Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive, somatic, and rhetorical level were theorized and practiced in multiple medieval and early-modern sources (literary, medical, theological, and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical span from eleventh-century France, to fifteenth-century Iberia and England, and ending with seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative literature. Essays in this book explore how particular emotional norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly, academic, urban elites) were subverted or re-shaped; engage with the study of emotions as sudden, but impactful, bursts of sensory experience and feelings; and analyze how emotions are filtered and negotiated through the prism of literary texts and the socio-political status of their authors.

In this volume seventeen scholars from Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and the US pay tribute to the memory of Roger M Walker, Professor of Spanish at Birkbeck College, London. His publications were chiefly in the field of Old Spanish narrative epic, romance, hagiography and the Libro de buen amor and the editors have sought to assemble contributions on these topics. Versions of some of the papers were presented at the symposium held in Professor Walkers memory at Birkbeck College in October 1999.

The series Studies of the Bible and Its Reception (SBR) publishes monographs and collected volumes which explore the reception history of the Bible in a wide variety of academic and cultural contexts. Closely linked to the multi-volume project Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (EBR), this book series is a publication platform for works which cover the broad field of reception history of the Bible in various religious traditions, historical periods, and cultural fields. Volumes in this series aim to present the material of reception processes or to develop methodological discussions in more detail, enabling authors and readers to more deeply engage and understand the dynamics of biblical reception in a wide variety of academic fields. Further information on „The Bible and Its Reception“.

First published in 2003, Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, is the first comprehensive reference to the vital world of medieval Spain. This unique volume focuses on the Iberian kingdoms from the fall of the Roman Empire to the aftermath of the Reconquista and encompass topics of key relevance to medieval Iberia, including people, events, works, and institutions, as well as interdisciplinary coverage of literature, language, history, arts, folklore, religion, and science. It also provides in-depth discussions of the rich contributions of Muslim and Jewish cultures, and offers useful insights into their interactions with Catholic Spain. With nearly 1,000 signed A-Z entries and written by renowned specialists in the field, this comprehensive work is an invaluable tool for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

The masterpieces of medieval Spanish literature have come to be known and loved by Hispanists, and more recently by others throughout the world. But the brilliant illuminations with which the original manuscripts were illustrated have remained almost totally unknown on the shelves of the great European libraries. To redress this woeful neglect, two noted scholars here present a generous selection from this great visual treasury including many examples never before reproduced. John E. Keller and Richard P. Kinkade have chosen five representative works, dating from the mid-thirteenth century to the late fifteenth, to illustrate the richness of early Spanish narrative art. Together, these five works encompass the entire range of narrative techniques and iconography to be found in medieval Spain, and reflect both foreign and native Spanish artistic tendencies. The authors' analyses of the relation between verbalizations and visualizations will provide students of medieval art and literature a wealth of new information expanding our knowledge of this fascinating period. The beauty of many of the illuminations speaks for itself.