As an artist, Montoro represents both a dead-end and a harbinger. He was a dead-end because with the imposition of the Spanish Inquisition and the purity of blood laws, conversos after him could no longer proudly point to their Jewish roots. That attitude would lead to being burned to death as a heretic. Converso artists turned instead to secrecy and indirection. It is no coincidence that the two most important works by conversos, La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes (both classics of world literature), were both initially published anonymously.
He was a harbinger in that the attitudes he and other cancioneros embraced: irony, irreverence, and the use of low class characters to attack the pretensions of the higher classes, would soon inspire a much more important genre. Picaresque literature came out of the cancionero tradition.12 The picaresque novel, in its turn, was to become part of the foundation of modern literature.
Francisco Marquez Villanueva, "Jewish 'Fools' of the Spanish Fifteenth Century", Hispanic Review, V. 50, No. 4 (Autumn, 1982), P. 393.
Yirmihayu Yovel, "Converso Dualities in the First Generation: The Cancioneros", Jewish Social Studies, V.4, N. 3 (1998), P. 4-5.
Montoro, Antón de. Poesía completa. Ed. Marithelma Costa. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Press, 1990., Poem No. 12
Ibid, poem No. 10
Marquez Villanueva, P. 403.
Montoro, Antón de. Poesía completa, P. 23
Ibid, P. 29-30
Yovel, P. 5-6
Barbara Weissberger "A Tierra, Puto!", in Queer Iberia, (Duke University Press, 1999), p. 294
Ibid, P. 316
Marquez Villanueva, P. 397
Victoriano Roncero Lopez, "Lazarillo, Guzman and Buffoon Literature", MLN 116 (2001), P. 237.