Luis de León

Luis de León (Belmonte, Cuenca, 1527 – Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Castile, Spain, 23 August 1591), was a Spanish lyric poet, Augustinian friar, theologian and academic.

While serving as professor of Biblical scholarship at the University of Salamanca, Fray Luis also wrote many immortal works of Spanish Christian poetry and translated both Biblical Hebrew poetry and Latin Christian poetry into the Spanish language. Despite being a devout and believing Roman Catholic priest, Fray Luis was descended from a family of Spanish Jewish Conversos and this, as well as his vocal advocacy for teaching the Hebrew language in Catholic universities and seminaries, drew false accusations from the Dominican Order of the heresies of being both a Marrano and a Judaiser. Fray Luis was accordingly imprisoned for four years by the Spanish Inquisition before he was ruled to be completely innocent of any wrongdoing and released without charge. While the conditions of his imprisonment were never harsh and he was allowed complete access to books, according to legend, Fray Luis started his first post-Inquisition University of Salamanca lecture with the words, "As I was saying the other day..."

According to Edith Grossman, "Fray Luis is generally considered the leading poet in the far-reaching Christianization of the Renaissance in Spain during the sixteenth-century. This means that as a consequence of the Counter-Reformation, and especially of the judgments and rulings of the Council of Trent, the secular Italianate forms and themes brought into Spain by Garcilaso were used by subsequent writers to explore moral, spiritual, and religious topics. The poets and humanists who were the followers of Fray Luis in the sixteenth-century formed the influential School of Salamanca."