"Scholars of all periods and centuries who are interested in Iberian languages and letters will benefit from the book, and libraries both around the States and abroad will want to acquire it." (Patricia Hart, World Literature Today).

This collectoion brings together an outstanding group of historical, cultural, and literary scholars to investigate the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union and desire and dread associated with the figure of the foreign Other in the Middle Ages--represented variously by Muslims, Jews, heretics, pagans, homosexuals, lepers, monsters, and witches. Exploring the diverse manifestations of the foreign in medieval literature, historical documents, religous treatises, and art, these essays mine the traces of unprecedented encounters in which fascination and fear meet.

The Jewish community of medieval Spain was the largest and most important in the West for more than a thousand years, participating fully in cultural and political affairs with Muslim and Christian neighbors. This stable situation began to change in the 1390s, and through the next century hundreds of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. Norman Roth argues here with detailed documentation that, contrary to popular myth, the conversos were sincere converts who hated (and were hated by) the remaining Jewish community. Roth examines in depth the reasons for the Inquisition against the conversos, and the eventual expulsion of all Jews from Spain. “With scrupulous scholarship based on a profound knowledge of the Hebrew, Latin, and Spanish sources, Roth sets out to shatter all existing preconceptions about late medieval society in Spain.”—Henry Kamen, Journal of Ecclesiastical History “Scholarly, detailed, researched, and innovative. . . . As the result of Roth’s writing, we shall need to rethink our knowledge and understanding of this period.”—Murray Levine, Jewish Spectator “The fruit of many years of study, investigation, and reflection, guaranteed by the solid intellectual trajectory of its author, an expert in Jewish studies. . . . A contribution that will be particularly valuable for the study of Spanish medievalism.”—Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, Annuario de Estudios Medievales

This study examines a series of recurring patterns that can be observed in Miguel de Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares (1613). Author E. T. Aylward proposes that the precise ordering of Cervantes's twelve novellas is based on the thematic and structural patterns of the individual stories contained in the collection.

This volume contains seven of the eleven papers offered at the First Catalan Symposium organized by the Center for Catalan Studies at The Catholic University of America, October, 1990. Under the general topic of «The Present State of Catalan Studies in North America, » it contains papers by Patricia J. Boehne, Robert I. Burns, S.J., Peter Cocozzella, Roberto J. González Casanovas, Montserrat Piera, and Josep M. Solà-Solé, and an introduction by Ellen Ginsberg. This volume will be the first of a series, generated by annual symposia, and is dedicated to the memory of Father Pauli Bellet, O.S.B., who, from 1962 until his death in 1987, regularly taught a Catalan course in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures at CUA.