Las Obras de Cristoval Castillejo Corregidas y Enmendadas por Mandado del Consejo de la Santa y General Inquisición.
Madrid. Andrés Sánchez.- 1600
Cristóbal Castillejo (Salamanca 1490?- Vienna 1550). Highest exponent of renaissance poetry in Spain. He strove to assert the Castilian literary tradition against the Italian trends advocated by Garcilaso de la Vega, Boscán and Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, while recognizing the beauty of the alternative forms of metric and rhyme.
As a teenager he was taken to the Court of King Fernando el Católico to serve as a page for the Infante Don Fernando, second son of Juana la Loca and brother of the future Emperor Carlos V. He became involved in the intrigues of the power struggles between the supporters of the Infante Don Fernando and the future King Carlos I and much of his work focuses on the criticism of those aspects of the courtiers that he considered excessive and deviant from the ideal reflected by Castiglione.
After the death of Cardinal Cisneros and the proclamation of Carlos as Emperor, he accompanied the Infante Don Fernando to Flanders.
Disappointed with court life, he entered the Cistercian Order in the Monastery of San Martín de Valdaiglesias (Madrid) in 1520 and in 1522 he travelled to the Court of Henry VIII of England with the Bishop of Astorga by direct mandate of Pope Adrian VI. He returned to the Monastery where he remained until 1525 when, at the request of the Infante Fernando, already Archduke of Austria, he left for Vienna to once again hold the position of secretary from which he had been removed seven years earlier.
Among his works, the following stand out:
– The Story of Pyramus and Thisbe, the first translation of a mythological fable devoid of the moral or allegorical application characteristic of medieval translations,
– The translation of Cicero’s dialogues De senectute and De amicitia,
– The Sermon on Love, which was censured by the Inquisition,
– The Women’s Dialogue where the actors maintain an antagonistic stance towards women, the older one emphasizing the negative aspects of the female gender and the younger one the positive ones, and to whom the arguments of the former are not able to convince.
– And the “Aula”, also in the gender of the Dialogue between the young Lucrecio, eager and eager to succeed at Court, and the old Prudencio, whose experience results in a very negative view of the Court.
The first edition of the complete works, whose license to publish had been requested in vain in 1552 by a nephew of the poet to Philip II, did not see the light until 1573, after severe corrections and inquisitorial suppressions.
This is a nice edition with a fantastic binding by Brugalla.