Fernando Ruiz de Villegas

Fernando Ruiz de Villegas (* around 1500 in Burgos ; † after 1536) was a Spanish poet .

life and work

Fernando Ruiz de Villegas was born in Burgos at the beginning of the 16th century and came from an impoverished aristocratic family. Under the guidance of his teacher Juan Luis Vives , he made rapid progress in the field of literature studies. His parents had chosen him for the clergy, but he fell in love with the beautiful Marianne de Lerma and married her. After only a few months of marital happiness, however, his wife suddenly died. To distract himself from his grief, he devoted himself to poetry. It was probably then that he was making a scholarly trip to France . In Paris he made friends with the humanist and philologist Guillaume Budé . Perhaps he was also in touch with Erasmus of Rotterdam , whose death (1536) he deplored in several poems. After his return from France he held the post of governor of his native city for some time and died, ultimately robbed of his post by an intrigue, in private. The date and place of his death are not known.

Villegas was completely forgotten for more than a century after his death, until Emanuel Marti , dean of Alicante cathedral , accidentally discovered a copy of his poems written in Latin in the Valenza library of Count Castelvi, an ardent patron of scholars . Marti corrected numerous typographical errors in the manuscript and prepared his edition, but Andreas Lama only carried out this plan thirty years later. Lama had the manuscript appear in print in 1734 under the title Ferdinandi Ruizii Villegatis, Burgensis, quæ extant opera zu Venice . At the beginning of this issue is a description of Villegas' life written by Emanuel Marti. The edition also contains six eclogues , the heroic poems De nuptiis Philippi et Isabellæ and Sphæra mundi , translations of Aesop's fables , the poem Cybdelomastix , which describes important facts from Greek and Roman history , epistles , epigrams , epitaphs and much more. The epistles are similar to those of Horace , whom Villegas had taken as a model.

literature

• Villegas (Fernand Ruiz de) . In: Louis-Gabriel Michaud (Ed.): Biographie universelle , 2nd edition, Vol. 43 (1865), pp. 447f.