Abstract

The term ‘miscelánea’, as applied to works of heterogeneous content published in the Spanish Golden Age, is still only poorly understood, functioning too often as a ‘dustbin category’ for hard-to-classify works. This critical uncertainty is compounded by the relative rarity of the term in the Golden Age itself and by the fact that the five works entitled as ‘misceláneas’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are radically different amongst themselves.

In this paper, therefore, I intend to assess the suitability of ‘miscellany’ as a generic label. I hope to achieve a greater definition for the term, both through an examination of the differences between these five works and through an analysis of their points of convergence with respect to their conception of literary ‘miscellaneity’. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that a great deal of validity for the generic usage of ‘miscelánea’ can be derived from the previous Latin humanist tradition, and that at least two of the authors of Spanish ‘miscellanies’ explicitly entitled as such were aware of this prior literary current and sought to interact with it.