The twelve essays in this fiorilegio of the work of Otis H. Green afford a representative view of the thought and scholarship of one of the world's foremost Hispanists. In each of them is developed some important facet of the intellectual milieu of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, reflecting Otis Green's life-long and wide-ranging quest for evidence that would broaden our understanding of those complex periods and correct the misapprehensions which have gathered about them. Included are important sections of his great work, Spain and the Western Tradition and essays from journals now difficult to obtain or out of print. This book provides a valuable introduction to Spanish thought and to the work of a scholar who has done much to elucidate it.

A study of literary theory in Castile between 1400 and 1460.

Universals and particulars : themes and persons -- Writing and the pursuit of origins -- Conquest, civil war, and political life -- The emergence of patria : cities and the law -- Works of nature and works of free will -- "The discourse of my life" : what language can do -- The Incas, Rome, and Peru -- Epilogue: Ancient texts : prophecies and predictions, causes and judgments.

Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person—to experience who-ness—in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes.

This study outlines the history and anatomy of the European apology tradition from the sixth century BCE to 1500 for the first time. The study examines the vernacular and Latin tales, lyrics, epics, and prose compositions of Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Spanish, and Welsh authors. Three different strands of the apology tradition can be proposed. The first and most pervasive strand features apologies to pagan deities and-later-to God. The second most important strand contains literary apologies made to an earthly audience, usually of women. A third strand occurs more rarely and contains apologies for varying literary offenses that are directed to a more general audience. The medieval theory of language privileges an imitation of the Christian master narrative and a hierarchical medieval view of authorship. These notions express a medieval philosophical concern about language and its role, and therefore the role of the author, in cosmic history. Despite the fact that women apologize for different purposes and reasons, their examples illustrate, on yet another level, the antifeminist subtext inherent in the entire apology tradition. Overall, the apology tradition characterized by interauctoriality, intertextuality, and intratextuality, enables self-critical authors to refer not only backward but also-primarily-forward, making the medieval apology a progressive strategy that engenders new literature. This study would be relevant to all medievalists, especially those interested in literature and the history of ideas.

As a whole, this study demonstrates how, in order to examine a mind like Cervantes's, we need to approach his work and his world from a perspective as culturally integrative as his own." "This book includes twenty-eight illustrations."--Jacket.