The compiler of a poetical anthology has been defined as a reader who rewrites the texts he selected by organizing them in new configurations. Claudio Guillén (413) also characterized the compiler as a “superreader” who wants to guide his contemporaries as consumers of literature, thus ultimately modifying their horizon of expectations. Guillén's observations help us understand the function that some florilegia fulfilled in early modern Spain, an age when, as is well known, in very few cases did individual writers supervise printed editions of their own work and poetry circulated mostly in manuscript. The printing presses mostly helped popularize old and new ballads with the publication of romanceros, while in manuscript or printed cancioneros poetry lovers gathered anonymous compositions or texts authored by well and lesser known writers.

One of the most important printed anthologies of the early seventeenth century, Flores de poetas ilustres de España, compiled by Pedro Espinosa, transmitted some 248 original poems, composed by more than 60 new authors who were active in Spain during the last decade of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Flores is divided into two books; the first is dedicated to profane, the second to religious poetry, thus its disposition sets in contrast two kinds of topics, two subgenres. Espinosa's selection encompasses texts written by consecrated artists, among others, Góngora, the brothers Argensola, Lope de Vega and Barahona de Soto, as well as by younger ones like Quevedo. Flores exploits varietas, literary variety, in genre and subject, capitalizing on thematic and metrical diversity to attract its early readers, who would identify with this major principle of thought and rhetorics since the Renaissance. As is well known, the intimate connection between variety and pleasure was located first in nature, next in poetical discourse itself, built as it was upon the principle of imitation which thrives in the games of similarity and difference (Langer 120).