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A volume of eleven innovative essays on cultural production in medieval Castile, blending original archival work with a rigorous consideration of comparative methodology for the study of religions and languages in contact.
Now in its fourth edition, Sexuality in Medieval Europe provides a lively account of a society whose attitudes toward sexuality both were ancestral to, and differed from, contemporary ones. The volume is structured not by types of sexual interactions or deviance, but to reflect the difference in gendered experiences when sex is seen as an act one person does to another. Sexual activity, within and outside of marriage, as well as sexual inactivity, had different meanings based on gender, social status, religious affiliation, and more. This book considers these iterations of medieval sexuality in its effort to show there was no single medieval attitude towards sexuality. With an emphasis on Ch...
The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings. This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviours are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, ...
In ten essays authored by an international team of scholars, this volume explores queer readings of Western and Eastern Mediterranean Europe, Northern Africa, Islam and Arabic traditions. The contributors enter into a dialogue, comparing cases from opposite sides of the Mediterranean, in order to analyze the forgotten exchange of sexualities that was brought forth through the Mediterranean and its bordering landmasses during the Middle Ages. This collection questions the hypothesis that distinct cultures treated sexuality and the “other” differently. The volume initiates the conversation around queerness and sexuality on these trade routes, and problematizes the differences between various Mediterranean cultures in order to argue that through both queerness and sexuality, neighboring civilizations had access to, and knowledge of, common shared experiences. Contributors are Sahar Amer, Israel Burshatin, Robert L.A. Clark, Denise K. Filos, Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, Edmund Hayes, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Vicente Lledó-Guillem, Leyla Rouhi, and Robert S. Sturges.
Globalization discourse now presumes that the “world space” is entirely at the mercy of market norms and forms promulgated by reactionary U.S. policies. An academic but accessible set of studies, this wide range of essays by noted scholars challenges this paradigm with diverse and strong arguments. Taking on topics that range from the medieval Mediterranean to contemporary Jamaican music, from Hong Kong martial arts cinema to Taiwanese politics, writers such as David Palumbo-Liu, Meaghan Morris, James Clifford, and others use innovative cultural studies to challenge the globalization narrative with a new and trenchant tactic called “worlding.” The book posits that world literature, c...
Hercules and the King of Portugal investigates how representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity, scrutinizing ways that gender performances of two early modern male icons—Hercules and King Sebastian—are structured to express enduring nationhood. The classical hero Hercules features prominently in Hispanic foundational fictions and became intimately associated with the Hapsburg monarchy in the early sixteenth century. King Sebastian of Portugal (1554–78), both during his lifetime and after his violent death, has been inserted into his own land’s charter myth, even as competing interests have adapted his narratives to promote Spanish power. The h...
The essays in this volume present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized conceptions of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of sexuality in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not denying the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how historical work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in medieval sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such instabilities. At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture from our current set of vantage points within postmodernity. The authors focus ...
The New Companion to the Libro de buen amor provides a platform for exploring current, innovative approaches to this classic poem. It is designed for specialists and non-specialists from a variety of fields, who are interested in investigating different aspects of Juan Ruiz’s poem and developing fruitful new paths for future research. Chapters in the volume show how the book engages with Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures, and delve into its legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part One sheds light on intersecting cultural milieux, from the Christian court of Castile, to the experience of Jewish and Muslim communities. Part Two illustrates how the poem’s meaning through time can be elucidated using an array of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches. Contributors are Nora C. Benedict, Erik Ekman, Denise K. Filios, Ryan D. Giles, Michelle Hamilton, Carlos Heusch, José Manuel Hidalgo, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Veronica Menaldi, Simone Pinet, Michael R. Solomon. See inside the book
Lesbian Realities/Lesbian Fictions in Contemporary Spain, edited by Nancy Vosburg and Jacky Collins, focuses exclusively on manifestations of lesbian cultures and identities in contemporary Spain. Bringing together key essays from a range of international scholars, this anthology of critical essays examines the changing cultural, sociological and political landscape of Spain at the turn of the millennium. Divided into two sections, the first contributions focus on the realities of lesbian lives and looks at how Spanish lesbian identities are constructed through language and the media. The essays in the second section analyze contemporary lesbian identities as manifested in novels and short s...
These studies illustrate the various high and late medieval transformations of formal and formalized argument, from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective. They challenge today's dominant disciplinary approaches to what was and is still a pervasive mode of thought in the West. Many current treatments of medieval disputational texts have a narrow focus either on the history of scholasticism, rhetoric, and pedagogy, or the genesis and function of such period-specific forms of academic altercation as demonstrative, dialectic, or sophistic disputation, or the later quaestiones, quodlibeta, and sophismata. Moreover, scholarship in literature often ignores the parallel structures of academic argument and narrowly focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of debate poem.