This chapter is the product of a Keynote Address that Dr. Davis offered at the VII Conference of the Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro which took place at Robinson College, Cambridge, 18-22 julio, 2005. She examines a variety of kinds of early modern Spanish maritime writing (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

Abstract: This article explores how the abad Maluenda exploited his amateur poetry and vihuela talents, as a way of social promotion in courtly circles also frequented by young Count of Villamediana. This work also sheds some light on the ecdotic entanglement between Villamediana’s and Maluenda’s poems, in connection with the poetry com…[Read more]

Abstract
This article tries to restore the central figure of doña Catalina de la Cerda, lady-inwaiting
of the queen during the first quarter or the 17th Century, consistently
mistaken for other noble women of higher social rank. Nevertheless, this lady
enjoyed an unparallel celebrity at court, due to her beauty and personality, and
became a…[Read more]

In the Laurel de Apolo (1630), Lope de Vega inserts a funeral sonnet for Catalina de la Cerda, a sonnet also contained in a letter addressed «To the Prince». In this article, we will prove that this letter was not addressed to the soon to-be Felipe IV, as Lopian epistolary editors unanimously accept, but to Francisco de Borja y Aragón, Prince of…[Read more]

Abstract
Scholars have constantly stated their complaints about the alleged structural failures in The
Two Damsels, such as the repetition of episodes, or the unnecessary duplication of characters.
In our reading, we show the instrumentality of those controversial issues, not to elucidate the
honor cases of the two female protagonists, but the…[Read more]

Seventeenth Century writers and poets exploited the discourses on age, which early modern
humanists inherited from Antiquity, reworking at their convenience theories about natural wit, the
value of experience, or humoral constitution, to propound an image of the ideal author favoring
their own literary careers. This article examines the…[Read more]

The new fashion in courtly culture during Philip III´s reign triggered a high demand for image
creation and artistic representation, pieces of art that in turn constitute better way to understand
the aforementioned changes. This is true for some of Luis de Góngora’s poems, which are
dedicated to Margaret of Austria´s ladies-in-waiting at the…[Read more]

Stories from the Hebrew Bible were popular among the Iberian Peninsula’s Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Beginning in the 14th century, Muslims and Moriscos retold these stories in Aljamiado texts in Spanish or Aragonese written in Arabic characters. These fictionalized retellings drew on vernacular language and literary forms common to C…[Read more]