Chapter 2 treats the early Italianate-poetry that Cervantes wrote for Isabel de Valois (1567, 1568) when he was around twenty years old as serious works composed within the particular cultural and poetic practices of the Habsburg court. In his first sonnet, Cervantes’ speaker develops a conceptual play between the speaking ingenio and the lofty lady through the use of an exalted apostrophe, a key feature of Pastoral Petrarchism that would inflect the subsequent decades of the author’s literary career. The only known copy of this sonnet was preserved in an early seventeenth-century manuscript collection of pastoral and erotic lyric and narrative poetry pertaining to the Habsburg court, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu. This chapter examines and draws upon the manuscript in order to reconstruct the literary environment in which Cervantes wrote, as it was understood by the early modern compiler (a primary source on readership, reception, and genre). Ms. Espagnole 373 also recontextualizes the poetry that Cervantes composed the following year for the untimely death of Isabel on October 3, 1568. This chapter considers Cervantes’ relationship to Giulio Acquaviva while the papal legate was present in the Habsburg court, his journey to Rome, and the Sigura affair.

Chapter 5 reconstructs the site of production for Cervantes’ prosimetric pastoral, the Galatea (1585), and investigates the way in which he disguised himself and members of his own literary milieu as shepherd-poets under pastoral pseudonyms. It employs paratextual sources to reconstruct this milieu. Drawing on early manuscript annotations (ms.2.856, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) that identify Cervantes as the “Lauso” of the Galatea and earlier scholarship on the Galatea as roman à clef, this chapter proposes an additional decoding of the work through attention to the use of biographical names (and pseudonyms) for poets associated with the river Tajo in the “Canto de Calíope” (Book VI of the Galatea). With the decline of literary circles in the courts, poetic life migrated from the Alcázar to the barrio de las letras. The established poets of Isabel’s reign – Figueroa, Laínez, Gálvez de Montalvo, Gómez de Tapia, and Cervantes – were joined by younger poets – López Maldonado, Pedro de Padilla, Vargas Manrique, Liñán de Riaza, Juan Rufo Gutiérrez, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora – to form a milieu of “urban pastoralists.” The encomiastic poetry that Cervantes wrote indicates a network of authors contemporary to the Galatea, in which the figura of the poet became a literary character.