Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Fernando de Herrera carefully crafts in his Anotaciones a version of literary history that redefines the position of Garcilaso de la Vega, who had been seen as the only national poet worthy of imitation and as an aristocrat who attained an exemplary combination of literary and military glory. Herrera directs the reader's intertextual location of Garcilaso's poetry for polemical purposes: the profusion of source citations stresses Garcilaso's imitations and undermines the perception that the poems are acts of sprezzatura. Herrera also inserts himself into the intertext through translations, quotations of his own poems, and the sheer quantity of annotations, which dwarfs the original texts. Furthermore, the overly learned citations have a countereffect, as the mass of contradictory information subverts the very notion of literary authority and thus of canonicity. Today the Anotaciones is read as promoting Garcilaso's canonization, but the responses of Herrera's earliest readers show they understood the work's subversive aims.