Editing the poetry of don Diego de Silva y Mendoza, Count of Salinas and Marquis of Alenquer

Various efforts have been made during the last one hundred years or so to edit the poetry of Diego de Silva y Mendoza, Count of Salinas and Marquis of Alenquer (to give him his poetic titles), but all have come to naught due, principally, to the sheer complexity and size of the task that awaits the would-be editor. Buceta, Rosales and Glaser all expressed a desire to edit properly the poetry of one of the most lyrical voices of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Spain, but each in the end failed to do so. The principal complexity is the simple fact that there is no printed edition of Salinas's work nor an autograph manuscript to fall back on, his poetry is to be found in dozens of anonymous manuscripts all over Spain, Portugal, the USA, and most major libraries in Europe. In this paper I make the first attempt to introduce some clarity and logic into the editing of Salinas's poetry, by showing how a canon of his work can be created out of the morass of manuscript versions, and from there how an edition of his poetry that is reasonably correct and close to the author's originals can be achieved.