Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature explores the ways Arabic, Jewish and Christian intellectuals in medieval Iberia (courtiers and clerics) adapt and transform the Andalusi go-between figure in order to represent their own role as cultural intermediaries. While these authors are of different religious, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, they use the go-between, an essential figure in the Andalusi courtly discourse of desire, to open up a secular, more tolerant intellectual space in the face of increasingly fundamentalist currents in their respective cultures. The way this study focuses on the hybrid discourses and identities of medieval Iberia as Muslim, Jewish and Christian responses to continual contact/conflict reflects a methodological approach based in Cultural and Translation Studies.

"Examines the influential role of visual images in reinforcing the efforts of Spain's Christian-ruled kingdoms to renegotiate the role of their Jewish minority following the territorial expansions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries"--Provided by publisher.

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.

We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.

This book examines evolution of medieval patience literature from a focus on male and female sufferers to a focus on female suffers in particular. Using feminist revisions of genre-theory, Waugh analyses the concept of counterfeit consciousness in the works of Margery Kempe and Chaucer among others.

This book is first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, it proposes a 'gendered model' for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant.

Julian of Norwich the best-known of the medieval mystics today. The text of her Revelation has circulated continually since the fifteenth century, but the twentieth century saw a massive expansion of her popularity. Theological or literary-historical studies of Julian may remark in passing on her popularity, but none have attempted a detailed study of her reception. This collection fills that gap: it outlines the full reception history from the extant manuscripts to the present day, looking at Julian in devotional cultures, in modernist poetry and present-day popular literature, and in her iconography in Norwich, both as a pilgrimage site and a tourist attraction.