The Feijoo Institute of Studies of the 18th Century of the University of Oviedo has published the first edition of the complete poetry of Benito Jeronimo Feijoo (1676-1764) in a volume that is fruit of Rodrigo Olay Valdés' doctoral thesis, supervised by Elena de Lorenzo Álvarez. This novelty work, which gathers a corpus of 131 poems, of which 37 were unedited, has been awarded by the Spanish Society of Studies of the XVIII Century its prize for the best monography of an 18th century theme published in 2019, a distinction that has deserved ex aequo together with the study Art and Office of common life. Models of civility and tensions in the Century of Light, by Mónica Bolufer. Furthermore, the volume is inserted into the series of Feijoo's Complete works, which under the management of Inmaculada Urzainqui, the Feijoo Institute of Studies of the 18th Century has been being published since 2014 thanks to a team integrated by specialists of the University of Oviedo like Eduardo San José Vázquez or the member of the RAE Pedro Álvarez de Miranda.

 

Olay Valdés' edition, comprising 880 pages, demonstrates that the poetic work of Feijoo is part in its own right of his intellectual labour in the light of the thematic similarities between his verse and prose and, furthermore, it represents one of the first steps of poetic renovation from the baroque to the classicism of the middle of the 18th century. In order to develop this study, the researcher located and checked the evidence known of all of the poems, which made him work with 27 non-autographed manuscripts and 50 printed testimonies, many of them unknown up until now.

 

Against what has been repeatedly claimed about him, Feijoo wrote poems throughout his whole life – at least between 1701 and 1755 –, although he only managed to publish three poems and eleven translations, which he did not want to sign with his name. The size of the corpus cancels out the belief that poetry was only an occasional occupation for him. On the other hand, from the thematic point of view, the variety of his work stands out, offering religious, funeral, comedy, love and satyric-burlesque poetry, this latter being the most represented, given that he employed poetry as a weapon in many of his polemics.

 

In combination with the themes mentioned, circumstantial poetry prevails above all, so that his verses are plagued with references to specific characters that allow the biography and the human universe of the character to be better known, and that reveal their integration in the Oviedo of his time and his importance in the Benedictine order.

 

The Feijoo Institute of Studies of the 18th Century, headed by Elena de Lorenzo Álvarez, has come to be specialized in the critical and annotated edition of Spanish authors of the 18th Century, such as Juan Meléndez Valdés, Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes or Vicente García de la Huerta. Forthcoming projects of the current Head of the Institute include the culmination of the series of Jovellanos' Complete works, of which 14 volumes have been published up to this date.