Abstract
The paper I would like to present at the congress aims to propose a new reading of the last book Los siete libros de la Diana by Jorge de Montemayor based on Juan Goytisolo's idea of the importance of rereading literary texts. Literary critics awarded Montemayor's book the label of the first Spanish pastoral novel, thereby reducing its possible readings to its relations with the pastoral tradition before it.
My work tries to break this perspective: it prefers to concentrate on the historical context in which the book is born rather than to follow the traces of the pastoral, thematically or aesthetically. In this way, I intend to construct a new methodology and from it reconstruct another reading taking into account the context immediately before Montemayor.
To this end, I will outline a small panorama of certain historical events that could play a great role in the context of the work: the Inquisition and the Printing Press. I will also consider some literary works of his time, from which Montemayor might have received some kind of inspiration (e.g.
Leon Hebreo's Dialogues of Love). The goal of this comparison is to elaborate a re-reading that unveils new possible meanings of the work neglected because it does not belong to the pastoral tradition by redefining what the pastoral tradition is.