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.

In Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, editor Laura Delbrugge and contributors Jaume Aurell, David Gugel, Michael Harney, Daniel Hartnett, Mark Johnston, Albert Lloret, Montserrat Piera, Zita Rohr, Núria Silleras-Fernández, Caroline Smith, Wendell P. Smith, and Lesley Twomey explore the applicability of Stephen Greenblatt's self-fashioning theory, framed in Elizabethan England, to medieval and early modern Portugal, Aragon, and Castile. Chapters examine self-fashioning efforts by monarchs, religious converts, nobles, commoners, and clergy in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries to establish the presence of self-identity creation in many new contexts beyond that explored in Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, greatly expanding the understanding of self-fashioning on diverse aspects of identity creation in late medieval and early modern Iberia.

A study of the cultural practices and paradigms of reading and textual composition among medieval Iberian women readers and writers (specifically Violant of Bar, Leonor López de Córdoba, Constanza de Castilla, Teresa de Cartagena and Isabel de Villena).

The last decade has witnessed a striking upsurge of interest in Iberian hagiography. In painting and the fine arts through to poetic and narrative treatments composed in Castilian and Catalan, the legacies of Christ, Mary, and the saints have been approached from a range of perspectives and subjected to detailed critical scrutiny. This book, which focuses specifically on the application of theoretical and methodological approaches to analysis, asks what scholars of early Iberian hagiography can bring to the analysis of the sacred past and how the study of the discipline can be taken forward innovatively in the future. Its fourteen essays, each focusing on a different aspect of composition, seek in particular to explore interdisciplinary methodologies and the ways in which they intersect with broader discourses in other branches of research. Contributors are Carme Arronis Llopis, Fernando Baños Vallejo, Andrew M. Beresford, Sarah Jane Boss, Sarah V. Buxton, Marinela Garcia Sempere, Ryan D. Giles, Ariel Guiance, Lluís Ramon i Ferrer, Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida, Connie L. Scarborough, and Lesley K. Twomey.

Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700) addresses historians and literary scholars. It aims to recapture oral culture in a variety of literary and non-literary sources, tracking the echo of women’s voices, on trial, or bantering and gossiping in literary works, and recapturing those of princes and magistrates, townsmen, villagers, mariners, bandits, and songsmiths. Almost all medieval and early modern writing was marked by the oral. Spoken words and turns of phrase are bedded in writings, and the mental habits of a speaking world shaped texts. Writing also shaped speech; the oral and the written zones had a porous, busy boundary. Cross-border traffic is central to this study, as is the power, range, utility, and suppleness of speech. Contributors are Matthias Bähr, Richard Blakemore, Michael Braddick, Rosanna Cantavella, Thomas V. Cohen, Gillian Colclough, Jan Dumolyn, Susana Gala Pellicer, Jelle Haemers, Marcus Harmes, Elizabeth Horodowich, Carolina Losada, Virginia Reinburg, Anne Regent-Susini, Joseph T. Snow, Sonia Suman, Lesley K. Twomey and Liv Helene Willumsen.

This volume presents an overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of women's studies, including original essays by pioneering scholars as well as by younger specialists. New pathfinding models of theoretical analysis are balanced with a careful revisiting of the historical foundations of women's studies.

Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.