San Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de Leon
Edited by Mary Malcolm Gaylord and Francisco Marquez Villanueva

Nineteen-ninety one being the four-hundredth anniversary of the deaths of St. John of the Cross and Fray Luis de León, provided students of Hispanic letters with an unusual double incentive for retrospection and reevaluation. During the recent double quadricentenary a colloquium was held at Harvard University, attended by a distinguished company of European and American scholars, representing a variety of approaches to literature and other arts and to intellectual history.

Because of the undisputed esteem in which both of these Spanish great writers have long been held, there was of course no urgent need for the revindication of their intellects or their works. Nor was there any pressure, of past or present origin, to call either writer to the service of political agendas: the works of San Juan de la Cruz have long since been adopted into the canon of universal masterpieces; and Fray Luis, though thoroughly enmeshed in the political turmoil of his own day, has escaped it in his immortality, perhaps protected by the mantle of his classical philologist's calling. Rather than any ideological urgency, the colleagues shared a quality of thoughtfulness, of seriousness and respect for the rich legacy of these two remarkable poets, scholars, thinkers, churchmen. What emerges from their articles as a whole is neither a radically new collective vision, nor any heated dispute about the global significance of either writer. It is instead a deepened sense of the complexity of their works, derived from scrupulous archaeological sifting and resifting through their texts, their intertexts and their multiple historical contexts.

What is most striking about these essays as a group is the way in which the authors of virtually all of them make use not just of one, but of a combination of newly sharpened historiographic and critical tools: philology, exegesis, poetry and poetics, rhetoric, music, philosophy, theology, law, political and social history, and so on. Surely this methodological richness, fortified always with love for the primary literary artifacts themselves, is the most eloquent homage one could have desired for Saint John and Fray Luis. It also delivers a hopeful message about Hispanic literary studies in the 1990's.

Here is its contents: "The Wonder of Reading St. John of the Cross," (Inaugural Address) Jaime de Ojeda; "Los misoneistas de fray Luis," Antonio Blanco; "Las voces de mis duelos (xiii, 38): El Libro de Job en tercetos de fray Luis de León," Antonio Carreño; "Francisco de Salinas en el entorno de fray Luis de León," Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta; "El águila de San Juan de la Cruz: mística y poesía en las coplas 'Entréme donde no supe' y 'Tras de un amoroso lance,'" Aurora Egido; "Imagen y voz en el Cántico espiritual," Mary Malcolm Gaylord; "El discurso de fray Luis de León al cap¡tulo de Dueñas (mayo, 1557)," Luis M. Girón Negrón; "Ideology, Economy and Feminism In La perfecta casada," Carroll Johnson; "El Cántico espiritual—El júbilo de la unión transformante," Luce López Baralt; "Retórica en las canciones entre el alma y el esposo," Luisa López Grigera; "Fray Luis de León y el Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real," Francisco Márquez Villanueva; "El proceso hermenéutico de la Llama de amor viva," José C. Nieto; "Belleza, deleite y ascesis en Juan de la Cruz," Eulogio Pacho; "La temporalización de Jesucristo como padre del siglo futuro," Roberto Ruiz; "La huida poética de fray Luis de León," Albert A. Sicroff; "Una elegancia desafeitada: Fray Luis de León y Santa Teresa," Colin Thompson.