This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Until recently, Spanish literary historiography has virtually ignored hundreds of women who wrote between 1500 and 1700. Most of them wrote to record, defend, and disseminate their spiritual visions, for despite the general disempowerment of Spanish women, female visionaries enjoyed considerable authority. This book recovers and examines the visionary experiences of Mother Juana de la Cruz, the most famous of these women during her lifetime and for two centuries afterwards. Born of peasant stock, she became abbess of a Franciscan convent and a mystic who was visited not only by Cardinal Cisneros, but by Emperor Charles V himself. Ronald E. Surtz places Mother Juana's visions in the religious and social context of the age and discusses such pertinent biographical elements as the nun's own androgyny. His focus is on the questions of gender, power, and authority, so pertinent to our own age. The Guitar of God will be of particular interest to scholars and students of late medieval Spanish culture, religion, and history, and women's studies.

The Queen who shaped the music, literature, architecture, and painting of late medieval Spain. This multidisciplinary volume was inspired by the quincentenary of the death of Queen Isabel I of Castile, early modern Europe's first powerful queen regnant. Comprising work by distinguished art historians, musicologists, historians, and literary scholars from England, Spain, and the United States, it begins with a theoretical examination of medieval queenship itself that argues - against the grain of the volume - for its inseparability from kingship. Several essays examine the complex ways in which the Queen and her advisers shaped the music, literature, architecture, and painting of fifteenth-century Spain and how these in turn shaped the sovereign's power and persona. Others analyze influences on Isabel's reign from Aragon, Portugal, and northern Europe. A third group deals with issues of periodization, arguing from a variety of perspectives for the modernity of Isabelline culture. The evolving construction of Isabel's image from the mid-fifteenth to the late-twentieth century is also studied. BARBARA WEISSBERGER is Associate Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota. OTHER CONTRIBUTORS:Rafael Dominguez Casas, Theresa Earenfight, Michael Gerli, Chiyo Ishikawa, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Nancy F. Marino, William D. Phillips, Jr., Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Ronald E. Surtz