Resumen de Jorge Manrique, Portrait of a Child of Saturn

Luis F. López González

• Jorge Manrique, whose Coplas a la muerte de su padre elevated him to the summit of fifteenth-century Iberian belles lettres, self-fashions his lyrical subjectivity as a grief-stricken persona whose pangs of love and inherent melancholy prompt him to long for and find comfort in death. Manrique's aesthetic lyricism serves as a platform through which the poet can display his melancholic condition, which was associated with an imbalance of humors and the planet Saturn's influence in the Middle Ages. Contemporaneous poets and chroniclers perceived Manrique's atrabilious constitution, and they turned the poet's melancholic self-fashioning into poetic matter. In their own literary creation, these poets and chroniclers portray Manrique as a typology of a pensive and self-engrossed melancholic whose poetic and philosophical musings led to the composition of his superb Coplas. This study argues that Manrique's lyrical poetry and contemporaneous poets represent Manrique as a pining lover rooted in an overabundance of black bile and the influence of Saturn.