An early self

Meer over het boek

What role has Jewish intellectual culture played in the development of modern Romance literature? Susanne Zepp explores this through five influential early modern texts written between 1499 and 1627: Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Montaigne's Essais, and João Pinto Delgado's poetic renditions of the Bible. These Iberian conversos, Jews who converted to Catholicism, navigated two cultures and religions, foreshadowing the subjectivity that defines modernity. As "New Christians" in an intolerant society, they challenged prevailing norms and dogmas. Previous scholarship has often emphasized the Jewish origins of these literary figures. However, Zepp shifts the focus from the authors' backgrounds to how they innovatively subverted and transcended traditional genres. Through close readings, she situates the evolution of various literary forms within the broader historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrating how the development of early modern subjective consciousness and its literary expression can be partly understood as a universalization of originally Jewish experiences.