Germanesca hagiography in the seventeenth century: the jácaras of Cáncer, Solís, Pérez de Montoro and sor Juana

Abstract

Germanesca hagiography, a form of the jácara that enjoyed great success in the second half of the seventeenth century, was almost unanimously reviled from the eighteenth century due to its unseemly blend of the sacred and the Burlesque, more for preceptive reasons than moral ones. These peculiar accounts of saints’ lives, whose protagonists emulate the marginalised adventures of underworld rogues, find a home in the poetry of renowned dramatic authors such as Cáncer and Solís, but also in writers with a notable sacred poetry output, such as Pérez de Montoro and Sor Juana. Starting with their relationships with hagiographic humour and medieval preaching or sacred conceptismo, this article studies the traits of the poems featuring characters from Catholic hagiography, along with the editorial norms of their printed transmission, including in volumes of sacred works, approved and sponsored by the ecclesiastical authorities. The analysis reveals that the compositions by Cáncer and Solís evoke the original spirit of the jácaras and their characteristic traits with two sharp planes – divine and marginalised – of similar importance, while Montoro and Sor Juana appear to imagine them more as a type of verse (the romance or the villancico, for example) than as a genre, depriving them of their essential features: the lexicon of rogues and the villainous material and characters. Their rise has been interpreted as another sign of hypertrophy and degeneration of the jácara in its lyrical mode when, having passed its peak under Quevedo’s pen, it was transposed to the stage, infecting and, in turn, being infected by other short dramatic forms. However, instead it seems that the long hagiographic tradition, embedded, as it happens, in common humorous resources since medieval times, made use of a highly successful model in the Golden Age – thuggish aesthetics – to achieve a more effective dissemination of the faith.