SILVEYRA, MIGUEL DE:
Spanish poet; born in Celorico, Portugal, in the last third of the sixteenth century; died at Naples in 1638. He studied philosophy at Coimbra, and jurisprudence, medicine, and mathematics at Salamanca; and for twenty years lectured at the Spanish court on different branches of science and on poetry. At an advanced age he went to Naples with his patron, Ramon Philip de Guzman, Duke of Medina de la Torres, and here his great heroic poem "El Macabeo, Poema Heroico en Octavos" appeared (1638; 2d ed. Madrid, 1731). Silveyra, who was a relative of Thomas de Pinedo, has been placed among the Jewish poets by Daniel Levi de Barrios, while Dieze and Ticknor doubt if he was ever a professing Jew. Antonio Enriques Gomez, in the prologue to his "Samson Nazareno," classes Silveyra with such poets as Camöens, while others, on account of his grandiloquent style, value him but little. Silveyra is said to have translated into Spanish Pedro Matheo's version of "Vida de Elio Sedano" (Barcelona, 1621).
- Barbosa Machado, Bibliotheca Lusitana, iii. 486 et seq.;
- Velasques-Dieze, Gesch. der Spanischen Dichtkunst, p. 395;
- Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, ii. 451;
- Rios, Estudios Sobre los Judios de España, pp. 556 et seq.;
- Don Levi de Barrios, Relacion de los Poetas, p. 37.