Framing Iberia is a study of medieval Iberian culture observed through the lens of the frametale, a type of story collection cultivated by medieval Iberian authors in several languages. Its best known examples outside of Iberia are Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, and the Thousand and One Nights. In Framing Iberia the author relocates the Castilian classics El Conde Lucanor and El Libro de buen amor within a literary tradition that includes works in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Romance. In doing so, he draws on current critical...

Revisiting al-Andalus brings together a range of recent scholarship on the material culture of Islamic Iberia, highlighting especially the new directions that have developed in the Anglo-American branch of this field since the 1992 catalogue of the influential exhibition, Al-Andalus: the Art of Islamic Spain. Together with examples of recent Spanish scholarship on medieval architecture and urbanism, the volume's contributors (historians of art and architecture, archaeologists, and architects) explore topics such as the relationship between Andalusi literature and art; architecture, urbanism,...

The kings of Castile maintained a personal cavalry guard through much of the fifteenth century, consisting of practicing Muslims and converts to Christianity. This privileged Muslim elite provides an interesting case-study to propose new theories about voluntary conversion from Christianity to Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the ways of assimilation of such a group into the local and courtly environments where they lived thereafter. Other subjects involved are the transformation of royal armies from feudal companies to regimented, professional forces including a well-trained...

Although the Spanish Inquisition looms large in many conceptions of the early modern Hispanic world, relatively few studies have been made of the Spanish state and Inquisition's approach to book censorship in the seventeenth century. Merging archival and rare book research with a case study of the fiction of Baltasar Gracian, this book argues that privileged authors, like the Jesuit Gracian, circumvented publication strictures that were meant to ensure that printed materials conformed to the standards of Catholicism and supported the goals of the absolute monarchy. In contrast to some elite...

Drawing on arguments for and against the expulsion of the Moriscos, and using previously unpublished source material, this book compares the case against banishment made by the Christian humanist Pedro de Valencia with that in favour pleaded by Catholic apologists.

Based on extensive study of the primary and secondary sources, Damian J. Smith here provides the first full account of the combined influence of crusade, heresy and inquisition in and about the lands of the Crown of Aragon until the death of James I the Conqueror in 1276. This work deals with the gradual loss of influence of the Crown in Provence and Languedoc culminating in the treaty of Corbeil in 1258. It then investigates the extent of heresy in the lands of the Crown and in other areas of Christian Spain. In the final part, the origins and development of the Aragonese inquisition are...

Gamblers, cheats, womanizers and thieves, and cranky reformers who wanted their old Order back, flesh-and-blood men with complicated desires and knotty dispositions. Opening a rich trove of sources - the annual chapter acts of the Dominican Order's Province of Aragon - Michael Vargas uncovers the costly successes and institutional weaknesses that contributed to the distressing realities of Dominican conventual life in the troubled fourteenth century. Taming a Brood of Vipers finds Dominican friars engaged in activities very much at odds with our sense of the way it should have been, but...

A Scholarly Edition of Andres de Li's Thesoro de la passion (1494) is the first new edition of this early Castilian Passion text in five hundred years. Originally published in 1494 by the prolific Zaragozan printer Pablo Hurus, this beautifully illustrated devotional offers the modern reader a glimpse into the complex social world of late fifteenth-century Spain. Li's converso identity permeates his retelling of the Passion through expositions on hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, and false faith. This new, modernized edition of the Thesoro de la passion dramatically illustrates the...

The conversos of late medieval and Golden Age Spain were Christians whose Jewish ancestors had been forced to change faiths within a society that developed a preoccupation with pure Christian lineage. The aims of this book is to shed new light on the cultural impact of this social climate, in which public suspicion of the religious sincerity of conversos became widespread and scrutiny by the Inquisition came to impede social advancement and threaten life and property. The bulk of the essays center on literary works, including lesser known and canonical pieces, which are analyzed by scholars...

The bibliography includes material published from 2007 to 2009. Following on from the first bibliography (Brill, 1988) and its first update (Brill 2007) this volume covers recent literature on: Archaeology, Liturgy, Monasticism, Iberian-Gallic Patristics, Paleography, Linguistics, Germanic and Muslim Invasions, and more. In addition, peoples such as the Vandals, Sueves, Basques, Alans and Byzantines are included. The book contains author and subject indexes and is extensively cross-indexed for easy consultation. A periodicals index of hundreds of journals accompanies the volume. Further...