Humanism and the Bible in the Poetry of Benito Arias Montano (Bloomsbury Neo-Latin Series: Studies in Early Modern Latin)

This open-access book fills a gap in our understanding of the religious poetry of sixteenth-century Spain by arguing for a new significance to the poetry of one of its central figures.The Latin poetry of cleric, scholar, librarian and political advisor Benito Arias Montano escaped censorship inspired by the 1559 Valdés Index, and so provides a unique window into the development of religious poetry in the late sixteenth century between Renaissance biblical paraphrase and the advent of Baroque religious poetry. Although Arias Montano was a true Renaissance polymath, learned in disciplines ranging from philology to natural philosophy, his interest in emerging humanist disciplines had to be balanced with his convictions that the Bible was the only source of true knowledge.Part One of this study presents an overview of his work and compares this with other religious poets writing across Europe.Czepiel argues that this scholar, a Spanish Catholic of the sixteenth century, is an early exponen