El neoestoicismo en la Vida de Boecio (1642) de Don Francisco de Montcada: una propuesta ético-histórica en tiempos de declinación

Abstract

Francesc de Montcada (1586-1635) was a politician and historian, active in both fields during the first decades of the seventeenth century. As a historian his most known work is Expedición de los catalanes y aragoneses contra turcos y griegos (1623). He also wrote a Vida de Boecio, posthumously published in Frankfurt in 1642 thanks to the count of Rebolledo. While currently hardly known, this latter work enjoyed a fairily good diffusion at the time, as can be seen from the several manuscript copies kept at the Biblioteca Nacional, Spain. This article has two basic goals: first, to present a text that today has been practically forgotten; second, to analyze its key elements and the conceptual mechanisms of the Neoestoic mouvement, which combined tradition and cultural innovation, both of them clearly present in Montcada’s work.