The story of the Celtiberian town of Numancia and its fall in 133 B.C., as seen in the writings of Livy, Plutarch and others, was a well established topos in sixteenth-century Spain. The accounts of the bravery of the Numantians in defending their besieged city formed the basis for hispanitas, the gradual construction of a Spanish national identity. This paper examines the circulation of the tale of Numancia in four writers of the period: Antonio Guevara, Ambrosio de Morales, Fernando de Herrera, and Miguel de Cervantes.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Schmidt, R., (2025), "The Development of Hispanitas in Spanish Sixteenth-Century Versions of the Fall of Numancia", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Schmidt, Rachel. "The Development of Hispanitas in Spanish Sixteenth-Century Versions of the Fall of Numancia." Renaissance and Reformation 31 (2): 2010. 27-45. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v31i2.11610. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.