Pedro Mexía

He maintained correspondence with Erasmus of Rotterdam, Luis Vives and Juan Gines de Sepulveda.

In 1548, he was appointed official chronicler of the court of Emperor Charles V. His major work is Silva de varia lección (A Miscellany of Several Lessons) (1540), which became an early best seller across Europe.

It is an encyclopedic miscellany or mixture of subjects of interest across the diverse repertoire of humanistic knowledge of the time.

The work takes material from the Attic Nights by Aulus Gellius, the Banquet of the Sophists by Athenaeus, the Saturnalia of Macrobius, the Memorable deeds and sayings of Valerius Maximus, the De inventoribus rerum of Polydore Vergil, the Moralia and Parallel Lives of Plutarch and, above all, the Natural History of Pliny the Elder.

Traces of this miscellany can be found in works by Mateo Alemán, Miguel de Cervantes, Shakespeare and Montaigne, to mention only a few of the authors he influenced.