ABSTRACT
The denomination of miscelánea, or miscellany, is still one of the most misunderstood literary labels in Hispanic studies, not least in relation to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century works in Castilian, and the category that it purports to demarcate is among the most nebulous. Given the propensity of Golden Age texts to incorporate a wide array of diverse materials in order to satisfy the Renaissance tenets, common to rhetoric and literature, of copia and varietas, abundance and variety, many would agree (and have agreed) with Bataillon’s famous, sweeping remark that, in Spain ‘au XVIe siècle, d’ailleurs, tout livre courait le risque de se convertir en miscellanée’ [‘in the sixteenth century, moreover, every book ran the risk of becoming a miscellany’].1 In the last three decades or so, however, attempts have been made to lend greater clarity and focus to what we might consider a miscellany in the Hispanic context; such studies have approached Golden Age miscellaneity not as a modal consideration, but as a genre, linking together under the common heading of miscelánea commercially successful works, such as Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección (1540) and Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas (1570), and lesser-known books, like Ambrosio de Salazar’s Tesoro de diversa lección (1636).2 A number of the genre’s key characteristics have been investigated in varying degrees of profundity: emphasis has been placed on the variety of these miscellanies’ contents, and their often idiosyncratic structure; a number of scholars have noted the wish to arouse admiración, or awe, in the reader; and, with regard to the evolution of the tradition, critical consensus has settled on the growing presence of contemporary information as a principal feature of the genre’s progression. Nevertheless, these aspects will benet from further study, while a number of long-standing assumptions concerning the miscelánea may be fruitfully challenged. Ultimately, we are still some way from delineating the Golden Age Spanish miscellany qua genre in the more rigorous sense of the term, and a corollary of this shortcoming is our ignorance relating to a potential corpus of Spanish miscellanies. As Rodríguez Cacho notes:
Pero el problema al que nos enfrentamos es precisamente el de la extensión del concepto ‘miscelánea’ … ¿Cabe meter en el mismo saco,
con el rótulo mencionado, obras tan dispares como la Silva de varia lección, la Filosofía vulgar de Mal Lara, o la Filosofía secreta y la Silva de Pérez de Moya, la Floresta española de Santa Cruz, y la Miscelánea de Luis Zapata?3
