Speculum
- Speculum / Volume 87 / Issue 02 / June 2012, pp 499-519
- Copyright © The Medieval Academy of America 2012
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0038713412001042 (About DOI), Published online: 13 June 2012
Articles
Gendering Spain's Humanism: The Case of Juan de Lucena's Epístola exhortatoria a las letras
Barbara F. Weissbergera1
a1 University of Minnesota—Twin Cities (email: weiss046@umn.edu)
The role that class and ethnicity played in the self-fashioning of the professional men of letters who shaped fifteenth-century Spain's humanist project has been the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny for over fifty years. It was José Antonio Maravall who first demonstrated that the so-called letrados had a “conciencia estamental,” a class consciousness derived from their indispensable roles as administrators, advisors, diplomats, and chroniclers in the service of the crown. Subsequent scholarship showed that part of letrado self-consciousness resulted from the hostility of Old Christian noblemen toward these ambitious non-noble, university-trained men, many of them New Christians or conversos. One way in which the aristocracy stigmatized the intellectual pursuits of the letrados was in fact to call those endeavors “Jewish.”
(Online publication June 13 2012)
Barbara F. Weissberger is Associate Professor, Emerita in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities (email: weiss046@umn.edu)
