Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain

Review of Barletta, Vincent. Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Originally published in Hispania 89.1 (2006): 50-52

Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusi Narrative Practice in Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor

The author argues that Juan Manuel’s willingness to embrace Andalusī narrative genres and materials, including a number of proverbs which he quotes in the original Arabic, seems on the surface to run counter to his official narrative of Reconquest. However, this apparent contradiction is typical both of the colonial society in which Don Juan Manuel came of age and of his genre of choice in writing the CL

Reading Jaume Roig's Spill and the Libro de buen amor in the Iberian maqama tradition

In this article the author argues for the influence of the Hebrew and Arabic maqama on the Libro de buen amor (Juan Ruiz) and Spill (Jaume Roig) based on the narratological disposition of the narrator/protagonist

Review of Díaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Ed. and trans. George K. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Review of Díaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. Ed. and trans. George K. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Originally published in Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 33.1 (33-34)

An Interstitial History of Medieval Iberian Poetry

The complexity of Medieval Iberia’s linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity is a commonplace. Descriptions abound of the lands that are now modern Spain and Portugal as a “melting pot” or a “multicultural” space. However, modern literary history, with its tendency toward monolingual, national narratives, has produced a vision of medieval Iberia that often makes it out as, in the words of María Rosa Menocal, “the primitive stages of what will eventually become the real thing.” The literary evidence of the poetic traditions looks quite different. It shows us a poetic culture that drew on several linguistic and regional traditions, and that was characterized far more by bilingualism, diglossia, and artistic crossings than by anything approaching a monolingual sense of national culture. In this essay I will examine the interstices of these crossings in a series of examples of the poetic cultures of medieval Iberia: the adaptation of popular Romance and colloquial Andalusi Arabic lyric by poets working in Classical Arabic and Hebrew (10th-13th c.), the adaptation of classical Arabic poetics by Andalusi Hebrew poets (10th-14th c.), the diffusion of Provençal and Galician-Portuguese poetics throughout the Peninsula (12th-13th c.), Jewish authors’ adaptations of Romance language poetics (14th-15th c.), and the phenomenon of Aljamiado poetry, Ibero-Romance verses written in Arabic characters by crypto-Muslim writers in the 15th and 16th centuries

Toward a History of Hispano-Hebrew Literature in its Romance Context

Wacks proposes a new, comprehensive look at the Romance context of the Hebrew Literature of Christian Iberia. He surveys the extant criticism and provides an overview of key texts and their relationship to vernacular literary and cultural practices. Along the way, he provides some explanation for the intellectual and institutional practices that, until recently, have discouraged such an approach

Fairies and pagan mythologies in the medieval Spanish ballad

Reading of two medieval Spanish ballads featuring fairies in light of ethnographic evidence of fairy consciousness in Spai

Vernacular Anxiety and the Semitic Imaginary: Shem Tov Isaac ibn Ardutiel de Carrión and his Critics

Shem Tov ibn Isaac Ardutiel (Santob de Carrión) lived in the fourteenth century, period of intense vernacularization of literary practice in Castile. Shem Tov has long been imagined as a model of multiculturality, and the lasting impact of his diglossic literary legacy is undeniable. He is a compelling case study of the role of Hebrew literature in the age of Hispano-Romance vernacularity. Shem Tov writes at a time when Spanish Jewish authors voice considerable ambivalence about the practice of vernacular literature. In this essay I offer a new reading of Proverbios morales and his Hebrew Debate between the pen and the scissors as veiled critiques of Castilian literary practice and a defense of Hebrew in an age of vernacularization. The ambivalence and anxiety that characterized Jewish approaches to the vernacular are mirrored by modern critics of the literature of Spain’s Jews. Spanish criticism of Shem Tov’s work is revealing of conflictive modern Spanish attitudes toward the role of Jewish authors in a national literary legacy. In the second part of this essay I demonstrate how the anxieties that characterized Jewish-Christian literary relations in 14th century Castile are still alive and well in 19th and 20th century Spanish scholarship

Review of Mocedades de Rodrigo. Ed. Leonardo Funes, with Felipe Tenenbaum. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. 2004

Review of Mocedades de Rodrigo. Ed. Leonardo Funes, with Felipe Tenenbaum. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. 2004. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83.8 (2006): 982-83

Privacy and Process

Commentpublished_or_final_versio