The Academies and Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature

Scholars who deal with Italian letters generally recognize, although they may deplore, the overriding importance of literary academies in the intellectual life of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, just as students of French literature know that the salons and academies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France had much to do with the refinement of taste and manners, with the evolution of critical standards, and with the vogue of the pastoral novel or of the vast historical romance such as Mile de Scudéry's Clélie. Students of Spanish seventeenth-century literature, however, have been remarkably incurious about literary academies, knowing at most, perhaps, that there was an Academia de los Nocturnos functioning in Valencia from 1591 to 1594, or that Lope wrote his much-debated Arte nuevo for an “Academia de Madrid,” and have seemed to regard them as no more than idle games through which the participants passed untouched. Few have asked how widespread the academies were, and even fewer have speculated on their connections with the literature of the time.