This thesis presents a first critical edition of Lope de Vega’s saint’s play 'San Nicolás de Tolentino' (c. 1614) alongside an introductory study. The text is based on the sole seventeenth-century witness. The four modern re-prints/editions of the play have been consulted to help remedy defects in the 'princeps', which has been edited in accordance with the current practices of 'comedia' editors. Variants are collated in a list following the playtext. Footnotes to the text explain the important complexities and obscurities of 'San Nicolás' and some idiosyncrasies of Golden-Age literature generally. The introductory study has six sections. The first pieces together a history of the veneration of St Nicholas in Spain, detailing the miracles and patronages that might have led Lope to compose this play of his own accord or that might have led to a commission. Internal evidence suggests strongly that any commission must have come specifically from the Discalced Augustinians. The second section examines Lope’s possible sources, concluding tentatively that Critana’s 'Vida' is the most likely source. Sections 3 and 4 present an interpretation of the protagonists – Nicolás and the 'gracioso' Ruperto. My comparison of Lope’s Nicolás with the saint depicted in the hagiographies casts into relief techniques Lope used to prevent this prodigious miracle-worker from alienating the audience. The 'gracioso' character, I argue, is intended to offer a model of Christian piety of a humbler kind: one significant factual departure from the hagiographic tradition places Ruperto at the forefront of the play’s religious purpose. However, a couple of comically lewd scenes in Act 2 (unmentioned by previous critics) make for a complex 'gracioso' struggling to resist temptation. I argue that Ruperto’s inner turmoil might reflect Lope’s own sense of unworthiness as he prepared for priestly ordination. Section 5 treats the supernatural in 'San Nicolás', demonstrating Lope’s familiarity with early modern theories of supernatural phenomenology and concluding that, despite the typically allegorical names of Ira, Carne, and Inobediencia, for example, these figures are intended, not as literary abstractions, but as real spirits, incorporeal demons. The final section presents an analysis of the play’s versification, which is largely in keeping with Lope’s usual habits.

The Bible serves as a source for Celestina, but biblical references and reminiscences in the text do not derive from the Scriptures themselves, but from secondary and even tertiary sources. These represent the typical medium of access to the Bible of laymen and, in the case of Celestina, of a very specific group of laymen: university members, which formed the original audience of the work and shared a same way of reading it. Therefore, biblical intertextuality in Celestina is defined by the relation of university members to these sources. When analysed from the perspective of university readers, Celestina becomes a pseudo-contemplative work to which the principles of visual mental representation of affective meditation apply. If read making use of these principles, the didactic and moralising message of the preliminary texts is confirmed and Celestina reveals itself as an admonitory tale against carnal love. Moreover, it appears as a counterfeit sentimental romance, concretely, a reply to "Cárcel de amor", to contemporary love habits and to courtly customs. In addition, reading Celestina from the perspective of an university audience offers a new view on the misuse of biblical references. Instead of being representative of a heterodox attitude toward the Scriptures, these function as a condemnation of the bad use of auctoritates in dialectic contexts. As a result, Celestina can be related to a reformist current in the university world, which was particularly critical to Scholasticism and its teaching methodology. In this sense, Celestina aligns itself with Humanism and, specifically with Christian Humanism. Finally, analysing Celestina from the point of view of university readers explains why a work, which had been originally conceived as a didactic and moralising text, was criticised in the sixteenth century for being inmmoral: audience and times had changed.

This thesis examines the Jesuit and Ignatian influence on the works of Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), who was a prolific and widely published author and a member of the Society of Jesus in Spain. He wrote several works across different literary genres both in Spanish and Latin, but was best known for his popular works in Spanish: two miscellanies of natural philosophy, Curiosa filosofía (1630) and Oculta filosofía (1633); a catechism, the Práctica del catecismo romano (1640); his ascetical treatises, especially De la diferencia entre lo temporal y eterno (1640); and his ‘advice-books’ to princes and nobles, most notably Causa y remedio de los males públicos (1642). As a member of the Jesuit Order, Nieremberg wrote these works with the intention to ‘save souls’, this being the main apostolic goal of the Society. While they provide people with knowledge (‘noticia’) – whether doctrinal, natural, spiritual, or political – these works teach readers to view human existence according to its true end: God’s will of salvation. All things of the temporal world are portrayed as a means to that end. In order to accomplish this goal, Nieremberg incorporates elements from Loyola’s Ejercicios espirituales (1548), the spiritual foundation of the Jesuit Order, and develops a rhetorical strategy which encourages readers to discern the will of God in the world they inhabit. He also develops this rhetoric according to some of the principal literary and artistic conventions of the seventeenth century, and provides an important example of how a prominent Jesuit writer came to express the apostolic and spiritual principles of his Order, but in the language and imagery of Spain’s Siglo de Oro.

This thesis examines the articles the Brazilian writer Lima Barreto (1881-1922) published in the popular satirical magazine Careta. It argues that Careta epitomises Lima Barreto’s aim to create social impact through literature, as it provided him with the largest readership he enjoyed in his lifetime, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers weekly nationwide and internationally. The thesis expands the knowledge about the strategies Lima Barreto used to convey his ideas, showing how he endeavoured to engage with mass audiences in order to combat social fragmentation and intellectual alienation in early twentieth century Brazil. The significance of this thesis is evident on two levels. First, I demonstrate throughout the chapters that Barreto fully engaged with Careta to convey his ideas to a mass audience, choosing the magazine as his main periodical voice in the last years of his life. This argument challenges the idea that Lima Barreto was a marginal writer in the First Republic. Second, the originality of this thesis lies in locating and uncovering almost one hundred and fifty hitherto unknown texts, most of them published pseudonymously in Careta. Chapter one discusses the militancy of Barreto's works. Chapter two argues that Barreto elected magazines, more than newspapers, to convey his message to a large audience. Chapter three relates the early history of Careta. Chapter four suggests that Barreto incorporated pictorial strategies into his articles. Chapter five argues that Barreto embraced Careta's central theme derived from the Commedia dell'Arte. Chapter six discusses systematically the pseudonyms attributed to Barreto in Careta and provides robust evidence that he published many hitherto unknown texts pseudonymously. Finally, I conclude that Careta encapsulates Barreto's efforts to reach a mass readership and communicate with readers beyond literary circles.

This thesis investigates the first poetry written in Castilian by intellectuals, the 'mester de clerecía', ‘craft of clerics’. Exploring the unique circumstances of Iberia in the Middle Ages as a hub for the intellectual vanguard and a holy territory for encounters with saints, pilgrimage and Reconquest, I examine the canonical texts of an alleged thirteenth-century poetic school as the Castilian bedrock of a wider Iberian and European literary movement. Notably including analysis of the fourteenth-century "Libro de buen amor", a canonical work in its own right thought to parody the earlier poems, I also reassess the significance of the verse form 'cuaderna vía' for the 'mester de clerecía', in which the thirteenth-century poems are exclusively written. Over an introduction and four chapters, I combine close reading of the "Libro de Alexandre" (Chapter 1), Berceo’s Vidas of Millán, Domingo and Oria (Chapter 2), the "Libro de Apolonio" and "Poema de Fernán González" (Chapter 3), and the "Libro de buen amor" (Chapter 4), with research into intellectual, pedagogical, and religious contexts. Notably, I have found the poems analyzed to be especially concerned with the landscape of the reading mind. The result is an expanded view of the 'mester de clerecía' as theological and philosophical poems that offer ways of understanding and approaching the life of the mind as well as that of the body that are thought-provoking and informative to this day. Concluding that the thirteenth-century, canonical poems are the witnesses of a 'textual community' of authors rather than a poetic school, I advocate an inclusive definition of the 'mester de clerecía'. The 'mester de clerecía' are of extremely rich intellectual scope and are of potential interest to scholars of all European literatures, and literary, intellectual, and social history, as well as theology and philosophy.

This thesis studies, through a literary and theological analysis of her writings and an examination of her background, how a fifteenth century Spanish nun called Teresa de Cartagena dealt spiritually with disability. She was physically disabled, having become deaf as an adult but also having endured many illnesses. Her first book, Arboleda de los enfermos, was written to pass on to other sufferers the spiritual lessons she had learned from her own suffering; that suffering was good because it had saved her from sin and had brought her to God. Her second work, Admiraçión operum Dey, was written to answer those who had criticised her for the act of writing because of her gender, at that time a disability for any woman wishing to write or teach. She justified her writing as a special work of God, but did not claim mystical direct divine inspiration. Teresa was a member of a prominent family of Jewish Christians (conversos). At the time she was writing, the second half of the fifteenth century, anti-converso prejudice and violence were growing in Spain. This culminated in the introduction of the Inquisition in order to deal with the so-called 'judaising conversos'. In these circumstances her conversa status was a distinct social disability, but there is no express mention of this in her writings. However, there are traces in her writings of converso concerns, and of a specifically converso theology. Although there have been many studies of Teresa de Cartagena from the viewpoints of medieval Spanish literature, disability studies, feminist history and her use of rhetorical techniques, there has been no in depth study of her theology and spirituality. This thesis demonstrates that, although in general these were orthodox and unoriginal, they were unusual for a woman of her time and background.

In addition to coverage in the national and international media of the ongoing violence in Mexico related to the drug trade, there has been growing interest in fictional representations of the Mexican drug trade, its origins and social context. There is now a considerable body of written narratives that have been christened narconovelas. A small number of academic works has charted the emergence of the narconovela and sought to examine how drug traffickers have been represented and evaluated in fiction. However, very little attention has been paid to the aesthetic qualities of ‘narco-literature’. This study examines four of the most highly-regarded works in detail: Balas de plata (2008), by Élmer Mendoza; Los minutos negros (2006), by Martín Solares; Contrabando (2008), by Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda; and Trabajos del reino (2004), by Yuri Herrera. So embedded is the phenomenon of drug trafficking in northern Mexican culture, so suffused with cliché is its representation in other media, that to write about the topic with originality and ethical nuance is difficult. This thesis accounts for the distinct choices made by the four authors in question to address this difficulty of representation in the structure, style and tone of their novels. The self-awareness exhibited by these works of fiction regarding the challenges of representing their subject matter render them the most sophisticated examples yet created of the so-called narconovela.

This dissertation comprises the first study of the poetry of the Portuguese humanist Diogo de Teive (1513-14 – c. 1569). It examines and presents a scholarly edition of the Epithalamium which Teive composed on the occasion of the marriage of Princess Maria of Portugal to Alessandro Farnese in 1565. It also critically explores the work in which the poem was published, the Epodon libri tres (Lisbon, 1565). Because both this and the Epithalamium bring together different strands of Teive’s literary work, Chapter One analyses the development of his literary career, linking it to the ideological and cultural transformations which took place in Portugal from the 1540s to the 1560s, and the author’s attempt to carve his identity and space in the Portuguese literary scene. Chapter Two explores the concepts of ‘imitatio’ and ‘mimesis’ in the Epodon libri tres, shedding light on specific aspects of the Epithalamium. In the eyes of his readers, Teive emerges as a Catholic Horace. This is achieved by means of formal imitation, ‘aemulatio’, and allusion to Horace, a process whereby Teive introduces significant and ideologically motivated differences representative of the impact of Counter-Reformation upon literary writing. The ‘aemulatio’ of Prudentius’s Peristephanon in book II is to be understood in this light. Part Two engages with Teive’s comments on questions of verbal representation in the Epodon libri tres. Chapter Three analyses the Epithalamium from a generic perspective, arguing that it presents instances of generic enrichment, and that these are an example of the appropriation of occasional poetry for the purpose of authorial self-representation. One of the instances of generic enrichment is the incorporation of a didactic passage indebted to the tradition of the ‘speculum principum’, which is analysed in Chapter Four. Part One interprets the rewriting and appropriation of Plutarch and Erasmus as authorising strategies whereby Teive represents himself as an advisor of kings in the Epodon libri tres. Part Two discusses the author’s political thought and opinions, drawing from an analysis of the Epithalamium. Finally, Chapter Five comprises the study of the transmission of the poem, its metrical analysis, edition, translation, and commentary.

The motif of 'exile-and-return' is found in works from a wide range of periods and linguistic traditions. The standard narrative pattern depicts the return of wrongfully exiled heroes or peoples to their former abode or their establishment of a superior home, which signals a restoration of order. The appeal of the pattern lies in its association with undue loss, rightful recovery and the universal vindication of the protagonist. Though by no means confined to any one period or region, the particular narrative pattern of the exile-and-return motif is prevalent in vernacular texts of England and Spain around 1170–1250. This is the subject of the thesis. The following research engages with scholarship on Anglo-Norman romances and their characteristic use of exile-and-return that sets them apart from continental French romances, by highlighting the widespread employment of this narrative pattern in Spanish poetic works during the same period. The prevalence of the pattern in both literatures is linked to analogous interaction with continental French works, the relationship between the texts and their political contexts, and a common responses to wider ecclesiastical reforms. A broader aim is to draw attention to further, unacknowledged similarities between contemporary texts from these different linguistic traditions, as failure to take into account the wider, multilingual literary contexts of this period leads to incomplete arguments. The methodology is grounded in close reading of four main texts selected for their exemplarity, with some consideration of the historical context and contemporary intertexts: the Romance of Horn, the Cantar de mio Cid, Gui de Warewic and the Poema de Fernán González. A range of intertexts are considered alongside in order to elucidate the particular concerns and distinctive use of exile-and-return in the main works.