The first comprehensive study of Calderon in English Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is one of the most important dramatists - many would say the single most important dramatist - of the Spanish Golden Age. Spain's dominant and most prestigious playwright for much of the seventeenth century, his work is still regularly staged and translated, influential in more recent times on writers as diverse as Schiller, Shelley and Lorca. The author of around 120 plays (not counting his numerous Corpus Christi autos) in a variety of styles, Calderon is most famous for his stirring dramas, characterized by rhetorically powerful poetry, dramatic structures carefully calibrated to produce poignant echoes, and the fizzing intellectual energy they apply to the age's ontological, eschatological and political preoccupations. His plays succeed in combining these perennial concerns with compelling plots subtle enough to defy definitive interpretation. As this volume seeks to show, however, Calderon's comedies deserve equal recognition. Too long stereotyped as a dour, cerebral conservative, this playwright's comic works are as amusing as they are clever. This Companion is the first comprehensive study of Calderon in English. It provides a rigorous but readable introduction to the man, his work and its legacy. Its chapters - written by leading international comedia specialists - provide an overview of his life, explain his intellectual, social, moral, and literary contexts, and examine his stagecraft, his corpus, and his reception both within and without the Hispanic world up to the twenty-first century. Specific chapters are devoted to La vida es sueno, his most famous work, which appears on many a university syllabus, and to his infamous wife-murder plays.

Francisco Vitoria was the earliest and arguably the most important of the Thomist philosophers of the counter-Reformation. His works are of great importance for an understanding of both the rise of modern absolutism, and the debate about the emergent imperialism of the European powers, and are unusually accessible since they survive in the form of summaries of his lecture courses on law and theology. Translated here into English for the first time, these texts comprise the core of Vitoria's thought, and are accompanied by a comprehensive introduction, chronology, and bibliography.

New interpretations of the text and context of the 15c Catalan romance telling of Tirant's heroic exploits and adventures in love. In Don Quixote, Cervantes describes Tirant lo Blanc as `the best book in the world'. A remarkable work of fiction, probably the finest to appear anywhere in Europe before Rabelais, it has recently become increasinglyfamiliar to English readers. However, it is a problematic book to categorise: on the one hand, it is an exciting story of Tirant's military exploits and his love for the Princess Carmesina; on the other, it is an encyclopedic work treating many aspects of late fifteenth-century society in vivid detail. The essays collected in this volume offer a variety of fresh interpretations. They cover a vast amount of material, from questions of authorship toclose readings of particular episodes, bringing a varietyof new interpretations to bear. ARTHUR TERRY is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. Contributors: RAFAEL BELTRAN, JOSEP GUIA, THOMASR. HART, ALBERT G. HAUF, JEREMY LAWRANCE, MONTSERRAT PIERA, JOSEP PUJOL, JESUS D. RODRIGUEZ VELASCO, MARIA JESUS RUBIERA Y MATA, ARTHUR TERRY, CURT WITTLIN