ABSTRACT

The sense of peril that pervades Fray Luis de Leon’s “Vida retirada” is not only metaphysical. The descendants of the Iberian Jews who in the 1390s were killed, converted, or expelled still led in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lives of considerable risk, especially if they were in the least notable. In Fray Luis’s dialectic between disaster and security, a key concept is the one suggested by the Latinate adjective almo. Almus in Latin means “nourishing” and is an epithet of the gods who provide bounty from the earth. Most Golden Age literature unreflectingly prefers aristocratic values and rejects the non-aristocratic from the beginning or before the beginning. A whole system of rejection intrudes upon and becomes a vital part of the “Vida retirada,” an essential feature of its economy, whereas pastoral and courtly poetry automatically exclude genuine economic activity.