The Dark Side of Things: Praxis of Curiosity in La silva curiosa (Julián de Medrano 1583)

Abstract

Curiosity lies at the heart of the sixteenth-century miscellany books, which served as precursors to the essay genre. Among them, a truly exceptional piece stands out: La silva curiosa by Julián de Medrano, published in 1583. This work pushes the boundaries of curiosity to such an extent that it challenges its classification within the genre of miscellany owing to its unconventional and strange nature. Julián de Medrano, the author of this outlandish work, transforms himself into a character and protagonist, defining himself as an “extremely curious” individual. During his extensive travels, he curates a collection of “curious” epitaphs associated with often comical and peculiar deaths, spanning Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Galician, and Italian. In addition to this, La silva curiosa includes an autobiographical narrative, a precursor to the Gothic genre, in which Medrano recounts unsettling encounters with black magic. This work offers a multifaceted exploration of curiosity, taking it to the extreme by narrating the author’s life experiences driven by a relentless pursuit of the curious, which is synonymous with the bizarre, extraordinary, marvelous, and unexpected. La silva curiosa emerges from a time marked by an almost nihilistic void, as the full force of the Baroque era has not yet arrived, and the ideals of humanism are fading away. It stands as a unique document that unveils an unexpected facet of the concept of curiosity within Spanish Renaissance culture.

Curiosity, long celebrated in Renaissance thought as a driving force behind human inquiry, also harbored a more ambivalent nature—one that could lead to excess, transgression, and the destabilization of knowledge itself. While humanist discourse often framed curiosity as an epistemological virtue, early modern literature reveals how it could just as easily become a disruptive force, undermining the very intellectual structures it sought to build. La silva curiosa (1583b) by Julián (or Julio) de Medrano exemplifies this tension.1 Although its title aligns it with the tradition of Renaissance miscellanies, its content radically reconfigures curiosity as an erratic and destabilizing principle, pushing it beyond the mere acquisition of knowledge toward an intense engagement with the grotesque, the macabre, and the esoteric. Medrano’s relentless pursuit of the extraordinary not only fragments the structure of his text but also transforms curiosity into a praxis—an experiential enactment that dissolves the boundary between the observer and the observed, between collector and object.

At the heart of La silva curiosa is the figure of Julio de Medrano as a traveler, a restless low-range aristocrat, who traverses the cultural and linguistic landscapes of sixteenth-century Europe, collecting epitaphs, encountering strange phenomena, and documenting his experiences with an insatiable curiosity. Medrano’s wanderings take him from Spain to France, Italy, Flanders, and Portugal, and even to the distant islands of Madeira and Menorca, creating a textual cartography of curiosity that apparently mirrors the intellectual ambitions and anxieties of his time. Yet, unlike the Renaissance traveler who seeks knowledge through engagement with antiquity, science, or geography, Medrano’s curiosity leads him into territories of excess and disorder—spaces haunted by the past, filled with cryptic inscriptions, morbid relics, and uncanny encounters. His journeys do not follow a linear trajectory of discovery but instead form an erratic, disjointed path through a world that is increasingly illegible.

La silva curiosa embodies a radical enactment of Renaissance curiosity, not as a vehicle for systematic knowledge but as an excessive, erratic, and self-referential pursuit that ultimately subverts the epistemological ideals of the period. While Renaissance curiosity was often framed as a disciplined inquiry into the natural world, antiquity, and humanist scholarship, Medrano’s work dismantles this paradigm by turning curiosity into an unrestrained fascination with the ghoulish and the bizarre. His amassing of epitaphs, necromantic encounters, and esoteric inscriptions does not seek to order or interpret knowledge but revels in its chaos, constructing a textual heterotopia where meaning is perpetually deferred. In this sense, La silva curiosa is not merely an example of Renaissance curiosity; it is its paradoxical inversion—a curiosity that devours itself, reducing the pursuit of knowledge to an exercise in accumulation without synthesis, an aestheticized fixation with death and the arcane that anticipates the spectral anxieties of the Baroque.

Although this scarcely known text has been considered a miscellany, it greatly differs from any work of this genre, even though the author, beginning with the book’s title, plays with references to Pedro Mexía’s (1989) Silva de varia lección (1540) and Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas (Torquemada [1570] 1982). The Renaissance miscellanea, while fundamentally heterogeneous and devoid of rigid formal constraints, adhered to a general principle of curated variety that balanced erudition with accessibility. These texts, which flourished in sixteenth-century Spain, functioned as compendia of historical anecdotes, moral reflections, philosophical speculations, scientific curiosities, and literary excerpts, arranged with an implicit pedagogical intent. As precursors to the essay, miscellanies privileged associative logic, thematic fluidity, and digressive exploration, yet they often retained an underlying coherence, however subtle, that structured the reader’s intellectual engagement. Even within their inherent dispersion, Renaissance miscellanies were not purely arbitrary collections but rather texts shaped by the desire to cultivate a refined and well-rounded knowledge.

In contrast, La silva curiosa defies even these loose parameters, embracing disorder not as an incidental feature but as an organizing principle that deliberately undermines the genre’s conventional function. In reality, it is an unclassifiable book, as there are no works that resemble it. While it can be affirmed that it is a genuine silva in the Renaissance sense—a work in prose and/or verse whose elements are deliberately presented in disarray—Medrano’s text pushes this disorder to an extreme that transforms the very notion of miscellaneity into a paradoxical exercise in excess and self-reflexivity. Rather than using curiosity as a means of structuring knowledge, Medrano surrenders entirely to its destabilizing force, crafting a text in which the act of accumulation supplants interpretation, and the pursuit of knowledge dissolves into a strong fascination with the arcane, the morbid, and the bizarre.

Whereas traditional miscellanies subtly guided their readers through an engaging interplay of instruction and diversion, La silva curiosa disrupts this balance by privileging the erratic over the instructive, the esoteric over the rational, and the grotesque over the edifying. The text revels in a compulsive cataloging of epitaphs, necromantic encounters, and inscriptions devoid of explanatory context, eschewing the epistemological aspirations that typically underpinned the Renaissance miscellanea. This shift signals not merely a deviation from the genre’s established tendencies but a profound subversion of its intellectual ethos, reconfiguring the miscellany’s capacious form into a disorienting, labyrinthine exploration of curiosity itself. In doing so, the Silva emerges not as a repository of scattered wisdom, but as a literary artifact that embodies the very excesses of curiosity—unbound, insatiable, and ultimately self-consuming—prefiguring the unsettling sensibilities of the Gothic imagination.2

1. The Unsettling Pursuit of Curiosity: From Renaissance Wonder to Proto-Gothic Obsession

La silva curiosa can rightly be considered one of the earliest manifestations of the gothic or horror genre, antedating it by two centuries.3 One of many striking manifestations of this paradoxical curiosity occurs when the protagonist and author, Julián de Medrano, descends into the secret cavern of a necromancer. The cave is a space filled with parchments written with blood, skulls, teeth of the dead, heads stolen from graves, human hair and other terrifying things to partake in the secrets and knowledge that this space holds. The necromancer withdraws to a corner and, after conversing with the devil, presents the nobleman with a concave mirror with which he can see in real-time his father going to bed, his brother playing cards with a lady, his cousin feeding his greyhounds, and his beloved, a certain Marfisa D.A., reading Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana in her bed.

Unlike the classical image of the scholar uncovering hidden truths in an archive or library, this is a journey into a space of horror and forbidden knowledge, where learning is supplanted by dread. The necromancer’s cave, filled with remnants of death and occult artifacts, offers not enlightenment but a confrontation with the eerie and the unknown. Here, curiosity does not serve an intellectual function but rather compels the protagonist to witness an unsettling vision—an event that underscores how La silva curiosa anticipates the spectral anxieties of the Gothic imagination. Medrano describes this moment in vivid detail:4

Pasando adelante, y escudriñando más adentro en su cueva, [el nigromante] saca de un rincón un gran puñado de cabellos atados en dos mil lazos. Saca una calabaza larga llena de dientes de muertos, saca huesos, saca cabezas que él había cortado en los sepulcros de los muertos. Yo, viendo cosas tan diabólicas, principié a sentir tal horror y espanto que volvía la cabeza atrás por no ver cosas tan terribles. […] En esto, él se esconde como un gazapo en un rincón de la cueva y, después de haber allí hablado con el Diablo (como yo creo), sale al cabo de poco rato con su espejo en la mano, y me dice: «Hermano, tomad esta candela, y estad atento a lo que viéredes en este espejo, y principiad a llamar todos los que ver deseáis.» […] vi a mi padre con su pierna cortada que dos mozos que yo conocía le estaban acostando. Vi a un primo mío, llamado Pedro Íñiguez, el cual, siendo aficionadísimo a la caza, él mismo estaba dando de comer a dos galgos que él quería mucho. Vi a mi hermano Pedro de Medrano, el cual estaba en muy buena conversación con una dama vecina suya, sentados los dos en sendas sillas. Vi a dos hermanas mías, que la una de ellas, la mayor, estaba haciendo red o resul sentada cerca del fuego y la otra menor estaba jugando a los naipes con un caballero de mi tierra. Me mostró a uno de mis amigos muerto, a otro acuchillado. Vi a Marfisa, D.A., que es una mujer valerosa de alta sangre y virtuosísima, la cual estaba acostada y sentada dentro de su cama, leyendo en un libro español que le llaman La Diana de Montemayor. Y yo afirmo que era aquel libro porque dentro del espejo vi y quise leer el nombre, y conocí claramente que era La Diana.

(Medrano [1583] 1998, pp. 276–77)

[Moving forward, and delving deeper into his cave, [the necromancer] takes from a corner a large handful of hair tied in two thousand knots. He takes out a long gourd full of teeth from the dead, he takes out bones, he takes out heads that he had cut from the graves of the dead. Seeing these diabolical things, I began to feel such horror and dread that I turned my head back to avoid seeing such terrible things. […] At this point, he hides like a rabbit in a corner of the cave and, after having spoken with the Devil there (as I believe), he comes out after a while with his mirror in hand and says to me, “Brother, take this candle and pay attention to what you’ll see in the mirror, and begin calling all those you wish to see.” […] I saw my father with his leg amputated, and two young men I knew were putting him to bed. I saw a cousin of mine, named Pedro Íñiguez, who, being a great hunting enthusiast, was feeding two greyhounds he dearly loved. I saw my brother Pedro de Medrano, who was in a pleasant conversation with a neighbor lady, both sitting in chairs. I saw two of my sisters, one of them, the older one, making lace or sitting near the fire, and the younger one playing cards with a gentleman from my village. It showed me one of my friends dead, another one stabbed. I saw Marfisa, D.A., who is a valiant woman of noble blood and virtuous, sitting in her bed reading a book in Spanish they call La Diana of Montemayor. And I say it was that book because in the mirror I saw and wanted to read the title, and I clearly recognized it was La Diana.]

The contrast between the realm of black magic in the cave and the peaceful, and yet uncanny, vision of domestic life in the mirror highlights how La silva curiosa engages with curiosity as both a literary device and an existential force. The mirror, a classic Gothic motif, acts as a portal between worlds, collapsing the boundaries between the living and the dead, the sacred and the profane, the real and the illusory. Medrano does not merely depict curiosity as an intellectual pursuit; rather, he stages it as a precarious encounter with the unknown, where the pursuit of hidden knowledge becomes indistinguishable from transgression.

Although the Gothic novel would not emerge as a recognized genre until Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), La silva curiosa contains many of the foundational elements that would later define Gothic fiction (Walpole [1764] 2014). The genre is characterized by a fascination with ruins, the supernatural, the grotesque, and the collapse of reason, all of which are present in Medrano’s work. The necromancer’s cave, the enchanted tomb of Orcavella, and the ritualistic inscriptions that populate the text all function within the Gothic aesthetic, where the past continually haunts the present and where the search for knowledge leads not to enlightenment, but to horror.

A particularly relevant point of comparison is Jan Potocki’s the Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1804–1815), a work that shares La silva curiosa’s narrative structure of digressions and nested stories, as well as its preoccupation with necromancy, esoteric knowledge, and the blurred line between reality and illusion (Potocki 1989). Both works feature a protagonist whose journey is marked by supernatural encounters, where curiosity repeatedly draws them into a labyrinth of ominous, unsettling experiences. However, while Potocki’s novel embraces a fully developed Gothic aesthetic, Medrano’s work remains an unstable, transitional text, caught between Renaissance miscellaneity and the emerging sensibilities of Gothic horror. Ultimately, La silva curiosa anticipates the core anxieties of the Gothic genre, particularly its obsession with the past, its preoccupation with mortality, and its fascination with knowledge that threatens to undo its seeker. Medrano’s world is one in which curiosity has no resolution, only endless accumulation, where the quest for understanding results not in clarity but in a confrontation with the void. This is the true dark side of curiosity, a realm where inquiry does not illuminate but instead shrouds the seeker in darkness, leaving them forever lost in the labyrinth of the unknown.

In La silva curiosa, curiosity moves away from the pursuit of knowledge to become the dominant trait of the author, who refers to himself numerous times as curious and undoubtedly ends up being the main curiosity of his work, illustrating Barbara Benedict’s assertion that a curious person ultimately becomes an object of curiosity (Benedict 2001, p. 2). Medrano writes a book that is, above all, an extravagant collection of curiosities that gradually lead to the themes that obsess him: death, magical arts and, above all, ancient and modern inscriptions such as epitaphs carved into stones, caves and tombs.

2. Julián de Medrano: Courtier, Amateur Writer and Collector of Curiosities

La silva curiosa was originally published in Paris in 1583 by Nicolas Chesneau and later re-edited in 1608 by César Oudin (Medrano 1608), who appended El curioso impertinente without acknowledging Cervantes’ authorship, a decision that generated considerable scholarly debate. The work was subsequently re-edited by José María Sbarbi in 1878. The Silva was dedicated to queen Marguerite of Navarre—or of Valois—the sister of French king Henry III and the wife of Henry IV. On the frontispiece it reads: “en que se tratan diversas cosas sutilísimas, y curiosas, muy convenientes para damas y caballeros en toda conversación virtuosa y honesta” [“In which very subtle and curious matters are discussed, highly suitable for ladies and gentlemen in all virtuous and honest conversation.”].5

The first part of the book is composed of an enormous variety of elements with the common denominator that they can be considered “curious”: paremias (proverbs, aphorisms, sayings, riddles, mottos), humorous stories, Italianate poetry, ballads, courtly poems, and short pastoral narratives in which the author presents himself as the shepherd Julio. Additionally, there are digressions and personal anecdotes that connect all these elements.6 The second part of the book is what unquestionably makes it exceptional and sets it apart from other miscellanies. As mentioned, it consists of a series of journeys during which Julio collects curious epitaphs from different parts of Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and Flanders, including islands like Madeira and Menorca. Within these travels, Julio incorporates the story of his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which comprises several interwoven episodes with an undeniable character of gothic horror. In La silva curiosa, the author and narrator merge in an autobiographical text in which they continuously connect with the reader, providing insights into the writing process and involving the reader in the impromptu nature of the composition, making this a highly engaging work in which the author does not hide his enthusiasm as a novice writer. For instance, he refers to his book as the “primera y tierna flor de mis trabajos entre las espinas de mis penas y fatigas” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 73) [“first and tender flower of my labors amidst the thorns of my sorrows and hardships”], and, as an example of the many times he announces his changes of plans, he informs his readers that “Yo pensaba pasar adelante y había propuesto de ensalzar la gloria del buen Baco hasta el cuerno de la luna, pero principio ya a sentir que sus versos y presencia fumosa me dan mal de cabeza, y temiendo que el mismo accidente acontezca a los lectores […], por ahora baste lo que hemos dicho de su licor devino” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 140) [“I had a mind to go on and had intended to extol the glory of good Bacchus right up to the horn of the moon, but I’m beginning to feel that his verses and smoky presence are giving me a headache, and fearing that the same might happen to the readers […], for now, let what we’ve said about his divine liquor suffice”].

Apart from what he says about himself in the Silva, we know very little about the author.7 Nevertheless, the information his work offers is sufficient to understand that Julio de Medrano (1583b) was a Navarrese nobleman in the court of Nerac with queen Marguerite of Navarre (popularly known as queen Margot; she would later become queen of France). He was a soldier, courtier and tireless traveler, and his text repeatedly references his journeys through various parts of Europe and the Indies. As the laudatory poems validate this information, even comparing him to Ulysses, it seems that this is true.8 His loyalty to France against Spanish interests is evident as there are two compositions in the paratext added to the end of the 1583b first edition that prophesy the decline of Spain under Philip II in favor of the victorious arm of Henry III (Medrano [1583] 1998, pp. 310–11). These compositions were removed in the 1608 edition by César Oudin.

There are other curious details about this author and his work. In 1583, he published—with the same publisher Nicolas Chesneau, a fervent Catholic and anti-Huguenot propagandist—his Historia singular de seis animales, del can, del caballo, del oso, del lobo, del ciervo y del elefante (Medrano 1583a) (A singular history of six animals: of the dog, the horse, the bear, the wolf, the deer and the elephant), dedicated to Henry III.9 The astonishing fact is that Medrano did not write this book at all; rather, he appropriated a pre-existing work, Del can y del caballo (Of the Dog and the Horse), originally published in 1568 by the prothonotary Luis Pérez (1568). Medrano reissued the text under his own name, changing only the title, the preliminary materials, and the cover, while leaving the content untouched. What makes his audacity truly remarkable—bordering on temerity—is that he dedicated this “stolen” book to Henry III of France, not only passing it off as his own but also claiming that it contained new and rare knowledge about four additional animals—the bear, the wolf, the deer, and the elephant—that were never mentioned in the original, nor, for that matter, in the text he plagiarized. In the dedication, he boldly declares: “para que Vuestra Majestad […] entienda, y sepa todo lo que del Can y del Caballo fue nunca escrito, y así mismo, vea aquí y descubra, los secretos más raros y curiosos, que se hallan en Natura, del Oso, del Lobo, del Ciervo y del Elefante” (2v) [“So that Your Majesty […] may understand and know everything ever written about the Dog and the Horse, and likewise see here and discover the rarest and most curious secrets found in Nature of the Bear, the Wolf, the Deer, and the Elephant”].

This lack of integrity is repeated in the epistle dedicated to queen Marguerite of Navarre that opens La silva curiosa, in which he claims that it is divided into seven books that do not exist. Thus, he writes: “suplico a V. M. no deje de pasar adelante y emplear algunos ratos de espacio en los otros seis libros siguientes, compuestos en prosa” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 73) [“I beseech Your Majesty not to hesitate to proceed and spend some moments of leisure on the following six books composed in prose”]. Indeed, a “Tabla de los siete libros de la Silva” [“Table of the seven books of the Silva”] is added with “phantom” books dedicated, respectively, to the study of plants, precious stones, land animals, fish and birds, culminating in the seventh book which “Descubre los más raros y delicados secretos de naturaleza experimentados por el mismo Julio y otros hombres curiosos de nuestros tiempos; la mayor parte de ellos sacados del ermitaño de Salamanca, y de los más excelentes filósofos de Italia, Francia y España” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 78) [“Reveals the rarest and most delicate secrets of nature experimented with by Julio himself and other curious men of our times; most of them taken from the hermit of Salamanca and the most excellent philosophers of Italy, France, and Spain”].10 Likewise, the Silva appropriates compositions from Joan de Timoneda (1576), Cristóbal de Castillejo (1556), Francisco de Aldana (1985), Francisco Suárez de Figueroa (1988), Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Fernando de Acuña, Gregorio Silvestre and Gutierre de Cetina (1981), as well as anonymous compositions found in cancioneros dated before the publication of the Silva, in a game that goes beyond Renaissance imitation: at times he even explains the circumstances in which he composed the plagiarized poems, some of whose verses he would alter.11

All the above points to an “amateur” author, not a professional, who writes in Spanish as a courtier to delight queen Marguerite with the Spanish book she has commissioned.12 The entire work exudes the joyful freedom of an aficionado who engages in writing with the abandonment and pleasure of improvising literary remnants united by their curiosity. Medrano writes about himself: “siendo yo soldado, desnudo y estéril de las letras y ciencias que son necesarias al que compone alguna obra” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 143) [“being a soldier, naked and barren of the letters and sciences necessary for someone composing any work”] to reaffirm throughout the work his enthusiasm as a writer committed to various literary projects. It is not a typical Spanish literary work but a text that we could define as pan-European, written and published in France for a courtly audience and composed in Spanish with snippets in French, Latin, Italian, Portuguese and Galician, possibly without expectations of being read in Spain and without any literary ambition. It seems that Medrano’s initial plan was to write a conventional miscellany, a compilation of short literary units as varied as they are curious.13 Indeed, the requirement of “curiosity” is insistently repeated throughout the text and is undoubtedly the guiding thread that unites all these heterogeneous materials. Fortunately, however, the intended plan is constantly compromised by the continuous improvisation of the author, who appears and disappears in the text, weaving in stories, expressing his opinion on various subjects, interrupting the planned course, changing direction and constantly addressing the reader as if speaking to someone he knew.

Thus, the Silva gradually becomes disorganized, while the author’s persona becomes the main object of the writing. The digressions and the author’s direct presence become increasingly interesting and significant until they reach the second half of the book, in which the apparent initial plan has been completely abandoned. Here, Julián de Medrano shows his readers the object of his curiosity, his obsessions, the secret of his evolution and vitality, for in the end the Silva is nothing more than the book of an extremely curious man who therefore becomes the focus of his writing, giving free rein to his undisguised attraction for very specific curiosities related to death and the magical arts.

Medrano repeatedly expresses his interest in antiquities, graffiti and inscriptions, among which, of course, epitaphs play a prominent role. His curiosity does not arise from the pursuit of knowledge but from the gathering in his notebook of words written on stones that he can turn into objects for his collection. For instance, in Orense he asks a friar about what remarkable things the city offers, and the friar responds:

“La ciudad es muy deliciosa y regalada. Y, entre las cosas que en ella son tenidas singulares, hallaréis excelentes baños, muy buenas tripas, excelentes vinos y hermosas mujeres.” Yo le dije: “Padre, no os pregunto yo de los vinos ni tripas; pero deseo que me digáis si hay cosas antiguas desde el tiempo de los Romanos y Moros, como son Pirámides, Ídolos, Letreros y Epitafios”.

(Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 234)

[“The city is very delightful and pleasurable. And among the things that are considered unique in it you will find excellent baths, very good sausages, outstanding wines and beautiful women.” I said to him, “Father, I am not asking you about wines or sausages, but I desire you to tell me if there are ancient things from the time of the Romans and Moors such as pyramids, idols, inscriptions and epitaphs”].

Miguel Morán Turina (2010), in his study on the fervent interest in antiquities in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, explains that there was indeed a substantial group of scholars “who always had something of curious antiquarians and who, convinced that there was no memory more secure or certain than that of the stones, traveled the peninsula with pen in hand, committed to the ‘good practice of questioning antiquities’ […]. The answers were on the stones, and they dedicated themselves to the massive task of gathering in their notes enormous collections of inscriptions with which to form that indispensable corpus on which to base their historical work” (p. 11). Medrano’s case is radically different because he is not a scholar with a research-driven ambition but a collector of curiosities. His quest for antiquities is nothing like that of Ambrosio de Morales, Juan Fernando Franco or Rodrigo Caro, who were engaged in a common cause of historical research.

3. The Endless Cemetery: Epitaphs, Necromancy, and the Heterotopia of Death

In the second part of the book, Medrano narrates his extensive travels in search of curious epitaphs. In the Silva, the world his protagonist traverses turns into an endless graveyard. The space becomes a heterotopia, a place within another place, a necrophilic utopia within the vast landscape of his journeys. Heterotopia, according to the term coined by Michel Foucault (1998), is a real place in which other places belonging to a culture are “at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places outside other places, although they are actually localizable” (p. 178). The cabinet of curiosities, the library, and, I dare to venture, the pages of a book like the Silva—by gathering inscriptions and epitaphs found during Medrano’s travels—also become a kind of representational derivation of real space turned into an immense cemetery.

Before the second part of the book, we also find some amusing epitaphs such as that of Gil Vivanco in Menorca,14 after which, despite being in the ‘paremias’ part of his Silva, he writes:

La curiosidad de los Epitafios ha sido tan grande entre los antiguos, y así mismo entre los de nuestros tiempos que, pues hemos caído en el propósito de ellos, yo quiero ponerte a la fin de este mi primer libro una parte de los que yo he hallado en diversas tierras buscándolos con curiosidad. Y si conozco que este mi servicio te dé gusto, y que tú te recreares en la lectura de estos mis epitafios, yo te ofrezco de servirte con otros doscientos que te guardo para ponerlos en mi Vergel curioso, los cuales yo he sacado de muchas partes, siguiendo mi peregrinación larga y trabajosa.

(Medrano [1583] 1998, pp. 154–55)

[The curiosity about epitaphs has been so great among the ancients, as well as among those of our times, that since we have embraced their purpose, I want to place at the end of this my first book a selection of those I have found in various lands, searching for them with curiosity. And if I know that this service of mine pleases you, and that you take pleasure in reading these epitaphs of mine, I offer to serve you with another two hundred that I have kept to include in my Curious Orchard, which I have gathered from many places during my long and laborious pilgrimage.]

Indeed, throughout the second part of the Silva, the Vergel curioso [Curious Orchard], is referred to six times. According to Medrano, this chimerical book, probably never written, will be the repository of the true and orderly history of his travels, of all the epitaphs in his collection, and of the unspeakable secrets he has experienced in his adventures, which he quickly passes through in the Silva. It is then that the need arises to plan a second book in which his uncontainable curious passion will have ample and organized space for documentation. Each time something interesting appears on its pages, the Vergel curioso [Curious Orchard] emerges as a promise and to stimulate the reader’s curiosity.

While epitaphs as a theme are not unfamiliar in the Renaissance, they usually belong to a radically different poetic or classical tradition than what we encounter in the Silva, where, as we will see, the obsession with death, the heterodox interest in necromancy and the compulsive collecting of curiosities related to these themes deviate from any tradition of its time.15 Before he recounts these travels there is a brief pastoral narrative in which Medrano becomes the shepherd Julio and narrates the carnal love of other shepherds, thus betraying the neoplatonic character of the pastoral novel. This part ends with a surprising request from the shepherdess Marfisa, a lady who appears several times in the work and who may well be a counterpart of queen Marguerite herself:

La generosa Marfisa, estando triste y muy afligida por la muerte del pastor Gélido de Riojo, envió una carta a Julio, y por ella entre otras cosas le ruega que no le escriba ya más cartas ni versos que traten de amores porque pasó solía. Y el mayor consuelo que ahora ella tomaba era en andar solitaria por un desierto, cantando versos tristes y lamentables, y escribiendo diversos epitafios por las fuentes y peñas, y sobre las cortezas de los árboles. Asimismo, escribe a Julio y le ruega mucho que en lugar de las sentidas empresas y hermosísimas divisas que otras veces solía ofrecerle por estrena, que ahora le envíe tristes y amargas lamentaciones, y los epitafios que en tierras extrañas hubiere descubierto, para que ella los ponga y escriba de su mano sobre las peñas y árboles de todas las florestas donde ella apacentare su ganado.

(Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 225)

[The generous Marfisa, feeling sad and deeply afflicted by the death of the shepherd Gélido de Riojo, sent a letter to Julio. Among other things, she asks him not to write her any more letters or verses about love because that time has passed. Her greatest consolation now is to wander alone through a desert, singing sad and lamentable verses and writing various epitaphs by the springs and cliffs and on the bark of trees. She also writes to Julio and implores him to send her, instead of the heartfelt tokens and beautiful mottos he used to offer her as gifts, sad and bitter laments and the epitaphs he may have discovered in foreign lands so that she can inscribe them by her own hand on the rocks and trees of all the forests where she grazes her cattle.]

It is worth noting that among all these genres—mottos, emblems, lyrics, etc.—of courtly wit and gallantry intended for the entertainment of ladies, the genre of epitaphs is introduced as one more, which obviously has a formal resemblance but completely deviates in its purpose. It is at the very least gruesome that in the Silva epitaphs are discussed as potential gifts and are appreciated as incentives for courtship. In them, the function of honoring and remembering the deceased is completely omitted, and they are reduced to small morbid narratives offered to a noble lady. The epitaph is not unrelated to the interests of the time. For example, it is not unusual to find small collections of epitaphs scattered in works of a different nature. Such is the case with Luis Zapata’s Miscelánea (Zapata de Chaves 1949), Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa’s El pasajero (Suárez de Figueroa 1988), and a text dedicated to them a century later, Philippe Labbé’s Thesauros epitaphiorum veterum ac recentium (Labbé 1666). Even in the prologue of the 1605 Don Quixote there are burlesque (literary) epitaphs, See (Rodríguez Cacho 1996). This proliferation of epitaphs outside of funerary contexts responds to broader cultural and rhetorical conventions. One must not forget that the quasi-catalogic display of extraordinary deaths was a long-standing literary tradition, traceable at least to Valerius Maximus (2004). In chapter XII of book IX of his Memorable Deeds and Sayings, he devotes an entire section to such deaths among both Romans and foreigners—demonstrating that, far from being marginal curiosities, these narratives occupied a legitimate place in the didactic and commemorative practices of early imperial literature. However, I do not believe there is a work in which they are the subject of a collection of curiosities corresponding to the selection criteria linked to the author’s morbid infatuation with death.

I will briefly summarize this second part of the book, which fully fits within gothic literature. The text begins with various anecdotes and places where the author compiles curious epitaphs because they refer to curious deaths.16 This characteristic “curiosity” about death can be summarized as comical deaths—“ridiculous” and “funny” ones—absurd, tragic, disastrous and in some way extraordinary deaths. The journey in search of epitaphs does not follow a specific geographical order, as the author mixes different travels and adventures. The cities mentioned are Barcelona, Calatayud, San Pedro de Cárdena, Alcántara, Zamora, Burgos, Salamanca, and Orense. The city of Orense reminds him of a previous journey he made to Galicia as a pilgrim from Roncesvalles to Santiago de Compostela. This will be the main narrative in the Silva, which I will refer to later. After arriving in Santiago, he goes to Padrón and then to the hermitage of Finnibus Terrae, where he announces an “Adventure and epitaph”. This adventure consists of the story, also horrific, of the witch Orcavella, who, in a remote past, plagued the region with her dark magic, feeding on the flesh and blood of children and using her spells: “fue tan grande el estrago y matanza que esta loba encarnizada hizo que ella dejó la mitad de este reino despoblado y desierto” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 289). [“The devastation and slaughter that this ferocious she-wolf caused were so great that she left half of this kingdom depopulated and deserted”].

The narrative focuses not on the story of the sorceress herself but on the description of her enchanted tomb and the incantations that condemn the curious who approach it to die within a year, as well as the venomous snakes that guard her grave and attack those who dare to touch it. Julio is warned by a shepherd who prevents him in time from approaching her tomb. However, the same illiterate shepherd shows him a stone reproduction of a cave with the three inscriptions found on the original tomb, the last one being the epitaph carved by Orcavella herself: “Aquí yace sepultada/dentro de esta peña dura/la enemiga de natura/Orcavella la encantada” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 291) [“Here lies buried/within this hard rock/the enemy of nature/Orcavella the enchanted”]. Again and again, the strange environments, fantasy, magic, and the macabre—in the strictly etymological sense of the Arabic maqabir, meaning tombs—along with the inherent Gothic elements of this world of apparitions, spirits, necromancers, and wonders, make the final part of the book a precursor to fantastic stories that explore themes closely related to what we now recognize as the horror genre. A great example of this is Louis Adrien du Perron de Castera’s Relation de la découverte du tombeau de l’enchanteresse Orcavelle, avec l’histoire tragique de ses amours (Castera 1729), written in 1726 and based on the mentioned Orcavella episode from the Silva. This Gothic novel employs the found manuscript device and attributes its authorship to Julio de Medrano, turning him into the protagonist of a work of fiction that portrays him as an extremely curious adventurer.

Later, Julio de Medrano continues his journey through Galician lands and arrives in Redondela, where he finds the epitaph of a fortune-teller named Marcolfo, whose death he extensively recounts. It seems that his pilgrimage and journey through Galicia end here because he abruptly transports us to the island of Porto Santo, near Madeira, where he collects another epitaph with its story. He then recalls an epitaph found in Coimbra, another in Brussels, and continues with some epitaphs found in Italy: Ravenna, Rome, and Cività-Vecchia, as well as Athens in Greece. After this, he travels to France and transcribes epitaphs found in Rouen, Chartres, Paris, Blois, Orléans, Dauphiné, Nivernois, Bourbonnais, Laon, several villages in Picardy, Amiens, and Poyssi, from where he selects five epitaphs of nuns. This rather necrophilic journey concludes with a substantial group of epitaphs found in various churches in Paris.

The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which is inserted into the narrative of collecting epitaphs, is a digression that links several adventures related to necromancy and spans fifty pages in the 1998 edition. It begins with the numerous epitaphs found in a hermitage, including the one written on a wall above a dead man sitting and leaning against the wall.17 In the hermitage there lives a hermit and his servant, whose name is Cristóbal Salvaje. This character is a deformed necromancer who, with his dark magic, exercises power over all the shepherds in the region, as well as controlling wolves and other beasts at his whim, being as influential as he is vital for the survival of the inhabitants of those lands. He is an ambivalent character, capable of great cruelties and terrible incantations, with his knowledge stemming from his dealings with the devil. Cristóbal chooses Julio de Medrano as a confidant and friend because he recognizes in him a “corazón insaciable de tales cosas” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 274) [“an insatiable heart for such things”] and because he notices “que yo era curiosísimo” [“that I was extremely curious”]. For his part, Medrano sees in this friendship a unique opportunity to satisfy his curiosity for secrets that would be forbidden to human knowledge if not through the terrifying channel of black magic. He naively tries to convince the reader of his integrity as a Catholic as he implores the magician, whom he calls his brother, to ensure that his teachings that do not cross the boundaries of orthodoxy:

No quiero yo penetrar tan adelante que vos me mostréis ningún secreto ni experimento de los que tocan a esa ciencia negra y tenebrosa, porque yo aborrezco mortalmente las invocaciones y conjuros de demonios, pues son enemigos de Dios, nuestro creador. No, no, Vade retro Satanás, no quiero conversación con tan mala gente, Dios me guarde de tal deseo. Y si en tal error yo cayere de desear cosa tan mala, le suplico de todo mi corazón que antes que a tal paso llegue, escogiéndome en hora y estado de gracia él me toque con su santa mano, y me mate y conserve esta pobre almaa pues es suya”.

(Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 273)

[I do not wish to delve so deeply that you may show me any secret or experiment related to that black and gloomy science, for I abhor invocations and conjurations of demons as they are enemies of God our creator. No, no, get thee behind me, Satan! I do not desire conversation with such wicked people. May God keep me from such a desire. And if I should fall into such an error of desiring something so evil, I beseech Him with all my heart that, before I reach such a point, choosing me in a time and state of grace, He touch me with His holy hand and kill me and preserve this poor soul, for it is His” (emphasis mine)].

And this is said by a gentleman who has begged to enter the cave of a necromancer and who, despite the horrors he sees, decides to stay and receive the gift of a book of spells that, due to its content, must be kept secret. In fact, Medrano never stops expressing his gratitude to this magician for the knowledge he has imparted, even as he continually conveys the terror it inspires—subtly suggesting the transgressive nature of these lessons: “él principia a descubrirme su pecho y a decirme cosas que, viéndome solo con él los cabellos de la cabeza se me erizaban en oírlas” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 274) [“He begins to reveal his heart to me and to tell me things that, being alone with him, made the hair on my head stand on end when I heard them”].

4. A Collection of Words

Julio de Medrano is a collector of words—words written in epitaphs, on stones and walls that he encounters on his journey. David Castillo (2011) describes this book as a textual cabinet of curiosities (p. 57), and although it is an evocative definition, the Silva takes the idea of collection and curiosity into unknown territory. Indeed, it is a cabinet of curiosities in which the text, beyond the book, is the terrain in which Medrano roams, extracting words from the stones without paying much attention to their meaning. What Medrano does with the words he finds in the inscriptions is to transform them into objects, into things. These things are words copied from inscriptions and epitaphs and taken to another domain—for example, to the pastoral/courtly fantasy in which a lady, Marfisa D. A., supposedly writes them on the bark of trees. The words are transformed into collectible objects that have been sought, treasured, given, reproduced, and exhibited. The sign—the letter—is separated from the medium—the stone—that gives it meaning. These words without context have an existence detached from their meaning. Although they can be deciphered, they have lost the logic of their existence, the reason why they were written by someone and placed in a specific space. What now defines them is that they are possessed by someone, and as Byung-Chul Han (2021) writes, “only an intense relationship with things makes them a possession” (p. 28).

The words transcribed in the Silva are part of a collection that exemplifies the praxis of a superfluous curiosity that corresponds to a time whose energy has faded away. The Silva emerges in a time marked by an almost nihilistic void. It is a frivolous and almost puerile work that displays the fatigue of an exhausted world. Thus, the frivolity of the Silva demonstrates a change of epoch, an empty time stripped of beliefs.

The Baroque era has not yet arrived with its extraordinary vigor, and the dream of humanism has been vanishing. The Silva is intensely original while it is also deeply enmeshed in its cultural context. David Castillo affirms that “the multiple faces of death and the unsettling shadows that emerge in the dark section entitled “Parte de los epitaphios curiosos hallados por Julio” represent the original expression of loss of values of an age that has not yet replaced the eroded beliefs of the ancients” (p. 60).

In its transcribed words, sometimes unintelligible, there is an excess of signifiers and an absence of signifieds: interpretation as such does not exist. Thus, curiosity is exhausted on the surface of signs in an exercise of accumulation that does not illuminate the search for meaning beyond banality. When, for instance, Medrano on his journey encounters indecipherable texts in a church in Alcántara, it seems not to matter to him: “donde hay muchas cosas antiguas y curiosas desde el tiempo de los Romanos, como lápidas escritas, estatuas, ídolos, columnas, trofeos con diversos letreros y epitafios, que debido a su gran antigüedad y al estar parte de ellos rotos y cubiertos de moho, no se podía sacar el sentido de lo que significaban” (Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 231) [“where there are many ancient and curious things from the time of the Romans such as inscribed stones, statues, idols, columns, trophies with various inscriptions and epitaphs, which, due to their great antiquity and being partially broken and covered in mold, their meaning could not be deciphered”].

Han reflects on Ernst Bloch’s interpretation of the story of Sinbad the Sailor. Sinbad and his companions arrive on a paradisiacal island with tall trees and lush vegetation. They delight in the beautiful landscape, go out hunting, and when they light a fire to cook dinner, the ground shakes, the trees fall and the island sinks because it is nothing more than the back of an immense whale that has been asleep for a very long time, allowing plant and animal life to thrive on its back. Bloch interprets the story as an allegory of our ignorance of things that, beyond their utility, have a hidden and elusive aspect: “the back of things”. Indeed, as Han surmises, things have an unsettling part that we never quite come to know; they are presences that belong to another world, their own, embedded in the human but essentially different. Things represent a kind of otherness that connects us to the world; they possess an essence that goes beyond their utility. They are presences that radiate warmth, the warmth of the hands that made them or the coldness of machines. He adds that the ontological depth of things and their intrinsic otherness is eroded in the modern era: “Things lose their own life, their own weight and their independence” (p. 71). Thus, things and objects constitute a fundamental otherness for us to relate to the world (pp. 66–72). Medrano’s Silva curiosa, however, anticipates this process in a different yet strikingly analogous way. His obsessive collection of epitaphs and inscriptions, meticulously copied from tombstones and stones found across Europe, detaches these texts from their original material and commemorative contexts. What were once markers of memory—engraved upon stone to endure beyond the fleeting presence of the living—become, in Medrano’s hands, disembodied fragments, stripped of their spatial and historical significance. In this relentless cataloging, the very weight of the stone—a material charged with permanence and memory—dissolves into the lightness of textual accumulation, mirroring the modern world’s transformation of objects from bearers of presence into hollow tokens of excess and spectacle. Medrano’s work thus foreshadows a mode of engagement with materiality in which things are no longer valued for their intrinsic depth but for their capacity to be extracted, displaced, and collected into a system where accumulation overtakes meaning.

In the Silva there is a certain intuition of the presence of “the back of things”, which leads this work to attempt to uncover magical secrets and sense transcendent messages hidden in antiques and in the memory of stones. Yet, this intuition remains unfulfilled: Medrano’s relentless accumulation of epitaphs and inscriptions does not lead to revelation but to an excess of signs transformed into objects stripped of their original depth. On another occasion, Cristóbal Salvaje takes Medrano and his Bretón companion to a cave:

El Bretón y yo, curiosos, andábamos mirando por todas las partes de la cueva y gustábamos mucho en ver cosas tan antiguas como eran aquellos letreros y divisas que estaban allí escritas, la mayor parte desde el tiempo de los Moros y Romanos. Y, como eran en lenguas diferentes y en letra muy antigua, no pudiendo entender algunas de ellas, el fámulo leyéndolas bien nos las interpretaba y hacía entender muy claramente. Viendo allí cosas tan sentidas y curiosas, escribiéndolas las guardamos por memoria.

(Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 282)

[Curious, the Bretón and I were walking around all parts of the cave and greatly enjoyed seeing things as ancient as those inscriptions and symbols that were written there, most of them dating from the time of the Moors and Romans. And, since they were in different languages and in very old script, we were not able to understand some of them, but the servant, by reading them carefully, interpreted them for us very clearly. Seeing such meaningful and curious things there, we wrote them down and kept them in our memory.”]

Medrano turns the world he inhabits and frantically traverses into a stone canvas, pursuing the fantasy of deciphering mysteries and secrets inaccessible to everyone but him. The orography of the deserts he describes, the caves, the mountains, the village cemeteries, the abandoned ruins… all these spaces conspire to show him written words that, beyond what they say, supposedly contain a mystery. The surface of the world he travels in his journeys is marked by writing in various languages, from different eras, sometimes illegible. It is a world that is literally encrypted and needs to be deciphered, even though those letters do not mean anything because their secrets are nonexistent. Medrano wanders the world out of a sterile and exhausting curiosity. This is exemplified and taken to the extreme when the necromancer Cristóbal gives him a (secret) book of secrets that implicitly promises to illuminate that hidden side of things that is intuited in this work obsessed with mysteries.

Julio mío, aunque yo creo que sois caballero y hombre verdadero, todavía por mayor firmeza quiero que juréis en esta cruz de nunca dar a hombre ni mujer un libro que yo quiero daros, que lo tengo más caro que mi corazón; y que, estando en el paso de la muerte, si tenéis tiempo ni fuerza, vos mismo lo quemaréis para que ninguno después de vos goce de tesoro tan precioso. También quiero que prometáis sobre este santo madero que nunca descubriréis a criatura nacida los secretos que yo quiero mostraros.”

(Medrano [1583] 1998, p. 274)

[My dear Julio, although I believe you are a nobleman and man of truth, I still want you to swear on this cross to never give to a man or a woman a book that I want to give you, a book that I hold dearer than my own heart. And that, when you are at the threshold of death, if you have the time and strength, you will burn it yourself so that no one after you can enjoy such a precious treasure. I also want you to promise on this sacred cross that you will never reveal the secrets I want to show you to any living creature.]

As can be seen, this book gifted by a magician is a key to unlock the secrets of the world: the chimera of a curious person. The knowledge that Medrano claims to possess is as imaginary as it is exclusive: the necromancer orders him to destroy it so that no one after him can enjoy these precious secrets.

5. Conclusions: The Dark Side of Things and the Exhaustion of Curiosity

Nothing in the Silva is what it promises. There is never more than a trivial curiosity that barely scratches the surface of things without the will to delve deeper. The world presented in the Silva—and let us not forget that it claims to be a non-fictional and autobiographical account—is, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms (Baudrillard 1994), a simulacrum or the depiction of something that either had no original or that no longer has an original (p. 6). Within the universe drawn by Medrano, the distinction between reality and its representation is futile; the equivalence between the real and its representation has been irretrievably lost.

La silva curiosa exposes the dark side of curiosity, revealing its potential to unravel meaning rather than construct it. In Medrano’s work, curiosity is presented as an erratic, obsessive force that ultimately consumes itself. The book’s structure is a fragmented labyrinth of anecdotes, epitaphs, and necromantic encounters, in which information is gathered but never synthesized. Unlike traditional miscellanies, which sought to curate and organize diverse material, the Silva offers no stable framework or resolution—only the relentless collection of strange and unsettling phenomena. Medrano does not seek knowledge; he seeks possession, accumulating inscriptions and arcane references as if they were mere artifacts, detached from their original contexts and devoid of interpretative depth.

The necromancer’s cave, where past and present collapse into a spectral vision, epitomizes this destabilization of meaning. Here, curiosity does not lead to wisdom but instead confronts the traveler with a disturbing spectacle of disorientation, where reality dissolves into illusion. Medrano’s relentless quest—whether literary, antiquarian, or supernatural—reveals a world in which the profusion of signs does not generate insight but rather exhausts it. This excess of curiosity, which leads him to amass epitaphs and macabre inscriptions without interpretation, anticipates the thematic concerns of Gothic fiction.

Yet La silva curiosa is not merely a precursor to the Gothic; it also encapsulates the ideological exhaustion of its own time. Unlike the Gothic novel, which often restores some semblance of resolution, Medrano’s work offers no closure, no revelation, no deeper truth—only the compulsive accumulation of signs that remain detached from meaning. He himself becomes the ultimate object of curiosity, trapped in an endless cycle of inquiry without resolution. His relentless pursuit of the strange, the morbid, and the arcane ultimately reflects a world in crisis, where curiosity has reached its breaking point and where interpretation, rather than illuminating, only deepens the mystery of things. Thus, the Silva fully embodies a world where curiosity does not enlighten but obscures, where coherence is replaced by fragmentation, and where the pursuit of meaning ultimately leads to a confrontation with the void. In Medrano’s textual maze, curiosity ceases to be an instrument of discovery and instead becomes a force that dissolves knowledge into spectacle and excess.

In the praxis of curiosity found in the Silva, the world is a hieroglyph of signs, of hermetic signifiers, compulsively collected, paradoxically never sought for meaning beyond the suggestion of a mystery. By the late sixteenth century, La silva curiosa embodies a unique, outlandish, and unproductive curiosity that, nonetheless, dreams of the fantasy of the dark side of things.