Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe
Mary Barnard
Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the “new poetry” of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as contingent and unstable, expose knowledge of the self as deceptive, and show how history intersects with the ideology of empire.
Mary E. Barnard’s study argues persuasively that the material culture of early sixteenth-century Europe embedded within Garcilaso’s poems offers a key to understanding the interplay between objects and texts that make those works such vibrant inventions.
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About Mary Barnard
Reviews for Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe
K.M Sibbald
Choice Magazine vol 52:12:2015
‘Barnard’s studies of Garcilaso’s Naples period are excellent approaches to his politics and his representations of emotional states…. Barnard’s book is worthy of careful attention of anyone interested in Renaissance verse.’
Eric Clifford Graf
Renaissance Quarterly vol 69:01:2016
‘Barnard’s book will prove to be of great interest and benefit to students of early modern poetry by offering a timely exploration of how objects allow a poetic speaker to constitute himself as a subject.’
Felipe Valencia
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature vol 71:02:2017
‘This book is an articulate and well-informed view of the poems that defined Garcilaso… Barnard’s sophisticated interpretations make an important contribution to our understanding of an author not coincidentally dubbed ‘principe de los peotas españoles.’
Antonio J. Arraiza Rivera
Bulletin of Spanish Studies vol 94:2017