Boscán, Juan

Juan Boscán, original name Joan Boscà I Almogàver, (born c. 1490, Barcelona, Aragon [Spain]—died Sept. 21, 1542, Barcelona), Catalan poet who wrote exclusively in Castilian and adapted the Italian hendecasyllable to that language.

Though a minor poet, Boscán is of major historical importance because of his naturalizing of Italian metres and verse forms, an experiment that induced one of the greatest of all Spanish poets, Boscán’s younger friend Garcilaso de la Vega, to follow his example. Their works appeared together posthumously in 1543, and the tide of Petrarchianism dominated over Spanish poetry for the next century and a half.

Boscán had published in 1534 a translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (The Courtier). His prose was greatly superior to his verse, and El Cortesano is not only one of the influential books of the Spanish Renaissance but a work of art in its own right.