Writer Jorge de Montemayor wrote in the Spanish 16th century. History of literature is mainly interested in his last book Los siete libros de la Diana (The Seven Books of Diana) which is traditionally called the first pastoral romance written in the Iberian Peninsula. Concurrently, most studies explain the book from the same perspective, which works with the big artistic period (Renaissance) and artistic genre (the pastoral romance). If we focus on Jorge de Montemayor's book from a different view - which is connected with period situation (problems of converso, the Inquisition, the heterodoxy's opinions or book censorship) and which takes the author's previous texts in consideration - we are able to reread his work. This thesis seeks to use ideas coming from New Historicism. Using period situation Montemayor's texts set out to explain that Los siete libros de la Diana is closer to the spiritual way of mysticism than to literary form such as the pastoral romance.

The work focuses on the study of Spanish pastoral novels presenting their two fundamentally different aspects. On the one hand, the thesis describes the idealised world of shephards living in harmony with nature, singing about their unrequited love. On the other, the work points out, that these novels also include some realistic elements, corrupting the mentioned idealism. It aims to answer the question, to what extent these elements appeare in the studied novels, and what is their function. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This thesis studies the literary genre of pastoral between 1559 and 1647. The first of these dates is that of a work that changed the course of early modern pastoral, Montemayor’s Diana; and the second marks the English translation of Gomberville’s Polexandre, a pastoral romance which exemplifies the shifts in cultural values that re-shaped Montemayor’s model over the century that followed its publication. My study focusses on the significance for this genre of the ethical quality known to classical moral philosophy as otium, and translated in early modern English by words such as peace, leisure, retirement, ease and idleness. Otium has strong historical associations with the tradition of Virgilian pastoral. Its significance in early modern pastorals, however, has been largely overlooked, despite the fact that early modern interest in otium had been revitalised by the rediscovery of some of its most important classical discussions. This renewed interest in otium, I argue, was essential to the development of early modern pastoral. My argument challenges both old and new critical perspectives on pastoral, and engages with key issues in early modern culture which literary scholars have neglected. Older studies understood pastoral otium simply as idyllic retreat; newer ones accept this view, but argue against its privileged and quietist political implications, preferring to concentrate on the tradition of interpreting pastoral as political allegory. Otium’s principal connotations, however, were neither quiet nor idyllic. Though its restorative qualities were sometimes cautiously acknowledged, otium’s potential to corrupt was ever-present, and affected a range of areas including privacy, politics, moral psychology and medicine. When people wanted to imaginatively explore those effects, I argue, pastoral was the genre to which they were most likely to turn. Listening to what pastorals say about otium can play an important role in reconstructing this crucial and misunderstood aspect of early modern culture.