Bernat Metge
Catalan writer, humanist and senior royal official (c. 1340/46–1413), born in Barcelona and raised in a family environment tied to the royal chancery, where he served for decades as secretary and notary to four successive kings of the Crown of Aragon — Peter the Ceremonious, John I, Martin the Humane and, at the very end of his life, Ferdinand of Antequera — a position that gave him access to an exceptional humanistic education for the time and put him in contact with the Italian intellectual currents reaching the Catalan-Aragonese court. A key, pioneering figure of Catalan humanism, Metge is regarded as the man who introduced the ideas of early Italian humanism — especially Boccaccio and, to a lesser extent, Petrarch — into Catalan literature, a humanism combining renewed classical erudition with vernacular prose of an elegance and rhetorical sophistication unprecedented in the language. His masterwork, The Dream (Lo somni, 1399), written while he was imprisoned over an accusation — of which he would be acquitted — connected to the death of King John I, is a philosophical dialogue in four books in which the deceased king's spirit appears to the author in dreams to debate the immortality of the soul, divine providence, fortune and, in the final book, the nature and conduct of women, one of the most remarkable texts of medieval Catalan literature for its combination of scholastic philosophical sophistication, classical influence and narrative irony. Also the author of Valter and Griselda, a Catalan translation-adaptation of Boccaccio's well-known tale (via Petrarch's Latin version), and of shorter works such as the Book of Fortune and Prudence, Metge represents the culminating point of medieval Catalan prose and the decisive bridge between the earlier courtly tradition and the new Renaissance humanism that would penetrate the Crown of Aragon in the fifteenth century.