Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society's definition of what is acceptable. Through the medieval epic poems Cantar de Mio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo, the ballad tradition, Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, and Lope de Vega's theatre, Geraldine Hazbun demonstrates that illegitimacy and legitimacy are interconnected and flexible categories defined in relation to marriage, sex, bodies, ethnicity, religion, lineage, and legacy. Both categories are subject to the uncertainties and freedoms of language and fiction and frequently constructed around axes of quantity and completeness. These literary texts, covering a range of illegitimate figures, some with an historical basis, demonstrate that truth, propriety, and standards of behaviour are not forged in the law code or the pulpit but in literature's fluid system of producing meaning.

Exploring medieval literary representations of the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711, Hazbun discusses chronicles, epic and clerical poetry, and early historical novels. While material on the conquest of Spain is substantial, it is understudied and this book works to fill that gap.

The essays in this volume cover lyric, hagiography, clerical verse narrative, frontier balladry, historical and codicological studies, and include the draft of an unpublished essay found amongst Professor Deyermond's papers. Professor Alan Deyermond was one of the leading British Hispanists of the last fifty years, whose work had a formative influence on medieval Hispanic studies around the world. There were several tributes to his work published during his lifetime, and it is fitting that this one, in his memory, should be produced by Tamesis, the publishing house that he helped establish and to which he contributed so much as author and editor right up to his death. The contributors to this volume are some of Professor Deyermond's former colleagues, doctoral students, and members of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar. Given Professor Deyermond's breadth of expertise, the span of the essays is appropriately wide, ranging chronologically from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and covering lyric, hagiography, clerical verse narrative, frontier balladry, historical and codicological studies. The volume opens with a personal memoir of her father by Ruth Deyermond, and closes with the draft of an unpublished essay found amongst Professor Deyermond's papers, and edited by his literary executor, Professor David Hook. Andrew M. Beresfordis Reader and Head of Hispanic Studies at the University of Durham. Louise M. Haywood is Reader in Medieval Iberian Literary and Cultural Studies, and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval & Early Modern Hispanic Studies at King's College London.

Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society's definition of what is acceptable. Through the medieval epic poems Cantar de Mio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo, the ballad tradition, Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, and Lope de Vega's theatre, Geraldine Hazbun demonstrates that illegitimacy and legitimacy are interconnected and flexible categories defined in relation to marriage, sex, bodies, ethnicity, religion, lineage, and legacy. Both categories are subject to the uncertainties and freedoms of language and fiction and frequently constructed around axes of quantity and completeness. These literary texts, covering a range of illegitimate figures, some with an historical basis, demonstrate that truth, propriety, and standards of behaviour are not forged in the law code or the pulpit but in literature's fluid system of producing meaning.

An overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of Women's Studies within the area of peninsular Hispanism. After an introductory survey of the development of women's studies in the context of Spain, twenty-one chronologically ordered essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, Spain and Mexico explore women's roles in the cultural production of their time from the Middle Ages to the present. The essays of the first half examine the work of the earliest women writers and artists - memoirs and meditations, novellas and plays - and the representationor self-representation of women in a broad sweep of texts including medieval folksong, hagiography, and painting of the Baroque era. The modern section focuses on women's participation in politics and culture from the eighteenth century onwards: as translators and essayists, as consumers of visual ephemera and conduct books, as writers and artists, film directors and performers. An alternative and supplement to standard literary histories, thisvolume offers new insights into women's agency and representation in the cultural heritage of Spain. It will prove a useful and stimulating resource for students at all levels, and an accessible guide for the general reader. XON DE ROS and GERALDINE HAZBUN lecture in Spanish literature at the University of Oxford. CONTRIBUTORS: Nieves Baranda, Andrew M. Beresford, Monica Bolufer Peruga, Helena Buffery, Rosanna Cantavella, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Georgina Dopico-Black, Joanna Evans, Carmen Fracchia, Margaret F. Greer, Jessamy Harvey, Louise M. Haywood, Geraldine Hazbun, Susan Kirkpatrick, Frances Lannon, Laura Lonsdale, Maria Ana Masera Cerutti, Roberta Quance, Xonde Ros, Alexander Samson, Alison Sinclair, Joyce Tolliver.

Coplas a la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique (c.1440–79) is one of the most celebrated poems in the Spanish language. Written shortly before the poet’s death, it is a dignified elegy that speaks not just of a personal loss, that of the poet’s father Rodrigo Manrique (d.1476), but of the evanescence of all things. Its popularity is aided by memorable lines, not least the two opening metaphors: man’s life is a river meandering unto the sea of death, and this world is the road to the next, the lasting dwelling place. The poem replicates these reflections in its wending form. Its forty stanzas each comprise four tercets; each tercet is made up of two longer octosyllabic verses combined with one four-syllable half-line known as pie quebrado. These regular broken lines, like beats of a heart, invest the poem with a resonant quality befitting the injunction at the opening of the poem to awaken one’s slumbering soul to the passage of time.