Following studies by Goodman, Waley, and Darst, this new study of Garcilaso's work rejects as unfounded the traditional readings of Garcilaso's poetry based on the idea of sincerity and the poet's frustrated love for the Portuguese lady-in-waiting Isabel Freire. In place of the much-abused concept of sincerity, Heiple argues that the intellectual currents of the Renaissance are much more important for the analysis of Garcilaso's poetry. He analyzes in Garcilaso's poetry the uses of Renaissance concepts of mythology, poetic style, theories of love, primitivism, and iconological traditions. Especially important in these analyses are the poetic practices of Petrarchism as defined by Pietro Bembo and the reaction against them proclaimed by Bernardo Tasso. Heiple studies each of the sonnets, tracing their roots in the Hispanic cancionero poetry through Petrarchism and Neoplatonism to the specific reactions against the Italian Petrarchan mode, ending with the sonnets in imitation of the classical epigram. Several longer poems, Canción IV, Elegy II, and Ode ad florem Gnidi, are discussed within the contexts of Renaissance poetic conventions and ideas, bringing to the fore Garcilaso's incisive wit. By abandoning the traditional search for biographical elements in the love poems, Heiple is able to bring new relevant information to the interpretation of well-known texts and provide new readings for many of Garcilaso's poems.

A careful re-evaluation of pastoral poetics in the early modern Hispanic literature of Spain and Latin America. In her analysis of the verse of representative poets of the Hispanic Baroque, Holloway demonstrates how these writers occupy an Arcadia which is de-familiarised and yet remains connected to the classical origins of the mode. Herstudy includes recent manuscript discoveries from the Spanish Baroque (Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa, now attributed to the Gongorist poet Pedro Soto de Rojas), the poetry of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Francisco de Quevedo. The study considers pastoral as a global cultural phenomenon of the Early Modern period, its reverberations reaching as far as Viceregal Peru. The tradition of the pastoral as a site for the discussion of 'great matters in theforest' has deep roots, and re-emerges to praise the urban hearts of empire. Furthermore, it proves to be a site of spiritual encounter--a poetic space that frames the staging of indigenous conversion in the poetry of Diego Mexiaand Fernando de Valverde. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text. Anne Holloway is a Lecturer in Spanish, Queen's University Belfast.