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. He was a graduate in history of the Complutense University of Madrid.

In 1844 he was the secretary of the Comisión Central de Monumentos. With Antonio de Zabaleta, he co-directed the ephemeral Boletín Español de Arquitectura, the first Spanish journal dedicated exclusively to architecture, published only from 1 June to December 1846. In 1852 he published the complete works of Íñigo López de Mendoza. Amador de los Ríos first used the term mudejarismo in 1859 to describe a form of architectural decoration.

In 1861 he published the first volume of Historia crítica de la literatura española, the first general history of Spanish literature written in Spain. The work remained incomplete. Ideologically, Amador de los Ríos, influenced by liberal and romantic, conceived of Spain as a unified entity, simultaneously Roman Catholic and Castilian. He saw it as a constitutional monarchy (though it was not yet established) connected to its past by an idea luminosa (luminous idea). Countering foreign historians who regarded medieval Spain as a backwater, he also defended Spanish literature as the foremost among those that emerged after the Fall of Rome. Though he only covered the Middle Ages, he demonstrated that he regarded Spanish American literature as part of the Spanish tradition. In another work, Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España, he included Spanish Jewish literature as part of the tradition, considering it "bloomed" on Spanish soil. Unlike Adolf de Castro, however, he did not condemn the Spanish Inquisition.