Publisher's Synopsis
One of the first European hagiographic and epic poems, Bernardo de Monzón's Xavieradas unifies the western epic tradition, visual elements, metaphors, with some oriental knowledge, to bring back to life the adventures of Francis Xavier through East Asia. The story of Xavier's pilgrimage is accompanied by geographical descriptions, dramatic twists often dreamlike and unreal, portraits of illustrious people, historical events, appearances of nymphs, and much more.
This very extensive heroic piece (more than 2,000 verses) has a solid structure and a clear language, in which many quotations from Latin and Greek authors, alongside Gongorian comparisons and metaphors, testify to the classical spirit of its author.
The purpose of this critical edition is to bring further the rediscovery of a fundamental genre of the Spanish Golden Age: epic poetry. It offers a unique and modern approach to this little known piece, through a modern transcription, a critical apparatus, and a rigorous philological study that reveals the rich aesthetic of the epic and heroic discourse in the Spanish Golden Age, as well as the formation of some of the most innovative poetic modalities of the late Renaissance and Baroque.
