Ideological and Poetic Construction of Marriage and Wife in Boscán’s Epistle

Abstract

This article reexamines the depiction of marriage and the figure of the wife in the renowned passages from Juan Boscán’s verse epistle to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (c. 1540). Firstly, it analyzes Boscán’s representation of his wife and their marriage and draws connections with the poetic and ideological change he underwent, with reference to other poems that constitute this cycle of new, reciprocal love in an anti-Petrarchan mode. The analysis compares Boscán’s poetry of conjugal love with that of other authors who focused on this type of love: the Italian Neo-Latinist poet Pontano, the French Neo-Latinist Salmon, and the Portuguese Ferreira. Treatises by Vives and Castiglione also shed light on Boscán’s matrimonial poetry, for they offer conceptual underpinnings for its ideological construction of conjugal love.