ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that some sixteenth-century Spaniards were well aware of the basic problem of ecriture , that is, of a standard style of writing as related to, yet different from, vernacular speech. The linguistic theory behind Garcilaso’s poetic revolution is clearly not that of Nebrija’s Spanish grammar, based in part upon a poetic ecriture developed and fixed in the fifteenth century by Juan de Mena, a clumsy mixture of ‘palabras muy groseras’ and ‘palabras muy latinas’. The chapter emphasizes the significance of the attention paid by El Brocense to Garcilaso’s poetry. It was Herrera, the philologian from Seville, who codified in a conservative way the radical innovations, both linguistic and poetic, of the earlier part of the sixteenth century. In his lengthy annotations to Garcilaso’s poetry, and in his own poetry, Herrera combined his intuitive knowledge of poetic composition with a very conscious knowledge of grammar and rhetoric.
