The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of Al-Andalus explores the culture of Iberia from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and to the centuries following the Christian conquest, when Arabic continued to be used. While the focus is on literature, the study extends to the related fields of philosophy, art, architecture and music. Edited by an Arabist, a Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters by a team of the world's leading experts in the field, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work offering a radical new approach.

""Beautifully written. . . . A fascinating introduction to an area of medieval literacy still replete with nationalistic tensions.""--Speculum ""Calls for a wider acceptance of the idea that medieval Western culture was influenced more widely by Arab

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of "Shards of Love," as...

From a legendary translator: a magnificent new rendering of Spain's national epic

Venture into the heart of Islamic Spain in this vibrant, rollicking new translation of The Song of the Cid, the only surviving epic from medieval Spain. Banished from the court of King Alfonso, the noble warrior Rodrigo Diaz, know as the Cid, sets out from Castile to restore his name. In a series of battles, he earns wealth and honor for his men and his king, as well as fame and admiration for himself. But it is in rescuing his daughters from their ill-suited marriages that the Cid faces the...

Named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement, this lavishly illustrated work explores the vibrant interaction among different and sometimes opposing cultures, and how their contacts with one another transformed them all. It chronicles the tumultuous history of Castile in the wake of the Christian capture of the Islamic city of Tulaytula, now Toledo, in the eleventh century and traces the development of Castilian culture as it was forged in the new intimacy of Christians with the Muslims and Jews they had overcome.

The authors paint a portrait of the culture through its...

The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of Al-Andalus explores the culture of Iberia from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and to the centuries following the Christian conquest, when Arabic continued to be used. While the focus is on literature, the study extends to the related fields of philosophy, art, architecture and music. Edited by an Arabist, a Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters by a team of the world's leading experts in the field, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work offering a radical new approach.

Using the work of Dante as its critical focus, this study examines questions of truth, ideology and reality in poetry as they occur in a series of texts and in the relationship between those texts across time.