La gloria de don Ramiro

About This Book

La gloria de don Ramiro: una vida en tiempos de Felipe II is widely considered one of the finest historical novels in Spanish American literature. Written by Argentine author Enrique Rodríguez Larreta and first published in 1908, the novel is set in the Spanish city of Ávila during the reign of Philip II in the late sixteenth century — the height of the Spanish Golden Age and the Inquisition. The protagonist, Don Ramiro, is a young nobleman tormented by the discovery that his mother was a Moorish woman, a secret that places him in impossible conflict with the rigid Catholic society of Counter-Reformation Spain. Torn between his Christian upbringing and his hidden Moorish heritage, Ramiro embarks on a spiritual and physical odyssey that takes him from the austere streets of Ávila to the intrigues of the Spanish court and ultimately to the New World. Larreta spent years researching in Spain, and his meticulous recreation of sixteenth-century life — the architecture, religious ceremonies, social customs, and political machinations — earned comparisons to Gustave Flaubert's historical method. Miguel de Unamuno praised it as 'a generous and happy effort to penetrate the soul of sixteenth-century Spain,' and the Encyclopaedia Britannica described it as the finest Spanish American historical novel. The work won the Grand Prize for Literature from the Argentine National Commission of Fine Arts.

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