as a cultural phenomenon, Greene argues that the "humanist poet is not a neurotic son crippled by a Freudian family romance, which is to say he is not in Harold Bloom's terms Romantic. He is rather like the son in a classical comedy who displaces the father at the moment of reconciliation" (41). But Greene takes too benevolent a view of father-son relationships when he offers the following letter to explain the connection between imitation and sonhood:

An imitator must take care to write something similar yet not identical to the original, and that similarity must not be like the image to

its original in painting where the greater the similarity the greater the praise for the artist, but rather like that of the son to his father. While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something our painters call an "air," especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance; seeing the son's face, we are reminded of the father's. . . . We must thus see to it that if there is something similar, there is also a great deal that is dissimilar, and that the similar be elusive. (3.301–2, Familiares 23.19; see Greene, 95)

Although the father-son model of imitation is, like that of the bee, taken from Seneca, Petrarch's particular use of it here skirts close to the very family romance that Greene finds of no relevance. Like the earlier tropes emphasizing the imitator's divergence from models (his own suit of clothes, however ill-fitting; his own honey, made of the nectar gathered from many flowers), this one stresses both similarity and difference. Slavish imitation is likened to mimesis, but while the possibility of deviating from the prototype offers some comfort, the analogy between model and father, and imitation and son, suggests that the model poet engenders the imitator, and this relationship of direct dependency is closer to medieval notions of midgets on the shoulders of giants than to the humanist hermeneutic. Moreover, the reader's constant back-and-forth comparison between imitation and model, to Pigman a sign of competitive emulation (26), hardly eases the anxiety of poets attempting to compete with the great writers of the past.

The father-son model established in the letter on imitation underlies Petrarch's letter about Dante. There, Petrarch compares the Tuscan poet to his own father, both of whom were exiled from Florence at the same time: "[M]y father, compelled by other matters and by concern for his family, resigned himself to exile, while his friend resisted and began devoting himself all the more vigorously to his literary pursuits, neglecting all else and desirous only of glory" (3.203, Familiares 21.15). Because of Petrarch's own thirst for fame and his resentment about life in Avignon, he imagines Dante as a fantasy father, more appropriate than his own. Yet he then denies that relationship by asserting that he never imitated Dante. The purpose of the letter (which is addressed to Boccaccio) is to defend

himself against the charge that he is jealous of the Florentine poet. Petrarch concedes that there are grounds for the allegation, but goes on to justify his behavior:

While always passionately hunting for other books with little hope of finding them, I was strangely indifferent to this one, which was new and easily available. I admit this to be so, but deny that it was for the reasons that they give. At the time I too was devoted to the same kind of writing in the vernacular; I considered nothing more elegant and had yet to learn to look higher, but I did fear that, were I to immerse myself in his, or any other's, writings, being of an impressionable age so given to indiscriminate admiration, I could scarcely escape becoming an unwilling or unconscious imitator. . . . This one thing I do wish to make clear, for if any of my vernacular writings resembles, or is identical to, anything of his or anyone else's, it cannot be attributed to theft or imitation, which I have avoided like reefs, especially in vernacular works, but to pure chance or similarity of mind, as Tullius calls it, which caused me unwittingly to follow in another's footsteps. (3.203–4)

Like the romantic poets Harold Bloom studies, Petrarch here tries carefully to hide his debts, a task made harder by his clear dependence on the Vita nuova and the Commedia for the plan of his own Rime sparse .^[8] Here, in the context of vernacular poetry, Petrarch abandons the combination of piety and independence with which he had characterized imitation of the classical authors. Instead, predecessors become dangerous and imitation an unavoidable snare for the unwary poet. In contrast to his earlier admission of casually reading minor authors and studying the major ones until they became part of him, he now denies ever being an imitator, and where similarity to a model was earlier explained on a genetic basis, Petrarch now resorts to the mimetic imitation of a similar reality, or even happenstance, to account for the resemblance of his works to Dante's.

In the same letter Petrarch also emphasizes his turn to Latin and away from the vernacular, attempting to elevate himself above Dante, who had followed just the opposite path in his career. Dismissing the notion that he is envious of Dante's popularity, Petrarch becomes shrill and unconvincing: "How can someone who does not envy Virgil envy anyone else, unless perhaps I envied him the applause and raucous acclaim of the fullers or tavern keepers or woolworkers who offend the ones they wish to praise, whom I, like Virgil and Homer, delight in doing without? I fully realize how little

the esteem of the ignorant multitude carries weight with learned men" (3.205–6). Forgetting his republican principles, Petrarch here resorts to the tropes of vituperatio , portraying himself as a literary aristocrat appealing even in the vernacular to the more cultivated tastes of those who can appreciate Virgil and Homer (which is to say few indeed, as Petrarch himself probably did not know Greek). This letter, written at roughly the same time as his letters on imitation, gives us a very different image of Petrarch, struggling not with the ancients but with the living legacy of a more recent poet. The transparent defenses against Dante reveal the identity of his true poetic father and force Petrarch to employ every sort of reproach in his rhetorical warehouse. Just as his descriptions of the imitative process heuristically refer to both his Latin and his vernacular poetry, so too this letter reveals how even the strongest and most successful imitator can feel anxiety about his task.

Reviewing Petrarch's letters on imitation and the one on Dante, we can distinguish between two distinct reactions to his predecessors. The first is a sense of being inferior or deficient in comparison to the achievements of the ancients; this is what Harold Bloom calls "cultural belatedness" (Map , 77–80), and it became a defining feature of the Renaissance. Although Petrarch clearly looks up to their achievements and feels that his own culture as a whole has no comparable attainments, he is not ashamed to admit he has read their work. Indeed, he uses the digestive trope to emphasize how much labor he expended on study of the principal classical authors, to the point that they have been absorbed and transformed into a part of himself; in actuality, it is the very gulf between them that allows him the freedom to imitate these models in the fashion that Greene dubbed "heuristic." Dante poses a different set of problems, however, and Petrarch's clear retreat into the language of a Freudian family romance (the assertion and then denial of a fantasy father in the place of his own) cannot merely be accounted for in terms of the real acquaintance between Dante and Petrarch's biological father. Dante is threatening to Petrarch in a much more immediate way than were the classical authors because his works, however rough Petrarch may judge their language to be, are the towering accomplishment of Italian vernacular literature, and in textual, structural, and mythic terms they are a necessary model for Petrarch's own work. Thus his feelings about Dante constitute what

Bloom calls feelings of poetic belatedness, a nagging sense that the dead predecessor has formed oneself, and is even now speaking through one's own voice. Petrarch's shrillness regarding Dante is striking compared to his generosity about ancient authors; poetic belatedness is a much more emotional phenomenon than humanist belatedness, yet for that very reason, in a strong poet it produces greater results.

Shifting to Bembo, we can now appreciate the full implications of transfer to the vernacular of the tripartite model of history, and its attendant sense of humanist cultural belatedness. Bembo in the Prose explicates Petrarch's texts in terms of a rather idiosyncratic set of linguistic theories that were to have relatively little influence; what was influential was his designation of trecento Tuscan as the national literary language. Similarly, however much Bembo's theories of imitation may have been motivated by the need for well-trained writers in a papal chancery that was shifting its language of operation from Latin to Italian (see Donisotti's introduction to Bembo's Prose e rime , 36; and more recently Partner, 142–44), Bembo's argument is presented in terms of a myth of decline, and a proposal to stem the decline by reversing Petrarch's own self-proclaimed move from the vernacular into Latin. By using this myth, however, Bembo runs the risk of conflating the cultural belatedness of the humanists with the poetic belatedness Petrarch felt about his vernacular predecessor and rival. By crystallizing this union, Bembo transforms Petrarch from a mere linguistic model (one whose example is to be "followed," in Pigman's terms) into a classical model subject to transformation and competitive emulation. Yet if he burdens the Renaissance vernacular poet with Petrarch as a type of poetic father, he also provides that poet the freedom inherent in the humanist hermeneutic. This distance allows writers to make of Petrarch what they will; however much Bembo may have meant Petrarchism to be a sociolinguistic concept, Petrarchism—particularly outside Italy—can take on a variety of generic, stylistic, thematic, and even ethical dimensions. The freedom of the foreign imitator, however, is conditioned by the horizons offered by the national tradition; hence, we must turn our attention from Italy to the country that is the focus of this study, and examine the construction of a Castilian literary identity in the late fifteenth century.

Spanish Alterity and the Language of Empire

Petrarchism outside Italy is necessarily different, for Bembo's linguistic prescription—that literary composition should employ the Tuscan dialect of the trecento—cannot be transferred where the adoption of Petrarch as a model necessarily involves a change of language, and where his influence is mediated through a different set of conditions on both literary and extraliterary levels. Spanish alterity arises from just such an interplay of social and literary factors: Spain, the first unified nation-state in Europe and for more than a century the most powerful, early on attained a self-conscious national literature. This process coincided with the completion of the so-called Reconquest of Granada, even as an intimate relationship with Italy brought a perception of Italian cultural superiority. Far from diminishing Petrarch's role as a model, alterity expands the ways in which he can be imitated, as imitators look beyond the linguistic surface that was Bembo's main concern: Petrarch was repeatedly a source of poetic renewal, as poets continuously reread, reinterpreted, and reappropriated his work. The new horizons led to imitations that at their worst fixated on the decorative aspects of Petrarch's style, but at their best looked to the organization of the Rime sparse as a macrotext and, in exceptional cases, tackled the profound issues of love, morality, and individuation that troubled Petrarch himself.

Humanist belatedness, while not unique to Italy, necessarily acquired different characteristics in other countries, resulting in the elevation of different topoi to the status of master tropes. Italians, for example, regarded the Romans as their ancestors, so the death and rebirth of ancient culture, while influenced by external invasions, were viewed as national concerns and expressed through the trope of the tripartite model of history. To scholars such as Curtius, the very idea of the "Middle Ages" is "a coinage of the Italian humanists and only comprehensible from their point of view" (20). The "Renaissance" was a strictly Italian affair, and "the concept that Spain, France, Germany, and so on, experienced 'Renaissances' is to be rejected. It is true, however, that these countries had one or more waves of 'Italianism'—which was the export form of the Italian Renaissance" (34 n. 44). Yet by acknowledging the existence of cultural

rebirth as a trope in fifteenth-century Italy, and its subsequent dissemination abroad, he concedes that a notion of the Renaissance can be grounded in the self-concept of the period, and that as this movement spread it created a problem of priority for humanists outside Italy, where insecurity about the present was compounded by anxiety over national identity and its relation to the classical sources of Western culture.^[9] Curtius illuminates the issue by examining one of the principal topoi used to counter the lack of priority, that of the translatio studii . According to this theory, the center of learning shifts periodically and moves gradually to the west: thus, the origin of civilization was in the ancient Near East, which gradually passed the torch to the Greeks and then to the Romans, and so on.^[10] The trope was of little consequence to the Italian humanists (though, as we have seen, Bembo used it), but it was very important to those outside Italy who sought to show that their efforts were the most important. The Italian revival might be a continuation of Rome, but, viewed from abroad, a Renaissance in France or Spain indicates a new movement farther to the west, so French or Spanish humanists had to posit a translatio studii that lagged behind the translatio imperii , which had already been accomplished. Thus, like the trope of humanist belatedness, that of the translatio serves as much as a sign of hidden worries about the lack of priority, as an effective antidote. Moreover, it prompts an added degree of anxiety, for as a cyclical scheme of history it implies an eventual downfall for the very nations that use it to account for their rise. As Italian humanist ideas spread abroad, they carried with them, as Johan Nordstroem put it, Italian notions about the importance and superiority of Italian civilization, and a disdainful attitude regarding "barbarians" who lived beyond the Alps (15). The result of appropriating such Italian ideas may be termed "displacedness," a geographical sense of national inferiority parallel to the historical sense of belatedness.

In Spain a tradition of classical scholarship existed throughout the late medieval period, particularly in the wake of contacts fostered with Avignon during the reign of the Spaniard Pedro de Luna as Benedict XIII. Ottavio Di Camillo, adapting Ferguson's model to Spain, shows how these efforts remained largely "prehumanistic," for scholars did not conceive of themselves as renewers of antiquity; rather, they viewed the past ahistorically, minimizing the gap that

separated them from ancient times. Only in the wake of Inñigo López de Mendoza, marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), did a more thoroughgoing, but still indigenous, form of humanist belatedness arise. In his "Proemio e carta"—the preface to an anthology of his poetic works, written in the late 1440s—Santillana presents a panoramic history of poetry from the ancients to his own day. The twelve-hundred-year gap he posits between the ancients and the moderns suggests the tripartite division of history that opens the way for the humanist hermeneutic, but by and large his is a chronologically and geographically inclusive list. Though deeply involved in the political events of his day, Santillana does not link the situation of Spanish poetry to military attainments, or view literary history in terms of a translatio studii that would set up an opposition between Spain and Italy. Similarly, Santillana's sonnets, though considerable poetical achievements in their own right, show an eclectic approach to imitation, and while permeated with Petrarchisms as decorative devices, they do not struggle to appropriate Petrarch as a single, privileged model.

Yet Santillana's importance to Spanish humanist self-consciousness stems as much from the posthumous praise of his followers as from his own accomplishments. In a letter written after Santillana's death, his nephew the poet Gómez Manrique pictures him as the first to join the cuirass to the gown, and as figuratively tearing ignorance from the fabric of Spain, while Pero Díaz de Toledo commented that more than anyone else in Spain this nobleman exercised himself so as to perpetuate his fame through both his wise writings and his extraordinary acts of chivalry (249–50). Even more interesting, as Di Camillo points out, are the comments of Diego de Burgos (in Schiff, 460–64). By attributing the revival of learning to Santillana, Burgos employs a trope already well established in Italian humanist circles; but Di Camillo is correct in underlining its significance, for Burgos uses it to set up an opposition between Italy and Spain. With language that anticipates later writers, he depicts Santillana as a warrior successfully looting that eloquence which was formerly the property of the Italians and bringing it to Castile, where now it begins to Flourish.^[11] His choice of words legitimizes Santillana's intellectual pursuits, for they result in the same aggrandizement of Castile as the other, more traditional and bellicose occupations of the nobility. Thus as Di Camillo concludes, with the de-

velopment of a tripartite historical conscience, there grew both a sense of humanist belatedness and a turn toward Italy as the model country in which the literary recovery was furthest advanced.

Yet if fifteenth-century humanist belatedness was primarily indigenous, it was transcended at the end of the century by national developments that led to a more complex relationship with Italy. As Di Camillo observed, in humanist rhetoric Antonio de Nebrija (ca. 1441–1522) replaced Santillana as the instigator of the rebirth of learning in Spain; and while in part this move paralleled the Italian humanists' postponement of the Renaissance, with Nebrija's greater classical scholarship allowing him to eclipse Santillana, it also reflected the evolution of Spanish political and cultural institutions. By the end of the fifteenth century, the homogenization of Spain was clearly at hand, as the dynastic union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile presaged the imminent conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews. With it came Castilian hegemony in linguistic as in political matters, but with it too came an internationalist attitude previously associated with Aragon. Late fifteenth-century concepts of Spanish cultural inferiority to Italy, and of the connection between literary achievement and the Spanish empire, can be glimpsed in the Gramática de la lengua castellana by Nebrija and the "Arte de poesía castellana" by his probable student Juan del Encina (1468-ca. 1529). To both Nebrija and Encina, literary history lags behind Spanish political and military achievements, and they contrast cultural shortcomings to Italian achievements. By casting both political and literary history in terms of a translatio , they seek to predict that literary accomplishments will eventually catch up with military ones. But in the process they reveal a rivalry with Italy for cultural legitimacy, based on feelings of belatedness and displacedness, and they burden Spanish culture with fear of eventual decline and extinction.

The year 1492 is a key one for the Spanish Renaissance, not only because of its political events, but also because the first grammar of a modern European vernacular was printed in Salamanca, the Gramática de la lengua castellana by Nebrija.^[12] Although Nebrija had been engaged in its production since at least 1486, when he presented to the queen a sample of his proposed project, its appearance in that historic year was not entirely coincidental, as the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews only culminated long-

standing policies designed to unify and pacify the Iberian peninsula. Castile seemed to be at its political and military peak, ready at last to look outside itself; and the most immediate opportunities lay in Africa and Italy, each in its own way symbolic of Spain's cultural heritage. Ferdinand's Italian policy was to yield, within a decade, the deposition of his Neapolitan cousins and the absorption of southern Italy by the Spanish crown. The new international prominence of Spain and its focus on Italy leave their mark on Nebrija's grammar, which emerges as the first document of Spanish cultural belatedness and thus of the Spanish Renaissance.

It is primarily in the prologue to the Gramática that Nebrija advances the concept of cultural belatedness, by linking the national language to a theory of empire, and presenting both in cyclical terms:

Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caída de entrambos. (97)

Language was always the companion of empire, and followed it such that together they began, together they grew and flourished, and later together they fell.

To substantiate this assertion of connection and cycle, Nebrija proceeds to a historical survey of the great political and linguistic powers of the past, combining military and literary accomplishments. Abraham spoke the Chaldean language of his birthplace, which, mixed with Egyptian, resulted in Hebrew at the same time that the Jews were constituted a nation. Moses was the first to philosophize and write in the language; from there it flourished, reaching its zenith during the peaceful reign of Solomon, after which, with the disintegration of the Jewish state, it declined. After the Jews the Greeks were the next to attain hegemony, a process that began with Orpheus and continued after the Trojan War with Homer and Hesiod, reaching its apogee at the time of Alexander the Great, when poets, orators, and philosophers gave the Greeks mastery of all the arts and sciences. With the dissolution of his empire, the Romans became their masters, and then simultaneously the Greek language began to dissipate and Latin to grow strong (98). Latin had its childhood with the city's foundation, and began to flourish at the time of

Livius Andronicus some five hundred years later. Thence it grew until the pax romana of Augustus, which was also the time of the birth of Christ, in a period of peace foretold by the prophets and prefigured by Solomon's own reign. Then flourished Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Livy, and all the others who followed until the time of Antoninus Pius, when the decline set in that ultimately resulted in the corrupt Latin of Nebrija's own day.

Nebrija employs these cycles from the past to establish a structure that he can apply to the situation of Spain. In view of that motive, the history he provides cannot be taken at face value, for it exists only to substantiate the pattern he wishes to defend. Thus, although his rhetoric is historical rather than metaphysical, the model he employs is essentially typological. He cites literary figures to support his argument of linguistic and cultural domination, and while avoiding theories of divine inspiration (Moses and Orpheus are merely the first writers in their respective traditions), he echoes the trope of the translatio imperii along with its accompanying translatio studii . This echo is particularly evident in his exposition of the transition from Greece to Rome, motivated by the dissipation of Alexander's empire, which in turn made possible the Roman conquest of Greece. At the same time, Nebrija extends the decline forward to his own day, so that the ancient traditions have not totally disappeared, though they have been corrupted. His portrait of contemporary Jews as completely ignorant of Hebrew ("ninguno sabe dar más razón de la lengua de su lei, que de cómo perdieron su reino, y del Ungido que en vano esperan" [none can explain the language of their laws, nor how they lost their kingdom, nor the Anointed One they vainly await], 98) plays an important rhetorical and typological function. On the one hand, as the first nation to decay, they have sunk the farthest, and thus they serve as a warning to the Castilians, appropriate in the year of the expulsion. On the other hand, Nebrija successfully privileges them: the reign of Solomon is the model for the reigns of Alexander and Augustus, and the Hebrew prophets are mentioned not at their pertinent historical moment but during his history of Rome. Contemporary Jews still awaiting a Messiah may not realize it, but the fulfillment of their history occurred precisely at the apogee of Roman military and cultural power.

That moment of universal peace "en que embió Dios a su Unigé-

nito Hijo" (when God sent his Only-Begotten Son, 98) is also typologically related to present-day Castile, for the same organic pattern, with a childhood and then a maturity, is applicable to Castilian, as is the sometimes blurred combination of language, culture, and empire (see Sacks; Piedra). The language had its childhood, associated with the laws of León and Castile, and it showed its strength at the time of Alfonso the Wise, not only because of his General estoria and Siete partidas but also because he fostered the translation of works from Latin and Arabic into Castilian. This support gave it the strength to spread to Aragon and Navarre and even to Italy, "siguiendo la compañía de los infantes que embiamos a imperar en aquellos reinos" (following the company of the princes we sent to rule in those kingdoms, 100). It has reached its fullness in the reign of the present monarchs, through divine generosity but also because their diligent efforts have insured that the parts and members of Spain have been reunited. The subsequent religious purgation of Spain should guarantee its freedom from dissolution for hundreds of years; thus it is time for the arts of peace to flourish.

On this note Nebrija connects the current situation of Spain to the situation of those earlier empires at their apogee, with verbal echoes reinforcing the typology: "La monarchía y paz de que gozamos" (the monarchy and peace we enjoy, 100) is related to "aquella paz de que avían hablado los profetas" (that peace of which the prophets spoke [i.e., the time of Christ's birth], 98), and Solomon, in whose time "con la monarchía floreció la paz" (with the monarchy peace flourished, 98). Yet Nebrija also employs this connection to modulate from the history of the rise of Castile to its threatened decline. The first art of peace is language, yet Castilian remains "suelta y fuera de regla, y a esta causa a recebido en pocos siglos muchas mudanças; por que si la queremos cotejar con la de oi a quinientos años, hallaremos tanta diferencia y diversidad cuanta puede ser maior entre dos lenguas" (loose and unregulated, and for this reason it has changed a great deal in just a few centuries; thus if we compare the language of today to that of five hundred years hence, we will see as many differences as exist between two languages, 100). Time is thus spatialized: the language of his Spanish contemporaries could be a foreign tongue to their descendants, and just as the decline of earlier empires had led to linguistic corruption and oblivion, the same thing could happen to Spain if the cycle were

to be repeated. Their majesties' chronicles and histories, written to ensure their immortality, would eventually expire along with the language, or survive weakened in translations.

Yet this decline need not occur, for the language has a champion in Nebrija, who has decided to regulate the Castilian tongue, so that whatever is written from then on may be of one kind, which can extend itself through time. This is how Latin and Greek survived; "fue aquella su gloria" (that was the glory [of the classical grammarians]) "y será nuestra" (and it will be ours [both the monarchs' and Nebrija's], 101) to do the same. The time is right for this endeavor, "por estar ia nuestra lengua tanto en la cumbre, que más se puede temer el decendimiento della que esperar la subida" (for our language is already at its height, so that its decline is to be more feared than its growth to be expected, 101). The grammar will also help those wanting to learn Latin and, more importantly, foreigners wanting to learn Castilian. Nebrija recalls how, when he presented a sample to the queen and she inquired about its utility, the bishop of Avila (Hernando de Talavera, later first archbishop of Granada) answered for him that as she subjected new lands to her yoke, foreigners would need to be able to read the laws she decreed. The extent of the empire Nebrija envisions is clear: not only Muslims in Africa will have to learn the language but also Basques, Navarrese, Frenchmen, and Italians. Thus in imitation of those ancients who dedicated their works to august patrons, Nebrija dedicates his grammar to the sovereigns, removing it from "la sombra y tinieblas escolásticas a la luz de vuestra corte" (the shadow and darkness of the schools to the light of your court, 102).

The key to Nebrija's concept of history is his notion that Castile is at a pivotal instant, which he links typologically to the rule of Solomon in Israel, Alexander in Greece, and Augustus in Rome. Not all nations achieve this moment, and it has literally moved westward and arrived in Spain. It is the time when great empires come into their own, but also when they begin to decline; and while ordinarily political dominance is accompanied by cultural hegemony, in Spain's case the latter feature is lagging. Nebrija's grammar will facilitate the extension of the Spanish empire by allowing foreigners to learn the language, and its perpetuation by insuring that future generations will always be able to read it. Yet although the thrust of Nebrija's argument is clear, his method is subtle in its equivocations.

The nature and the workings of the cycle are ambiguous, for the argument is mythological rather than scientific, and only in the case of Rome's conquest of Greece does he suggest how dominance is passed on. Language change is invoked only in terms of decline, and Nebrija's philological explanation of how Spanish evolved from Latin, present in other parts of the grammar, is absent from the prologue. Moreover, in contrast to the quick succession of Greece and Rome, the fourteen-hundred-year lag between the latter and Spain begs a question about the regularity of the cycle, and the sense of belatedness is implicit in that Spain, supposedly at its peak, has nothing to rival classical and biblical literature.^[13] Indeed, the grammar is intended to jump-start the process of cultural development. Yet while a decline in Spanish fortunes would seem an imminent and inevitable feature of the cycle, Nebrija holds out an uncertain promise for the sovereigns: perhaps his grammar will assure their immortality by allowing future generations to read their history; perhaps it will possess an efficacy allowing the further extension of the Spanish empire, at the cost of the peace that marks the apogee. Although Nebrija never invokes the argument over arms and letters, he implies an ambiguous role for the aristocracy, on the one hand continuing to extend Spain's rule over neighboring countries, on the other, wasting their precious leisure reading novels and stories for lack of better alternatives. The empire can be extended only if Nebrija is successful in regulating the language of all Spaniards, so his function as grammarian will parallel that of the nobility as warriors.

In rhetoric, style, and ideology the prologue stands apart from the rest of the grammar, for there is something nearly apocalyptic in Nebrija's attitude regarding the translatio , a suggestion that Spain may—perhaps because it is the westernmost European country—be its fulfillment and thus escape the fated decline. It is this suggestion that led Américo Castro to infer a Semitic background for Nebrija's prologue, asserting that "the Hebraico-Islamic . . . lived in the will-be of his hope, in prophecy, in messianism, in a temporal and spatial beyond" (593). Nebrija, instrumental in bringing the press to Salamanca, was surely aware of its capabilities for aiding the exercise of control over the national language. Yet such messianism is absent from the rest of the grammar, even from the special prologue to book 5, devoted to the teaching of Spanish to foreigners. Moreover, throughout the grammar, but particularly in the chapter de-

voted to rhetorical figures, Nebrija cites as examples quotations from earlier fifteenth-century writers without any of the reservations expressed in the opening prologue.^[14] Nebrija's cyclical view of the translatio is problematic, for behind his optimistic view of Spain as the heir to Greece and Rome there lurks the threat of a Spanish decline (see Buceta), while the fourteen-hundred-year gap between Rome and Spain raises the question of modern Italian culture as either a successor to or a continuation of Rome. These issues are taken up and given a more specifically literary refraction in the "Arte de poesía castellana" by Nebrija's probable student Juan del Encina, first printed in Encina's Cancionero (published in Salamanca by the printer of Nebrija's grammar in 1496).^[15]

Encina's 1496 Cancionero is notable in Spanish literary history as the first major published collection of secular poetry by a living author; his close links with Nebrija's circle in Salamanca suggest that Encina himself may have supervised the edition.^[16] In addition to the "Arte," it contains translations of Virgil's eclogues, considerable amounts of religious and secular poetry, and some of the earliest surviving dramatic texts in Spanish. The general prologue dedicates the entire book to the Catholic monarchs:

Dizen los antiguos y fabulosos poetas, que Prometeo, hijo de Japeto, acostumbrado a fabricar cuerpos umanos de barro, subió al cielo con ayuda y favor de Minerva y traxo de una rueda del sol un poco de fuego con que después introduzía vida y ánima en aquellos cuerpos. Y assí yo, desta manera, viéndome con favor del duque y duquesa de Alva, mis señores, subí a la gran altura de la contemplación de vuestras ecelencias por alcançr siquiera una centella de su resplandor, para poder, en mi muerta labor y de barro, introduzir espíritus vitales. (1.2)

The ancient mythological poets say that Prometheus son of Iapetus, accustomed to making human bodies out of mud, rose to heaven with Minerva's help and took from the wheel of the sun some fire with which he gave life and soul to those bodies. And so I, in this way, seeing myself in favor with the duke and duchess of Alba, my lords, rose to the heights of contemplating your excellencies by reaching just a spark of your splendor, so as to introduce vital spirits into my dead labor of mud.

In this opening image, masterfully analyzed by Andrews (85–91), Encina exhibits the combination of obsequiousness and arrogance,

humility and pride, typical of his prose style. The amplificatio , often achieved through doublings ("antiguos y fabulosos," "ayuda y favor"), fails to obscure the keystone of the analogy ("assí yo"), through which Encina identifies himself with Prometheus. By the repetition of the word "favor," his current patrons are reduced to types of Minerva, boosting him up to heaven, with which the monarchs are identified, while he associates his work of poetic creation with Prometheus's divine creation of life. As Andrews notes, "The exaltation of the King and Queen is not 'free,' but is intermeshed with considerations of personal import. As one who has contemplated their excellence, who has tapped the moving force of their effective virtue and who has handled a flash of their brightness, Encina enters the realm of the select servants of their divine magnificence" (87). The message is clear: if they patronize him, only greater glory both for him and for them will ensue. Yet the prologue is also permeated with a fear of rejection, expressed in what Andrews called "a humility almost without modesty" (90), and in warnings about "detratores y maldizientes" (detractors and gossips, 1.3) out to blacken his reputation.

These psychological themes, in particular a love-hate relationship with the nobility coupled with a fear of slanderers, pervade many of the works in the 1496 volume. Nebrija, despite a reliance on aristocratic patronage, was ultimately a technocrat, offering philological skills to the monarchs whom he proposed to serve. Encina, by the nature of his artistic talents, was more directly dependent on patronage, so he attempts from the start to coopt the nobility with a theory of ocio , or aristocratic leisure (see Andrews, 71–72; López Estrada). Like Nebrija, Encina proposes to ameliorate the quality of Spanish literature; but while the former had aimed to improve what was available for the nobility's consumption during its moments of leisure, the latter proposes to make poetry an aristocratic activity by regulating that leisure. He opens the "Arte" by providing himself with a classical antecedent, Cicero's description of Scipio the Elder, "que dezía nunca estar menos ocioso que cuando estava ocioso" (who declared he was never less leisured than when he was at leisure, 1.6), and thereby confronts a double paradox: poetry requires otium , an aristocratic neglect of the very duties associated with the position of a nobleman, particularly in Spain, while leisure must be used constructively and in a disciplined way, which negates its sta-

tus as leisure. Poetry requires not just talent but also skills that must be mastered, and which Encina proposes to teach, claiming to have written the treatise "por donde se pueda sentir lo bien o mal trobado, y para enseñar a trobar en nuestra lengua, si enseñar se puede, porque es muy gentil exercicio en el tiempo de ociosidad" (so that good verse may be told from the bad, and to teach how to write verse in our language, if such a thing may be taught, for it is a very gentle exercise for moments of leisure, 1.7). Thus the aristocratic poet must embrace poetic work instead of military and governmental tasks. Yet Encina does not picture this departure as a radical one, for he describes Prince John, the son of the Catholic monarchs to whom the "Arte" is dedicated, as raised in the lap of sweet philosophy, favoring the ingenuity of his subjects, and inciting them to knowledge with himself as the example (1.7). These accomplishments in turn are traced back to the monarchs, "tan poderosos y cristianíssimos príncipes, cue assí artes bélicas como de paz están ya tan puestas en perfeción en estos reynos por su buena governación" (such powerful and Christian princes, that the arts of war as well as of peace are perfected throughout these realms, by their good government, 1.6). Thus Encina links the abundance of ocio back to the typological role of the kings, earlier exploited by Nebrija. With false modesty, Encina promises the prince that if he desires,

estando desocupado de sus arduos negocios, exercitarse en cosas poéticas y trobadas en nuestro castellano estilo, porque lo cue ya su bivo juyzio por natural razón conoce, lo pueda ver puesto en arte, según lo que mi flaco saber alcança. (1.7)

when not occupied in his arduous affairs, [he] can exercise himself in poetry composed in our Castilian style, so that what his lively judgment through natural reason recognizes, he may see regulated, insofar as my slender knowledge allows.^[17]

Having established this didactic aim and connected it to the historical moment, Encina describes yet another reason for writing the work. Specifically recalling Nebrija's attempts to reform the language through a printed set of rules, he presents his own efforts as a parallel:

Creyendo nunca aver estado tan puesta en la cumbre nuestra poesía y manera de trobar, parecióme ser cosa muy provechosa ponerla en

arte y encerrarla debaxo de ciertas leyes y reglas, porque ninguna antigüedad de tiempos le pueda traer olvido. (1.8)

Believing our poetry and manner of verse never to have been at such a height, it seemed to me a useful thing to codify it and place it under rules and laws, so that no passage of time can cause it to be forgotten.

To reinforce the danger of oblivion, Encina declares that while previous Spanish poets may have surpassed his contemporaries, he is ignorant of their work. Instead he offers a history of poetry, beginning with its divine origin as understood by the Greeks and as evidenced in the Bible. The former attributed its origins to Apollo, Mercury, Bacchus, and the Muses, while much of the Old Testament was written in verse, and in view of the anteriority of the Hebrews to the Greeks, Moses can rightly be called the first poet (see Curtius, 241–46, 446–58). Encina also cites generals who exhorted their troops by means of speeches in verse and recalls how Orpheus moved stones with his poetry, how other poets had their lives spared because of their verses, and the high esteem both Greeks and Romans had for their poets.

This historical discussion of the origins of ancient poetry ends with an account of meter and rhyme in ancient Christian hymnody, which Encina sees as the genesis of modern vernacular poetry; but he asserts that the Spanish received it only through the mediation of the Italians:

Quanto más que claramente parece, en la lengua ytaliana aver avido muy más antiguos poetas que en la nuestra, assí como el Dante y Francisco Petrarca y otros notables varones que fueron antes y después, de donde muchos de los nuestros hurtaron gran copia de singulares sentencias, el cual hurto, como dize Virgilio, no deve ser vituperado, mas dino de mucho loor, quando de una lengua en otra se sabe galanamente cometer. . . . Assí que, concluyamos luego el trobar aver cobrado sus fuerças en Ytalia, y de allí esparzídolas por nuestra España, adonde creo que ya florece más que en otra ninguna parte. (1.14–15)

Moreover, it seems clear that in the Italian language were poets much more ancient than those in our own, such as Dante and Francis Petrarch and other notable men who came before and after, from whom many of ours took a great quantity of singular ideas, which theft, as

Virgil says, should not be criticized but is worthy of much praise, when it is gallantly made from one language into another. . . . Thus we may conclude that verse drew its strength in Italy, and from there was broadcast and sown in Spain, where I now believe it flourishes more than in any other place.

With this transition to the modern Italians, who pass the art of poetizing on to the Spanish, Encina also modulates into the notions of belatedness and of the translatio . Once again there is a gap between ancient Rome and Spain, only this time it is partly filled with Christian hymns and with Dante and Petrarch. As in Nebrija, culture is linked to empire, and to effect the translatio Spanish poets literally have to sack or rob their Italian predecessors, carrying the booty back to Spain. This action is justified with an indirect (and pseudo-) Virgilian quotation, which also reinforces the link between Rome and Spain first established through the allusion to Cicero that opened the "Arte." By citing only Romans and Italians, Encina preserves the westward movement dictated by the translatio , but at the cost of ignoring not only the Provençal troubadours and the eastward movement of poetry into Italy (recognized by Santillana and other fifteenth-century writers; see Andrews, 75–76) but all Spanish poetry before his own day (see Weiss, 237); only Nebrija is praised for his earlier effort at codification of the Spanish language. This selectivity allows Encina to employ the same historical scheme as Nebrija and to present Spain as the true heir of Greece and Rome, an aspect he highlights by referring to Quintilian as "nuestro Quintiliano" because of his birth on the Iberian peninsula, and by emphasizing that the Spanish language is descended from Latin (see López Estrada, 157).^[18] Yet Encina's use of the translatio has its inescapable drawbacks, for it polarizes literary history into a decline/ascent dichotomy. Italy was the source of Spanish poetry, but by fertilizing Spain, Italy lost potency. Now it is the Spanish who are on the ascent, but they must compete with the prior Italian achievement in order to surpass it and at the same time regulate their own art in order to assure its comprehension by future generations.^[19]

Having justified the work in terms of a larger historical vision, Encina now turns to more immediate didactic ends, and here the discussion of poetry changes from the mythical accounts of its origin to more familiar Horatian precepts. He defends, by appealing to the examples of Horace and Quintilian, the need for an arte , a

technical handbook to instruct poets, for natural talent is not enough. Indeed, drawing on the contrast between composer and performer, geometer and stonemason, he argues for a distinction between the poeta and the trobador: the former term is reserved only for those who have studied and are conscious of the quantitative rules of poetry (on this distinction see Weiss, 190). Ever aware of his royal audience, Encina even here attempts to couch his argument in ways that would appeal to the nobility, extending the analogy to include lord and slave, captain and soldier. He warns that the distinction is not much observed in Spain, and while he himself sometimes neglects it, the point is an important one, for in contrast to the confidence in the opening chapter about the position of Spanish letters, we now get a sense of confusion, of the need for rules and, even more, for the public recognition of rules. They must be acknowledged by the talented, and are best nurtured by reading:

Deve exercitarse en leer no solamente poetas y estorias en nuestra lengua, mas tan bien en lengua latina; y no solamente leerlos como dize Quintiliano, mas discutirlos en los estilos y sentencias y en las licencias, que no leerá cosa el poeta en ninguna facultad de que no se aproveche para la copia que le es muy necessaria. (1.20)

He should exercise himself by reading poets and historians not only in our language but also in Latin; and, as Quintilian says, not only read them but discuss their style and ideas and figures, for there is nothing the poet will read that he will not take advantage of for that abundance which is necessary to him.

These passages reinforce the earlier ones asserting the need for poetic work.

Most of the rest of the treatise is taken up with technical matters, such as meter, line lengths, and the like. The fundamental unit of verse is the line, or pie , composed of either eight or twelve syllables (respectively, arte real and arte mayor ). Encina also discusses the division of arte mayor into hemistichs, the use of pies quebrados (four-syllable half-lines), and the rules for consonant and assonant rhyme. He admits the possibility of rhyming proverbio with sobervio (rhyme is based on sound, not orthography), and advises against internal and repetitious rhymes. Lines of verse may be gathered into units of two, three, or more; only those units with at least four lines may

properly be called coplas .^[20] Throughout this section of the "Arte," Encina cites poems by earlier fifteenth-century poets, particularly Juan de Mena. Thus here, as in Nebrija's grammar, there is a distinction between the visionary rhetoric of the preface and the body of the work itself. Encina's rules, centered on syllable count, reflect an aural conception of poetry, but also an attempt to apply to poetry those mathematical forms of analysis which make music and geometry part of the quadrivium. The examples from Mena justify Encina's rules (see Andrews, 172–73, nn. 12–13), but those rules more accurately reflect Encina's own poetic practice (see Clarke, "On Juan"). As such, study of the "Arte" trains not only poets but also readers who will be properly appreciative of Encina's own work. The chapter on poetic colors is mostly concerned with rules for adapting words to fit the meter, and with complex rhyme schemes. Encina thus emphasizes melopoeic devices, while figures such as metonymy and metaphor are scarcely mentioned, for as they are not unique to poetry, they belong to the more general fields of rhetoric and grammar.^[21] The last, brief chapter includes instructions on breathing during oral performance, perhaps a reflection of Encina's double role as musician and poet; but it concludes with a discussion of how a poem should look on a page, reflecting the luxuries introduced by the mass production of paper and printing.

Encina is not ambivalent about the social status of poetry: he regards it as an aristocratic activity, a talent that only the man of leisure can afford to cultivate. Yet the very notion of devoting leisure time exclusively to literary pursuits reflects Encina's professional situation and is antithetical to the Spanish nobleman's concept of himself. Moreover, he never seems quite convinced of the superiority of Spanish letters. Spaniards may be, via the Italians, the heirs to Greece and Rome, but they are not really as accomplished; and just as the Romans, at the height of their powers, needed handbooks of poetry and rhetoric, so too the Spanish must have them. In the treatise Encina attempts to come to terms with the legacy of the past, both antiquity and, more immediately, the Italians. He thus stands at a crux, on the one hand ignoring (save for Juan de Mena) the poetical accomplishments of medieval Spain, much of them already in print, on the other hand citing Dante and Petrarch as poets from whom the Spanish have learned a great deal. Yet Encina does not slight traditional Spanish forms, and whatever the influence of Dante and Petrarch may have been, he makes no mention of sonnets

or hendecasyllabic verse. Indeed, as Rico has shown, the traces of Petrarch in fifteenth-century Spanish poetry are primarily linguistic and decorative, while only Santillana wrote sonnets.

Spanish belatedness as a national cultural problem thus arises toward the end of the fifteenth century, and its appearance at that time is related to a number of roughly coinciding developments, including the introduction of printing, national unification and purgation, and greater Spanish intervention in Italy The basic text for Spanish belatedness and alterity is the prologue to Nebrija's Spanish grammar; employing the trope of the translatio , Nebrija demonstrates how the great civilizations of the past attained their apogee at a moment of peace, when culture also flourished. He finds contemporary Spain at that point in its military history, but culture lags and deterioration threatens to set in: if it does, the achievements of his day will be forgotten. With his grammar he hopes to redress that lag and perhaps even deliver Spain from the previously inevitable decline. Nebrija's program is refracted in Encina's "Arte de poesía castellana," in which Encina makes the translatio more pointed by combining it with Greco-Roman and Christian poetics: poetry began with the Jews and was practiced successively by the Greeks, the Romans, and their latter-day descendants Dante and Petrarch. By responding to the formation of the nation-state and identifying the fate of the empire with that of its poetry, Nebrija and Encina codify Spanish belatedness and alterity, and ultimately prepare the way for the poetical innovations of Boscán and Garcilaso forty years later. As each successive generation continues to perceive a cultural inferiority to Italy, the translatio , which Encina saw occurring in his own day, is successively postponed, and Petrarch's status—for Encina merely proverbial—becomes ever more significant. Encina tries to elevate the status of poetry by tying it to a theory of aristocratic leisure and associating it with the quantitative study of the quadrivium; while his rules for poets are primarily melopoeic, his conception of literary history opens the way for the transformations of the next 150 years.

Some Questions of Method

My approach to Spanish Renaissance lyric is based on an understanding of Renaissance cultural belatedness as elaborated by examining Petrarch and Bembo, and then contextualized by reference to

Spain. These strictly literary determinations are leavened with a consideration of the social and historical environment in which the poetry was written and read. The significance of the social context is strongest in the earlier chapters, which cover the time during which the link between Petrarchism and the Spanish empire is being forged; it diminishes later as that link becomes more and more residual. My emphasis is on those poets who were most self-conscious of the conflicts between their roles as imitators of Petrarch and their desire for national and individual priority. The collective judgment of history has in fact identified them as the principal Petrarchist poets of the Spanish Renaissance; consequently, this study focuses on the most canonic poets of the period, from both the first rank (Garcilaso, Góngora, Quevedo) and the second (Boscán, Herrera). The historical and theoretical importance of less-canonized poets such as Gutierre de Cetina and Francisco de la Torre is an interesting problem in its own right, but not one that concerns us here.^[22] Similarly, I do not discuss the continuing popularity of verse in traditional Castilian forms; Boscán, Garcilaso, and Herrera conscientiously turned their backs on these genres, differentiating Italianate poetry as a separate discourse, a status it retained into the seventeenth century. Other historical and theoretical issues worthy of further discussion but excluded because of their relatively tangential relation to this study are the role of primarily Portuguese poets such as Camoens in the fuller Iberian polysystem; the mystic poets, Fray Luis de León and St. John of the Cross, on whom Petrarchism was an important but secondary influence; and Lope de Vega, whose Petrarchist lyric is not at the center of his literary production. My approach does however entail a consideration of poetic theory along with poetic texts. Not until the end of the Renaissance did poetic theory attain in Spain the status of an autonomous discourse (see Terracini, Lingua , 122–25), and systematic preceptive poetics were antithetical to the courtly aesthetics associated with Petrarchism in Spain (see Elias Rivers, "L'humanisme linguistique" and chapter 2, below). Most often, Petrarchist poetic theory was expressed in the form of paratexts on the poetry itself, particularly prefaces and commentaries, and nearly all of the poets I consider either wrote such paratexts or were the objects of others' paratextual production.

By using Curtius and Bloom to elaborate a theory of cultural belatedness, we not only apply twentieth-century theory to early mod-

ern Spanish texts but also use those texts to historicize the theory and explore its specifically Renaissance applications. Bloom, a close reader of Curtius, whose work he calls "the best study of literary tradition I have ever read" (Map , 32), considers belatedness a "recurrent malaise of Western consciousness" (77) and distinguishes psychopoetic belatedness from the cultural belatedness of the Renaissance (77–80). To Bloom, "reading, when active and interesting, is not less aggressive than sexual desire, or than social ambition, or professional drive" (Breaking , 13), as the act of reading forces a confrontation over the lack of priority, particularly on poets who are in competition with their predecessors. Yet while the romantic poets on whom Bloom concentrates could attempt to disguise their predecessors, Renaissance poets had canons that determined their models, and as a result compounded their psychopoetic and cultural belatedness. The applicability of Bloom's theory to Renaissance literature is controversial; the Freudian terms of his analysis are often rejected on grounds resembling Greene's, that the humanist poet is not a neurotic son in an Oedipal struggle with predecessors (41; for comment on Greene see Cruz, Imitación , 7–9).^[23] However, Bloom's use of Freud (along with Lucretius and the cabala) is heuristic, serving more to explain a theory than to construct it, and the poets he studies, ranging from Milton to Wallace Stevens, were hardly crippled by their relationships with their predecessors. Bloom's triad (sexual desire/social ambition/professional advancement), meant as a catalog of what his audience might recognize as their strongest drives, is also an appropriate delineation of the passions that motivated Renaissance poets, who often composed poems about love in order to obtain not just a woman's favor but also recognition at court and its tangible benefits.

For me Bloom himself serves a heuristic purpose, which brings several advantages. The first is that his once-exotic critical terms have passed into common use, allowing one to describe Petrarch's belatedness (the section on Bembo and Petrarch, above), Garcilaso's metalepsis (chapter 3), Quevedo's clinamen (chapter 5), and the like by analogy, without positing a pathological diagnosis. Second, Bloom's theory of poetic agon resonates in two important directions. One of them is what Pigman calls eristic imitation or emulation, in which "the model, without whose help any progress is impossible . . . has become an adversary engaging the young author in a

fight to the death" (Pigman, 18). While Pigman makes a good case for the presence of three kinds of imitation in the theorists he studies, only agonistic emulation held out, for Spaniards, the possibility of surpassing Italian hegemony. Bloom's theory also resonates with Bakhtin's investigation of the relation between imitation and polyphony. Development of a Bakhtinian approach to the lyric has been somewhat stymied by the Russian theorist's conception of lyric poetry as a "straightforward" genre, incapable of being truly polyphonic (Dialogic Imagination , 49–50; see also Todorov, 63–67). But in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , Bakhtin, while not specifically addressing the question of lyric poetry, takes up the question of how imitation can lead to polyphony or intertextuality. To Bakhtin, mere stylization or nonagonistic imitation of the type recognizable by a specialist does not make a discourse polyphonic (Problems , 186–87.^[24] But in imitation of the type that Bakhtin calls parodic, polyphony does occur because there is a clash between the original and the later discourse, in which the latter is given a new orientation (ibid., 189). Bakhtin goes on to explain how this is different from ordinary imitation, wherein the other's voice, while taken seriously, is not heard as an other but is merged with the author's own voice. In parody

as in stylization, the author again speaks in someone else's discourse, but in contrast to stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, once having made its home in the other's discourse, clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing aims. In parody therefore, there cannot be that fusion of voices possible in stylization . . . the voices are not only isolated from one another but also hostilely opposed.
(ibid., 193)

Bakhtin limits polyphony to what he calls parody, but as Linda Hutcheon notes, the historical phenomenon that most closely and most consistently approximates theoretical parody is Renaissance imitation, which, like parody, "offered a workable and effective stance toward the past in its paradoxical strategy of repetition as a source of freedom. Its incorporation of another work as a deliberate and acknowledged construct is structurally similar to parody's formal organization" (10). Admittedly the relationship among Bloom's notion of poetic agon, Renaissance ideas about emulation, and the

Bakhtinian theory of parody is not one of identity but one of affinity. Still, consideration of these related phenomena allows us to qualify and to historicize Bloom's model, better adapting it to our own purpose.

In her discussion of parody, Hutcheon also cautions against a shallow approach that remains on the level of merely noting the structural or formal relations between texts (exemplified for us by Herrera's laconic introductions, "la imitación es de" [it is an imitation of], Anotaciones , 334; but see chapter 4). Rather, she argues for a pragmatic approach that considers both the encoder and the interpreter (22–23), as well as the parodists' double role as both interpreter of the original and encoder of the new sign. Here again there is a family resemblance with Bloom's notion of poetic misprision. Intertextuality can then become, as for Maria Corti, "un avvicente forma di ermeneutica testuale" (a prospective form of textual hermeneutics: La felicità mentale , quoted in Gargano, 9). For us to cast an imitation/parody in terms of Bloom's revisionary strategies, then, is not to make an aesthetic judgment about a work but to interpret the way that the author of the imitation has encoded within that text his own relationship with the original. Furthermore, by emphasizing the historical process of reading and writing, Bloom also enables us to write something approximating a narrative history, albeit an idiosyncratic one.^[25] Spanish literary studies, particularly of Golden Age poetry, have long labored under the shadow of Dámaso Alonso's approach, which—drawing on Saussure—viewed a poem as an accumulation of signifiers crafted to affect a reader.^[26] On practical and theoretical levels, Alonso made important contributions to literary history, but by privileging Saussure he also privileged synchronicity and thus a method that, like Poesía española , results in a series of chronologically arranged essays on various poets, rather than a diachronically developed argument.^[27] I acknowledge a debt to Alonso, whose historical contributions and stylistic analyses, along with those of his intellectual progeny, are used throughout this book in the discussion of particular poets, particularly the later ones whose rhetorical complexity demands a traditional "close reading"; but in the end, mine is a different approach.

In addition to the ones already described, there are further points of contact between Renaissance and modern theory, and between formalism and historicism; one, as Kennedy argued (Rhetorical

Norms , 1–3, 16–18), is the reader as an implied, fictionalized entity (Ong), as a hermeneutic principle (Gadamer, Jauss), and as a phenomenological reality (Ingarden). Kennedy argues against a strict adherence to formalist and structuralist notions of literature as a closed system, but agrees that it is only within the context of historically specific horizons of expectations that readers and poets appropriate other texts. Thus I prefer, as a model for synchronic characterization, Even-Zohar's nuanced formulation of a literary and cultural polysystem, creating multiple opportunities and constraints, multiple ways of approaching and rewriting a predecessor text.^[28] Three further theorists have also contributed to my understanding of Renaissance poetry. The first is Ezra Pound, whose distinction between the phanopoeic and melopoeic aspects of a poem is particularly useful for understanding the aesthetic transformation that accompanied the shift from medieval Castilian octosyllabic poetry to genres employing the hendecasyllabic line (see chapters 2 and 4, below). Second, there is Maria Corti's notion of a macrotext, an organized collection that is a sign in its own right and whose meaning thus exceeds the sum of its parts (see chapters 3, 4, and 5). Finally, I use Bakhtin's discussion of imitation and parody to analyze the breakdown of Petrarchism through the overabundant intertextuality of seventeenth-century poetry (see chapter 5).

The lyric potency of the Petrarchist myth cannot be explained by exclusive recourse to formalism or literary history, however. Belatedness played an important part, but so did artistic ambition. As Kerrigan and Braden expressed it, "Artistic and sexual ambitions are interchangeable; they can be substituted for each other in the course of reaching countless bargains. A solitude stocked with images may be preferable to having an amorous partner. The value of postponement, hedonistic as well as moral, is considerable" (188). Petrarchism is thus best understood as a synecdoche for the broader yearning for fulfillment and autodetermination. As such, it is always slightly subversive, even when most established and canonical. At a time when legitimate expressions of sexuality were tightly controlled (by family, by royal decree, by rules of celibacy, by economics), every time a Petrarchist lover complains, he suggests that sexual relations ought to be freer, without recourse to the burlesque world of prostitution. Every poem about powerlessness and imprisonment spoke to a real and ever-present danger for the religiously

searching and the politically active; every poem about bodies and wealth spoke to the unbalanced economy of Renaissance Spain, and even to the slave labor of the Americas. There is relatively little of Petrarch's moral questioning in this poetry, which depends on the fantasy that the impossible should be possible, without asking whether it is deserved. Such questions could bring down the system (and, in Quevedo's case, possibly did), by destroying both the fantasy and its capacity to generate new avatars of the myth. I will touch on these issues now and then in the course of this study, and return to them in the conclusion.