The most important versification manual in the history of Spanish literature is undoubtedly Juan Díaz Rengifo's Arte poética española, which first appeared in Salamanca in 1592 and was reissued a number of times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That the influence of this Renaissance treatise on Spanish verse has been great cannot be questioned. For approximately four centuries, in fact, it was the handbook on metrics for versifiers and poets. Reasons for the value and usefulness of the Arte poética española are not lacking. Rengifo was a scholarly investigator—scholarly in the modern sense. He worked systematically; he based his conclusions on actual practice rather than on theory; he illustrated his rules with examples chosen generally from the best-known poets; he studied the investigations of previous writers and, in full bibliographical references in marginal notes that correspond to today's footnotes, frankly gave them credit for all ideas and material borrowed from them; he showed unbiased judgment in the presentation of controversial topics; he described accurately, but never prescribed; he wrote clearly in simple language and without unnecessary wordage; he supplied time-saving devices for the reader; and he presented his work in an orderly, logical, and concise manner. His work is comprehensive and well balanced.

Epitaphs of somewhat greater literary and historic interest than those usually met with are to be found in two volumes in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Though one was written down in a mediaeval manuscript and the other relates to an English nobleman who died early in the fifteenth century, they may nevertheless be identified with the era to which the Renaissance Society dedicates itself, since both the epitaphs were probably composed in the sixteenth century and they were set down in the Morgan volumes by two writers of the same century.

On the verso of the first fly-leaf of Morgan Ms 771, there is written, in a hand of the early sixteenth century, the following stanza:

La terre monde et ciel/ont deuise ma dame
Anne qui fut des Roys/diaries et loys femme
La terre a pris le corps/qui gist soubz ceste Lame
Le monde ansy Retient/Sa Renommee et fame
Pardurable a Jaymes/Sans estre blasmee de ame
Et Le ciel pour sa part a voulu prendre L'ame