ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter of this study, we noted a recurrent emphasis on the concept of variety, relating to the content, form and structure of miscellanies, and it is indeed this aspect of miscellaneity which provides the most readily identiable conceptual characteristic of the genre. In this part of my examination, I shall concentrate in the main on variety in so far as it underpins the matter of the miscellanies, since this manifestation of the quality is the true constant of Spanish miscellaneity, while the diverse permutations and evolutions of variety of structure and form will constitute the basis of later chapters of this book. After establishing the nature of the material variety of the Golden Age miscellany, I shall examine the purposes to which the miscellanists put this most prototypical of features and the benets which they envisage it entailing, as well as the practical-and sometimes less than frank-means by which it may be achieved. It is to the eye-catching quality of variety in the genre of the miscelánea that modern critics have most often drawn attention; Alcalá Galán, for instance, states: ‘El principio fundamental de esta clase de obras es la heterogeneidad-la variedad de materias y el uso llevado a extremos de la intertextualidad’ [‘The fundamental principle of this category of works is heterogeneity-variety of topics and the extreme use of intertextuality’].1 And, of course, in the previous chapter we have heard Dávalos y Figueroa aunt the ‘variety in the titles of the dialogues and the discourses found therein’ and Arce underline the ‘variety and mixture … of topics and materials’ present in his book. However, because miscellaneity and variety appear to be such self-evident bedfellows, two omissions have generally gone unaddressed in those critical studies which have contributed to our current state of knowledge regarding the Golden Age miscelánea. Firstly, too little has been done to situate the variety of the miscellanies in its wider cultural context, a signicant oversight given that these works grew up in a period in which humanist works on style were legion, and subsequently achieved maturity in an age in which vernacular treatises on literature were being produced with increasing frequency and condence. And a corollary of this lacuna is the fact that not enough effort has been invested in questioning to what extent the variety of the Spanish miscellanies might
be different to that found in other literary productions of the period, or whether it might even be of a singular sort.
