Interpretations of the Renaissance in Spanish historical thought.

There are several reasons for presenting an overview of what the terms Renaissance and humanism have meant to Spanish historians and literary critics during the past one hundred fifty years. Despite the fact that these historiographical categories have not received the same attention in Spain as they have in other parts of Europe, it is still useful to identify certain recurring assumptions regarding the nature of the Spanish Renaissance and to point out how these underlying presuppositions are usually linked, directly or indirectly, to the historical development of the concept of the Renaissance elaborated elsewhere in Europe. One hopes that this brief exposition will be of some benefit to those students of the Spanish Renaissance who are unaware of the ideological currents and methodological trends that have motivated, and to a certain extent determined, the major interpretations of the period that have been proposed. For scholars who are unfamiliar with the views and ideas of Spanish historians and literary critics of the Renaissance this outline may serve as an introduction to their works and as an aid in assessing their contributions.

The period under review is relatively short, spanning approximately one hundred fifty years, that is, from the second half of the last century, when the first interpretations of the Renaissance were formulated, to the present. But long before any theoretical treatment of the concept of the Renaissance in Spanish historical thought was undertaken, the idea of a rebirth of Spanish letters had already enjoyed a long tradition. The earliest documented evidence of a revival of learning can be dated, in fact, to around the middle of the fifteenth century. Isolated occurrences of expressions relating to a cultural renewal, such as "dispelling the darkness of ignorance," "illuminating Spain with new light," or "driving out the barbarians from schools and universities," which are first recorded in the writings of this time, began to appear at an increasing rate in letters, books and treatises during the next two centuries, when both the notion of a cultural reawakening and the role of the movement responsible for bringing it about - what we call today humanism - were widely acknowledged.(1) The idea that a cultural rebirth had taken place within a well-defined period in Spanish civilization became the most significant feature in the first histories of literature, poetry and eloquence composed in the second half of the eighteenth century mainly by Jesuit scholars who took refuge in Italy after their expulsion from Spain.(2) It was also at this time that the sixteenth century, a period of unprecedented achievements in literature, arts and sciences, came to be known as the Siglo de Oro or the Golden Age, as it is usually referred to in English. This designation rapidly gained wide acceptance and eventually came to replace the term Renaissance. The question of periodization, a new and important feature of the incipient national history, was resolved in favor of dividing the literary culture of Spain into three periods: a primitive stage that lasted to the end of the fifteenth century, the Golden Age in the sixteenth century and a third period from the seventeenth century on. Jose Luis Velasquez was the only historian who believed that the literature and culture of the fifteenth century should constitute a separate period because of certain distinctive characteristics which set it apart from both the previous primitive stage and the Siglo de Oro of the following century.(3)

Interest in the Renaissance as a cultural rebirth waned during the first part of the nineteenth century when the predominant romantic interpretations of Spanish literature, generally written outside of Spain, stressed the originality, purity and spontaneity of the national creative genius as this manifested itself in the Middle Ages. All artistic expressions associated with the restoration of classical learning or with any form of erudition, from the fifteenth century on, were unconditionally branded as foreign, imitative and servile art.(4) Such an unmitigated characterization of the Renaissance, which made even the Spanish translators uneasy, proved to be only a passing fad.

In the years during which Michelet was preparing the seventh volume of his monumental history of France dedicated entirely to the Renaissance period, a Spanish historian, Jose Amador de los Rios, was also working on a massive history of Spain.(5) Although Amador de los Rios' work never reached the sixteenth century, the century that in Michelet's history bears the title of La Renaissance, the Spaniard's last volume, the seventh in a series, dealing exclusively with the fifteenth century, is clearly written with a new conception of the Renaissance in mind. Consistent with his idea of total history, based on the literary culture of the national tradition, he not only included under literature Latin and vernacular works but also other humanistic disciplines. His positive evaluation of the literary production inspired by the classical revival, still reviled by many romantic literary critics, made him the lone defender of the new learning that accompanied the revival of antiquity in fifteenth-century Spain.

His liberal concerns and his appropriation of German idealism, which are at the root of his search for strong personalities with a marked sense of freedom of thought and expression, led him to investigate the life and works of the Marquis of Santillana. This early fifteenth-century poet, who, in addition to being a learned man, was also actively involved in the political life of the time, became to Amador de los Rios a paradigmatic figure in whose activities are revealed the workings of the national spirit at a crucial moment of Spain's history. As a member of the highest nobility, Santillana embodied the traditional chivalric values and the social responsibilities commensurate with his rank. But what most likely attracted Amador de los Rios to Santillana was the latter's intellectual endeavors as well as his openness to the latest trends in learning and ideas. It should be noted that the library assembled by Santillana, which Amador de los Rios tried to reconstruct, contained one of the best collections of classical texts in Europe and a significant number of works by contemporary Italian humanists in either their original Latin or in Spanish and Italian translations.

The attention he paid to Santillana and to the century in which he lived is a clear indication that Amador de los Rios recognized in this period the beginning of a new era that was to culminate in the sixteenth century.(6) In his reluctance, however, to refer to this period as the Renaissance, he was perhaps following Michelet, who in those same years reserved the use of this term exclusively for the sixteenth century. His uncertainty about whether the fifteenth century represented the beginning of the Renaissance is best illustrated by his efforts to reevaluate the works of the humanists (he is still unaware of the newly coined term "humanism") while at the same time refusing to recognize their role as promoters of the new era. This apparent contradiction can be explained by his general conception of history as a series of stages, somewhat static in nature, wherein the culture of each period is characterized by a different manifestation of the national spirit. Within this scheme, the revival of learning in the fifteenth century was simply the door, as it were, leading to the true Renaissance. This basic interpretation, with minor variations, has dominated Spanish Renaissance studies to this day.

His rehabilitation of fifteenth-century poets, historians, moralists and learned men who up to that time had been described by romantic literary critics as slaves to fashionable trends coming from Italy, needed a plausible explanation that would justify their works as legitimate expressions of the national spirit. Mindful of the polemic between Spanish and Italian historians that had taken place in the previous century, especially the one between Lampillas and Tiraboschi,(7) over which country had fostered a true classical rebirth or "Risorgimento," and believing as well in the Latin national character or genius of the Spanish people, he explained the rebirth of antiquity in the fifteenth century as the normal manifestation of a cultural trait which was not entirely new to Spanish culture. Amador de los Rios was influenced by the views of Mme. de Stael who had divided European civilization into three racial groups, each with specific cultural characteristics, and who had placed Spain with France and Italy because of their common Latin heritage. Since Spain's national spirit was shaped by the language and civilization of the Latin group to which it belonged, he argued that it was only natural that a classical revival would reappear from time to time in Spanish history, whenever the socio-political circumstances of a particular period were favorable. The Latin cultural substratum, in fact, had first revealed itself, however dimly, in the thirteenth century during the reign of Alphonse the Wise. It reappeared again in a much more assertive way at the court of John II of Castile and Alphonse V of Aragon in Naples; and it manifested itself in all its plentitude during the following century. On the strength of this argument, Amador de los Rios introduced the Latin and vernacular works written at the court of Alphonse V in Naples as an integral part of the Spanish cultural world.

In spite of the vast amount of source material with which he documented his history, Amador de los Rios did not propose any new scheme regarding the periodization of Spanish history. And because he did not accept any continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance of the sixteenth century, he had to place the culture of the fifteenth century within the medieval period. It is curious to note how the cultural activities at the Aragonese court at Naples as well as the figure of Alphonse V were interpreted differently by Amador de los Rios and Burckhardt, who was writing at approximately the same time. If Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), views Alphonse V as the prototype of the Renaissance prince intent on creating "the state as a work of art," Amador de los Rios relegates this patron of famous humanists to the Middle Ages, even while acknowledging his contribution to the revival of antiquity.

Due to the work of Amador de los Rios, humanists, but not yet "humanism," had finally appeared in the literary history of Spain. They were reintegrated into the literary mainstream and, for the first time, considered an important factor in the unfolding of the national culture. Convinced that there were two Renaissances, a Latin and a vernacular one, each vying for hegemony, Amador de los Rios paid as much attention to Latin as to vernacular works, thus opening two lines of further investigation.(8) For our purpose, the significance of his work lies in his having established the chronological limits for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Spanish history, a model that has been accepted by later historians. His unfinished history, which extends only to the end of the fifteenth century, was taken up years later by a young scholar, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, who broadened considerably the scope of his own research by exploring different areas of the Renaissance and by focusing on the underlying connections among literature, aesthetics, philosophy, religious ideas, ethics, history and the sciences.

One of Menendez y Pelayo's earliest studies, indicative perhaps of the scholarly orientation he was to take, was an essay on sixteenth-century humanists written in 1878. His main objective was to show that a knowledge of the Spanish literature written in Latin during the 1500s is essential for the understanding of the vernacular literature of the time. In this study the term "humanism" was utilized, to my knowledge, for the first time in Spanish Renaissance studies.(9) Menendez y Pelayo used the word exclusively to describe the intellectual movement that promoted the classical revival and produced a body of Latin writings in Spain. As he later explained, the term should not apply solely to the sixteenth century but to the fifteenth century as well, since the use of this classical language for literary and historical compositions had also become prevalent at the court of Alphonse V in Naples and, sometime later, at the court of the Catholic Kings. In connection with his definition of humanism he also gave his interpretation of the Renaissance as the rebirth of forms and ideas of the classical world.(10)

But this revival of classical antiquity, he cautioned, cannot and should not be taken literally, for such a cultural phenomenon would have been historically impossible. There were, in his view, a number of historical factors that affected in a decisive way the outcome of the classical revival. Christianity and the barbarian invasions, for example, were two major conditioning forces that prevented classical culture from being reborn in its pristine form. Equally crucial in shaping the development of the classical rebirth were the different cultural traditions and institutions that emerged with the formation of European nations during the Middle Ages.

To Menendez y Pelayo, who saw the Renaissance as an historically identifiable phenomenon, the term itself was a misnomer, because classical civilization had never completely disappeared, especially in countries like Spain and Italy. In twelfth-century Spain, for example, even when French influences seemed to dominate Spanish letters, the Latin substratum still survived as a cultural undercurrent. And when this latent current reemerged in the fifteenth century, its driving force was characterized by the desire to recover "the ancient form in all its totality, even in its smallest components of language and rhythm."(11) But unlike Amador de los Rios, who saw a clearly defined trend toward the restoration of classical antiquity from the very beginning of the century, Menendez y Pelayo tended to dismiss these early efforts, attracted as he was by the fuller display of the classical revival in the last quarter of the century, during the reign of the Catholic Kings. Borrowing an expression from an eighteenth-century scholar, Mayans y Siscar, on whom Menendez y Pelayo relied a great deal in many of his works, he characterized the Renaissance period as the time when Spaniards finally regained their "critical awareness and stylistic art."(12) It should be noted that by "critical awareness" Mayans y Siscar was referring to the humanist attack on scholastic learning, a feature that he turned into the criterion for marking the end of one era (the Middle Ages) and the beginning of the other (the Golden Age). This point, which Menendez y Pelayo also stressed, but to a lesser degree, has never been fully clarified since later historians have either minimized the scope of this issue or dismissed it outright.

Regarding the classical revival of fifteenth-century Spain, Menendez y Pelayo was far more critical than Amador de los Rios when it came to associating it with the Renaissance. Though he saw numerous indications of a revival of classical learning and of the breakdown of the chivalric spirit - part of a general pattern in the dissolution of the Middle Ages - he still maintained that the overall culture of the period was essentially medieval. He explained that any manifestations of new intellectual trends were part of that gestation period when all the elements of the national life came together in order to form the "proper and more grandiose" Renaissance of the sixteenth century.(13) According to a principle of historical continuation, he believed that any period of great intellectual and artistic expression was necessarily preceded by one of lesser cultural excellence. For these reasons he defined the fifteenth century as "una especie de portico de nuestro renacimiento" (a kind of portal to our Renaissance),(14) a metaphor in which the impressiveness of the entrance is overshadowed by the monumental interior to which it leads. Though Menendez y Pelayo's metaphorical meaning has been lost on later historians and the portal has been taken for a mere door, the transitional character it conveyed has become emblematic of this century.

Menendez y Pelayo's study of sixteenth-century humanists marked a turning point in Spanish historical thought and literary criticism. Charting a new course amidst past and present historical interpretations and literary theories, this youthful essay, strongly resembling a manifesto, contained in a germinal state most of his ideas on the Renaissance. Much of his later works, in fact, are meant to clarify and support with documentary evidence, his original understanding of the Renaissance. For example, his multi-volume history of aesthetic ideas in Spain is primarily concerned with showing that Spanish literature, especially in the Renaissance, is indeed based on certain philosophical considerations regarding the nature of beauty in artistic and literary works. But it was also meant to oppose certain neoromantic historians who attributed to the unsophisticated utterances of primitive bards the true expression of the nation's literary genius, while accusing Renaissance authors of having buried their artistic creations in dead and worn-out forms and of having hindered the normal development of literature. Similarly, his extensive investigations into the history of religious heterodoxy in Spain served as a rebuttal to northern European historians who equated the true Renaissance with the Reformation and, closer to home, as a defense against the attacks of Neothomists and ultra-conservative intellectuals who viewed Renaissance humanists as having at best antagonized the Church and at worst as having practiced all sorts of heresy. His stated purpose, in fact, was to demonstrate that in the sixteenth century, the period of most intense religious upheaval, the Latin spirit of the nation, strengthened by the Renaissance ("vivificado por el renacimiento") was able to immunize Spanish society from the contagious disorder of Protestantism and thus prevent the intrusion of the Reformation, that "offspring of Teutonic individualism."(15)

This exceedingly partisan interpretation of the Renaissance, conditioned in many ways by the post-Burckhardtian versions of national Renaissances being elaborated in other parts of Europe, was never seriously questioned and mutatis mutandi set the stage for a new approach to the study of this period. As we know, the originality of Burckhardt's interpretation of the Italian Renaissance caught the attention of many scholars, some of whom in turn sought to provide a comparable assessment of that period in their respective countries. Unable to arrive at a synthesis similar to Burckhardt's achievement, they had to rely on the kind of revival of learning, often associated with religious issues, that manifested itself in their particular national tradition. Within this larger context, the religious component that Menendez y Pelayo injected into the discussion of the Spanish Renaissance is not unique. It was also found, to varying degrees, among historians of northern Europe whose interpretation of the Renaissance gave ample consideration to the religious concerns of their most distinguished humanists. Given the outrageous bias of some cultural theories circulating at the turn of the century, it is understandable that the controversy between Catholic and Protestant scholars, begun precisely at the time of the Renaissance and kept alive throughout the centuries more by inertia than by fervor, would again flare up with unusual virulence, fueled at this time by nationalistic and ethnic rivalries.

At issue was the meaning each national culture wanted to assign to this crucial period of European history, an epoch that was becoming increasingly identified with the beginning of the modern age. Emphasis on the religious aspect of the Renaissance in some European countries carried with it certain moral and political implications that determined in part the way in which they viewed their own cultural revival, a revival that was fundamentally different from the Italian model proposed by Burckhardt. For this reason, even the classical rebirth first promoted by Italian humanists came to be considered a foreign import, mainly pagan in nature, whose influence played only a secondary role in the Renaissance of the national culture. In Germany, for example, the Renaissance was seen as the prelude to a more important period and its duration was reduced considerably to the years from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the Reformation. Since in their view Spain, unlike Italy, did not produce a pagan revival of antiquity, but used instead its imperial power to retain and impose the medieval form of Catholicism (the Counter Reformation) on Europe, it was presumed that its culture remained essentially medieval. On the basis of this argument, some German historians, as late as 1927, would argue that Spain had never experienced a Renaissance.(16)

As a reaction to the theories advanced by Protestant historians who identified the true Renaissance with the Reformation and even rejected the Italian Renaissance for its paganism, Menendez y Pelayo claimed that it was only in sixteenth-century Spain that the true Renaissance took place. The explanation he gave and reiterated in many of his writings was that only Spanish humanists had been able to "christianize" the Italian revival of arts and letters, while northern humanists, in rejecting the achievements of Italian humanism, had only replaced it with heresy and thus "barbarism." In denying the existence of a northern European Renaissance on the basis that Protestant thinkers, because of their race and cultural traditions, could not understand Italian humanism and the lessons it had to offer, Menendez y Pelayo was even critical of Erasmus and of "Erasmism," a word he coined to describe a certain spiritual movement, heterodox in nature, that spread among Erasmus' followers in early sixteenth-century Spain.

Despite his biased interpretation of the northern Renaissance and derogatory assessment of Erasmus' works, Menendez y Pelayo should at least be credited with analyzing the development of spirituality as only one aspect of Renaissance humanism in Spain, a distinction which later Spanish critics and historians at times blurred, confusing humanism with religious feelings and practices of worship. By the turn of the century, as the idea of a Christian humanism, whether Catholic or Protestant, gained acceptance among European historians and Erasmus came to be seen as its most articulate representative, Spanish intellectuals began to search for historical causes that would explain the present political and intellectual crisis. They identified the origin of their immediate problems, among other factors, in the attempts at religious renovation and in the repressive measures which frustrated Erasmian humanism in the sixteenth century. The growing interest in Erasmus and, by extension, in the Christian humanism of northern Europe prompted Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin to write a history of Erasmus' influence in Spain.(17) The study, published in 1907, can be considered the forerunner of the more exhaustive investigation that a generation later was undertaken by Marcel Bataillon. With Bonilla y San Martin, who called the presence of Erasmus in Spain another "another chapter in the history of the Renaissance," the Christian aspect of the intellectual activities of this period became the object of renewed attention. But it was only in 1937, with Marcel Bataillon's publication of his extensive investigations on the reception and diffusion of Erasmus' works in Spain during the sixteenth century, that Erasmus took center stage in Spanish Renaissance studies, to the point that today there is hardly any writer, thinker or man of letters "worth his salt" who has not been called at one time or another an "Erasmist."(18)

The influence of northern European historians in Spain at the beginning of this century was much more pervasive than one would suspect. Even in terms of periodization we find, for example, that Bonilla y San Martin tried to reconcile the short-lived Renaissance of the German historians with the chronological interpretations of the Spanish Golden Age tradition. In his study of Fernando de Cordoba, a fifteenth-century schoolman whose works are a strange mixture of scholastic and Renaissance elements, Bonilla y San Martin accepted the beginning of the Renaissance as the middle of the fifteenth century, but extended its duration from 1517 (the beginning of the Reformation) to an arbitrary 1550.(19) His eclectic and often contradictory views reflected a vast array of sources ranging from Voltaire and Vico to late nineteenth-century German and French historians, including as well Menendez y Pelayo and a vague notion of the "revolt of the medievalists" against the Burckhardtian tradition.

For over half a century no new interpretations of the Renaissance were advanced, even though there was a slight increase in the number of studies on particular humanists and Renaissance authors. What is remarkable is that during the years in which the concept of the Renaissance was undergoing a radical revision by historians of the Middle Ages, none of the extreme interpretations that were then being proposed had any significant influence on medieval or Renaissance studies in Spain. This was due primarily to two deeply rooted assumptions which had remained constant in Spanish historiography: a consensus that strains of medieval culture survived through the Renaissance and a firm belief in the idea of a Golden Age mitigating any revisionist claim that would undermine the original character of the period. The only trace left by the medievalists' revolt that can even vaguely be related to a new understanding of Renaissance humanism in Spain is the brief attention that was paid to the topic of "arms and letters." The social and political reality underlying this recurrent motif in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writings was later turned into an embryonic interpretation of humanism. The theme of "arms and letters" was first discussed by Americo Castro as one of the elements of the Spanish Renaissance utilized by Cervantes.(20) It was meant to show that the issue dramatized by Cervantes originated in the social world of fifteenth-century men of letters who first became aware of the value of education as a means to social mobility. Though Castro, to my knowledge, never returned to this topic in his later writings, the "civic" humanistic dimension of the issue was further explored by Jose Antonio Maravall, a young scholar who was to become one of the major historians of post-war Spain.

Though Maravall's book on the "humanismo de las armas" in Cervantes' Quijote, published in 1948,(21) appeared in the guise of a literary analysis, it was really an essay on the intellectual life of the Spanish Golden Age. His aim was to demonstrate how, through this popular work, one could perceive the major currents of thought operating within the society of the time. The term humanism, used in the title in a generic sense, was in fact a synthesis of the main interpretations circulating in Spain during the first part of this century. Maravall understood humanism in its broadest sense, as a movement that combined the spiritual, moral, social, political and even economic preoccupations of sixteenth-century thinkers. Their spirituality was not learned solely from the pages of Erasmus, for it derived also from the spiritual currents of the Spanish Middle Ages. Their humanism was revealed in a yearning for personal reform that would extend to society and, ultimately, to the state. Forced to live in an empire with aspirations alien to their own, they longed for a Golden Age, a kind of political utopia which looked both to the past and to the future.

Maravall's concept of humanism is not strictly related to the revival of classical antiquity, for such a revival, though important, was incidental to the real concerns of the people of the sixteenth century. Regarding his concept of the Renaissance, he was convinced that the period had been misunderstood by those who believed that it represented a break with the Middle Ages. A revival, in Maravall's mind, is a way of looking at something from a new and different point of view. Hence his belief in an undeniable continuity that linked the culture of the so-called Renaissance to the Middle Ages.

Many of Maravall's early views developed along different lines as he joined the ongoing discussion on the question of Renaissance and humanism, a subject to which he returned many times and explored at great length. His views were often controversial but always stimulating. Those works in which he deals with the problem of the Renaissance deserve a more detailed examination.

In recent decades other studies have appeared that have made significant contributions to the field of Renaissance humanism. At a later date, I hope to review these works, together with those of Maravall that I have not touched on here.

1 With the exception, perhaps, of Italy, nowhere in Europe was the use of the neologism "humanist" as widespread as in sixteenth-century Spain. Used at first to indicate the teacher of the studia humanitatis, it soon acquired a variety of meanings. It came to designate the dangerous scholar with reformist ideas, the pedant, the poet, any student of the humanities, the rogue and, with this same meaning, it was even applied to a feminine literary character. By the end of the sixteenth century, the need was felt to put an end to the trivialization of such a designation and the true role of the "humanist" became the subject of two extensive treatises: Juan Lorenzo Palmireno, Vocabulario del humanista (Valencia, 1569) and Baltasar de Cespedes, Discurso de las letras humanas llamado el humanista, written in 1600, which circulated in manuscript form.

2 See among others: Juan Francisco de Masdeu, Historia critica de Espana y de la cultura espanola, 20 vols. (Madrid, 1783-1805); Juan Andres, Del origen, progreso y estado actual de toda literatura (Madrid, 1784).

3 Origenes de la poesia castellana (Madrid, 1754). His work was to have a lasting influence both in and outside of Spain. It became known in Europe in German translation by the famous philologist Johan Andre Diez in 1769.

4 There were several histories of literature in translation circulating in Spain during the first half of the nineteenth century, including Frederick Bouterweck, Historia de la literatura espanola, trans. J. Gomes de la Cortina and N. Hugalde de Mollinedo (Madrid, 1829); and J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Historia de la literatura espanola, trans. Lorenzo de Figueroa and Jose Amador de los Rios (Seville, 1841). In these and other translations, one can see how the Spanish translators went to great lengths to try to fill in what the foreign author had disregarded or to mitigate the excessively harsh judgment passed on Renaissance authors accused of pedantry because of their erudition.

5 It is very likely that J. Michelet, Histoire de la France, 5 vols. (Paris, 1833-1850), which covered French history up to the end of the fifteenth century, inspired Amador de los Rios to undertake a similar enterprise. The publication of the seventh volume of the Spaniard's Historia critica de la literatura espanola (Madrid, 1861-65), in which he deals with the fifteenth century, coincided with the appearance of Michelet's volume (1862) on the sixteenth century, entitled La renaissance.

6 Jose Amador de los Rios, Vida del Marques de Santillana, reprinted by Espasa Calpe (Madrid, 1947), 83-84: "Aquel inextinguible amor al estudio, aquella insaciable sed de nuevas y mas luminosas ideas que le animo toda su vida estableciendo vivos y estrechos comercios con los pueblos mas cultos de Europa," which "dotaron a Castilla de inapreciables tesoros y contribuyeron poderosamente a preparar la venturosa era de Isabel la Catolica, epoca de verdadero renacimiento."

7 The polemic started when G. Tiraboschi attributed the decline of Italian Renaissance culture to the Spanish domination of the country. Saverio Lampillas answered these and many other charges in a work written in Italian which is, in effect, a literary history of Spain: Saggio storico-apologetico della letteratura spagnuola contro le pregiudicate opinioni di alcuni moderni scrittori italiani, 4 vols. (Geneva, 1772-1782). A Spanish translation of this work was published in Zaragoza in 1783. The exchange of letters regarding the controversy between these two scholars is reproduced in G. Tiraboschi, Storia della letteratura italiana, 11 vols. (Modena, 177-1782).

8 Historia, VI, 9-10.

9 Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, "Humanistas espanoles del siglo XVI," reproduced in Estudios y discursos de critica historica y literaria, ed. E. Sanchez Reyes (Santander, 1949), II.3.

10 Ibid.: "Por renacimiento entiende todo el mundo la resurreccion de las ideas y de las formas de la antiguedad clasica."

11 Ibid., II.5: "la forma antigua en toda su amplitud, hasta en sus ultimas concreciones de lengua y de ritmo."

12 Ibid., II.6: "espiritu critico y arte del estilo." Mayans y Siscar may have learned about the humanist attack on scholastic learning from Luis Vives, In Pseudodialecticos. It should be noted that the only edition of Vives' complete works that has ever been published in Spain is the one prepared by Mayans y Siscar in 1782.

13 Ibid., II.18: "todos los elementos se determinaron con su propio y grandioso caracter."

14 Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, Poetas de la cone de Don Juan II (Madrid), 11.

15 M. Menendez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodox os espanoles, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1965), I.45: "el espiritu latino, vivificado por el Renacimiento, protesto contra la Reforma que es hija legitima del individualismo teutonico."

16 Indicative of this position is V. Klemperer, "Gibt es eine spanische Renaissance," Logos, XVI, 1927.

17 Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, "Erasmo en Espana (Episodio de la historia del Renacimiento)," Revue Hispanique 17 (1907): 379-548.

18 Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (Madrid, 1937).

19 Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, Fernando de Cordoba (1423?-1486?) y los origenes del Renacimiento filosofico en Espana. Episodio de la historia de la logica (Madrid, 1911), 16.

20 Americo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes (Barcelona-Madrid, new ed., 1972), 215-19.

21 Jose Antonio Maravall, El humanismo de las armas en Don Quijote. Prologue by R. Menendez Pidal (Madrid, 1948).