“Benito Arias Montano y su maestro de poesía Juan de Quirós”, Benito Arias Montano y los humanistas de su tiempo (Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2006), 1, 125-149.

Benito Arias Montano wrote around 1572 that Juan de Quirós "was a refined poet and a chaste priest." He had been his teacher of poetry in Seville in 1546-1547, and taught him the poetic and supernatural value of the Biblical Psalms. Quirós had written in 1545 two laudatory epigrams imitating Martial for Pedro Mexia's Historia Imperial, dedicated to the future king Philipp II, and in the 1547 edition of this work appeared an epigram and a sonnet by Montano, who also imitated Martial since 1548 in several epigrams written during his studies in Alcalá de Henares. Two other Latin poems of Quirós are known to us from Montano's quotations of in his Rhetorica. Montano, who considered Quirós as the best poet in Andalusia (Rhet. 3,259-260), had written a laudatory sonnet for Quirós's Cristopatía (Toledo, 1552), which he named with the same Latin words as the title of one of his own works and which also deals with the salvation of mankind: Humanae monumenta salutis (Rhet. 3,268). Around the middle of the century, both composed biblical paraphrases imitating the new poetry of Boscan and Garcilaso. Both wrote poems for the music book of Miguel de Fuenllana in 1554, and paid great attention to Music both in their poems and singing psalms and sacred hymns or playing the vihuela.  Montano was a laureate poet by the literary jury of Alcalá de Henares on June 22, 1552; and his teacher, who wore the laurel wreath in a portrait printed in January of that same year, was a judge in the literary joust held in Seville on June 29, 1558. Montano's spirituality responds to the same religious conception proper to Christian humanism that shows his teacher's Cristopatía, following the Bible as the main and almost unique source of inspiration and truth. This was the common basis for reconciling all Christians within the Church, which allowed them to maintain an ecumenical doctrine and a tolerant attitude towards Protestants, based on a common goal of regenerating the Christian doctrine, spirituality and moral according to the model of early Christians. These and other coincidences among teacher and disciple, as well as the differences regarding these same literary and religious attitudes, are developed in the present work.