For two decades (1598–1618), Don Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Marquis of Denia and Duke of Lerma, controlled all the levers of power in the Spanish dominions. Rather than simply dealing with his patronage, this monograph is the first to attempt to shed light on certain prominent aspects of the many-sided relationship that existed between literature and power during his time as royal favourite.

Under the direction of Juan Matas, José María Micó and Jesús Ponce, a multidisciplinary team of research scholars (from French, Italian and Spanish universities) attempts to clarify the context of heroic laudatory poetry, the culture of emblems, sacred oratory, court theatre, chivalric bullfighting and the artistic interrelationship between encomiastic verse and the genre of portraiture in painting.

This is the first published critical work to provide scholars and the educated public in general with a modern, refined edition of the Panegyric to the Duke of Lerma (1617), one of the main works of the mature period of Luis de Góngora (1561-1627).

Juan Matas Caballero is professor of Spanish Literature at the University of León. He has studied the work of authors such as Góngora, Juan de Jáuregui, and Luis Vélez de Guevara. His critical contributions include the study Espada del Olvido. Poesía del Siglo de Oro a la sombra del canon (2005).

José María Micó Juan, professor of Spanish Literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, has published an edition of the Guzmán de Alfarache (1987) and several editions of the poems of Góngora (Canciones y otros poemas en arte mayor, 1990; Poesía selecta, 1991, with A. Pérez Lasheras), as well as the study De Góngora (2001). He has edited and translated the works of classic Italian authors such as Ariosto’s Satires (1999) and Petrarch’s De remediis… (1999). Among other awards, he has received the National Prize for Translation.

Jesús Ponce Cárdenas holds degrees in Spanish Languages and Literature from the University of Deusto and in Classical Languages and Literature from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, where he is associate professor of Spanish Literature. He has published a series of monographs on learned lyric poetry of the Baroque: Góngora y la poesía culta del siglo XVII (2001), Evaporar contempla un fuego helado. Género, enunciación lírica y erotismo en una canción gongorina (2006), Cinco ensayos polifémicos (2009), and El tapiz narrativo del Polifemo: eros y elipsis (2010).