Enrique de Villena and Curial e Güelfa

Abstract

Enrique de Villena (1384-1434), a nobleman keen on arts, a bilingual author in Catalan and Spanish, who lived for some years (ca. 1416- 1429) –in a sporadic way– in the Valencian court of Alfonso V of Aragon and John of Navarre, had an influence on the concept of literature to the author of the chivalric novel Curial e Güelfa (Enyego d’Àvalos?), written in Catalan (Naples-Milan, ca. 1445-1448) and which could be related with the Italian court of the Magnanimous. The Curial displays intertextual connections with Villena’s work, apart from shared hapaxes and neologisms. The author was aware of –undoubtedly– Los dotze treballs d’Hèrcules (Valencia, 1417) and parodied mythographic mistakes from the romanced, glossed and moralised Aeneid by Villena (Valencia, 1427-1429), two works that he alludes to implicitly in his own. Both writers spread the ideal of the vir scientificus Hercules (Coluccio Salutati) as an allegory of the effort the sçientíficos/scientífichs knights put on studying the Greek-Latin classics to grow up in virtue. And both seem to anticipate a «political virgilianism» which could be interpreted as the idea of embellishing literarily the historical events to perpetuate the military glory in a respectable format.