Antony de Guevara
Antonio de Guevara Noroña (Treceño, c. 1480-Mondoñedo, April 3, 1545) was a Spanish writer, historian and ecclesiastic, belonging to the order of the younger brothers of the regular observance. He was one of the most popular authors of the Renaissance (his works have been estimated to have been published during the 16th and centuries. ="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">XVII more than 600 times throughout Europe).
Biography
Son of Juan Beltrán de Guevara —son of Beltrán de Guevara, lord of Escalante and Mencía de Bedoya— and his wife Ana or Inés de Ureña, he came from the side of his paternal family of the lords of Guevara and Oñate although his paternal grandmother and his mother were Jewish converts. He was second best and as such was assigned to an ecclesiastical career, although thanks to the good offices of an uncle of his he was able to educate himself at Court, "where I grew up, grew up and lived for some times, more accompanied by vices than care». He was the cousin of Ambassador Diego de Guevara.
There, according to him, although it has not been possible to document it, he was the page of Prince Don Juan and, after his death, of Queen Isabella the Catholic. But as she died in turn, he professed in the Order of San Francisco, in which he rose rapidly: he was guardian of the monasteries of Arévalo and Soria in 1518, and definer of his ecclesiastical province on November 11, 1520. On the 30th of the same month and year, he was in Villabrágima as a carrier of some imperial provisions to end the insurrection of the comuneros with the so-called "Villabrágima reasoning"; however, he came out of this meeting "badly treated and worse served." He was, then, in the Court of Emperor Carlos I during the War of the Communities of Castile, and he rewarded his loyalty by naming him royal preacher in 1521. He accompanied his lord on his trip to England in June 1522, where they would be so much loved. influence his works, and in May 1523 he attended the general chapter of his order in Burgos. During the following years he toured various cities in Castile together with the emperor.
He was in Valencia on May 10, 1525 as a member of a commission in charge of converting the Moors of that kingdom, he participated in the war against the Moors of the Sierra de Espadán and was wounded before they surrendered on May 19 of September, 1526. On December 7 of this year, in Granada, he had some part in the drafting of an edict against the Moriscos. At the beginning of 1527 Carlos V named him his official chronicler and he moved to Valladolid on June 27 to participate in the meeting of 24 theologians that was to rule on the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam.
He was in the Council of the Emperor and it is very possible that he wrote the important speeches that he had to deliver, first, before the Courts of Monzón in response to the challenge of Francisco I (June 1528) and, later, in Rome, before Pope Paul III in 1536, on the occasion of his coronation as emperor.
Episcopacy
Bishop of Guadix
On January 7, 1528, he was named bishop of Guadix, but it was only in 1529 that he obtained royal permission to go to that diocese, despite which he continued to accompany the Emperor in the company of Tunis between 1535 and 1536. During the latter year it was found in Rome at the aforementioned coronation of the Emperor and in Naples. He also acted as a preacher at the Empress's funeral (Toledo, 1538).
Bishop of Mondoñedo
In 1537 he was proclaimed Bishop of Mondoñedo, but the Court continually removed him from his ecclesiastical posts (and we must think, from what we know, quite willingly) with various tasks, including supervising the publication of his books. At Court he wrote his Disparagement of the Court and Praise of the Village (1539), a book that influenced not only Spanish authors (Pedro de Navarra, Difference from rustic to noble life, 1567) or Galician, (Coplas in reproach of palace life and village praise), but was translated at the time into French (Lyon, 1542), into English (London, 1548), Italian (Florence, 1601) and German (1604). On May 3, 1541, he promulgated some Synodal Constitutions that were very important for the history of the Church in Mendoza.
Death
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He died in his diocese on May 3, 1545 and was buried in the cathedral.
Historical evaluation
His Franciscan religious life and his active and busy court life are highly dissonant: he constantly pursued notoriety and accused a great intellectual disorder that made him use the quotes of Greco-Roman authors without worrying about assuring his sources, mostly erroneous, nor about subject them to criticism; what's more, he came to falsify or consciously invent them. He was accused of this equivocal or false erudition by humanist scholars such as Pedro de Rúa in some Censory Letters , and by Antonio Agustín, Melchor Cano and Pierre Bayle. His desire for glory and fame and his contagious enthusiasm for novelty, however, make him a fully renaissance spirit and he is currently regarded as an important forerunner of the essay for his Family Epistles, a collection of letters in prose, some perhaps fictitious, on a diverse subject and addressed to various courtiers and religious with the main purpose of discussing with ease on any subject susceptible to it, which more than achieves to such an extent that even today they are read with great pleasure and entertainment.. Guevara is characterized by an inexhaustible curiosity, a humorous mood, an absolute contempt for erudite precision and the intention to educate and moralize while delighting as much as possible.
His influence on the imperial policy of Charles V is reflected in his opinion that his domains should not extend beyond the territories he had received by inheritance. One of Guevara's most influential books has been the Relox de príncipes or Libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio , where a series of epistles written by the Roman emperor appear interspersed according to the assumptions of the rhetoric of the time. of the; In this work appears the quoted passage with the legend of the villain of the Danube, of great literary significance. From the mannered style of this book they have attempted to derive the English euphuism or conceptism, so called from John Lyly's Euphues.
In effect, one can see in Guevara's rhetorical style a characteristic abuse of the homoioteleuton until at some point he approached rhymed prose; he does not use this resource as sparingly as other authors of the time, such as Hernando del Pulgar in his Letras .
Works
- Golden Book of Marco Aurelio (Seville, 1528).
- Clock of Princes (Valladolid, 1529).
- Appreciation of court and village praise (Valladolid, 1539).
- Family items (Valladolid, 1539 and 1541).
- A decade of Caesars, is to know: The lives of ten Roman emperors who reigned in the times of the good Aurelio Framework (Valladolid, 1539).
- Art of the Marear and the inventors of it: with many notices for those who sail in them. (Valladolid 1539).
- Notice of private and courtier doctrine (Valladolid 1539).
- Oratory of religious and exercise of virtuous (Valladolid, 1542).
- Monte Calvario, first and second part.