Through an engagement with theory from the fields of art history, anthropology, and sociology, this article examines the archival existence of medieval manuscripts and facilitates an understanding of archival practice and its effects on user experience from the perspective of the researcher, rather than from that of the archivist or information…[Read more]

Occasionally, the handlers of the past chose to leave marks more permanent than the everyday wear and tear. The deliberate traces left by past user(s) demand further inquiry, beseeching us to investigate more closely the relationship between our experiences of manuscripts today, and those responses of past readers who have left an indelible mark…[Read more]

A capital with an unusual scene of the Baptism of Jesus has recently been excavated in the late twelfth-century cloister of San Juan de la Peña (Huesca). Remarkable for its depiction of a youthful Saviour seated in a footed baptismal font, the image deviates significantly from the traditional Romanesque formula of an adult Jesus baptized in the…[Read more]

Un poco antes de fallecer, recién rebasada la mitad del siglo XV (1454), el monarca castellano Juan II se atrevió a exponer en breves palabras la tremenda carga que suponía para
cualquier mortal el ejercicio del poder regio, es decir, lo que habitualmente se conoce con el modismo de «el peso de la púrpura»: “Naciera yo fijo de un labrador e fuera…[Read more]

Undergraduate Seminar on Medieval and Golden Spanish Literature

Graduate Seminar of Spanish Literature of the Middle Ages & Renaissance

Undergraduate Seminar in Medieval and Golden Age Spanish Literature

A half-erased woman’s name is partially legible at the bottom of folio 41 verso of the Anglo-Saxon manuscript we now call the Vercelli Book. Edith – eadgiþ – provides mystery as highly unusual marginalia, an individual name added to and then erased from the manuscript. I argue here that the erased name eadgiþ is direct reference to St. Edith o…[Read more]

The figure of Hrothgar, aging king of the Danes, forces an analysis of the relationships among age, maleness, and masculinity in Beowulf. Masculine characters, while enacting the poem’s complex reciprocities and social transactions in the hall and on the battlefield, accrue status and power through assertions of control and dominance, through…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Traditional equation of women with the feminine and men with the masculine is disrupted when Beowulf is read within the rubric of gender performance as determined by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Performativity enables a new way of interpreting the characters of Beowulf; specifically, in the world of the poem masculinity…[Read more]

Throughout the Christian era, literary and artistic representations of the Virgin Mary have been manipulated by a variety of ideologies, religious or political, to define the appropriate positioning and agency of the feminine in a culture. The culture of Anglo-Saxon England, like most others, almost always presented Mary in positive terms,…[Read more]

Like most female characters in Old English poetry, Judith from the Old English poem of the same name has been subject to much scrutiny in recent years. She has been read as a figure of Mother Church, or as a Germanic warrior, or as a warning against rape. Yet Judith’s relationship with her maid, the focus of my analysis of Judith, has been elided;…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

La prestigiosa colección de textos medievales y renacentistas del Centro de Estudios de Arizona se engalana en esta ocasión con una de las obras más exitosas de la literatura medieval hispánica: la Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor (BETA, Texid 4157), cuya versión castellana, situada en plena época de la dominación islámica de España, es un verdadero…[Read more]

Impreso en 1511, el ‘Cancionero general’ de Hernando del Castillo representa
la más extensa e importante recopilación de poesía de cancionero en lengua
castellana. En ella hay más de mil obras pertenecientes a más de 150 poetas,
muchos de los cuales han permanecido en el más profundo anonimato. La tesis
pretende concretar el número total…[Read more]

La presencia de hombres de letras italianos en la Península Ibérica durante el reinado de los Reyes Católicos (1474-1516) constituye uno de los factores principales para el despegue del Humanismo hispano (Gómez Moreno, 1994). De entre tantos nombres ilustres, quizá sean Pedro Mártir de Anglería y Lucio Marineo Sículo los más conocidos, en especial…[Read more]

En la historiografía medieval más reciente se han realizado diversos trabajos para recuperar la figura de Alfonso el Inocente (1453-1468), hermano de Enrique IV y de Isabel la Católica, que fue elevado al trono castellano por parte de la nobleza el 6 de junio de 1465 después del acto comúnmente conocido como farsa de Ávila. Al estar su deven…[Read more]