Comentarios del desengañado de sí mesmo, prueba de todos estados y elección del mejor de ellos. Vida del mesmo autor de Diego Duque de Estrada. Edición crítica y estudio

Resumen

The main goal of this dissertation is the critical edition and study of Duque de Estrada’s Comentarios del desengañado de sí mesmo. For the fixation of the text, an exhaustive comparison of the seven testimonies has been carried out. The similarities and differences of this work are described in the critical apparatus at the end of the edition. The punctuation, the spelling and the division into paragraphs has also been reviewed. As regards the annotation of the text, the criteria of the Biblioteca Clásica de la Real Academia Española are followed and a distinction is made between footnotes and additional notes. The first ones consider lexical and linguistic questions, expressions, and proverbs, as well as the explanation of all historical and cultural element necessary for the correct interpretation of Duque de Estrada’s text. However, in those cases in which further clarification is needed, a diacritical mark [°] is placed at the end of the footnote, which refers to the additional notes. In relation to the interpretative analysis, the study that accompanies this edition is focused on those aspects that have gone unnoticed by critics or those that need to be revised. This study has been organized in ten chapters. The first chapter contains all the news that exist about the soldier and new historical discoveries. After this historical review, the literary analysis begins with a new reading of the Comentarios where the text has been interpreted as a mixture of the life of soldier and religious. The following chapter is focused on describing the writing and revising process of the text. It also analyses the structure of the work. Then, attention is paid to the digressions that the soldier inserts in his speech and to de marginal notes and the summary that closes the Comentarios. After this analysis, the self-portrait of Duque de Estrada as an author, soldier and religious is described. In order to complete the literary study, a brief chapter is dedicated to the possible readers of the Comentarios. Finally, after the history of the text, study ends with some conclusions and the editing criteria. As supplementary material, some appendices are added at the end of this dissertation. The first appendix is a chronological scheme of Duque de Estrada’s life; the next appendix summarizes the nineteen parts of the Comentarios. There is also a scheme that collects the geographical references of the text and, in addition, there is an index of historical characters. Lastly, the dissertation closes with the bibliography used in both the study and the edition as well as an index of notes.