A study of the mentality of the 16c Spanish writer, Fray Luis de León. Luis de León, poet and Biblical exegete, lived from 1527 to 1591. The study attempts to explain the impression received from his prose and verse works that he intended them to conform to what he believed to exist in Nature, society, and the spiritual world, but that he gave equal attention to their aesthetic form, i.e. the figures and fictions they contain. The following questions are posed: does Fray Luis make any distinction between truth and fiction inthe content of his works, or between poetic language and logical language in their form? If so, does he use any consistent criteria for these distinctions?

This book looks at the poetry of Fray Luis de León together with other works in both Latin and Spanish of biblical and classical texts.