Dos escritos politicos de Francisco de Quevedo: "La Rebelion de Barcelona" y "Descifrase el Alevoso Manifiesto". Edicion critica. (Spanish text);

Abstract

Within the new interdisciplinary historical studies which have been developed on the problem of the so-called "period of decadence" of the Spanish monarchy, one of the areas needing critical and scholarly attention is the political ideas and doctrine of the Spanish thinker and writer, Francisco de Quevedo. The whole period of the reign of Philip IV and his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, has recently come again under historiographic scrutiny. Best known for his literary works, Quevedo's contribution to political thought has been largely neglected. Given his importance at the time and his potential and crucial role in the current debates, it is of the utmost importance to have reliable versions of these works. To date, with the exception of James Crosby's excellent edition of the Politica de Dios published in 1966, this corpus has been known exclusively through the publication of a limited number of Quevedo's manuscript texts, which, unfortunately, have not been submitted to the necessary rigors of a bibliographical and philological examination. In contrast, this dissertation provides a critical edition of two important works of Quevedo, La Rebelion de Barcelona and Descifrase el Alevoso Manifiesto, which deal with events that were crucial to the fate of Imperial Spain: the uprisings of Catalonia and Portugal. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. In the first part, attention is paid to providing historical background of the incidents that motivated the writing of the works. The second part begins with a detailed bibliographical study that includes a description of the manuscripts and their water marks. The critical edition is based on newly found manuscripts and documents using the Neolachmanian method. The critical texts are preceded by a stemma followed by the Mss. variants and a host of philological and historical notes which are necessary for the modern reader to comprehend the allusions to past incidents and personages. These two works represent a new and indispensable source to evaluate a critical period in Spanish and European history and widen our underst and ing of one of the greatest writers of Golden Age Spanish literature.