El hallazgo del escrito oculto en la literatura española del Siglo de Oro: elementos para una mitología del Libro

Abstract

The pseudo-historicity, spurious attribution and alleged translation of a lost manuscript was a paratextual theme widely used in the Spanish literature of the Golden Age, usually associated with a taletype in which the author tells the circumstances of finding the lost text. Delpech focuses on the relations of such a theme —essential in apocrypha and in the literature of Revelation— to the mythology underlying talismanic magic. He argues that this mythology is rooted in some esoteric trends of Judaism and Islam that originated in the Hermetic Tradition, where ancient views of the East on the heavenly origin of writing and the holy nature of the book converged.