Paul Joseph Lennon
Birutė Ciplijauskaitė Fellow in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture (2025–2026)
Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrews
Petrarchan Wives: Conjugal Love in Early Modern Luso-Hispanic Poetry
This project constitutes the first book-length study of conjugal Petrarchan love poetry within the Luso-Hispanic world. Traditionally, Petrarchism—a dominant poetic tradition celebrating unattainable, often adulterous love leading to spiritual ennoblement—explicitly excluded marital relationships. The work challenges that norm by investigating a significant, yet critically overlooked, subgenre: poems dedicated by husbands to their wives using Petrarchan conventions.
Focusing on three poets—Juan Boscán (Spain), António Ferreira (Portugal), and Eugenio de Salazar (Mexico)—the study asks how marriage and its prescribed gender roles, as discussed in contemporary conduct literature, are represented within this poetic form. It explores how these poets adapted or diverged from standard Petrarchan tropes of suffering and unattainability to express conjugal love, analysing their aesthetic and philosophical strategies.
The study will fill a critical gap by defining conjugal Petrarchism as a distinct lyric category. It examines the subgenre’s transnational role in shaping national poetic identities and vernacular language movements (questione della lingua) in Iberia and the New World. Furthermore, it investigates the interplay between these poetic expressions and contemporary discourses on the ideal wife, marriage, and morality (qurelle du mariage). By offering nuanced comparative analysis across a significant corpus, the monograph aims to significantly revise our understanding of Petrarchism’s flexibility and its socio-cultural functions in the early modern Luso-Hispanic context.
PJ Lennon is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research concerns 16th- and 17th-century Hispanic literature and culture, in particular love poetry, interrogating our understanding of key paradigmatic aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural concepts. He is the author of Love in the Poetry of Francisco de Aldana: Beyond Neoplatonism as well as a variety of articles on Golden Age authors, 19th-C. British Hispanophilia, and film studies.
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