A Cognitive Poetics of Wonder: The Synthesis of Aristotelian Rhetoric, Grammar, and Psychology in Fernando de Herrera’s Anotaciones

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Fernando de Herrera, Renaissance Spain’s foremost poetic theorist, blended classical poetics and rhetoric with facultative psychology to craft a revolutionary framework of poetic thought in his most important work, the Anotaciones (1580). Drawing on James J. Murphy’s concept of metarhetoric, the analysis foregrounds how in the Anotaciones Herrera intertwined semantics, cognitive processes involving perception, imagination, and memory, and key rhetorical and stylistic doctrines to theorize the pursuit of wonder as poetry’s normative goal. This complex framework was made possible thanks to the often-neglected influence of Aristotelian philosophy on Herrera. Thus building on Aristotle, Herrera originally contributed to the construction of the epistemological paradigm of the Spanish Renaissance by developing one of the period’s most versatile explanations of how poetry and language engage the mind.