The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and…[Read more]

Paper given for the LLC Middle English Forum’s roundtable on “Campus Chaucer. ” See also separately uploaded PowerPoint slides (not strictly necessary; the bold in the text, however, refers to a change of slide). Contains many informational links. Accompanying PowerPoint: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6BW3B

Paper given for the LLC Middle English Forum’s roundtable on “Campus Chaucer. ” See also separately uploaded PowerPoint slides (not strictly necessary; the bold in the text, however, refers to a change of slide). Contains many informational links. Accompanying PowerPoint: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6BW3B

Paper given for the LLC Middle English Forum’s roundtable on “Campus Chaucer. ” See also separately uploaded PowerPoint slides (not strictly necessary; the bold in the text, however, refers to a change of slide). Contains many informational links. Accompanying PowerPoint: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6BW3B

PowerPoint to accompany paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6GP71) given in #s280 at the 2017 MLA Convention.

PowerPoint to accompany paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6GP71) given in #s280 at the 2017 MLA Convention.

PowerPoint to accompany paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6GP71) given in #s280 at the 2017 MLA Convention.

The attached syllabus was written for my Honors undergraduate seminar “The Art of the Book in the Digital Age,” taught Fall 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill. Here is an excerpt from the course description: “The book’s role and significance within literary culture is being scrutinized today with an intensity unseen for five centuries. Nowhere is this quest…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss three Hebrew translations made by Sephardic Jews writing in from a position of a double diaspora (from ‘Zion’ and from Sepharad, or Spain): Joseph Tsarfati’s Celestina by Fernando de Rojas, Jacob Algaba’s Amadís de Gaula by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, and Joseph Hakohen’s Historia general de las Indias by Francisco L…[Read more]

Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinani (Granada, ca. 1250) and the 101 Nights
(Granada, 1234) are two examples of Andalusi popular fiction that provide important
information for our understanding of works of early Castilian fiction such as the Libro del
Caballero Zifar. The two Andalusi works provide evidence of a bilingual culture of
storytelling that n…[Read more]

Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor is a medieval romance interpolated into a thirteenthcentury
account of the struggles of the Kings of Asturias (eighth-ninth centuries)
with the Umayyad Caliphate in Cordova. In this essay I demonstrate how the
chronicler mapped political concerns onto courtly adventure narrative in order to
promote ideologies of…[Read more]

Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor is a medieval romance interpolated into a thirteenthcentury
account of the struggles of the Kings of Asturias (eighth-ninth centuries)
with the Umayyad Caliphate in Cordova. In this essay I demonstrate how the
chronicler mapped political concerns onto courtly adventure narrative in order to
promote ideologies of…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

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,…[Read more]

The author surveys Spanish and Hebrew literary criticism to determine to what extent the Hebrew language production of medieval Iberian authors have been reflected or omitted from Spanish literary history and draws some conclusions as to the reasons why or why not.

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 Ma…[Read more]

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 Ma…[Read more]