The civil satire in verse in the Seville of the Golden Age: new data about the Sonnets of the Reception that Seville made to the Marquise of Denia

Abstract

In October 1599, the Marchioness of Denia, the wife of the King´s Counsellor and future Duke of Lerma, arrives in Seville. At the request of Felipe III, she is given a reception which befits the rank of a royal visitor. The popular indignation at the public authorities' squandering of money on this event was reflected in a series of satirical sonnets spread as manuscripts in many different publications, which are mentioned and described in this article. The event is well documented, but new testimonies which have not been referred to before, have now been added. Likewise, these sonnets are part of the currents of satirical poetry which developed in the Golden Age of Seville. These currents became the gap through which the civil humanism could be heard and they were not completely indifferent to the social problems of the time. The rhetorical models of this group of sonnets are also studied and two of them, which had hitherto been unpublished, are now published for the first time.