Jorge de Montemayor's great pastoral novel La Diana (1559), one of the fountainheads of Spanish Renaissance literature, has often been regarded as a work written merely to amuse an effete courtly world. Bruno M. Damiani argues here that, far from being simply a ""pastoral dream,"" Diana has profound socio-historical and religious dimensions, and that Montemayor's intentions in it were largely moral and instructive. The timeless, idyllic nature which forms the essence of the pastoral is, in the ca