"Spanish medieval language and literature newsletter." (varies).

The majority of medieval and sixteenth-century Iberian manuscripts, whether in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, or Aljamiado (Spanish written in Arabic script), contain fragments or are fragments. The term fragment is used to describe not only isolated bits of manuscript material with a damaged appearance, but also any piece of a larger text that was intended to be a fragment. Investigating the vital role these fragments played in medieval and early modern Iberian manuscript culture, Heather Bamford’s Cultures of the Fragment is focused on fragments from five major Iberian literary traditions, including Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebrew poetry, Latin and Castilian epics, chivalric romances, and the literature of early modern crypto-Muslims. The author argues that while some manuscript fragments came about by accident, many were actually created on purpose and used in a number of ways, from binding materials, to anthology excerpts, and some fragments were even incorporated into sacred objects as messages of good luck. Examining four main motifs of fragmentation, including intention, physical appearance, metonymy, and performance, this work reveals the centrality of the fragment to manuscript studies, highlighting the significance of the fragment to Iberia’s multicultural and multilingual manuscript culture.

Martyred saints, Moors, Jews, viragoes, hermaphrodites, sodomites, kings, queens, and cross-dressers comprise the fascinating mosaic of historical and imaginative figures unearthed in Queer Iberia. The essays in this volume describe and analyze the sexual diversity that proliferated during the period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries when political hegemony in the region passed from Muslim to Christian hands. To show how sexual otherness is most evident at points of cultural conflict, the contributors use a variety of methodologies and perspectives and consider source materials that originated in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Catalan, and Galician-Portuguese. Covering topics from the martydom of Pelagius to the exploits of the transgendered Catalina de Erauso, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive historical examination of the relations among race, gender, sexuality, nation-building, colonialism, and imperial expansion in medieval and early modern Iberia. Some essays consider archival evidence of sexual otherness or evaluate the use of “deviance” as a marker for cultural and racial difference, while others explore both male and female homoeroticism as literary-aesthetic discourse or attempt to open up canonical texts to alternative readings. Positing a queerness intrinsic to Iberia’s historical process and cultural identity, Queer Iberia will challenge the field of Iberian studies while appealing to scholars of medieval, cultural, Hispanic, gender, and gay and lesbian studies. Contributors. Josiah Blackmore, Linde M. Brocato, Catherine Brown, Israel Burshatin, Daniel Eisenberg, E. Michael Gerli, Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Mark D. Jordan, Sara Lipton, Benjamin Liu, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Michael Solomon, Louise O. Vasvári, Barbara Weissberger

In Chariots of Ladies, Núria Silleras-Fernández traces the development of devotion and female piety among the Iberian aristocracy from the late Middle Ages into the Golden Age, and from Catalonia to the rest of Iberia and Europe via the rise of the Franciscan Observant movement. A program of piety and morality devised by Francesc Eiximenis, a Franciscan theologian, royal counselor, and writer in Catalonia in the 1390s, came to characterize the feminine ideal in the highest circles of the Iberian aristocracy in the era of the Empire. As Eiximenis’s work was adapted and translated into Castilian over the century and a half that followed, it became a model of devotion and conduct for queens and princesses, including Isabel the Catholic and her descendants, who ruled over Portugal and the Spanish Empire of the Hapsburgs. Silleras-Fernández uses archival documentation, letters, manuscripts, incunabula, and a wide range of published material to clarify how Eiximenis’s ideas on gender and devotion were read by Countess Sanxa Ximenis d’Arenós and Queen Maria de Luna of Aragon and how they were then changed by his adaptors and translators in Castile for new readers (including Isabel the Catholic and Juana the Mad), and in sixteenth-century Portugal for new patronesses (Juana’s daughter, Catalina of Habsburg, and Catalina’s daughter, Maria Manuela, first wife of Philip II). Chariots of Ladies casts light on a neglected dimension of encounter and exchange in Iberia from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries.