Schwellentexte in Der Historischen Poetik

Zu Juan del Encinas Arte de poesía castellana (1496)

Castilian Golden Age poetics flourishes in the first half of the 17^th century. In contrast, the 16^th century, the heyday of Renaissance poetics in Italy and France, is largely devoid of Castilian sources significant for the history of poetic theory. A gap of a century separates Sánchez de Lima's sketchy Arte poética en romance castellano (1580) or López Pinciano's more prominent Philosophia Antigua Poetica (1596) from Juan del Encina's Arte de poesía castellana (1496), the last proto-poetics in the late-medieval vernacular tradition. This state of sources led research to approaching these texts on the basis of heuristics informed by the common narrative of an 〉epochal break〈 separating the Late Middle Ages from the Renaissance: While Encina's work has been seen as paradigmatically 〉late medieval〈 and largely epigonic, Pinciano's treatise shines as the first systematic outline of poetic theory in Castilian, standing on equal terms with its precursors in Renaissance Italy. This article relies on recent tendencies to question this narrative in order to problematize the resulting assessment of Encina's work. An in-depth analysis reveals a complex configuration of disciplinary references, in part firmly established in medieval and late medieval lines of thought, in part showing evidence of conceptual shifts and reception processes commonly seen as defining features of the Renaissance and Renaissance poetics. This very complexity, backgrounded by common conceptualizations of the epochal break, is not only the work's most salient trait and most meaningful quality for the history of poetics, but more widely significant for the understanding of the decades around 1500 as a 〉threshold period〈 (Koselleck) as well.