Luis de León

Luis de León
Fray Luis de León, described and drawn around 1598 by Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644) in his Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos, ilustres y memorables varones.
Born	Luis de León 1527 or 1528 Belmonte
Died	August 23, 1591 (aged 63 or 64) Madrigal de las Altas Torres
Education	Philosophy and theology; student of Fray Juan de Guevara, Melchor Cano, Cipriano de la Huerga
Alma mater	University of Salamanca, University of Alcalá
Occupations	Theologian, poet, humanist and religious of the Order of Saint Augustine and the Order of Augustinian Recollects
Writing career
Language	Castilian, Latin
Period	Renaissance
Genres	Theology, biblical studies, lyric poetry

Classroom of Fray Luis de León in the Escuelas Mayores of the University of Salamanca.

Fray Luis de León (Latin: F. Luyssi Legionensis; Belmonte, 1527 or 1528 – Madrigal de las Altas Torres, August 23, 1591) was a Spanish theologian, poet, astronomer, humanist and Augustinian religious of the Salamancan school.

Fray Luis de León is one of the most important poets of the second phase of the Spanish Renaissance, together with Francisco de Aldana, Alonso de Ercilla, Fernando de Herrera and Saint John of the Cross. His work forms part of the ascetic literature of the second half of the 16th century and is inspired by the soul's desire to withdraw from everything earthly in order to attain what God has promised, identified with peace and knowledge. Moral and ascetic themes dominate all of his work.

In addition, Fray Luis de León was one of the experts consulted for changing the Julian calendar, used in the West since the time of Julius Caesar, to the current Gregorian calendar, so named after Pope Gregory XIII, who oversaw it.

Biography

Fray Luis de León was born in Belmonte in 1527 or 1528 and was of Jewish converso origin on both sides. His father was the lawyer Lope de León and his mother Inés Varela. He lived and pursued his first studies in Madrid and in Valladolid, places where his father carried out the distinguished work of royal counselor. When he turned fourteen, he went to Salamanca to enter the Order of the Augustinians, probably in January 1543, and he took his vows on January 29, 1544. From then on, Salamanca was the center of his intellectual life as a professor at its university.

He studied Arts and Philosophy under the tutelage of Fray Juan de Guevara (1544–1546) and Theology in Salamanca and Toledo, supposedly with Melchor Cano, although this has not been proven. During the 1556–1557 academic year he met Fray Cipriano de la Huerga, an orientalist and chair of Bible at Alcalá de Henares, and this encounter was a crucial experience in Fray Luis's intellectual formation. Likewise, an uncle of his, Francisco de León, chair of law at the University of Salamanca, served as his tutor at that time, since his family had moved to Granada following the vicissitudes of the profession of his father, who had been appointed Oidor in its Chancery in 1542.

Between May and June 1560 he obtained the degrees of licentiate and master in Theology from the University of Salamanca. He then began his competition for the chairs: first that of Bible, which had been left vacant by Gregorio Gallo—later appointed Bishop of Orihuela—and which was won by Gaspar de Grajal; and then that of Saint Thomas, which he finally obtained the following year (1561), defeating seven candidates, among them the Dominican master Diego Rodríguez.

In 1565, upon completing four years in the chair of Saint Thomas, he competed for that of Durandus, and once again emerged triumphant against the same Diego Rodríguez. He held it until March 1572. At the end of 1571, together with the musician Francisco Salinas and the rector Diego de Castilla, he was part of the jury of the literary contest held to give thanks for the victory of Lepanto and for the birth of Prince Ferdinand.

These and other successes probably earned him the ill will of the Dominicans, patrons of the Inquisition; and indeed, the Augustinian was denounced and spent some time in prison in Valladolid, on the street that now bears the name of Fray Luis de León. His principal offense was translating the Song of Songs into the vernacular without a license. In addition, his defense of the original Hebrew text had irritated the most intransigent scholastics, especially the Canon and chair of Greek León de Castro—author of some commentaries on Isaiah—and the Dominican Fray Bartolomé de Medina, who was annoyed with him because of some academic failures. For Fray Luis, during the meetings of theologians held at the University to deal with the approval of the so-called Vatable Bible, had defended a series of propositions that were seen as dangerously close to Protestantism. All of this ended up bringing the friar to prison, along with the masters Gaspar de Grajal and Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra. In prison he wrote De los nombres de Cristo and several poems, among them the Canción a Nuestra Señora.

After his precautionary detention in prison (from March 27, 1572, to December 7, 1576), he was appointed professor of Moral Philosophy. And, a year later, he at last obtained the chair of Sacred Scripture, which he obtained in ownership in 1579. At the university, one of his students was Saint John of the Cross, who was then called Fray Juan de San Matías.

In Salamanca the poetic works that the Augustinian composed as a pastime soon spread, and they earned him the praise not only of his friends, the humanists Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (el Brocense) and Benito Arias Montano, but also of poets such as Juan de Almeida and Francisco de la Torre, as well as of Juan de Grial, Pedro Chacón, and the blind musician Francisco de Salinas, who would form the so-called first Salamancan School or School of Salamanca.

The reasons for his imprisonment must ultimately be attributed to the envies and quarrels existing among religious orders, above and beyond the specific denunciations. The main accusation was that he preferred the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to the official Latin version (the Vulgate translation of Saint Jerome) adopted by the Council of Trent, which was true. But to this was added—as we have seen—his having dared to translate parts of the Bible, and specifically the Song of Songs, into the vernacular, something expressly prohibited by that recent council, which, out of suspicion of Protestant thought (recall the translation of the Bible into German that had been carried out by Luther, also an Augustinian), only permitted translations in the form of paraphrase, that is, by way of commentaries and therefore using more words than the original text. For the first reason, his friends the Hebraists Gaspar de Grajal and Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra were also persecuted and imprisoned, as was the chair of the University of Osuna, Alonso Gudiel; the latter, like Grajal, died in captivity, in the prison of the Inquisition in Valladolid.

It is true that Fray Luis had translated the Song of Songs directly from Hebrew, with glosses and commentaries; but it is also true that he had done so privately, to instruct his cousin Isabel de Osorio, a nun in the Salamancan convent of Sancti Spiritus, who did not know Latin. The problem arose when someone made a copy of this translation without his consent, and afterward several more copies were made, with the consequent unwanted dissemination. In the Indexes of books prohibited by the church of Lisbon (1581) and of Toledo (1583) there appear both his prose version of the translation and another in verse, of doubtful attribution. His lengthy defense prolonged the inquisitorial trial, which dragged on for almost five long years, after which he was finally acquitted.

The more the captive bird / strives to free itself, the more it is limed, / and my own defense offends me more.

Since he paraphrases it in his "Oda XVII, en una esperanza que salió vana", it seems certain that the décima graffiti that he supposedly wrote on its walls upon leaving prison can be attributed to him:

Here envy and lies
kept me locked away.
Happy the humble state
of the wise man who withdraws
from this wicked world,
and, with poor table and house,
in the delightful countryside,
keeps measure with God alone
and spends his life alone,
neither envied nor envious!

Once exonerated of all guilt, and even though the Inquisition had recognized his right to return to his chair of Scripture, he renounced it in favor of Father Castillo, who had held it since his imprisonment; in this way the faculty, all but obliged, granted him the chair of Theology in January 1577. His biographers relate that Fray Luis, during his years of teaching, was in the habit of summarizing the lessons explained in the previous class; and that, upon returning to the University to his new chair, he resumed his lessons with the phrase "As we were saying yesterday…" (Dicebamus hesterna die) as if his four years in prison had not elapsed. But although the phrase bears the Luisian stamp, it is assumed to be a later invention of Fray Nicolaus Crusenius. A year later (1578), owing to his knowledge of Astronomy, he was commissioned for the reform of the Julian calendar. And at around the same time, he attained the chair of Moral Philosophy. Likewise, being a sympathizer of the Carmelite reform, he defended Teresa of Jesus when the saint was confined in Toledo and tried (she too) by the Inquisition for having written the book of her Life. In 1579 he again won by competitive examination the chair of Bible, a subject he would teach until his death.

From 1580 onward he was very busy with the affairs of his order, although he found time to arrange and correct his Poesías, concealing himself under the pseudonym "Luis Mayor", and adding to them a prologue and a dedication to his friend the Inquisitor General Pedro Portocarrero.

In 1582, together with the Jesuit Prudencio de Montemayor, he took part in the De auxiliis controversy that had been stirred up at the University by the publication of the Concordia of the Jesuit Luis de Molina; and once again he confronted the Dominicans by pronouncing himself in favor of human freedom, which led to his being denounced again before the Inquisition, this time with no other consequence than a mild admonition from the Inquisitor General, the Archbishop of Toledo and Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga.

On September 15, 1587, Luis de León dated in Madrid his letter-prologue to the first edition of the Libro de la vida of Teresa of Jesus. The Augustinian had examined for publication and approved the autograph of the «big book»—as the Saint called it—which she herself had written between 1563 and 1565, secluded in her cell in the convent of San José in Ávila, which she had just founded in 1562, the first of her reform. Fray Luis admired the work of that intrepid nun and her vivid and genuinely Castilian language, and had even sought to have her join his order. On the advisability of publishing the book, Luis de León commented thus on the inherent goodness of that work:

In judging things, one must consider whether they are good in themselves and suitable for their ends, and not what the misuse of some will make of them. For if one looks to that, there is nothing so holy that it could not be forbidden.

On December 5, 1588, after the chapter of Toledo, his Order entrusted him with writing the Forma de vivir de los frailes agustinos descalzos. This document would lay the spiritual and practical foundations of the group of new foundations of reformed Augustinians that would be the seed of the future Order of Augustinian Recollects. The Forma de vivir would immediately become its first Constitutions, and Fray Luis de León one of its principal inspirers, since in his writing he captured the original spirit of this Augustinian reform movement and gave it shape in the daily life of its friars.

On August 14, 1591, Fray Luis was elected prior of the Province of Castile of the Order of Saint Augustine, in the convent of the town of Madrigal de las Altas Torres (Ávila). And it was right there that death would overtake him, only nine days later. His remains were moved to Salamanca, where he was buried. The painter Francisco Pacheco describes him thus in his Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de ilustres y memorables varones (1599):

In his natural features he was small of body, in due proportion; the head large, well formed, covered with somewhat curly hair; the tonsure, closed; the forehead, broad; the face more round than aquiline; olive-skinned in color; the eyes green and lively. In his moral character, the most silent man ever known, although of singular sharpness in his sayings, extremely abstemious and temperate in food, drink and sleep; very discreet, truthful and faithful, punctual in words and promises, composed, little or not at all given to laughter.

Work

Intellectual activity

As a man committed to his time, he did not set aside the problems of daily life, so that, in the context of the problems addressed by the School of Salamanca, to which he belonged, Fray Luis took part in the De auxiliis controversy, together with the Jesuit Prudencio de Montemayor, defending the freedom of man, which cost him the prohibition of teaching those ideas. Montemayor had fared worse, being removed from all teaching. But in fact he considered himself above all a natural poet, for he stated that verses fell from his hands «more through the inclination of his star than through judgment or will».

Literature

Fray Luis himself left in writing his concept of poetry: «a communication of the heavenly and divine breath», in his De los nombres de Cristo, book I, "Mountain", «so that the style of speaking might resemble the feeling, and the words and the things might be in accord»:

For [Christ] is the only worthy subject of poetry; and those who take it away from him and, forcing it, employ it, or rather lose it, in frivolous subjects, ought to be punished as public corrupters of two most holy things: of poetry and of morals. They corrupt poetry, because without doubt God inspired it in the souls of men in order, with its movement and spirit, to raise them to heaven, whence it proceeds; for poetry is nothing but a communication of the heavenly and divine breath; and thus, in nearly all the Prophets, both those who were truly moved by God and those who spoke incited by other superhuman causes, the same spirit that awakened them and raised them to see what other men did not see ordered and composed and, as it were, set in meter the words in their mouths, with due number and consonance, so that they might speak in a more elevated manner than other people spoke, and so that the style of speaking might resemble the feeling, and the words and the things might be in accord.

His favorite and personal themes, if we set aside the moral and patriotic ones that he also cultivated occasionally, are, in the large number of odes that he came to write, the desire for solitude and retreat in nature (the topos of the Beatus Ille), and the search for spiritual peace and for knowledge (what he called pure truth without veil), for he was a restless, passionate and vehement man, afflicted by all kinds of tormented outbursts, and he desired solitude, tranquility, peace and calm above all things:

I wish to live with myself,
I wish to enjoy the good I owe to heaven,
alone, without witness,
free of love, of jealousy,
of hatred, of hopes, of misgiving.

This theme recurs throughout his lyric poetry: the search for serenity, for calm, for tranquility for a nature that, like his, was prone to passion. In him the classical balance of the Renaissance was already struggling with the nascent and dynamic Baroque asymmetries, already constituting in fact a living example of poetic mannerism. And he finds that consolation and serenity in the heavens or in nature:

Mountain range that rises to the sky,
most lofty, and that enjoys the calm
the ground below does not know,
where the blind common herd
loves dying, burning in living fire:

receive me on your summit,
receive me, for I flee, pursued,
the misguided multitude,
the wasted toil,
the false peace, the undeserved ill.

— Ode «Al apartamiento»

As a poet he developed the lira as a stanza, which had been introduced by Garcilaso de la Vega, composed of heptasyllables and hendecasyllables, but he preferred the hendecasyllable exclusively for translations of Latin and Greek poets, which he generally carried out in chained tercets or in octavas reales.

Style

Writing, Fray Luis thinks, is a difficult activity («because I put order into the words and choose them and give them their place... because speaking well is not common, but a matter of particular judgment, both in what is said and in the manner in which it is said»). Common words are to be used, but select ones, since the good writer, among

those that everyone speaks, chooses those that are fitting and looks at their sound, and sometimes even counts the letters and weighs them and measures them and arranges them so that they not only say clearly what they mean to say, but also with harmony and sweetness

Harmony was for him the oral balance of the sentence, but in him it prevails over sweetness, since one does not notice in him the honeyed qualities of, for example, the contemporary bucolic prose of the pastoral novel. He achieves harmony through a perfect correspondence between content and form, learned from the Latin classics, which he studied not only to imitate them but to reproduce their qualities in Castilian. His language, then, is that of Juan de Valdés: natural, select and without affectation.

Although his style is apparently sober and austere, and according to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo reflected Greek sophrosyne or balance, current criticism has pointed out that his language and technique reveal the vehement and passionate character of the author. Thus his style is simple and austere only as regards images, vocabulary and ornaments: the syntax, which says more about the true essence of the author, is constrained by the demanding form of the lira, and resorts with unusual frequency to abrupt enjambment and to brachystich, as well as to hyperbaton, thereby expressing a tense and tormented character that frequently overflows the channel of the verse and even of the stanza. Moreover, his vehemence is reflected through the numerous exclamatory expressions and interjections that stitch through his verses, of broken rhythm, and both in his prose and in his verse he habitually resorts to pairs of words joined by a conjunction or a comma, that is, to doublets of words with complementary meaning, or to geminations, doublets of synonyms, which with their balance calm that passion that he strives to contain both in his verse and in his prose.

His communicative eagerness is expressed in a particular preference for the second person, so that his texts usually have a discursive character of moral commentary that in some way exhorts the receiver. This discursive tone, in some way oratorical, gives rise to frequent enumerations, exclamations and rhetorical questions, and there are also abundant descriptive passages with which the author makes the interlocutor live in the present tense what he evokes: hence his frequent use of the historical present. The odes are short: only two exceed one hundred lines, the XX and the XXI. The most important range between forty and eighty or ninety lines, and of the twenty-three, seventeen are written in Garcilasian liras. As has already been said, enjambments are frequent as a manifestation of the tension between his vehemence and his desire to restrain it; they are extremely numerous and at times violently abrupt, so that Fray Luis's style is characterized by a particular tension proper to Mannerism, in short, parallel to that expressed in the severe and contemporary Herrerian architectural style.

He uses a symbolic repertoire taken from classical Latin and Hebrew poetry, which synthesizes three distinct cultural traditions: the classical Greco-Latin (lyric poetry, especially the Odes of his greatly admired Horace and the Eclogues of Virgil, and philosophical Neoplatonism); biblical literature (Psalms, Book of Job, Song of Songs); and, finally, the poetry, both Italianizing and native Castilian, of the early Spanish Renaissance.

In 1572 he began writing in prose De los nombres de Cristo, a work in three books that he would not finish until 1585. In it he shows the last and definitive elaboration of the themes and ideas he sketched in his poems, in the form of a Ciceronian dialogue in which the various interpretations of the names given to Christ in the Bible are discussed: "Bud", "Faces of God", "Mountain", "Father of the Age to Come", "Arm of God", "King of God", "Bridegroom", "Prince of Peace", "Beloved", "Lamb", "Son of God", "Way", "Shepherd" and "Jesus". His Castilian prose reaches its maximum perfection there, of which the following paragraph may be a good example:

The perfection of things consists, then, in each one of us being a perfect world, so that in this way, all being in me and I in all the others, and I having the being of all of them, and all and each one of them having my being, this whole machine of the universe may be embraced and linked together, and the multitude of its differences be reduced to unity; and, remaining unmixed, they may be mixed; and, remaining many, they may not be so; and so that, the variety and diversity being extended and, as it were, unfolded before the eyes, unity may conquer and reign and set its throne over all. Which is for the creature to draw near to God, from whom it flows, who in three persons is one essence, and in an infinite number of incomprehensible excellences, one single perfect and simple excellence (De los nombres de Cristo, book I).

For this work he was inspired by that of his fellow member of the order Alonso de Orozco (1500–1591), De los nueve nombres de Cristo. Fray Luis is also the author of works of some substance in Latin (De legibus, in three books; In Cantica Canticorum Salomonis explanatio, 1582; In psalmum vigesimumsextum explanatio, 1582; the treatise De agno typico, the Exposiciones sobre Abdías and Ad Galatas, the Constituciones para los Recoletos de San Agustín...) and some other moral works in Castilian on education, such as La perfecta casada (Salamanca, 1584), addressed to his cousin María Varela Osorio, in which he describes what for him is an exemplary wife and sets out the duties and attributes of the married woman in family relationships, daily tasks and the love of God. Inspired by classical sources and above all by the Proverbs of Solomon, whose last chapter he expounds and illustrates from verse 10 onward, it is a work that must be placed in correlation with others of the same genre written by Luis Vives (De Insitutiones Feminae Christianae, translated into Castilian in Valencia in 1528) and other European humanists of the Renaissance.

As a translator he rendered from Hebrew into verse the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Job, on which he also commented, as did his fellow member of the order and friend Diego de Zúñiga, an important philosopher and defender of Copernican heliocentrism. It took him twenty years to finish the Exposición del libro de Job, which he began in prison and concluded shortly before his death. First he translated fragments in prose, then he commented on them, and finally he versified them.

He likewise translated the Song of Songs in octavas (the version in liras is apocryphal) for the nun Isabel Osorio; and some Psalms, specifically 21, including the two versions of «Psalm 102». For these versions of a poetry built by means of semantic parallelism, he sometimes adopted a suitable stanza, the four-line lira: A11, B7–11, A11, B7–11, which metrics knows as the estrofa alirada. From Latin he rendered into Castilian the Eclogues and the first two books of the Georgics of Virgil, as well as 23 certain versions of the Odes of Horace and 7 attributed to him by Father Merino; also noteworthy is the version of the Rura tenent of Albius Tibullus and some fragments of Greek poets (part of the Andromache of the tragedian Euripides and of the Olympian I of Pindar). From the Italians there are poems by Pietro Bembo and Petrarch.

Editions

Although Fray Luis himself thought of printing his poems around 1584 and to that end wrote a "Dedicatoria" to his friend Portocarrero, which has been preserved in a manuscript, it can be deduced from it that they were going to appear anonymously or without the author's name, and that he composed his poems:

More through the inclination of my star than through judgment or will, not because poetry, especially if it is employed on fitting subjects, is not worthy of any person and of any name, proof of which is that God used it in many parts of His Sacred Books, as is well known, but because I knew the mistaken judgments of our people and their little inclination to everything that has some light of wit or of worth [...] and so I held it to be needless vanity, at the cost of my labor, to set myself up as a target for the blows of a thousand deranged judgments and to give matter for talk to those who live on nothing else [...] for this reason I never paid attention to these things that I composed, nor spent on them more time than I took to forget other labors, nor put into them more study than deserved what I was doing never to come to light, of which the thing itself, and the faults there are in it, give sufficient testimony.

His works achieved wide circulation in manuscript (eighty-seven manuscripts have survived to this day, according to Cristóbal Cuevas), but remained unpublished in print until 1631, the year in which Quevedo printed them for the first time together with those of another wit of the School of Salamanca, Francisco de la Torre, as an attack against the excessive stylistic culteranismo of Góngora; they bore the title Obras propias, y traducciones latinas y griegas y italianas, con la parafrasi de algunos psalmos y capítulos de Iob. Sacadas de la librería de don Manuel Sarmiento de Mendoça, canónigo de la Magistral de la santa Iglesia de Sevilla (Madrid: Imprenta del Reyno, under the charge of the widow of Luis Sánchez, 1631), and it was reprinted the same year (Milan: Phelippe Guisalfi, 1631). But Quevedo, who dedicated the work to the Count-Duke of Olivares, copied the poems from this Sevillian canon just as they were given to him, so that he published, together and jumbled, original poems by Fray Luis along with other apocryphal and spurious ones belonging to relatives, such as his nephew Fray Basilio Ponce de León, the custodian of his papers, friends, religious of his order, disciples, members of the first Salamancan school and crude imitators.

The Enlightenment scholar Francisco Cerdá y Rico edited some of them in 1779, and the likewise Enlightenment scholar Gregorio Mayans y Siscar a more complete one (Valencia: Tomás de Orga, 1785), to which he also added a biography, among many other reprints that took the one made by Quevedo as definitive. However, the manuscripts most faithful to his work are those preserved and copied by his nephew and fellow religious, the Augustinian friar and theologian Basilio Ponce de León, since they were handed over to him upon his death by the Augustinian Order so that he might edit them. In the 18th century an edition of his works was made by a philologist as reputable as Pedro Estala of La Mancha, based on a Valencian manuscript; it is already a critical edition, however, that produced by the Augustinian Fray Antolín Merino (1805–1806) in five volumes, collating numerous manuscripts, with the title Obras del maestro fray Luis de León, the fruit of the fervor that the members of the Second Salamancan poetic school always had for this writer; he established the current canon of texts considered strictly Luisian, based on ten manuscripts of recognized reliability, but not on Quevedo's edition. Menéndez Pelayo praised this edition as "the only one that is trustworthy... free from the absurdities of editors and copyists". Salvador Faulí produced one of De los nombres de Christo, añadido juntamente el nombre de Cordero (Valencia: Salvador Faulí, 1770). In the 19th century the edition of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid, Manuel Rivadeneyra, 1855) should be noted.

Among modern editions, worthy of mention are the one of Los nombres de Cristo edited by Father Manuel Fraile (1907) and, of that same work, the one by Federico de Onís for the Clásicos Castellanos of Editorial Castalia in three volumes, the first dating from 1914 and the other two from 1922; and the one of De los nombres de Cristo produced by the poet of the Generation of '98 Enrique de Mesa in 1876 and 1917.

Of the poetic works of Fray Luis de León, Father Llobera made a good edition in 1932–1933, in two volumes containing, respectively, the Poesías originales (volume I) and the Traducciones del latín griego y toscano e imitaciones (volume II); it was reissued in facsimile in 2001 by the Provincial Council of Cuenca with an introduction by Hilario Priego and José Antonio Silva Herranz.

Luis Astrana Marín produced one of La perfecta casada (Madrid: Aguilar, 1933), frequently reprinted, which was followed by that of Elena Milazzo (Rome, 1955); Joaquín Antonio Peñalosa edited this work together with the original poems and the Cantar de los Cantares with the Porrúa publishing house of Mexico (1970); in addition, the editions of the Augustinian Ángel Custodio Vega for the BAC or Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos circulated widely; a reprint of his edition of the Poesías is still available (Barcelona: Planeta, 1970). Juan F. Alcina produced another of his Poesía (Madrid: Cátedra, 1986); in addition we have those by Cristóbal Cuevas of De los nombres de Cristo (Madrid: Cátedra, 1977), of his Poesía completa (Madrid: Castalia, 1998) and of Fray Luis de León y la escuela salmantina (Madrid: Taurus, 1986); by José Manuel Blecua there are editions of his Poesía completa (Madrid: Gredos, 1990) and of the Cantar de Cantares de Salomón (Madrid: Gredos, 1994). José María Becerra Hiraldo for his part edited Cantar de los Cantares. Interpretaciones literal, espiritual, profética (El Escorial: Ediciones Escurialenses, 1992) and the Comentario al Cantar de los Cantares (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004). Antonio Sánchez Zamarreño produced a new one of De los nombres de Cristo (Madrid: Austral, 1991); José Barrientos, for his part, printed his Epistolario. Cartas, licencias, poderes, dictámenes (Madrid, Revista Agustiniana, 2001) and, with Emiliano Fernández Vallina, made the bilingual Latin-Castilian edition of his Tratado sobre la Ley (Monastery of El Escorial: Ediciones Escurialenses, 2005). Ángel Alcalá has also edited El proceso inquisitorial de fray Luis de León (Salamanca, Junta de Castilla y León, 1991), and Cristóbal Cuevas his Poesías completas in Madrid: Castalia, 2001.

Monument in Salamanca

In 1858, on the occasion of the transfer of the remains of Fray Luis de León to the chapel of San Jerónimo of the University, the university faculty raised the possibility of opening a public subscription to erect a monument. The process of selecting the sculptor was carried out through a competition, the first prize being awarded to Nicasio Sevilla in 1866, and the Patio de Escuelas being chosen as its location, facing the façade of the University. The sculptor requested of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando to travel to Rome to carry out the work. There he studied the fresco of the School of Athens by Raphael, taking the figure of Aristotle as the model for his work. In 1868 the sculpture was cast in Marseille and, after its journey to Spain, it was definitively inaugurated on April 25, 1869, with great ceremonies and festivities lasting several days.

Works by Fray Luis de León

• Escritores del siglo XVI. Tomo segundo. Obras del maestro Fray Luis de León; precédelas su vida, escrita por Don Gregorio Mayans y Siscar; y un extracto del proceso instruido contra el autor desde el año 1571 al 1576, Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1855.
• Traducción literal y declaración del libro de los cantares de Salomón. Salamanca, at the press of Francisco de Toxar, 1798. Other eds.: Madrid, Manuel Rivadeneyra, 1855.
• De los nombres de Christo, in Salamanca, by Juan Fernández, 1583. Other eds.: Valencia, at the Press of Benito Monfort, 1770; Madrid, Manuel Rivadeneyra, 1855.
• La perfecta casada, Salamanca, Juan Fernández, 1583. Second printing, expanded and corrected, in Salamanca, at the house of Cornelio Bonardo, 1586. Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1855.
• Exposición del Libro de Job (Ms.219) [Manuscript]. Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1855.
• Obras poéticas, divididas en tres libros, Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1855.
• In Cantica canticorum explanatio, Salamanca, 1580.
• In Psalmum vigesimumsextum explanatio, Salamanca, 1580–1582?
• De utrisque agni typici atque inmolationis legitimo tempore, Salamanca, 1590.
• Cantar de los cantares. Interpretaciones: literal, espiritual, profética.
• De legibus or Tratado sobre la ley
• De fide
• De spe
• De charitate
• De creatione rerum
• De incarnatione
• Oración fúnebre al maestro Domingo de Soto
• [Opinion concerning the exploitation of the mercury mines of Peru by Pedro de Contreras. March 28, 1588].
• Epistolario: cartas, licencias, poderes, dictámenes
• Writings from prison. Autographs from the first inquisitorial trial.

See also

• Spanish Renaissance literature
• Fray Luis de León Translation Prize

Bibliography

• Rafael Lazcano, Tesauro Agustiniano. Tomo 11. León, Fray Luis de. Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), 2023, 406 pp., illustr. ISBN 978-84-09-42692-8 [Offers 4,224 bibliographic references "by" and "about" Fray Luis].
• Rafael Lazcano, Fray Luis de León: Bibliografía. Madrid, Ed. Agustiniana, 1994, 2nd ed. ISBN 84-86898-27-7

External links

• Fray Luis de León in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
• Luis de León in the Biblioteca Virtual de Polígrafos of the Fundación Ignacio Larramendi (record POLI20090013803)
• Digitized works by Fray Luis de León in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Study and anthology of Fray Luis de León
• Biography and some works of Fray Luis in Los Poetas
• Selection of poems in A media voz
• Extensive poetic anthology of Fray Luis
• Link collection on Fray Luis de León Archived at virtual-spain.com
• Proceso que la Inquisición de Valladolid hizo al maestro Fray Luis de León, vol. X of the Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España.
• 'De versos de Fray Luis de León mal leídos' Archived at editoriallucina.es . Agustín García Calvo. Hyeronimus. No. 8, 1999, pp. 9-26.