The Life and Times of Jorge Manrique and his Coplas

There is little doubt that, if not for the Coplas por la muerte de su padre, Jorge Manrique would be simply a minor member of a lineage whose importance in Castile was diminishing, a lesser historical figure who participated in skirmishes that characterized the civil unrest in the kingdom in the third quarter of the fifteenth century and who, like other noblemen, dabbled in court poetry. Therefore facts about him that were recorded in his lifetime were relatively few. But the lasting fame he earned with the Coplas led to the desire of scholars and admirers to know the details of his days, resulting in a number of biographies. These accounts – both long and short – have attempted to glue together a life story from the fragmented information that remains about him. Most biographers have used as a point of departure Luis de Salazar y Castro's genealogical study of the Manrique family in the second volume of his Historia de la Casa de Lara. The first attempt to recreate Manrique's story was probably José Amador de los Ríos's short entry in his history of Spanish literature, which provided a general outline (7: 116–19). He was followed by his student Menéndez y Pelayo, who relied on Salazar y Castro as well as fifteenth-century chroniclers to assemble a three-page sketch of the events of the poet's life and his premature death (2: 379–81).