A highly regarded member of the literary court of the Castilian king Juan II, Juan de Mena held royal appointments as veinticuatro (alderman) of Cordova, secretario de cartas latinas (secretary of Latin letters), and cronista real (royal chronicler). He was considered the outstanding poet of his time, and his works circulated widely for more than a century following his death. His influence extended into the seventeenth century, and he was not forgotten--though his works were no longer widely read--in the eighteenth. Nineteenth-century historians of literature criticized him for the Latinized syntax and lexicon characteristic of his elevated poetic style. In 1950 María Rosa Lida de Malkiel's monumental Juan de Mena, poeta del prerrenacimiento español (Juan de Mena, Poet of the Spanish Pre-Renaissance) refurbished his reputation and refocused scholarly attention on his works--especially his acknowledged masterpiece, Laberinto de Fortuna (Labyrinth of Fortune, 1444). Modern scholars consider Mena...