Academias valencianas del barroco is an exhaustive study of the twenty-five literary academies, including two fictitius ones that appear in novels, that existed in Valencia between the years 1591-1705. using published and unpublished seventeenth-century documents, Pasqual Mas i Usó provides detailed information abaut the history, organitzation, mebership, and literary activity of the academies that were an integral coponent of the Golden Age Valencia’s social milieu. The comprehensive nature of this ground breaking study represents a valuable contribution to Golden Age studies and an important source of information for subsequent researchers, especially, sociologists, historians, and scholars of Golden Age Spain. Mas i Usó’s study consists of a Prólogo, Introducción, Catálogo bibliográfico, Corpus Académico, Diccionario de poetas y Académicos, and Indice de primeros Versos.

In the prólogo Mas i Usó explains that Academias valencianas del barroco evolved from his doctoral dissertation of nearly 2000 pages. Besides the current study, the dissertation, under the direction of Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros of the University of Valencia, served as the basis for a chapter in De las academias a la Enciclopedia (1999), an edition of José Ortí y Mole’s manuscript Academia a las señoras de 1698 (1995), Academias y justas literarias en la Valencia barroca (1995) and an anthology titled Poesia académica valenciana (1998). In the latest study, Mas i Usó explores the social, literary, and historical significance of the literary academies of Valencia, mentioning especifics, such as names of members and their nicknames, the location and dades of mettings, the topics proposed and discussed at the mettings, the rules and regulations by wich each academy operated, and the titles of each academy’s poems and plays. The description of several of the academies includes the complete text of the poems as well.