| This dissertation offers a great deal of new material for the study not only of the humanism of Alfonso de Palencia, but also of many aspects of Renaissance culture in Spain. The dissertation is divided into seven parts. It first reviews data concerning the education of Palencia (1423-1492) in Italy, as well as the current research on La Perfeccion del triunfo militar (1459); it also includes a catalogue of his works and his library. Secondly, it exposes Palencia's poetics and identifies the literary motives De Perfectione militaris triumphi shares with other humanistic dialogues. With a computer-aided study it reveals Palencia's superior fluency in Latin than in Spanish, as well as his ciceronianism by confronting Palencia's Latin vocabulary with lexical concordances of six relevant classical authors. Third, it reveals his moral philosophy and his sources on military science. It also exposes theories on the civic militia in XV century Spain. Fourth, it reveals Palencia's theories on literary styles explained in a letter of 1464 to his byzantine professor George of Trebizond. Palencia's familiarity with Hellenistic rhetoric and historiography is also explored in his translation of Flavius Josephus' De Bello Judaico and in his own De Bello Adversos Granatenses. Fifth, it investigates for the first time Palencia's lexicography through studying a previously unknown manuscript of the De Synonymis elegantibus libri III (1472). The collation of more than a thousand entries of this Latin lexicon reveals its sources, while a study of their content and rhetorical distribution suggests an independent compilation. It concludes that Palencia's use of classical and post-classical grammarians and lexicographers makes this dictionary, as well as his Universal Vocabulario en Latin y en Romance (1487), the two main humanistic lexica produced in XV century Spain.;The sixth and seventh parts contain the first critical editions of De Perfectione militaris triumphi and of La Perfecion del triunfo, based, in both cases, on sources either not well known or considered lost. |
