Background
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo was born at Santander, Spain on November 3, 1856.
(A Spanish saga of heretics, witches and saints ... Menénd...)
A Spanish saga of heretics, witches and saints ... Menéndez Pelayo, Spain's leading intellectual figure in the 19th century, tells the glorious tale of how Spain's Catholicism heroically survived all attemps against her; and in beautiful prose too, here rendered into English for the first time. The present volume deals with the challenges early Christianity faced in Spain prior to the Middle Ages. Books 2 and 3(in preparation) bring the history up to the eve of the Reformation. The author's introduction to the first edition ends with a prayer: "May God give me the light of understanding and a humble firmness of will; may He steer and guide my pen to narrate without anger or bias the sad history of error among our peninsular people! May He grant that this history may foster enlightenment and benefit, not scandal, to Christians everywhere." Few books of ecclesiastical history make for such a gripping read.
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Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo was born at Santander, Spain on November 3, 1856.
He studied at the Universities of Barcelona and Valladolid, and after receiving his doctorate at Madrid in 1875, he was given a government scholarship for research in the great libraries of Europe.
In 1878 he was appointed Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Madrid, a position which he held until 1898, when he became director of the National Library. Upon his death at Santander, May 19, 1912, he bequeathed his magnificent library to his native city.
Essentially, Menéndez y Pelayo was a creative explorer of Spain's national past. In La Ciencia española (1876), his first major work, he revives many forgotten aspects of Spanish thought in their relation to occidental philosophy and science. The Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880 - 1882) is a vivid picture of the history of ideas in Spain, seen through the eyes of an orthodox Catholic.
This work is a counterpart of the Ciencia española in that the author endeavors to show the foreign influence behind the Spanish heterodoxy and its lack of national roots. Both works are polemic in character. In the Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (1882 - 1891), Menéndez y Pelayo puts aside this polemic attitude to appear as a historian of aesthetics and a humanistic critic. The insight displayed in these volumes gives him a prominent place among the great European critics.
He also published Orígenes de la novela (1905 - 1910); Antología de poetas líricosliricos castellanos (1890 - 1906), the first anthology to include Spanish-American lyric poetry and the first anthology to bring under a single critical preview the whole body of Hispanic poetry; and many other scholarly works.
Menéndez y Pelayo's work represents the culmination of the scholarly activities of the critics and scholars who began during the Romantic period to study Spanish literature systematically. His was the first internal organization of the history of Spanish literature, for he had the genius to discover the unity latent in Spanish culture from its origins to his own time.
(A Spanish saga of heretics, witches and saints ... Menénd...)