The Arthur Of The Iberians

This book fills the Iberian linguistic and geographical gap in Arthurian studies, replacing the now-outdated work by William J. Entwistle (1925). It covers Arthurian material in all the major Peninsular Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician); it follows the spread of Arthurian material overseas with the seaborne expansion of Spain and Portugal from Iberia into America and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and, as well as examining the specifically Arthurian texts themselves, it traces the continued influence of the medieval Arthurian material and its impact on the society, literature and culture of the Golden Age and beyond, including its presence in Don Quixote, the influential Spanish Arthurian-inspired romance Amadís de Gaula, and in Spanish ballads. Such was its influence that we find an indigenous American woman called ‘Iseo’ (Iseult); and an Arthurian story appeared in an indigenous language of the Philippines, Tagalog, as late as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

"This collection of original essays examines the publication and reception history of sixteenth-century Iberian books of chivalry in English translation and explores the impact of that literary corpus on Elizabethan culture as well as its connections with other contemporary genres such as native English fiction, chronicle, and epistolary writing. The essays focus mainly on Anthony Munday's work as the leading translator as well as the two main Spanish sixteenth-century cycles-Le., Amadis and Palmerin-from a variety of critical approaches, including cultural studies, book history and reception, material history, translation, post-colonial criticism, and early modern Qender studies."--

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

Reading crusader fiction against the backdrop of Mediterranean history, this book explains how Iberian authors reimagined the idea of crusade through the lens of Iberian geopolitics and social history. The crusades transformed Mediterranean history and inaugurated complex engagements between Western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East in ways that endure to this day. Narratives of crusades powerfully shaped European thinking about the East and continue to influence the representation of interactions between Christian and Muslim states in the region. The crusade, a French idea that gave rise to Iberian, North African, and Levantine campaigns, was very much a Mediterranean phenomenon. French and English authors wrote itineraries in the Holy Land, chronicles of the crusades, and fanciful accounts of Christian knights who championed the Latin Church in the East. This study aims to explore the ways in which Iberian authors imagined their role in the culture of crusade, both as participants and interpreters of narrative traditions of the crusading world from north of the Pyrenees.

The renowned and illustrious tales of King Arthur, his knights and the Round Table pervade all European vernaculars, as well as the Latin tradition. Arthurian narrative material, which had originally been transmitted in oral culture, began to be inscribed regularly in the twelfth century, developing from (pseudo-)historical beginnings in the Latin chronicles of "historians" such as Geoffrey of Monmouth into masterful literary works like the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Evidently a big hit, Arthur found himself being swiftly translated, adapted and integrated into the literary traditions of almost every European vernacular during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This Handbook seeks to showcase the European character of Arthurian romance both past and present. By working across national philological boundaries, which in the past have tended to segregate the study of Arthurian romance according to language, as well as by exploring primary texts from different vernaculars and the Latin tradition in conjunction with recent theoretical concepts and approaches, this Handbook brings together a pioneering and more complete view of the specifically European context of Arthurian romance, and promotes the more connected study of Arthurian literature across the entirety of its European context.

A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to provide an updated scholarly introduction to all aspects of his work. Arguably the most influential secular writer of medieval Britain, Geoffrey (d. 1154) popularized Arthurian literature and left an indelible mark on European romance, history, and genealogy. Despite this outsized influence, Geoffrey’s own life, background, and motivations are little understood. The volume situates his life and works within their immediate historical context, and frames them within current critical discussion across the humanities. By necessity, this volume concentrates primarily on Geoffrey’s own life and times, with the reception of his works covered by a series of short encyclopaedic overviews, organized by language, that serve as guides to further reading. Contributors are Jean Blacker, Elizabeth Bryan, Thomas H. Crofts, Siân Echard, Fabrizio De Falco, Michael Faletra, Ben Guy, Santiago Gutiérrez García, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, Paloma Gracia, Georgia Henley, David F. Johnson, Owain Wyn Jones, Maud Burnett McInerney, Françoise Le Saux, Barry Lewis, Coral Lumbley, Simon Meecham-Jones, Paul Russell, Victoria Shirley, Joshua Byron Smith, Jaakko Tahkokallio, Hélène Tétrel, Rebecca Thomas, Fiona Tolhurst.

This book rediscovers and re-evaluates the work of the Welsh dramatist J. O. Francis (1882–1954) and his contribution to the development of Welsh drama in the twentieth century. More than a prize-winning dramatist, whose plays were performed all over the world, Francis can also be described as one of the founding fathers of modern Welsh drama, whose work has helped establish theatrical realism on the Welsh stage. His creative non-fiction for the popular press and for radio gives a unique perspective on how Wales was seen through the eyes of a perceptive London-Welsh observer. Using much previously unpublished material, this volume is an excellent introduction to one of Wales’s foremost dramatists, and is innovative in the way that it creates a picture of the amateur dramatic scene of south Wales (1920–40) based on sound statistical analysis of available evidence. It situates Francis’s work in its cultural context and brings this exciting period in Welsh cultural history to life in its introduction to a new audience.