Hurtado de Toledo’s «Cortes de casto amor» and the prosification of the «Ottava Rima» in Boscán: Neoplatonism and Love in Spanish Early Modern Literature

Abstract

In this article, we show that the Cortes de Casto Amor (Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1557), published under the name of Luis Hurtado de Toledo, include a prose version of some sections of Juan Boscán’s Octava rima, a poem in which, as it is well known, fragments of Pietro Bembo’s Stanze are translated and imitated. Apart from the task of transforming in prose some lines of the Octava rima, Luis Hurtado de Toledo in his Cortes modifies the ending of Boscan’s poem and proposes an articulation of the conflict of love in the author-protagonist pointing to an intellectual love and, in the end, the love of God.