<i>Lo demás preguntad a mi poesía</i>: Lope de Vega and the ‘Epístola de Amarilis a Belardo’ (1621)

Though published in Spain in Lope de Vega’s La Filomena (1621), the ‘Epístola de Amarilis a Belardo’ is attributed to an anonymous seventeenth-century Peruvian female poet and commands a key position in the history of colonial Latin American women’s writing. This article insists upon the recontextualisation of the work within La Filomena alongside the response piece with which it was originally twinned – Lope’s ‘Epístola de Belardo a Amarilis’ – and advocates forms of close reading which prioritise inter-/intratextuality and metaliterarity as key to its interpretation. What emerges is a game of literary ‘whodunnit’ to which the (thinly veiled) answer is always Lope.