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…[Read more]

English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of…[Read more]

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

The following text was presented as part of the Presidential Panel at the American Comparative Literature Association, Utrecht (The Netherlands), July 8th 2017. The panel was composed of Joseph Slaughter (ACLA President, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University in the City of New York), Maria Aristodemou, Law, Birkbeck College,…[Read more]

Review of López-Morillas, Consuelo, ed. El Corán de Toledo. Oviedo: Trea, 2011. Originally published in Calíope 18.3 (2013): 129-131. https://ssl.uh.edu/class/spanish/caliope/

Review of Decter, Jonathan. Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe. Indiana UP, 2007. Originally published in Calíope 14.1 (2008): 139-42. https://ssl.uh.edu/class/spanish/caliope/

In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the f…[Read more]

In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the f…[Read more]

In the next seven minutes, I would like to convince you that real formalism and real historicism really are, or really should be, one and the same critical practice. Our idea of what counts as knowledge about early English literature will be enriched by integrating formalist and historicist methods. Those of us who work on prosody and poetics are…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

Review of Maravillas, peregrinaciones y utopías: literatura de viajes en el mundo románico. Ed. Rafael Beltrán. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2002. Originally published in Bulletin of Spanish Studies 80.6 (2003): 743-44.

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.

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.