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This work is the first critical edition of Montemayor's Los siete libros de la Diana, the first Spanish pastoral novel. The textual sources used have been: Zaragoza 1560, Valencia (1559?), Milan (1560?), Barcelona 1561, Valladolid 1561 and Zaragoza 1562, six of the earliest editions extant. The collatio and the stemma reveal the following: first, that Valencia, today still believed to be the editio princeps, is not in fact the first edition; second, that the closest texts to the archetype are Zaragoza, 1560, and Valencia--each one belongs to one of the two family groups that compound the genealogical tree; third, that Barcelona, 1561, which is still today the most frequently published text, is further from the archetype than Zaragoza, 1560, and Valencia; and fourth, that Milan (1560?) has had corrections, which, if done by Montemayor, would thereby constitute a revision.
The base text used in this critical edition is that of Zaragoza, 1560, without the errors noted in the collatio. This critical edition is, therefore, the closest to the archetype. I present the variants, and the corrections, based on the stemma at the end. Enclosed, as an appendix, are copies of the collatio and covers of the editions used in this work, preliminary poems, and water marks.
Appendix E is a study of the theories of the Aristotelian concepts about the idea of change of fortune ($\mu\varepsilon\tau\acute\alpha\beta\alpha\sigma\acute \iota\varsigma$) and the idea of $peripeteia\ (\pi\varepsilon\rho\iota\pi\acute \varepsilon\tau\varepsilon\iota\alpha),$ as seen by commentators on the Poetics of Aristotle (1548-1575), and theorists of poetry during the time in which the first Spanish pastoral works were published. This long section presents the first part of an extended study on this topic which will later be concluded with observation of contemporary developments in rhetoric, philosophy and theology. One interesting preliminary conclusion is that the impulse which led to the elimination of the supernatural elements as a cause of the changes of fortune did not originate in poetics: in Italian poetics there is no trace of it until 1561.