Abstract
Otium(leisure), idleness (ociosidad) and labor (negocio/trabajo) are central categories in Pedro Mexía’s Silva de varia lección (1540), one of the most influential and popular miscellanea of the Early Modern Period, in Spain and Europe. In his work we see the breakdown of the opposition of ocio and negocio in the context of a new aristocratic ideology. Mexía’s reflections on leisure and intellectual labor shed new light on the nature of the mental sufferings of Cervantes’s Don Quijote, and contemporaries’ views of the hidalgo’s favorite pastime: reading.
Texts cited
Alcalá Galán, Mercedes (1996): “Las misceláneas españolas del siglo XVI y su entorno cultural”, Dicenda: Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 14: pp. 11–19.Search in Google Scholar
Allen, Don Cameron (1941): “Jacques ‘Seven Ages’ and Pedro Mexía”, Modern Language Notes 56.8, pp. 601–603.Search in Google Scholar
Atkinson, Catherine (2007):. Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe. Polydore Vergil’s De inventoribus rerum, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.Search in Google Scholar
Bittner, Adolf (1989). “Petrus Mexia: Sylva variorum lectionum. Ein Beitrag zur Quellenrezeption Grimmelshausens”, Wolfenbütteler Barock-Nachrichten 16.1, pp. 25–9.Search in Google Scholar
Castillo, Carlos (1945). “Cervantes y Pero Mexía”, Modern Philology 43.2, pp. 94–106.Search in Google Scholar
Castro, Antonio (1989): “Introducción”, en: Mexía, Pedro: Silva de varia lección, vol. 1., ed. Antonio Castro. Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 9–140.Search in Google Scholar
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1989: El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vol., ed. John Jay Allen, 12th ed., Madrid: Cátedra.Search in Google Scholar
Close, Anthony (2002): Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Eisenberg, Daniel (1986). “Did Cervantes Have a Library?”, in: Miletich, John (ed.): Hispanic Studies in Honor of Alan D. Deyermond. A North American Tribute Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminar of Medieval Studies, pp. 93–106.Search in Google Scholar
Fernández de Avellaneda, Alfonso (2011): El Quijote apócrifo, ed. Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vázques, Madrid: Cátedra.Search in Google Scholar
Folger, Robert (2001): Images in Mind: Lovesickness, Spanish Sentimental Fiction and Don Quijote, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Search in Google Scholar
Folger, Robert and Konstantin Mierau (2018): “Reading (in) Don Quijote”, in: Maarten de Pourcq/Levie, Sophie: Travelling Literatures. An Introduction to European Literary History, New York; London: Routledge, pp. 175–197.10.4324/9781315714622-16Search in Google Scholar
García Jurado, Francisco (2012): “Aulo Gelio y la literatura española del siglo XV. Autor, texto, comentario y relectura moderna”, Revista de Literatura 74.147, pp. 31–64.Search in Google Scholar
Gracián, Baltasar (2004): Agudeza y arte de ingenio, ed. Ceferino Peralta/Jorge M. Ayala/ José María Andreu, Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza; Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses; Departamento de Educación, Cultura y Deporte del Gobierno de Aragón.Search in Google Scholar
Huarte de San Juan, Juan (1989): Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, ed. Guillermo Serés, Madrid: Cátedra.Search in Google Scholar
Krebs, Víctor Eduardo (1998): “Translatio imperii in the Cancionero General and Mexía’s Historia imperial y Cesárea”, Hispanic Journal 19.1, pp. 143–56.Search in Google Scholar
Lerner, Isaías (1992): “Poética de la cita en la Silva de Pero Mexía: las fuentes clásicas”, in: Vilanova, Antonio (ed.): Actas del X Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, Barcelona 21–26 de agosto de 1989, Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, pp. 491–500.Search in Google Scholar
Lerner, Isaías (1993): “Autores y citas españolas en la Silva de Mexía”, Filología 26.1–2, pp. 107–20.Search in Google Scholar
Mexía, Pedro (1989): Silva de varia lección, 2. vol., ed. Antonio Castro. Madrid: Cátedra.Search in Google Scholar
Navarrete, Ignacio (1994). Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Search in Google Scholar
Nebrija, Antonio de (1984):. Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. Antonio Quilis, Madrid: Editoria Nacional.Search in Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin 1971: The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Prieto, Antonio (1986): La prosa española del siglo XVI. Madrid: Cátedra.Search in Google Scholar
Rico, Francisco (1996): “El primer pliego del Quijote”, Hispanic Review 64.3, pp. 313–36.Search in Google Scholar
Soufas, Teresa Scott (1990): Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature, Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press.Search in Google Scholar
Stroup, Sarah Culpepper (2010): Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons: The Generation of the Text, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511730177Search in Google Scholar
Vickers, Brian (1990): “Leisure and idleness in the Renaissance: the ambivalence of otium”, Renaissance Studies 4.1, pp. 1–37.Search in Google Scholar
Wolfson, Harry Austryn (1935): “The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Philosophic Texts”, Harvard Theological Review 28, pp. 69–133.Search in Google Scholar
Zedelmaier, Helmut (2003): “Die Karriere Eines Buches. Polydorus Vergilius De inventoribus rerum”, in: Büttner, Frank/Friedrich, Markus/ Zedelmaier, Helmut (eds.): Sammeln, Ordnen, Veranschaulichen: Wissenskompilatorik in der Frühen Neuzeit. Münster: LITVerlag, pp. 175–203.Search in Google Scholar
Zeller, Rosmarie (1999): “Wunderbares, Ingeniöses und Historien: zu Pedro Mexías Geschicht- Natur- und Wunderwald”, Simpliciana: Schriften der Grimmelshausen-Gesellschaft 21, pp. 67–92.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
