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ABSTRACT The verse glosa emerged in sixteenth-century Spain as an important means of shaping the Renaissance reception of late medieval poetry, with the composition and publication of glosas on ballads and cancionero verse. Building on recent scholarship, which has increasingly considered the verse glosa as an intertextual process, this article seeks to sketch out further lines of inquiry into the form's relationship with early modern concepts of authorship and poetic creativity. An examination of the Renaissance glosses composed by Luis de Aranda on key works of cancionero verse, along with their print and manuscript transmission, reveals that the glosa was understood as an authorial, and marketable, print product, as well as a creative, and often ambiguous, process through which the medieval poets of the past were canonized and the glossator might fashion himself as an author. The article concludes by considering how contemporary readers may have engaged with the glosa.
"Dos personas, pues, por lo menos, apadrinan toda glosa. El autor de la glosa, por así decirlo, recoge de manos de otro poeta el hilo espiritual, tejiendo luego con este su propia inspiración el complejo de la glosa" (Janner, "La glosa española" 186). What Hans Janner alludes to here is the process of intertextuality that is so particular to the Renaissance glosa. This poetic form allows one poet to expand on the verses of another while retaining the metrical scheme of the original; texto and glosa are interwoven to produce a new, symbiotic text. Janner's observations on the glosa anticipate the greater focus on intertextuality by more recent scholars of the form. Giuliana Piacentini and Blanca Perinan state in the introduction to their edition of sixteenth-century glosas on traditional ballads that this form is "uno de los fenomenos de intertextualidad mas peculiar de la poesía hispanica" (10). Emma Scoles and Ines Ravasini examine the relationship between the intertextuality of the glosa and its exegetical functions. Eva Belen Carro Carbajal's paper on Luis de Aranda's Glosa peregrina also draws out the importance of intertextuality in the glosa as it relates to the interaction between poetry transmitted in oral and book cultures in the early modern period. Most recently, Isabella Tomassetti has situated the glosa in the context of the intertextual literary culture of fifteenth-century courtly...