A truly groundbreaking book, presenting a portrait of Alfonso X, monarch and medieval intellectual "par excellence," and the extraordinary cultural history of Spain at that time.

A selection of the 13th-century Galician Cantigas de Santa Maria commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile in a new edition produced by the Oxford CSM Critical Edition project, with critical apparatus. The order of poems will replicate the distinctive internal structure of the main compilations and the edition will make these texts available in a form suitable as a set text for student use, with an introduction placing them in their historical, cultural and linguistic context, and with English translations.

Alfonso X (1221–1284) reigned as king of Castile and León from 1252 until his death. Known to history as El Sabio, the Wise, or the Learned, his appreciation for science and the arts led him to sponsor a number of books on the history of Spain since its Roman settlement. Among them were the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of over four hundred poems exalting his favorite patron saint, Mary, and chronicles of all the kings of Castile and León, Navarre, Aragón, and Portugal. Alfonso X died before his own life could be written. His was a reign fraught with political intrigue and double crosses, almost constant war and equally constant diplomacy, royal largesse and economic instability—all of which led to open revolt and efforts by Alfonso's own son to depose the king. It would be another sixty-some years before King Alfonso XI would commission Fernán Sánchez de Valladolid to write Cronica de Alfonso X to memorialize his great-grandfather. As Alfonso XI's trusted counselor, ambassador, diplomat, and legist, Fernán was an understandable choice, but in the centuries since, his convoluted prose has proven extremely difficult extremely difficult for scholars. Chronicle of Alfonso X is the first and only translation of the king's history. The original "clumsy Castilian" of Fernán Sánchez has now been transformed into literate and engaging English.

Emperor of Culture explores Alfonso's vast influence and will be valuable to all students and scholars of medieval Spain.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

In the "Cantigas de Santa Maria," a collection of about four hundred poems written in Galician, Alfonso X, el Sabio, king of Castile-Leon, has left us a kind of poetic biography. This volume explicates the historical circumstances surrounding the stories that the king tells about himself and his kingdom. As Mary's troubadour, he appeals to her as his advocate and consoler.

This book analyses text, image and manuscript layout to deepen our understanding of the different ways in which Alfonso is presented as a learned king in the manuscripts he commissioned, and reassesses the number of manuscripts copied for him.