VILLENA, ENRIQUE DE Spanish author, sometimes wrongly called marques de Villena. About 1402 he married Maria de Castilla, who speedily became the recognized mistress of Henry III. ; the complaisant husband was rewarded by being appointed master of the military order of Calatrava in 1404, but the nomination was rescinded in 1415. Villena is rep resented by a fragment of his Arte de trobar (1414), an indi gestible treatise composed for the Barcelona Consistory of Gay Science; by Los Trabajos de Hercules (1417), a pedantic and unreadable allegory; by his Tratado de la Consolation and his handbook to the pleasures and fashions of the table, the Arte cisoria, both written in 1423; by the Libro de Aojamiento a ponderous dissertation on the evil eye and its effects; and by a translation of the Aeneid, the first ever made (1428). His treatise
on leprosy exists but has not been published. Villena's writings do not justify his extraordinary fame ; his subjects are devoid of charm, and his style is so uncouth as to be almost unintelligible. Yet he has an assured place in the history of Spanish literature; he was a generous patron of letters and his translation of Virgil marks him out as a pioneer of the Renaissance.