ABSTRACT

In analysing Dávalos y Figueroa’s conception of miscellaneity in the rst chapter of this study, we noted that the author of Miscelánea austral, writing in the early 1600s, constructs the variety of his dialogue miscellany using both erudite content and poems.1 Having examined the informational aspect and the macroforms of the miscelánea, therefore, we should now consider the character and role of the literary microforms which increasingly jostle for space alongside kernels of knowledgeable material and introduce a more pronounced element of stylistic diversity to texts in the genre while further enhancing their thematic variety. If we have been keen to stress that the miscellanists’ status with regard to their borrowed learned material should be deemed authorial given the key ltering and re-presentational role that they play, it is in imaginative literature of their own composition that the miscellanists truly manifest a writerly personality, dismissing the opposition posited by Poliziano with respect to his own practice in his seminal miscellany: ‘If, however, in my Miscellanea, even leaving aside eloquence, I impress anyone as having a smattering of knowledge, then that’s wonderful, I win, for this was exactly my goal’.2 We do experience this sporadically in the early part of the tradition in Spain; we noted in the previous chapter the presence of pastoral prose and poetry in Medrano’s Silva curiosa, and each of the chapters of Fernández de Oviedo’s Quinquagenas contains fty lines of the author’s own verse, divided into twenty-ve pairs which may stand alone or be combined in differing measures-with no regularity within or between chapters-to advance more sustained thought. The topics broached in the poetry-by turns proverbial, moralistic or narrative-are then worked out in greater detail in the following prose passages, which replicate the thematic miscellaneity of the verses and expand, often quite considerably, upon it. More usual, however, in the miscellanies of the sixteenth century is the citation of poetic authorities, such as Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, to the same end as their counterparts in prose: to increase the store of knowledge presented on a given topic.