This book discusses five Early Modern literary texts that emerged in Europe between 1499 and 1627. The 5 texts are: La Celestina, the Dialoghi d’amore by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, and João Pinto Delgado’s poeticizing treatments of biblical texts. The book understands these text as essential for the epoch, the interpretation of which has hitherto focused mainly on the – alleged or actual – Jewish, “New Christian”, or Marranic affiliation of their authors. The book replaces an origin-focused discussion of Early Modern Spanish, Por ... More

This book discusses five Early Modern literary texts that emerged in Europe between 1499 and 1627. The 5 texts are: La Celestina, the Dialoghi d’amore by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, and João Pinto Delgado’s poeticizing treatments of biblical texts. The book understands these text as essential for the epoch, the interpretation of which has hitherto focused mainly on the – alleged or actual – Jewish, “New Christian”, or Marranic affiliation of their authors. The book replaces an origin-focused discussion of Early Modern Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French literature with another perspective which neither levels the particular character of these texts nor overlooks their encapsulation in a universal historical experience due to a too narrow focus on the authors’ biographies. The individually varying engagement of the five texts with questions of origin and ancestry described in this study reveals components of a Marranic historical experience beyond the authors’ affiliations. These components seem like layers of memory which, although buried, build the foundation for the overlying layers and show through them. The analysis of these texts serves to initiate a fresh discussion of the complicated link between author and text as well as of the relevance of an author’s origin for an insight into aesthetic characteristics. The texts provide an understanding of Jewish History in Early Modern Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian Literatures in the emergence of modernity.