For early modern authors, the meaning of invention lay between the classical world's omnipresent notion of imitation and what would later become Romantic ideals of genius and originality. In that sense, their era was a transitional phase, smoothing the passage from the classical notion of poetry as imitation to the understanding of literature as the product of the author's creative imagination and original thought. Yet a great conceptual richness lay in this intermediate position, capturing many of the political, religious and social tensions of the Renaissance.

Roc o G. Sumillera is Associate Professor at the Universidad de Granada.