Empire in a small space: Spanish pastoral in its imperial context

This dissertation examines the construction of space in European pastoral literature of the Renaissance, with special emphasis on the pastoral of Golden Age Spain. I argue that the pastoral reflects issues of geographical expansion in its construction of place, and this is especially true of Spanish pastoral in a time when Spain was constructing its European and transatlantic empire.;The study begins by examining the most familiar pastoral image, that of the locus amoenus, a space that is reduced and often closed off from the rest of the world. But as my dissertation demonstrates, coexisting with this image of the enclosed locus amoenus in pastoral are open images of travel and transcendence of geographical bounds. This aspect of the pastoral, introduced in antiquity by Theocritus and Vergil, gained greater importance in Renaissance pastoral with the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro, where the depiction of shepherds in an idealized Arcadian landscape was combined with the journey of the protagonist from Naples to Arcadia and back again. This combination of repose in an idealized landscape and travel to other lands was transmitted to Spain by the pastoral Garcilaso de la Vega, and then moved to the pastoral novels, such as Jorge de Montemayor's Diana and Gaspar Gil Polo's Diana enamorada. The dialectic between the locus amoenus and the wider world of Spanish power reached its height in the pastoral fiction of Cervantes, especially the pastoral episodes of Don Quixote. This interplay of repose and travel was appropriated by Spanish pastoral, it played a dual function: to construct Spain as a kind of locus amoenus, while at the same time gesturing toward and criticizing an expanding empire.