Volume I of the first complete English translation of the chronicles of Fernão Lopes chronicles the reign of Pedro I (1357-67), dubbed both 'the Just' and 'the Cruel', including his dealings with the kingdom of Castile, the war between Castile and Aragon, and the revenge he took on the men who murdered the woman he loved, Inês de Castro. Until now, the chronicles of Fernão Lopes (c.1380-c.1460) have only been available in critical editions or in partial translations. Comparable to the works of Froissart in France or López de Ayala in Spain, the chronicles provide a wealth of detail on late fourteenth-century politics, diplomacy, warfare and economic matters, courtly society, queenship and noble women, as well as more mundane concerns such as food, health and the purchasing power of a fluctuating currency. Lopes had a keen eye for detail and a perspective especially attuned to the common people, and his chronicles provide an invaluable source for the history of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages.

The master of the realist novel of nineteenth-century Spain, Benito Perez Galdos, is the subject of these new studies. The master of the realist novel of nineteenth-century Spain, Benito Perez Galdos, is the subject of New Galdos Studies, offered in memory of John Varey, author of Galdos Studies, the foundational text for contemporary Galdosian scholarship. Eamonn Rodgers describes Galdos's early readership and reception; James Whiston illustrates Galdos's creativity in Lo prohibido; Rhian Davies explores the enrichment of the novelist's language in Torquemada en la Cruz; Teresa Fuentes Peris demonstrates Galdos's radical critique of dominant social assumptions in Fortunata y Jacinta; Alex Longhurst deals with the representation of poverty in Misericordia while Lisa Conde detects a feminist intention in Tristana; Eric Southworth finds rich cultural and spiritual allusion in the same work; Nichols Round relates the deaths of children in the Torquemada novels and Angel Guerra to end-of-century ideological concerns.