THE RENAISSANCE DIALOG IN THE LIGHT OF CENSORSHIP IN SPAIN: FROM LEON HEBREO TO SPERONE SPERONI.

Abstract

The dialogic genre, connatural to Renaissance since the 15th century humanist period, reaches great editorial success for – it seems – it does not comprehend fiction alone, but also works of educational nature, that filled the reader with such delectare. The cosmopolitan character of Charles V’s epoch shows in the dialogs edited since 1525, in which Erasmus and the Italian writers’ influence increases considerably. Also, in the decade of the 1550s, the times hint to a radical increase in the censor activity in comparison to the three previous decades. This inquisitorial pressure was more noticeable in genres that promoted the dissemination of free thinking, among which dialog is to be listed.

In this studio, necessarily brief, three specific cases from the plentiful corpus of prestigious – as well as censored- Italian dialogs from the Rennaissance will be examined. These go from the translation of the Dialoghi d’amore (1593) by Leon Hebreo, about nature and the essence of love – its universality and its origin- to the six dialogs on political culture that make up the Discorsi de’ principii della nobiltà by Marco della Fratta Montalbani (1550) depicting politics as a means for individual and collective perfection; to the Dialoghi by Sperone Speroni (1546), a testimony of the author’s philosophy and whose philosophical and aesthetic contents were considered common knowledge among the literates of the time, and were relatively frequently quoted in literature.