By his contemporaries Luis de Leon was perhaps more esteemed as a theologian or a scholar than as a man of letters.  This judgement has been reversed by posterity mainly on the strength of the Spanish poems which were little known during the author’s lifetime beyond a small circle of his personal friends.[263] Experts tell us that as a theologian he ranks below his master Melchor Cano; and in the annals of scholarship Luis de Leon is less conspicuous than Benito Arias Montano and than Francisco Sanchez (el Brocense).  Few now read for pleasure the treatises which Luis de Leon composed in a dead language:  in any case these treatises can add nothing to his reputation as a writer of Spanish, and it is solely as a Spanish author that he concerns us here and now.  He was by no means the earliest of devout writers to use Spanish as a literary medium.  There is a long and illustrious bead-roll of authors from Bernardino de Laredo to Saint Theresa to prove the contrary.  Much less was Luis de Leon the first post-Renaissance scholar to recognize that Spanish had a great future before it.  Yet, if we take leave to assume that Luis de Granada was an ascetic rather than an extatic, we may account Luis de Leon as perhaps the first professional scholar to perceive that Spanish was adequate to convey the subtleties of theology and the ravishments of mysticism.  His chief prose works in Castilian include the Exposicion del libro de Job, a commentary dedicated to Madre Ana de Jesus, but not published till near the end of the eighteenth century (1779).  The provenance of this work calls for no explanation.  Apart from the quotation of a passage in Jorge Manrique’s Coplas, the Exposicion del libro de Job offers few indications of Spanish origin and fewer personal touches.  Equally Biblical in origin are a rendering of the Song of Songs and a corresponding commentary; the existence of both has a personal interest inasmuch as they prove that Luis de Leon was enabled to carry out a long cherished design by means of which he hoped, as he declared at Valladolid, to counterbalance the indiscreet prying of Fray Diego de Leon. La Perfecta Casada (1583) and De los nombres de Cristo (1583-1585) likewise have their roots in Scripture. La Perfecta Casada is avowedly based on the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, and De los nombres de Cristo, the first part of which appeared simultaneously with La Perfecta Casada,[264] discusses the various symbolic names applied to the Saviour in the Bible.

La Perfecta Casada is dedicated to Maria Varela Osorio, a recently wedded bride, who may have been a distant kinswoman of the author’s.[265] Nowhere more clearly than in this treatise does Luis de Leon justify the statement that he had a Hebrew soul.  He takes for granted the Oriental point of view, and illustrates his imperious thesis with ample quotations from writers of all types—­pagans, Christians,