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This edited collection examines the ways in which medieval grief is both troubled and troubling––troubled in its representation, troubling to categories such as gender, identity, hierarchy, theology, and history, among others. Investigating various instantiations of grief—sorrow, sadness, and mourning; weeping and lamentation; spiritual and theological disorientation and confusion; keening and the drinking of blood; and grief-madness—through a number of theoretical lenses, including feminist, gender, and queer theories, as well as philosophical, sociological, and historical approaches to emotion, the collected essays move beyond simply describing how men and women grieve in the Middle Ages and begin interrogating the ways grief intersects with and shapes gender identity. Contributors are Kim Bergqvist, Jim Casey, Danielle Marie Cudmore, Marjorie Housley, Erin. I. Mann, Inna Matyushina, Drew Maxwell, Kristen Mills, Jeffery G. Stoyanoff, Lee Templeton, and Kisha G. Tracy.
Memories of Colonisation in Medieval and Modern Castile: Rereading and Refashioning al-Andalus traces the evolving memory of a dominant al-Andalus in medieval Castilian and, later, modern Spanish literature, and its overlap with contemporary formations of collective identity, race, and nation. It presents a series of close readings of neomedievalist literary works that look back to the socioeconomic apogee of al-Andalus, the tenth-century Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. These works rewrite what has become known as the story of the siete infantes de Lara, although it is their Andalusi half-brother, Mudarra, who takes centre stage from the early mod...
First comprehensive survey of Isabel de Villena (Sor Isabel), the fifteenth-century Spanish nun and writer. Isabel de Villena (1430-1490) is one of the most fascinating women of the Spanish middle ages. Related to the royal family, she became abbess of the Poor Clare convent, the Santa Trinitat, in Valencia in 1462, a position she heldfor almost thirty years until her death. Her treatise on the religious life, Vita Christi, was the first book by a woman to be printed in the kingdom of Aragon. This is the first full-length survey in English of Isabel's life and literary works. The author pays particular attention to the way in which devotion to the Virgin Mary is manifested and described through material culture, on her rich fabrics, brocades, silks, shoes, and crown. The book thus highlights not only Isabel's distinctive contribution to the genre of the Vita Christi, but also reflects the status of Valencia as a centre for trade and producer of silks and velvets at the time, as well as its flourishing shoe-making industry. Lesley K. Twomey is Principal Lecturer, Hispanic Studies, Northumbria University.
This book argues that literary and historiographical works written by Iberian Christians between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries promoted contradictory representations of Muslims in order to advocate for their colonization through the affirmation of Christian supremacy. Ambivalent depictions of cultural difference are essential for colonizers to promote their own superiority, as explained by postcolonial critics and observed in medieval and early modern texts in Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese, such as the Cantar de mio Cid, Cantigas de Santa Maria, Llibre dels fets, Estoria de España, Crónica geral de 1344, Tirant lo Blanch, and Os Lusíadas. In all these works, the contradictions of Muslim enemies, allies, and subjects allow Christian leaders to prevail and profit through their opposition and collaboration with them. Such colonial dynamics of simultaneous belligerence and assimilation determined the ways in which Portugal, Spain, and later European powers interacted with non-Christians in Africa, Asia, and even the Americas.
This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on a journey from the late fourteenth-century conversions and the first blood purity laws (designed to marginalize conversos), through the early sixteenth-century Erasmian and radical mystical movements, to a Counter-Reformation environment in which conversos become the advocates for pacifism and concordance. His account ends at the court of Philip IV, where growing intolerance towards Madrid’s converso courtiers is subtly attacked by Spain’s greatest painter, Diego Velázquez, in his work, Los Borrachos. Finally, Ingram examines the historiography of early modern Spain, in which he argues the converso reform phenomenon continues to be underexplored.
After the success of the first international conference on the medieval chronicle, it was decided that another would be in place. It was held in the summer of 1999, and again drew some 150 participants. There are several reasons why the chronicle is particularly suited as the topic of an international conference. In the first place there is its ubiquity: all over Europe and throughout the Middle Ages chronicles were written, both in Latin and in the vernacular, and not only in Europe but also in the countries neighbouring on it, like those of the Arabic world. Secondly, all chronicles raise such questions as by whom, for whom, or for what purpose were they written, how do they reconstruct th...
Colonial Spanish bureaucracy produced masses of “autobiographical” texts ('relaciones de méritos and servicios') which forced/invited individuals to present themselves as perfect subjects of the King in order to be rewarded. Bureaucracy produced the officials of the colonial regime, and, at the same time, it provided individuals with the possibility of exploring the literary potential of writing one’s curriculum vitae. This book helps contextualize a body of often-used yet understudied historic sources; it indicates that the fabric of early modern society was held together by a pervasive economy of 'mercedes' (rewards); and it shows that the tension between state-induced production of autobiographical documents and the individual’s endeavor to outsmart this system is at the origin of modern forms of literature.
Portraying Authorship argues that the medieval Castilian writer Juan Manuel fashioned a seemingly modern authorial persona from the accumulation and synthesis of medieval authorial roles. In the manuscript culture of medieval Castile and across Latin Europe, writers typically referred to their work in ways that corresponded to their role in the bookmaking process: scribes took credit for preserving the works of others, compilers for combining disparate texts in productive ways, commentators for explaining obscure works, and authors for writing their own words. Combining literary analysis with book history, Anita Savo reveals how Juan Manuel forged his authorial persona, “Don Juan,” by ad...
A book on the theory and practice of Medieval Historiography in Spain.