José Amador de los Ríos

José Amador de los Ríos y Serrano (30 April 1818 – 17 February 1878) was a Spanish intellectual, primarily a historian and archaeologist of art and literature.

It was Amador de los Ríos who first used the term mudejarismo to describe a form of architectural decoration in 1859.

In 1861 he published the first volume of Historia crítica de la literatura española, the first general history of Spanish literature written in Spain.

Ideologically Amador de los Ríos, a liberal and romantic, conceives of Spain as a unit, at once Roman Catholic and Castilian, a constitutional monarchy (though it was not one yet) united with its past by an idea luminosa (luminous idea).

[2] Countering the foreign historians who regard medieval Spain as a backwater, he also defended Spanish literature as the foremost among those which appeared after the Fall of Rome.