Professor Mercedes Blanco
After being admitted to the ENS (École Normale Supérieure de Paris) in the Science department and graduating with a Master's degree in Mathematics (1975) I switched my focus to Humanities and to Spanish Literature. Subsequently I held the positions of assistant, then assistant professor in Spanish Studies at the Université de Limoges. I was a research fellow( membre scientifique) of the Casa de Velasquez (EHEHI, Madrid) from 1985 to 1988, where I prepared my Phd thesis before graduating in 1989. I became a chair professor (professeur) of Spanish Literature of Golden Age (Siècle d'Or) at the Université de Reims in 1990, then at the University of Lille in 1995, and at Sorbonne Université from September 2008 onwards. From September 2022, I have retired as an emeritus professor, with no regular teaching charge and no interruption to my research, and I am member of the research group in my field, CLEA, what I directed before 2022 and that is now directed by Prof. Hélène Thieulin-Pardo, and regarding Golden Age Literature, by Prof. Maria Zerari (https://clea.sorbonne-universite.fr/). I am co-directing with four other scholars a project called Translatio hosted by the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid for a three-year period from 2024 to 2026 (casadevelazquez.org/recherche-scientifique/programmes-scientifiques-de-lehehi/axe-i-cites-territoires-citoyennetes/translatio). It focuses on translations into Spanish of canonical Greek, Latin and vernacular literary texts between the end of the Middle Ages and 1750.
My publications have been covering all kinds of Renaissance and Baroque literature in Spain: prose fiction, poetry and rhetoric, treaties and political pamphlets, drama, preaching and poetry. However my research has never been strictly limited neither to this period nor to Spain. For some years I spent long periods writing on the twentieth century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which resulted in dozen publications, including several in the leading journal on the subject (Variaciones Borges, Aarhus and Pittsburgh). From the beginning, I was actively interested in the Italian literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to which I dedicated a large part of my book Les rhétoriques de la pointe, 1992. Later I wrote essays about Giambattista Marino, Giangiorgio Trissino and Berardino Rota. I have been recently charged of the chapter on metaphors and concetti for a Companion to Marino e il Seicento (Roma, Carocci) that is to be published at the spring of 2026. My Góngora project has a component about the quarrels in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that enters into the field of comparative literature. It introduces a novel online publication method, fit to the historical analysis of literary criticism.
During a period of five years (2010-2016) I became interested in the cultural dynamics of Antwerp during the period of Spanish domination, in particular by the phenomena of multilingualism in printing, epistolary exchanges, festivals and emblem books. My work on the subject, in collaboration to Roland Béhar and Jochen Hafner, resulted in a large bilingual French-German book, Villes à la croisée des langues (Geneva, Droz, 2019).
I began my research studying conceptismo in Spain and Europe and I reintroduced the use of tools that were discovered in the 17th century to analyse witticism and poetic conceit. As my interest shifted from Gracián and his theory of wit to its common practice by writers in every literary genre, my research focused on one of the greatest and most puzzling poets of this era, Luis de Góngora, who is the subject of the two books I published in 2012 (with a revised version in 2016).
Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) remains today the most influential classical poet of the Spanish language. The project I animated from 2014 to 2022 focuses on the reception to his work by his contemporaries which is a unique case in the history of Spanish literature, because of the duration and intensity of its effects. With a group of doctoral and post-doctoral students, and the collaboration with an international group of scholars baptised ∏ólemos, we studied the quarrels which arouse around Góngora in the seventeenth century, and the critical discourses on him, which contain the keys to understanding his subsequent reception. A book analysing and interpreting the polemical reception of the poet and its cultural significance was published in 2021, under my direction and that of Aude Plagnard, under the title El Universo de una polémica. Góngora y la cultura española del Siglo XVII (Iberoamericana).
In these late years my research taken several new directions, the first being the application of philological methods to some aspects of baroque painting and art theory. I finished during the Spring 2025 a book called Velázquez y el arte alusiva, currently in the process of publication. Allusive art consists of the inventive use of quotations or unequivocal references to previous works. Velázquez and Allusive Art attempts to apply this concept to Velázquez's painting. The four canvas studied (Vulcan's Forge, Mars, Venus, Spinners) are among the universally celebrated treasures of the Prado Museum. A few new sources are proposed, but what the book aims to contribute is a new method, inspired by the study of Góngora and other classical poets. Only demonstrable sources that help to interpret the painting and reconstruct its genesis are taken into account. The isolated quotations are less interesting than the system they form. This plot, starting with Homer and Ovid, reaches the culture of Baroque Rome and that of the European courts of the 17th century, those of Madrid, Naples, Vienna, Madrid and Brussels.
During my stay in Oxford, I will be completing a book in Spanish on which I have been working for the last two years, and whose provisional title is El poema heroico y la fábrica hispánica de la santidad en el siglo XVII (The Heroic Poem and the Hispanic Reinvention of Sanctity in the Seventeenth Century). I will deal with four poems of some importance written between the end of the 16th and the end of the 17th century: El Monserrate by Cristóbal de Virués (1588-1602-1609), La Cristiada by Diego de Hojeda ( 1611), S. Ignacio de Loyola, fundador de la Compañía de Jesús (1662) by Hernando Domínguez Camargo, Vida de santa Rosa de santa María. Poema heroico, by Luis Antonio de Oviedo y Herrera (1711).
In the study of these long and complex texts, the examination of ekphrasis, which is very much present, will serve as a guiding thread. On the one hand, ekphrasis is important for reasons of structure, since the long-described images representing biblical scenes or hagiographic episodes outside the action of the poem (for example the penitence of the Magdalene or the story of Judith in Virués' Monserrat) play an important role, linking various figures of sanctity, connecting times and places, manifesting the continuity of salvation history, and enriching the meaning of the narrative. On the other hand, the study of ekphrasis will show the parallel evolution and related problems encountered in poetry on the one hand, and in the iconography of paintings and sculptures on the other, both being supports for meditation and prayer and providers of concrete contents for religious life, both in public worship and in the intimacy of consciences.
• Les rhétoriques de la pointe. Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe. Paris-Genève, Éditions Champion, “Bibliothèque de l'Humanisme et de la Renaissance”, 1992, 800 p.
• Góngora heroico. Las “Soledades” y la tradición épica, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Europa hispánica, 2012, 440 p.
• Góngora y la invención de una lengua, León, Publicaciones de la Universidad de León, 2016, 532 p. (new edition with additions and changes).
• Velázquez y el arte alusiva Casa de Velázquez (to be published in 2026)
• The War Trumpet: Iberian Heroic Poetry 1550- 1700, eds. Emiro Martínez-Osorio and Mercedes Blanco, Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Essays and Studies, 2023.
• El Universo de una polémica. Góngora y la cultura española del siglo XVII, eds. Mercedes Blanco and Aude Plagnard, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2021, 747 p.
• Villes à la croisée des langues (XVIe-XVIIe). Anvers, Hambourg, Milan, Naples et Palerme. / Städte im Schnittpunkt der Sprachen (16.-17. Jahnrhundert. Antwerpen, Hamburg, Mailand, Neapel und Palermo, eds. Roland Béhar, Mercedes Blanco and Jochen Hafner, Genève, Droz, « Travaux d’Humanisme et de Renaissance », 2018, 1112 p.
• Variations sur le Siècle d’or. Bataillon, Cassou, Rumeau, Aubrun, Molho, eds. Mercedes Blanco and Maria Zerari, Paris, Éditions hispaniques, 2018.
Papers (a selection of recent publications)
•“Metafore, concetti, eccessi: per una perimetrazione del Barocco”, Marino e il Seicento, ed. Emilio Russo, Roma, Carocci, May 2026.
•“A Sephardic Quevedo? Abraham Gómez Silveira, between controversy and poetry”, ‘Diasporas of Sefarad and al-Andalus: Iberian Questions beyond Iberia, ed. Imogen Choi and Erica Feild, Renaissance Studies (in print)
• “Ángeles y demonios en la Cristiada de Diego de Hojeda. Una epopeya virgiliana a la gloria de la orden de Santo Domingo”, Calíope, n° 30, 2025.
•“Una canción heroico-sacra juvenil de Góngora a ejemplo y emulación de Herrera: En una fiesta que se hizo en Sevilla a san Hermenegildo”, La poesía religiosa en tiempos de Góngora, ed. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, 2025, p. 77-136.
• “Les traces de Velázquez chez Marcel Proust. L'oeuvre d'art à l'époque de la reproductibilité technique”, Proust et l'Espagne. Les Espagnols et Proust, éd. Maria Zerari Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne) In print.
• “ El desengaño como diagnóstico de un fracaso político-militar: Desengaño y reparo de la guerra del reino de Chile de Alonso González de Nájera”, éd. Maria Zerari, “Nos, el desengaño” (siglos XVI-XVII). El desengaño en la(s) literaturas y el mundo hispánico I, e-Spania 49 | 2024. https://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/52320
• “Reflexiones acerca de la biblioteca de Pacheco en el arte de la pintura”, Pacheco à la plume. Pacheco en papel, Monográfico dirigido por Cécile Vincent, Elena Escuredo y Héctor Ruiz Soto, Atlante. Revue d'Études romanes, 2024. https://journals.openedition.org/atlante/31168
• (with Aude Plagnard),“Editar una obra y los testimonios de su recepción. El caso de Góngora”, Editar el Siglo de Oro en la era digital, éd. Susana Allés-Torrent & Eugenia Fosalba, Studia aurea monographica, n° 9, 2024, p. 109-142.https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/caplli/2024/292184/stuarmon_a2024n9p109.pdf
• (with Emmanuel Bury and Riva Evstifeeva), “Introduction” to the dossier Un médiateur au Grand Siècle. Amelot de la Houssaye entre France, Espagne et Italie, XVIIe siècle, n° 304, 2024, p. 404-409.
• (with Riva Evstifeeva), “Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye lecteur et glossateur : les annotations manuscrites dans des ouvrages de sa bibliothèque”, XVIIe siècle, n° 304, 2024, p. 467-501.
• “Abraham Ortelius, inventor del Atlas”, Catálogo Por Facultad y Ciencia. Libros científicos de la Edad de Oro en la Biblioteca Grupo Cántico de Córdoba, ed. Rafael Bonilla, Córdoba, 2024, p. 263-273.
• “Écfrasis sacra en el Monserrate de Cristóbal de Virués”, Estudios sobre la épica sacra, ed. J. Ponce Cárdenas, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2024, p. 13-92.
• “Agudeza por desempeño. L’incontro fra Curzio Malaparte e Agustín de Foxá (Finlandia, 1940) e il suo ruolo in Kaputt”, Curzio Malaparte e la cultura europea. Cartografia di un palinsesto letterario, ed. Maria Pia da Paulis, Florence, Cesati, 2023, p. 339-364.
• (with Jesús Ponce Cárdenas), “Mudas señas. Espacio y tiempo en las Soledades”, Estudios sobre las “Soledades”, ed. J. Ponce Cárdenas, Valladolid, Universidad de Valladolid, 2023, p. 21-154.
• “Pacheco, Gracián, Apeles y la idea del arte en el entorno de Velázquez”, “Serio ludere”. Hommage à Jean-Pierre Étienvre, éds. M. Mestre et P. Rabaté, Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 2023, p. 325-362.
• “Ovidio global: variaciones ovidianas en la Edad de Góngora”, Calíope, n° 28/1, 2023, p. 1-33.
• “Desde las alturas y a pie de campo: vicisitudes de la mirada en algunos poemas épicos españoles”, Etiópicas. Revista de Letras Renacentistas, n° 19, 2023, p. 13-61.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/revista/11636/A/2023
• (with David Nelting), “Considerazioni intorno a un recente contributo della critica Mariniana: Clizia Carminati, Tradizione, imitazione, modernità. Tasso e Marino visti dal Seicento”, Romanistisches Jahrbuch, décembre 2023, p. 225-233.
• “L’écriture de la mélancolie avant les Modernes : les cas d’Ovide et de Leopardi”, Savoirs et clinique. Revue de Psychanalyse. Editions Érès, n° 29, 2022, p. 56-72.
•“Considérations sur le castillan à l’âge d’or de la traduction (1540-1570)”, e-Spania [En ligne], 40 | octobre 2021.
http://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/41343 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/e-spania.41343
• “Una edad de oro de la traducción (1540-1570)”. Dossier “El cambio de paradigma (1550-1560) : Hacia la novela moderna”, DiablotextoDigital. Revista de Crítica literaria, vol. 9, 2021, p. 111-153.
• “Góngora y la poética del epitalamio”, Dossier “El epitalamio en España”, dir. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas. Bulletin hispanique, 2020/ 2, p. 479-506. https://journals.openedition.org/bulletinhispanique/11263
• (with Riva Evstifeeva), “Un sujet de Louis XIV à l’école de Tacite et de Gracián. La carrière littéraire d’Amelot de la Houssaie (1634-1706) au travers d’un examen critique des données biographiques et bibliographiques”, e-Spania [En ligne], 35 | [Online since February 2020.
