Fifteenth & Sixteenth Century Literature: Key Themes

Posted on Apr 3, 2025 in Latin

Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Century Issues

Fifteenth-Century, the 1st New Mentality:

  • Influenced the epidemic after the Black Death.
  • Had consequential steps of the modern age, enabled by the media age.
  • Transformations:
    • Transformations policies: Recovery of royal authority.
    • Transformations economic and socials: Development of commerce in all regions and roads brought increased contact of bourgeois and wide for + of the thinking.
    • Transformations culturals: The step to knowledge from the universities (giving rise to the humanist thinking).
    • Changes in values system: Money became an essential value.

-La Celestina:

  • Scribed in the fifteenth century finals by Fernando de Rojas.
  • Reflects an urban society of that time.
  • A text dialogued, destined for oral reading.
  • Styles: A mix of colloquial language and elevated worship.
  • Different characters: No longer just great lords, but also marginalized people.
  • Passion and greed: The characters desire pleasures of life without holistic efforts (forgetting virtues).
  • Argumental schema: page 107.

-The Renaissance:

  • Diffusion resulted from trips. Determined a new conception of the world and man.
  • Born in Italy in the fourteenth century.
  • Arrived in Spain in the sixteenth century.
  • Very religious.
  • Humanists intended to educate the public and bourgeois nobility.
  • A stylistic and urban culture, which attached great importance to artistic and intellectual training.
  • Based on knowledge from the works of classical antiquity.
  • Renaissance culture:
    • The ideal courtier: Needed a noble humanistic education, also dedicated time to literature and love.
    • Artists and patrons: The Renaissance artist was an educated person and protectors of the arts.
    • Imitation of antiquity: Classical works were imitated and turned into models for creation.


-The Renaissance position: The model was the possibility that brought deep renovation of metrics.

  • New poetic models (renovation of metrics).
  • Themes:
    • Love: Considered a painful and contradictory experience. The beauty of the beloved is described with metaphors based on nature (carpe diem: the Latin tradition that invites to enjoy youth).
    • Nature and mythology: Love scenes develop in an idyllic nature (locus amoenus).
  • Metrics: Use of hendecasyllable combined with heptasyllable verses.
    • Sonnet: Compound of 2 quartets and 2 tercets rhyming ABBA ABBA CDC DCD (the tercets rhyme may vary).
    • Silva: Formed by an unlimited number of heptasyllable and hendecasyllable verses with free rhyme.
    • Italian influence:
      • Lira.
      • Royal eighth.
      • Stances.
      • Tercet.

D-Evolution in the Spanish position: In the second half of the sixteenth century bloomed literature of religious character.

  • Asceticism: Purification of the soul through rejection of earthly pleasures.
  • Mysticism: Consists of the union of the soul with God. 3 phases:
    • The purgative: Detaching the soul from what is earthly.
    • The illuminative: The soul feels the divine presence.
    • The unitive: The union.

“Garcilaso de la Vega:

  • Prototype of noble courtier.
  • Introduced the Petrarchan model in Spain and succeeded.
  • The most important issue of Garcilaso’s poetry is the loving complaint by the rejection or death of the beloved.
  • Stories featuring pastoral or mythological characters (Eclogue).