Atributos y representaciones del Humanismo europeo (siglos XVI-XIX)

The prestige of Western Modernity rests on two great myths: the Renaissance and Colonisation. Having at the time involved mere enterprises of financial power, intended for immediate material gain, they were subsequently dignified as expressions of a higher, somewhat spiritual design, through a set of narratives constructed to accredit their distinction and represent their authority. Humanism, the true cultural programme of the bourgeoisie, organised in the sixteenth century the system of significance and references of such stories, endowing them with an egregious status that found its legitimisation in a residual tradition called classical and inspired by the values and practices of the ancient aristocracy and the medieval nobility. This book links two crucial moments in the evolution of the attributes and representations of the humanist programme: an initial, hegemonic one, when it contributes to give theoretical support to Eurocentric discourses in literary genres of the sixteenth century, and a culminating, residual one, when the decadence of its main contents is glimpsed in large segments of poetry at the end of the nineteenth century.