In The Epic of Juan Latino, Elizabeth R. Wright tells the story of Renaissance Europe's first black poet and his epic poem on the naval battle of Lepanto, Austrias Carmen (The Song of John of Austria).

Piecing together the surviving evidence, Wright traces Latino's life in Granada, Iberia's last Muslim metropolis, from his early clandestine education as a slave in a noble household to his distinguished career as a schoolmaster at the University of Granada. When intensifying racial discrimination and the chaos of the Morisco Revolt threatened Latino's hard-won...

Composed in early thirteenth-century Iberia, the Libro de Alexandre was Spain's first vernacular version of the Romance of Alexander and the first poem in the corpus now known as the mester de clerecia. These learned works, written by clergy and connected with both school and court, were also tools for the articulation of sovereignty in an era of prolonged military and political expansion.

In The Task of the Cleric, Simone Pinet considers the composition of the Libro de Alexandre in the context of cartography, political economy, and translation....

In Inscribed Power, Ryan D. Giles explores the function of amuletic prayers, divine names, and incantation formulas that were inscribed and printed on parchment, paper and other media, and at the same time inserted into classic literary works in Spain. Giles' insightful analysis of the intersection between amulets and literary texts offers fresh and original interpretations of well-known texts such as the Poema de m?o Cid, the Libro de Alexandre, the Libro de buen amor, Celestina, Lazarillo de Tormes, and the Busc?n. Inscribed...

In Confessional Cinema, Jorge P?rez analyzes how cinema engaged the shifting role of religion during the last fifteen years of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. P?rez interrogates the assumption that after 1957, when the Franco regime recast itself in a secular and modernizing fashion, religion vanished from the cultural field. Instead, Spanish cinema addressed the transformation within Spanish Catholicism following Vatican II and Spain's modernization processes.

Confessional Cinema offers the first analysis of a neglected body of Spanish films, -nun films, - which...

In early modern Iberia, Moorish clothing was not merely a cultural remnant from the Islamic period, but an artefact that conditioned discourses of nobility and social preeminence.

In Moors Dressed as Moors, Javier Irigoyen-Garc?a draws on a wide range of sources: archival, legal, literary, and visual documents, as well as tailoring books, equestrian treatises, and festival books to reveal the currency of Moorish clothing in early modern Iberian society. Irigoyen-Garc?a's insightful and nuanced analyses of Moorish clothing production and circulation shows that as well as...

Josep Pla is Catalonia's foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century's most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being discovered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature.

In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer's deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. Resina condenses Pla's...

Silvia Berm?dez's fascinating study reveals how Spanish popular music, produced between 1980 and 2013, was the first cultural site to engage in critical debate about ethnicity and race in relation to the immigration patterns that have been changing the social landscape of Spanish society since the late 1970s.

In Rocking the Boat, Berm?dez examines the lyrics of songs by both renowned and up and coming artists to illuminate how these new migrants challenged Spain's notions of homogeneity, boundaries, accommodation, and incorporation. Berm?dez observes that immigration has had...

Beyond Sight, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, explores the ways in which Iberian writers crafted images of both Old and New Worlds using the non-visual senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch).

The contributors argue that the uses of these senses are central to understanding Iberian authors and thinkers from the pre- and early modern periods. Medievalists delve into the poetic interiorizations of the sensorial plane to show how sacramental and purportedly miraculous sensory experiences were central to the effort of affirming faith and understanding indigenous...

Nonmodern Iberia was a fluid space of shifting political kingdoms and culturally diverse communities. Scholars have long used a series of obsolete investigative frameworks such as the Reconquista, along with modern ideas of nation-states, periodization, and geography that are inadequate to the study of Iberia's complex heterogeneity.

In Edging Toward Iberia Jean Dangler argues that new tools and frameworks for research are needed. She proposes a combination of network theory by Manuel Castells and World-Systems Analysis as devised by Immanuel Wallerstein to show how network...

In Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura, Leslie J. Harkema analyzes the literature of the modernist period in Spain in light of the emergence of youth culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Harkema argues for the prominent role played by Miguel de Unamuno--as a poet, essayist, and public figure--in Spanish writers' response to this phenomenon. She demonstrates how early twentieth-century Spanish literature participated in the glorification of adolescence and questioning of Bildung seen elsewhere...