These new translations of Bernat Metge s Libre de Fortuna e Prudencia (1381) into Spanish (verse) and English (prose) make this key early work by 14th-century Catalonia s most challenging writer available to the wider audience it has longed deserved. As with Metge s masterwork, Lo somni (The Dream), recently translated by Cortijo Ocana and Elisabeth Lagresa (Benjamins, 2013), the writing of The Book of Fortune and Prudence seems to have been precipitated by a larger crisis in Catalan society, in this case, an all-too-familiar-sounding banking crisis. Drawing on sources ranging...

"Lo Somni" (The Dream) is a dream allegory divided into four chapters or books. It was written ca. 1399 and is considered Bernat Metge s best work. It is extremely innovative within the context of Catalan (and Iberian Peninsular) literature of the 1300 s. It consists of a dialogue between Metge-the-character and several participants (in fact the book is a dialogue between Metge and the Classical and Biblical tradition) on the topics of the immortality of the soul, the essence of religion and the dignity and moral essence of the human being. In addition to using many Classical and medieval...

The Book of the Order of Chivalry was written in Catalan by Ramon Llull between 1274 and 1276 and is one of the author s earliest works. After his death, it achieved a wide dissemination throughout Europe in part because it was considered the theoretical manual on knighthood par excellence. The book was written in Catalan for knights who might not have a knowledge of Latin. Llull devotes his treatise to the definition of the duties of a perfect knight. In addition, he is interested in delving into the religious and moral aspects of chivalry as well as in trying to reform this...

This volume gathers a superbcollection of articles on current research topicsfocused on the Catalan language andculture of the Catalan-speaking lands. The twenty contributions offer an overview of the current state of Catalan Studies and deal with medieval, early modern and contemporary Catalan literature, including the intersection of literature and painting or literature and film. There are also contributions on Linguistics, particularly inthe fields of lexicography and phraseology or neology as applied to the Catalan language. Finally, the volume includes some proposals for the improvement...