Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua. A Diplomatic Edition.
Edited by K. Anipa.

MHRA Critical Texts Vol. 38
ISBN 978-1-907322-82-2
Summer 2013
Pbk £9.99 / $15.99 / EUR11.99

Valdes portrait

Composed in Naples in the 1530s, Juan de Valdés’s Diálogo de la lengua occupies a special place in Spanish humanism, just as its author is widely acknowledged by Renaissance scholars as one of the most important intellectuals of 16th-century Western Europe.

Despite its modest size and general lack of recognition as a sociolinguistic commentary, the Diálogo has proved to be a major and authoritative source of reference for modern scholars on the Castilian language in the 16th century, multiple times more so than Nebrija’s famous grammar. In it, Valdés dealt with all levels of linguistic enquiry (within the broad context of the ideology of language standard), ranging from orthography and phonology to syntax and lexico-semantics.

This edition reflects on the complex early history of the earliest extant primary text (MS 8629, held in the Spanish National Library), which is unanimously accepted as the most reliable of the three): whether or not it could have been copied in Valdés’s lifetime, how and when it reached Spain from Naples (where it was written), its real intended recipients, its circulation amongst a circle of Castilian friends, and how it managed to evade the ubiquitous eyes of the Inquisition.

Table of Contents:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
- Juan de Valdés (His life and linguistic thought. Is he also amongst ‘the grammarians’? His role in the Castile-Andalusia intellectual rivalry)
- The Manuscripts: MS 8629, with possible considerations also of MS KIII.8 and MS 9939
- Subject Matter
- Preliminaries
- General Structure and Concealed Table of Contents
- Intended Readership
- From Naples to Spain
- The Spanish Inquisition and censorship
- The Toledo Circle of Humanists and the Diálogo’s Early Circulation
- Fray Pedro de Carvajal’s Annotation: A Likely Lifeline for MS 8629
- From Extremadura to Madrid
- A Crucial Anonymous Annotation (by a Librarian?)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Editions of the Diálogo
DIÁLOGO DE LA LENGUA - Text and Notes

K. Anipa is a lecturer in the Spanish Department at the University of St Andrews.

Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua. A Diplomatic Edition. Edited by K. Anipa.

Further Information:

Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua. A Diplomatic Edition.
Edited by K. Anipa.