'CONTRAFACTUM' AS ALLEGORY: THE RELIGIOUS RECASTING IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY ITALY AND SPAIN, FROM GIROLAMO MALIPIERO TO SAN JUAN DE LA CRUZ

The sixteenth century experiences an enthusiastic rebirth of religious allegory. The Christian allegorization of secular lyric poetry, contrafactum, among them, becomes very popular in Spain. For the modern reader, the mental processes operating in these poems remain alien to the extent of hindering our appreciation. We consider the contrafacta illegitimate products because of their parasitic attitude towards Renaissance literature, and because they disregard the modern aesthetic achievements that we value the most. Yet we glorify poets of the stature of San Juan de la Cruz forgetting that the same mentality structures his poetry. Anchored in the Renaissance lyric poetry, the contrafactum endures the vicissitudes of the Renaissance poetic sign--trapped, that is, in the intertextual webb of imitatio, translatio, and palinode.; Attempting to reconstruct the appearance and development of the contrafactum, this thesis demonstrates that the reification of Scriptural allegory is the Mediterranean response to the ideological demands of Northern humanists like Erasmus. As such this poetry has a central role in the thought of the Counter-Reformation, both as document, from our perspective, and as ideological artifact in their own time. Detailed analyses of Girolamo Malipiero's Il Petrarca spirituale and Sebastian de Cordova's Garcilaso a lo divino illustrate this assertion. The project closes with an analysis of San Juan de la Cruz as an inheritor and the highest exponent of the allegorical mind.; Observing Petrarch and Garcilaso as models we may deal with Malipiero and Cordova as deviances from the aesthetic norm. The reductive tendency of the contrafactum mostly operates at the referential level, forcing the ambiguous secular referent to be brought down to a graspable reality. As a result the contrafactors turn polysemic texts into monosemic entities. It is their means of extracting the 'germane sense' from secular poems, and thus hinder language from signifying more than conformity to established rules permit. This polemic approach, then, allows the original poem to surface in the purged text. San Juan's poemas a lo divino, on the other hand, resemble a palimpsest, successfully effacing the original--insofar as a poetic sign can efface its own diachrony. With his gaze fixed upon the Other-world, he perceives secularity as a void--an ever-empty receptacle that lives in hope of what is to come, making friction irrelevant.