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Lope de Vega y el Humanismo cristiano ed. by Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, and: Literatura y devoción en tiempos de Lope de Vega ed. by Jesús Ponce Cárdenas

2021; Auburn University; Volume: 73; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/boc.2021.0019

1944-0928

Chad Leahy,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

Reviewed by: Lope de Vega y el Humanismo cristiano ed. by Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, and: Literatura y devoción en tiempos de Lope de Vega ed. by Jesús Ponce Cárdenas Chad Leahy Lope de Vega y el Humanismo cristiano. Edited by Jesús Ponce Cárdenas. IBEROAMERICANA / VERVUERT, 2018. 206 PP. Literatura y devoción en tiempos de Lope de Vega. Edited by Jesús Ponce Cárdenas. IBEROAMERICANA / VERVUERT, 2018. 206 PP. Lope was a show-off. The flamboyant erudition characteristic of so much of his epic poetry and prose—La Arcadia (1598), La hermosura de Angélica (1602), El peregrino en su patria (1604), Jerusalén conquistada (1609), La Circe (1624), and Triunfos divinos (1625), to name just a few—screams for us to acknowledge him as brilliant scion of the Christian humanist tradition. That carefully self-fashioned reading, of course, may strike as too charitable for some. Since at least Karl Vossler's Lope de Vega y su tiempo in the 1930s, it has been commonplace—cliché, even—to note that Lope likes to pillage Ravisio Textor's sixteenth-century Officina, along with any number of other polianteas, florilegios, and encyclopedic miscellanies. The idea is often that Lope's learning may be flashy, but it is barely Wikipedia-deep. In the prologue to Part 1 of Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes famously skewers contemporaries writing in this same mode, ridiculing those who layer their works with references "por las letras del abecé, comenzando en Aristóteles y acabando en Xenofonte y en Zoílo o Zeuxis" (edited by Luis Andrés Murillo, Editorial Castalia, 1988, p. 53), and scholars have long assumed that a prime target of such barbs is Lope. The intellectual posturing that Cervantes gleefully destroys here is, perhaps ironically, on full display in one of Lope's most self-consciously popular works, Isidro: poema castellano (1599), a poetic hagiography of Madrid's patron, Isidro Labrador (ca. 1070–1130). Several scholars have argued that Isidro served as a powerful vehicle for Lope to position himself as "la vega llana. El [End Page 191] poeta del pueblo" (Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, Lope pintado por sí mismo: mito e imagen del autor en la poesía de Lope de Vega Carpio, Tamesis, 2006, p. 80). To borrow from the engraving of Isidro that graces the title page of Lope's later Justa poética (1620), through the labrador Lope "works, cultivates, and reaps" ("labré, cultivé, cogí") a poetic world that is rooted in the rustic materiality and humble piety of a simple, devout laborer—on this topic, see Elizabeth Wright's "Virtuous Labor, Courtly Laborer: Canonization and a Literary Career in Lope de Vega's Isidro" (MLN, no. 114, vol. 2, 1999, pp. 223–40). And yet the work also leverages its homegrown Castilian quintillas as vehicles for learned pyrotechnics. The margins of the ten-thousand-verse poem overflow with references—classical, Biblical, Scholastic, hagiographical, humanistic—that serve to root Lope's verse in the auctoritas of tradition while also showing the world that this monstruo de la naturaleza is no intellectual lightweight. As part of a broader professional position-taking that the Fénix pursued with fervor beginning at the close of the sixteenth century, the poema castellano labors to move Lope out of the lowbrow sphere of the corral to join the ranks of the lettered elite. Rather than dismiss Lope's erudition in the Isidro as vapid posturing, Jesús Ponce Cárdenas has gifted us two handsome volumes that take it as a matter of legitimate and serious inquiry. In doing so, Lope de Vega y el Humanismo cristiano and Literatura y devoción en tiempos de Lope de Vega insert themselves in the critical tradition of works such as Simon Voster's still imposing Lope de Vega y la tradición occidental (Castalia, 1977) or, more recently, Victor Dixon's helpful overview of "Lope's Knowledge" (Alexander Samson and Jonathan Thacker, editors, A Companion to Lope de Vega, Tamesis, 2008, pp. 15–29). In the spirit of this lineage, Ponce Cárdenas's volumes embrace a mode of intellectual and cultural archaeology aimed at rescuing from obscurity...