"He died, as they say, in the assault": biographical resources in Feijoo's polemical art.

Abstract

This paper studies a not inconsiderable part of the ars polemica -that is, the poetics for literary warfare, which presented a series of resources and writing tools- of the spanish Benedictine writer Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676-1764): the biographical construction (and deconstruction). The autobiographical narrative, the insult, the hagiography, the ad hominem attack or the exemplary biography are some of the ways in which polemics cross the account of life in the Benedictine polemicist. The inextricable union of life and polemics will be seen in testimonies such as the one Feijoo himself gives of his friend Martín Martínez, to whom "the villainous retaliation embraced by some of those whose errors Martínez contested [...] made such a deep impression on his noble spirit that it hastened his death".