Beyond Sight, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, explores the ways in which Iberian writers crafted images of both Old and New Worlds using the non-visual senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch). The contributors argue that the uses of these senses are central to understanding Iberian authors and thinkers from the pre- and early modern periods. Medievalists delve into the poetic interiorizations of the sensorial plane to show how sacramental and purportedly miraculous sensory experiences were central to the effort of affirming faith and understanding indigenous peoples in the Americas. Renaissance and early modernist essays shed new light on experiences of pungent, bustling ports and city centres, and the exotic musical performances of empire. This insightful collection covers a wide array of approaches including literary and cultural history, philosophical aesthetics, affective and cognitive studies, and theories of embodiment. Beyond Sight expands the field of sensory studies to focus on the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies from historical, literary, and cultural perspectives.

This book is about a couple, not a single, dominant ruler. Thus it raises issues of gender, and the dynamics of a marriage over thirty-five years, as well as the practice of monarchical power. The reader sees Ferdinand and Isabella struggle to establish their regime, and then work out an elaborate reform programme in Church and State. It sees them fight a ‘total war’, by fifteenth-century standards, against Muslim Granada, leading to that kingdom’s conquest, and an equally ‘total’ war, through the Inquisition and the Church in general, to convert Spanish Jews and Muslims to Christianity, and to reform and purify the religious and social lives of the established Christians themselves. For readers interested in Early European History.

A world traveler, Isabella Bird recorded her 1873 visit to Colorado Territory in her classic travel narrative, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. This work inspired Robert Root’s own discovery of Colorado’s Front Range following his move from the flatlands of Michigan. In this elegantly written book, Root retraces Bird’s three-month journey, seeking to understand what Colorado meant to her—and what it would come to mean for him. Following Isabella is a work of intersecting histories. Root interweaves an overview of Bird’s life and work with regional history, nature writing, and his own travels to produce a uniquely informative and entertaining narrative. He probes Bird’s self-transformation as her writing moved from private letters to published books, and also draws on reflections of other authors of her day, including Grace Greenwood and Helen Hunt Jackson. Like Bird, Root experiences his most fulfilling moments in the mountains, climbing formidable Longs Peak, living alone in the cabin of famed editor William Allen White, and wandering wild landscapes. Through reflections on earlier writers’ experiences, and by weighing his own response to them, Root learns not only how to come to Colorado, as visitors so often do, but more important, how to stay.