La mujer en el contexto epistolar poético del Siglo de Oro

Description

The literary verse epistle was an important vehicle for poetic expression among the Spanish poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though hundreds of verse epistles were written, only a few individual epistles have been the subject of scholarly articles; Carol Le Vine's and Andrea Lower's doctoral dissertations trace the development of the genre as a whole; and Damaso Alonso's book studies one of the epistles, dealing specifically with problems of authorship. None of these works focuses on the over thirty epistles addressed to or inspired by women. This dissertation attempts to begin to fill this lacuna in the literary criticism. For this study I divide the epistles in two groups, taking into consideration the addressee, who dictates the decorum and the subject matter of the letter. The first group includes those epistles addressed to men; the second one, letters to or inspired by women. The epistolary correspondence between men follows mainly the classical traditions and that of the debates, as the poets recur to the classical topoi of friendship, the court versus the village and the ars poetica. Similarly, the classical influence is observed in the generic contaminatio of the epistle with the eclogue, the elegy and the satire. Though most of the epistles addressed to men discuss a variety of serious themes, those addressed to women always present a stormy relationship between the sexes. Such letters imitate the courtly love tradition, the troubadour and satirical poetry, as well as the Bible and medieval works. This dissertation examines in detail the epistles addressed to women, which are divided in three categories--laudatory, querulous and satirical--by showing continuity in the perception of woman through the centuries. Obviously, this study of the verse epistle does not pretend to be definitive. My intention is to invite the reader to reconsider a genre cultivated by most of the well-known poets of the Spanish Golden Age but which unfortunately has been nearly ignored by literary critics.