September 18, 2023
Acquaintance: Loose Links and Fleeting Connections #1: The concept of “acquaintance” has historically been given much less attention than notions of “friendship” or “love,” the idea seemingly relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of influential social/intellectual/spiritual connections. And yet, much of our engagement with others—in social as much as in academic or political spaces—plays out on the level of acquaintance. This new series of essays on the Diacritics blog interrogates the impact of those fleeting, brief interactions, or, alternatively, the influence of connections with those we have known for a long time but not very well. Contributors explore how the meaning and value of “acquaintance” varies in different cultural, historical, or social contexts, and how we can think about surface connections between diverse thinkers and creators that nevertheless may have a far-reaching impact on their work.
Making Connections Through the Paper Trail:
Acquaintances in the Early Modern Hispanic World
In La ilustre fregona, Miguel de Cervantes mocks a type of relationship that we can identify as acquaintanceship. We see this type of relationship at play when certain characters attempt to solicit favor of the law. One of the protagonists, Carriazo, is arrested for having badly injured a water carrier. His friend, Avendaño, tries to obtain money to facilitate his release from prison. In order to accomplish this, his master, the innkeeper, brags about his contacts in the city and the chain of favors that could be activated by knowing the right people, explaining that
he [the master] had people in Toledo whose position brought them the respect of the authorities, especially a nun, kin to the Magistrate, with whom she was very close, and that a laundress for this nun’s convent had a daughter who was a very close friend to the sister of a friar who was very close to the nun’s confessor, and the laundress washed the clothes at home.[1]
After these lines, the master describes the chain of people in action to get the boy out of jail:
And if she asks her daughter, and she will, to speak to the sister of the friar to speak the her brother to speak to the confessor, and if the confessor speaks to the nun and the nun is willing to give a note (which will be easy) to the Magistrate, asking him kindly to look into the affair, there’s no doubt we can expect a good outcome, as long as the water carrier doesn’t die and there’s no lack of grease for the palms of all the ministers of the law, because if they aren’t greased, they squeak louder than an ox cart.[2]
However, the character admits that it is necessary to bribe or “grease” (untar) the high authorities, causing the web of contacts to be ridiculed for its ineffectiveness. As Gómez Estrada explains, “the inkeeper wants to show his influence through his chain of friends, but he fails, as he does not know these people directly.”[3] In other words, the knowledge of these people is so indirect that the relationships themselves serve more as a source of pride for Avendaño’s master than as a genuine asset. The young man, who is a stranger in the city, is the perfect third party for the old man to impress with his acquaintanceships.
Cervantes pokes fun at this type of relationship, perhaps because of his personal experience. At the end of his life, he lost out on the opportunity to return to Italy, likely because he lacked the contacts that would have been required to join the small court of his patron, the Count of Lemos, who was going to Naples as viceroy. His revenge against those who allegedly excluded him (the Argensola brothers) would be found in his long poem Viaje del Parnaso. The poem is a panorama of coetaneous Spanish poetry with its catalog of authors. By way of this catalog, Cervantes establishes himself among the poets of his age while at the same time positioning himself as judge of good literary taste, fashioning himself as the humblest poet among those named. In this poem, Cervantes discreetly complains about the brothers for not having taken him into account.[4] The Argensolas were loose acquaintances of his, but not close enough to receive their favor.
In early Modern Spain, friends and acquaintances, to a greater or lesser degree, were essential to success. Therefore, a gentleman’s education included activities that allowed him to establish bonds, interact socially, and win the sympathy of others. This behavior is central to courtly society, a social organization that characterized the old regime in the seventeenth century. To succeed at court, one had to learn to observe the men in their environment, and this meant analyzing human relationships and learning to cultivate and manage them.[5] Social skills were held in high esteem. Money, blood, being liked, and knowing how to garner others’s empathy were considered essential values. There were even courtly manuals that taught how to develop these skills. One of them, perhaps the most popular in Spain at the beginning of seventeenth century, was the Galateo español, adapted from the original Galateo in Italian. Lucas Gracián Dantisco, translator and adapter, explained the simple objective of his book, saying that it provided a guide with advice and guidelines “to be well esteemed and loved of men” (para ser bienquisto y amado de las gentes).[6] In its first pages, the Galateo español highlights the importance of these skills for those who want to access the court as well as the spaces ruled by social status in which individuals depend on how their status is perceived by others:
And therefore none can doubt, but that he that frames himself to live, be it not in hermitages or other solitary places; but in cities and courts amongst much people, to him I say it is a very profitable thing to know how to bee pleasing and acceptable in his manners; and that he so temper his behaviour, and dealings, that they content not so much his owne will, and liking as they be acceptable, and pleasing, to them with whom we converse withall.[7]
Nothing can be done alone in society. When depending on others, one must think more about the collective than about oneself. This conception is also present in Baltasar Gracián’s works of high Baroque literature in the middle of the seventeenth century. Gracián collects his best aphorisms and provides commentaries in the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. Among his gems of wisdom, several of them focus on how to cultivate friendships, always with practical purposes (learn from others, show off oneself, etc.):
Deal with people from whom you can learn (Tratar con quien se pueda aprender);[8]
Be known for pleasing people. To please is greatly to the credit of rulers, a quality that enables sovereigns to gain universal favour (Estar en opinión de dar gusto. Para los que gobiernan, gran crédito de agradar: realce de soberanos para conquistar la gracia universal);[9]
Know how to be all things to all people. A discreet Proteus: with the learned, learned, and with the devout, devout. A great art to win everyone over, since similarity creates goodwill (Saber hacerse a todos. Discreto Proteo: con el docto, docto, y con el santo, santo. Gran arte de ganar a todos, porque la semejanza concilia benevolencia);[10]
Never be associated with someone who can cast you in a poor light, whether because they’re better or worse than you (Nunca acompañarse con quien le pueda deslucir, tanto por más cuanto por menos);[11]
Know how to use your friends. This requires its own art of discretion. Some are useful at a distance, others close to hand, and someone who is perhaps no good for conversation will be as a correspondent (Saber usar de los amigos. Hay en esto su arte de discreción; unos son buenos para de lejos, y otros para de cerca; y el que tal vez no fue bueno para la conversación lo es para la correspondencia).[12]
Evidently, Gracián’s perspective embodies “a social discourse in which the ethical basis of relations is social tact.”[13]
This tact must be applied even when interacting with people of the same social class (other poets or aspirants), and considerably more in interactions with noble patrons. Relationships between writers and patrons, as vertical as they regularly were, were often confused with friendship, at least in ideal terms: “In the Renaissance, several authors portrayed their relationships with patrons in terms of idealized friendship, accepting the boundaries of a tacit agreement between unequal persons.”[14] There was a pragmatic vision of friendship in everyday life, in contrast to the perfect or exemplary friendship, as depicted or discussed in fictional literature. The latter was explored in depth ever since the writers of early modernity took Cicero’s canonical De Amicitia as touchstone when dealing with the subject of ideal friendship.[15]
This pragmatic approach to making useful friends or developing acquaintances could be better understood through the concept of homosociability. In addition to merits when serving the Crown (fighting in wars, being a public servant, etc.), “sociability—that is the art of pleasing others—also served to publicize the nobleman’s collaboration with the powers at court.”[16] The social skills that were learned in texts such as the Galateo español or the Oráculo manual to cultivate a personal network of acquaintances or good contacts are satirized in the picaresque novel. The picaresque world is inhabited by infamous people. The pícaro, as a misfit in society, must employ all kinds of tricks to create their own network of acquaintances. These networks contrast those of characters of more noble birth, who would have typically gained access to these networks through good education and proper socialization. A picaresque book like Francisco de Quevedo’s Buscón makes fun of these tricks through a catalog of vagabonds and swindlers who always pretend to be who they are not. Among so many impostors, the protagonist meets a mediocre poet, a sexton who boasts about false friendships at court, throwing around prestigious names:
And last of all he said: “I once stayed at an inn with Liñán and I’ve had dinner more than twice with Espinel.” And in Madrid he’d once been as close to Lope de Vega as he was to me, and he’d seen Alonso de Ercilla dozens of times, and at his house he had a picture of the incomparable Figueroa, and he’d bought Padella’s breeches when the latter went into a monastery, and he still wore them even if they were falling to pieces.[17]
The brief list includes living writers who are literary stars (such as Lope de Vega), somewhat more discreet yet highly respected authors (such as Pedro Liñán, or Vincente Espinel, the creator of the Décima espinela), some of them deceased (like Alonso de Ercilla, author of the famous Araucana). He keeps personal belongings of these acquaintances, almost like relics. More interesting is the mention of the divino Figueroa, the poet Francisco de Figueroa, whose work was only published in Lisbon in 1626 (a date very distant to the first version of the Buscón). To read Figueroa’s verses during his life was only possible via few manuscripts, and to access them one would have had to belong to a network in which they circulated. Indeed, the publication of Figueroa’s poems was a product of the same network of contacts that characterized the circulation of literary works at the time.[18] The poets used to gather around noble patrons who formed small courts (such as the Count of Lemos, who left Cervantes in Barcelona) or supported literary academies in major cities, such as Madrid or Seville. These academies were spaces of sociability for writers. More than one Baroque writer owes his entire career to this academic space where the aspiring poet was able to gain allies and protectors in the literary world.[19]
Due to early modern technology of communication, the evidence of all these relationships has only survived on paper, both printed and handwritten. A privileged field to observe literary networks of Golden Age Spain in action is the study of the ethical epistle, a type of poem, composed mostly by men, which presents a conversation about friendship and the discussion of what the author considered a good life, in the manner of the classic epistle model developed by Horace. In her study of thirty-four letters composed by fourteen poets active between the 1530s and 1580s, Clara Marías identifies four authors that are considered “epistolary nuclei,” as they are the ones who compose and receive more letters than the others: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Alonso Núñez de Reinoso, Jorge de Montemayor, and Baltasar del Alcázar. In general, the ethical epistle is composed by a young poet and addresses a more venerable and established figure in the literary world, with the purpose of introducing oneself and inexplicitly soliciting admittance to a certain intellectual guild. This is achieved by celebrating the recipient or, occasionally, through a gesture of friendship.[20] In these epistles, the writer self-fashions himself as an individual and artist in order to offer an organic image, both for the recipient and for posterity. In the letter, he recreates his life according to his own literary intentions. Hence, originality is not based so much on the content (which collected ideas from Horace and other ancient authors), but on how the author intertwines ethical reflection following classical principles and his own life experience for a recipient who was often only an acquaintance and usually more prestigious than the author who was writing to gain his esteem.
Networks of contacts or kinships, then, are preserved on paper, more specifically in verses. In the Golden Age, there are poems of variable length that consist of catalogs of poets, a sort of Who’s Who that captured the hierarchy of literary talents or merits, as well as the esteem they possessed in literary circles. The Canto de Calíope, a poem inserted in La Galatea (1585), and the Viaje del Parnaso (1614) are among the most famous. It is not surprising that Cervantes, whom we clearly identify as a prose writer, undertook this task. His place in the poetic canon of his age was never secure, and before being forgotten in other lists, he preferred to make his own at two key moments: once at the beginning of his career and once in his late years. Lope de Vega also composed a text of this kind, the Laurel de Apolo, in which he made his own canon of Spanish contemporary poetry by 1630. Considering that he would die five years later, and that the new literary generation no longer praised his works as in his early years, the Laurel de Apolo was Lope’s last attempt to show his authority within the literary field which he had ruled for decades.[21] Lope called new playwrights pájaros nuevos somewhere else, revealing emotional distance toward these new voices that were in vogue near the end of his life.
Admiration is not equivalent to friendship, of course, and it would be necessary to consider that a factor such as distance (social, geographical, or even temporal) fostered a rather dreamed or imagined friendship that we would now consider a relationship of empathy or a virtual connection. In book VI of La Galatea, along with the Canto de Calíope, the figure of a priest named Telesio, who organizes a funeral tribute to Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, poet, humanist, and nobleman (in the way of the perfect Renaissance courtier),[22] allows Cervantes to shape a relationship that in real life would have been tentative or simply non-existent, but which is expressed as devoted friendship in the text:
There exist great generational, spatial, and social distances between Diego de Hurtado de Mendoza and Cervantes. However, they are linked by the impulse of intellectual renovation that both, along with other intellectuals of the Canto, extol.[23]
The friendship imagined by Cervantes is an example of the growth of cultural capital. In the absence of an epistle to Hurtado de Mendoza during his life, the ceremony by Telesio was the best tribute to bond with the poet. As Hurtado de Mendoza died in 1575, a young Cervantes, soldado de fortuna, would hardly have been able to access the space of this demigod before the battle of Lepanto (1571).
It was easier for the aspiring novelist Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo to meet an old Cervantes in Madrid. In addition to the academies, where both participated, a space like the religious cofradías could also be the gateway to intellectual circles. This is what happens with the Hermandad de los Indignos Esclavos del Santísimo Sacramento of the convent of the Trinitarios Descalzos, a cofradía founded in 1609 that in a short time will bring together practically all the writers and literary aspirants living in Madrid: Cervantes, Lope, Quevedo, Espinel, Salas Barbadillo, etc.[24] In 1613, Salas Barbadillo wrote the aprobación of the Novelas ejemplares for the kingdom of Aragon, surely due to his well-known friendship with Francisco Gasol, a Crown official residing in Zaragoza who would have assigned the task to him. Cervantes would have appreciated that gesture a little later, as Salas was included among the poets praised in his Viaje del Parnaso. The three verses that allude to Salas are no more than praise based on commonplaces and without further detailed information about his work; therefore, according to López Martínez,
these few elements (sharing the same courtly spaces, the approval of the Exemplary Novels and the verses in the Journey to Parnassus) make us believe that they were not great friends. However, Salas, unlike many authors of his age, expresses a constant admiration towards the author of Alcalá throughout all his works.[25]
In his rich biography of Salas Barbadillo, López Martínez concludes that the writer’s friends were actually individuals whom we no longer identify as great names of that literary period: currently not-so-popular writers (Pérez de Herrera), second-rate novelists (Francisco de Lugo y Dávila), or educated persons that constituted Salas’s inner circle (the musician Eugenio de Heredia or the bookseller Antonio de Castilla).[26] In this way, not all of those who wanted to adopt a friend in the Golden Age really accomplished it (Cervantes and Hurtado de Mendoza), and nor did all those who may have wanted to be friends (Salas Barbadillo and Cervantes).
What happens in the New World? Here the distances reinforce the certainty that the academic space is more imagined than physical. Certainly, the Academia Antártica, a circle or group of colonial poets who produced their works between the end of sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, is less of a real space than it is a space of enunciation from which works are written (such as the Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña or the Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico by Diego Mejía Fernangil). Its members find in a territorial identity (Antártica refers precisely to the lands where they live and write their works) the strongest bond and point of departure to negotiate their role and status with the peninsular literary tradition.[27] Unlike an academy like the one in Madrid, which compiled collections of poetry by some of its most active members (Alonso de Castillo Solórzano published all the poems written for that academy in two volumes called Donaires del Parnaso),[28] the most famous literary academy of the New World was more of an idealized spirit, shared by poets who were united spiritually through their geographical distance.
Many decades after the Academia Antártica, at the end of the seventeenth century, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was able to publish her work in Spain (the Inundación castálida and the Segundo volumen) with the support of her patrons and friends. This success was resounding, and she began to receive letters and news from admirers of all kinds. Some Portuguese nuns asked her, through a noblewoman living in Mexico, to submit texts to their literary academy on the other side of the sea, the Casa do Prazer. These nuns belonged to eight convents in Portugal and maintained contact with another academy, comprised of aristocratic women, where they knew the Duchess of Aveiro. The duchess, in turn, knew Sor Juana through exchanges with her cousin, the Countess of Paredes, vicereine in Mexico.[29] For women, whose physical mobility was impeded by the gender restrictions of their age, this type of network could function as an imagined space or a relationship in absentia that papers kept alive and made feasible. Sor Juana, without ever leaving Mexico, was able to achieve global recognition by the end of her life. This much is evidenced in paratexts: the Segundo volumen of her work includes laudatory texts from eighteen ecclesiastics and poets of Seville, all wanting to link their name with that of the nun and to partake in her success in print. As her biographer, Francisco Ramírez Santacruz, points out, “this (the recognition by Peninsular writers) was a confirmation for Sor Juana that, between the end of 1692 and early 1693, the real Sor Juana had vanished from the world.”[30] Like literary academies, real individuals could just vanish via the recognition of a literary elite.
Even someone who is not particularly known for his sociability, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, participated in intellectual networks and made acquaintances. In his last years, the famous chronicler Ambrosio de Morales (possibly the Telesio de La Galatea) moved to Córdoba, and Inca Garcilaso managed to give him the manuscripts of La Florida del Inca to receive some input. In Córdoba, Garcilaso was also in touch with an in-law relative, Luis de Góngora, racionero of the city’s cathedral. There is no evidence that Garcilaso and Góngora were friends, although they shared spaces and had friends in common among the city elite, where both were respected caballeros.[31] Their careers are linked by Pedro de Valencia. According to documentation, he was a friend of Góngora and surely an acquaintance of Garcilaso. A bureaucrat in Madrid, Valencia approved the manuscript of the Segunda parte de los comentarios reales in 1614, although this work would only be published in Córdoba under the title of Historia general del Perú after Garcilaso died. We owe the same Pedro de Valencia the first commentaries on the style of the Soledades and the Fábula de Polifemo, which he sent to Góngora in a letter to reassure him about the possible reactions his texts could provoke. Nevertheless, it is needless to say that Garcilaso, Góngora’s neighbor, in-law relative, and colleague, never left anything in writing about the latter’s poetry. Góngora, for his part, drops some references about Peru in his verses, although they are so minimal that he did not need to consult Garcilaso to learn about them. Once again, with Góngora and Garcilaso. there is the ideal situation that motivates fantasy: that of a friendship between two extraordinary subjects that is only verified, against any romantic approaches, as mere acquaintanceship.[32]
Following from the cases discussed above, there are more acquaintances than friends that we can verify in the early modern literary field.[33] Connections are looked for and practiced in spaces such as the academy or the cofradía, or, more broadly, in the court (Madrid) or in the city (the streets of Córdoba, for example). When the distance (temporal or geographic) prevents it, the paper is the device that simulates that communal space through personal communication (the ethical epistle, for example), the literary text (La Galatea), a preliminary text (an aprobación, a laudatory poem, etc.), or the catalog of poet friends (or those whom the writer hopes to count among his or her friends) to be canonized. In all of these instances, the writer unfolds strategies of self-configuration, association, and opposition that induct him into a network of well-known writers. To acquire a position on the literary stock market, this is the basic cultural capital one must strive to obtain.
The milieu of Spanish Golden Age scholars shows a phenomenon similar to the one I have described in the world of Cervantes and his contemporaries following the paper trail they left behind: a scholar deploys strategies that lead him or her to accumulate cultural capital through his or her work in a research group or interpretative school. The different approaches to the study of Golden Age literature, or preferences toward certain themes lead to what Jannine Montauban, in her study on the mechanisms of family affiliation in the picaresque novel, calls familias or linajes inside the academic world,[34] or what we can call acquaintances, colleagues, or simply friends. In the end, the reason for writing this piece and the reason you are reading it is the same reason that made a character of La ilustre fregona think he could get someone out of jail only by listing a chain of contacts; the same reason the mediocre poet of the Buscón dreamed of being taken seriously: to accumulate cultural capital, in order to build or consolidate a career.
[1] Cervantes, Exemplary Novels, 258–59. “Él [el amo] tenía personas en Toledo de tal calidad que valían mucho con la justicia, especialmente una señora monja, parienta del corregidor, que le mandaba con el pie, y que una lavandera del monasterio de la tal monja tenía una hija que era grandísima amiga de una hermana de un fraile muy familiar y conocido del confesor de la dicha monja, la cual lavandera lavaba la ropa en casa” (Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, 71–2).
[2] Cervantes, 259. “Y como esta pida a su hija, que sí pedirá, hable a la hermana del fraile que hable a su hermano que hable al confesor y el confesor a la monja, y la monja guste de dar un billete (que será cosa fácil) para el corregidor, donde le pida encarecidamente mire por el negocio de Tomás [el compañero de Avendaño, Carriazo], sin duda alguna se podrá esperar buen suceso. Y esto ha de ser con tal que el aguador no muera y con que no falte ungüento para untar a todos los ministros de la justicia, porque si no están untados, gruñen más que carretas de bueyes” (Cervantes, 72).
[3] “La cadena de amistades con que el ventero quiere demostrar sus influencias logra el efecto contrario, porque muestra que no las conoce de forma directa” (Gómez Estrada, Los recursos formales, 87–8; translation by me).
[4] Canavaggio, Cervantes, 335.
[5] Elias, La sociedad cortesana, 142.
[6] Gracián Dantisco, Galateo Espagnol or the Spanish Gallant, 5; Gracián Dantisco, Galateo español, 105.
[7] Gracián Dantisco, 3. “Por esto nadie debe dudar que quien se dispone a vivir, no en las ermitas o partes solitarias, sino en las ciudades y las cortes entre las gentes, que no les sea utilísima cosa el saber ser en sus costumbres gracioso y agradable, y de suerte que temple su conversación y trato no tanto a su albedrío y voluntad, cuanto al contento y agrado de aquellos con quien trata” (Gracián Dantisco, 105–06).
[8] Gracián, The Pocket Oracle, 6; Gracián, Oráculo manual, 106.
[9] Gracián, 13; Gracián, 120.
[10] Gracián, 29; Gracián, 145.
[11] Gracián, 57; Gracián, 185.
[12] Gracián, 60; Gracián, 188.
[13] Cascardi, “The Subject of Control,” 250–51.
[14] “Durante el Renacimiento, numerosos autores pintaban sus relaciones con sus patrones en términos de amistad idealizada, aceptando los términos de un contrato tácito entre desiguales” (Gil-Osle, Amistades imperfectas, 114; translation by me).
[15] On this issue, it is useful to read the introduction to Gilbert-Santamaría, The Poetics of Friendship.
[16] Armon, Masculine Virtue, 8.
[17] Quevedo, “The Swindler,” 116. “Y últimamente dijo: ‘Hombre soy yo que he estado en un aposento con Liñán y he comido más de dos veces con Espinel’. Y que había estado en Madrid tan cerca de Lope de Vega como lo estaba de mí, y que había visto a don Alonso de Ercilla mil veces, y que tenía en su casa un retrato del divino Figueroa, y que había comprado los greguescos que dejó Padilla cuando se metió fraile, y que hoy día los traía, y malos” (Quevedo, Buscón, 77). The relationship between courtly discourse and the pícaro is explored in Ruan, Pícaro and Cortesano.
[18] Before dying, Figueroa ordered to burn his poems, but “a booklet including very few poems was saved by his close friend don Antonio de Toledo, who gave it as a gift to him (Tribaldos, the editor of the posthumous works) and the latter gave it to the Count of Villamediana, and Villamediana passed it to don Vicente Noguera: sixty small printed pages” (“se salvó un cuadernillo con muy pocos que tenía su íntimo amigo don Antonio de Toledo quien se los regaló a él (Tribaldos [el editor de la obra póstuma]) y este al Conde de Villamediana y Villamediana a don Vicente Noguera: sesenta paginitas de impresión”; Rodríguez Moñino, Construcción crítica, 28; translation by me).
[19] The best approach, via Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, to this social dimension of literary careers in Golden Age Spain is Gutiérrez, La espada, el rayo y la pluma.
[20] Marías, Conversaciones en verso, 132–33.
[21] These catalogs resemble, in a certain way, Facebook walls, where one can create the same network of “contacts,” although none of them actually may be friends in real life. Decades ago, those same networks were represented in anthologies that ended up being ultimate lists of a literary movement or period. That is the case of the Nueve novísimos (1970) compiled by José María Castellet, an anthology of young Spanish poets of that time, including only one woman.
[22] Pietro Aretino, among the most eminent intellectual figures of the sixteenth century, identifies himself as “uno di quegli che vi osservo e celebro [a Hurtado de Mendoza] più tosto come un dio che come uno uomo” (“one among those who look and celebrate [Hurtado de Mendoza] more like a god than like a human being”; cited in Marías, Conversaciones en verso, 164; translation by me). On the other hand, the character of Telesio has been interpreted as a representation of Ambrosio de Morales (Gil-Osle, Amistades imperfectas), another big intellectual figure of the sixteenth century.
[23] “Existe una tremenda lejanía entre Diego de Hurtado de Mendoza y Cervantes, tanto generacional, como espacial y estamental. Sí, los une, sin embargo, el impulso de renovación intelectual que ambos preconizaron y que también surge en otros intelectuales del Canto” (Gil-Sole, Amistades imperfectas, 63; translation by me).
[24] López Martínez, Su patria, Madrid, 49.
[25] “estos pocos elementos hacen suponer que no existía entre los dos ingenios una gran amistad. Pero lo cierto es que Salas, como pocos autores de su época, va a expresar una admiración constante por el autor alcalaíno a lo largo de toda su obra” (López Martínez, “Cervantes y el Quijote,” 472; translation by me).
[26] López Martínez, 246.
[27] This hypothesis belongs to Alvarado Teodorika, “Las letras transfronterizas.”
[28] The two volumes were published in 1624 and 1625. Castillo Solórzano’s first literary pieces that we know of are preliminary texts included in other people’s books, short poetic texts that he wrote to get access to intellectual circles: in 1619, he published a sonnet among the preliminary texts of a hagiography, and in 1621 he included a décima in Tirso de Molina’s Cigarrales de Toledo. On preliminary texts during the Golden Age, I suggest Cayuela, Le paratexte.
[29] More information about the communication with Portugal in Ramírez Santacruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 208–09. Another example of Sor Juana’s poetic networking in action is explored in Colombi, “Mecenazgo y redes poéticas.” On literary sociability practiced by female authors, I recommend Martos, Redes y escritoras ibéricas.
[30] “lo que confirmó Sor Juana a finales de 1692 y principios de 1693 es que la sor Juana real había desaparecido para el mundo” (Ramírez Santacruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 228; translation by me). We should consider how the narrative frameworks of María de Zayas’s novella collections could reflect real, fictionalized, or idealized literary soirees, where men and women share short novels and verses, some of them as gifts of friendship or kinship, others as gallant gestures in Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637), while in Desengaños amorosos (1647) a community of women shares short novels, as an expression of literary sorority.
[31] Roses, “El Inca Garcilaso y Luis de Góngora.”
[32] However, the alleged friendship of Góngora and Garcilaso has been the subject of imagination in literature. For instance, in Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, the protagonist envisions an imaginative comment about Góngora. According to the narrative, Garcilaso would have impressed the poet’s mind with his conversations on the American natives and their richness: “In Góngora there are frequent allusions to Inca jewels, but they still haven’t studied the relations between Góngora and the Inca Garcilaso during the time they were both in Córdova. ‘Incas in the imagination of Góngora.’ That’s a delightful topic. . . . The tales told by the Inca Garcilaso to Góngora about one of the imaginary epochs, the earth emitting images, must have aroused the senses of the great prebendary” (Lezama Lima, Paradiso, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 239). “En Góngora, es frecuente la alusión a las joyas incaicas, sin embargo, no se ha estudiado la relación de Góngora con el Inca Garcilaso, en el tiempo en que ambos coincidieron en Córdoba. Los incas en la imaginación de Góngora; he ahí un delicioso tema. . . . Los relatos que le hacía el Inca Garcilaso a Góngora de una de las eras imaginarias, la tierra despidiendo imágenes, tienen que haber sobresaltado los sentidos del racionero mayor” (Lezama Lima, Paradiso, 257).
[33] Obviously, the brevity of this note prevents me from addressing other cases: conventual writing (mainly practiced by women), collaborative writing as a common practice in the comedia world, the creation of networks around literary controversies (such as the one maintained by cultos and llanos, i.e., Góngora against Lope), etc.
[34] Montauban, El ajuar de la vida picaresca, 138–39.
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