Joseph and Aseneth is a pseudepigraphic hellenistic romance novel that elaborates on the biblical character of Joseph and his wife aseneth. an expansion of genesis 41: 45, the text describes how aseneth is transformed into a radiant bride t for Joseph, and is thereby associated with his god.1 previous studies may have overstepped the limits of…[Read more]

In this article, I address the challenge of fostering better student engagement with ancient material, and discuss my experience with designing a course around creative use of technology. In my recent course, “The Ancient Christian Church: 54–604 CE,” I employed several tactics to encourage student engagement with ancient and modern sources, which…[Read more]

This paper argues that 4 Ezra 14 represents the climax of the sensory revelations experienced by Ezra, and as such, that this is the episode which finally facilitates Ezra’s understanding of divine wisdom. In each of episodes one through six Ezra is incapable of making sense of what has been revealed to him, even though Ezra’s sensory rev…[Read more]

The open access movement has taken a strong hold within cultural heritage institutions, as large-scale digitization efforts are becoming increasingly popular in most libraries, museums, and archives. These initiatives have had a particular effect on the status of rare and unique materials through the provision of high-quality images and…[Read more]

My article takes up the thirteenth-century French allegorical poem, the Roman de la Rose, a poem that was begun by one author and continued by another after the death of the first. I consider how the second part of the poem foregrounds its status as a continuation, arguing that the work exemplifies a model of literary succession marked by mourning…[Read more]

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

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]

A Ph.D. dissertation considering nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.

What did it mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the Greco-Roman world? Jews, Greeks and Romans will explore the myriad ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean engaged with Greco-Roman culture and constructed their own ways of being Jewish. Using texts, artifacts and images–from rabbinic commentaries to Roman catacombs–we will investigate…[Read more]