Cancionero autógrafo de Pedro de Padilla, manuscrito 1579 de la Biblioteca Real de Madrid (review)

José Labrador Herraiz and Ralph A. DiFranco have produced yet another volume in their invaluable series of sixteenth-century manuscript cancioneros, this one, an autograph by the now-obscure but formerly well-considered Padilla (1549?-1600), an important link between fifteenth-century traditional Castilian styles and the Italianate mode of the sixteenth. As a Carmelite, Padilla gives some understandable importance on religious genres, but, surprisingly, there is a significant proportion of love poetry represented, some of it in the Italianate style, but a preponderance in the traditional canción form, with glossed refrain. The authors have produced an exhaustive catalogue of appearances elsewhere of these autograph poems as an appendix, and they show that ninety eight of them are uniques. Of these, many are unique love canciones, with one notable sequence of religious villancicos in the Encina/Fernández style amongst them. Curiously, although refrains with their glosses are mostly intact here, a few of the refrains are printed elsewhere in the Padilla canon without their glosses, and a few of the glosses without their refrains. Obviously, some of the lone refrains belong to other poets or are traditional, but printing another poet's refrain without the Padilla gloss seems to indicate an accidental omission. The interesting Carolingian ballads and those of an Orlando furioso cycle were previously published by Maxim Chevalier.

The authors give a brief but informative history of the author and of the manuscript. History-of-the-book enthusiasts, however, might have wished for a more rigorous description of the manuscript itself according to current norms of description, as folios are both out of sequence and bound with later copies of the author's work. A few diagrams (now easily produced on word processing programmes and easily reproduced by most modern printers) would not have been amiss, as in these cases the sketch is mightier than the pen.

However the authors have produced their usual magic in deciphering material that is in the process of correction and revision and is far from straightforward to read and interpret. This edition helps to bring to the attention of early modern poetry specialists a neglected figure whose work deserves further attention – and should receive it now that we have this valuable addition to his printed canon.