Explores the sophisticated ways in which medieval Castilian clerics and monarchs recreated stories set in the ancient, pagan past to shape cultural memory and monarchic culture in the Iberian kingdom.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, medieval Castile produced some of the liveliest, most sophisticated vernacular reworkings of narratives inherited from classical and late antiquity, including those about Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, or Apollonius of Tyre. This study recovers the overlooked tradition of the Castilian romances of antiquity, showing how these works offered a nuanced reflection of the relationship between cultural memory, the media through which memory is shaped and transmitted, and Castile's imperial ambitions. Clara Pascual-Argente restores a genre of great cultural and political importance to its rightful place in Castilian and European literary history.

Specialists in other languages offer perspectives on the widespread use of French in a range of contexts, from German courtly narratives to biblical exegesis in Hebrew. French came into contact with many other languages in the Middle Ages: not just English, Italian and Latin, but also Arabic, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Occitan, Sicilian, Spanish and Welsh. Its movement was impelled by trade, pilgrimage, crusade, migration, colonisation and conquest, and its contact zones included Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, among others. Writers in these contact zones often expressed themselves and their worlds in French; but other languages and cultural settings could also challenge, reframe or even ignore French-users' prestige and self-understanding. The essays collected here offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the use of French in the medieval world, moving away from canonical texts, well-known controversies and conventional framings. Whether considering theories of the vernacular in Outremer, Marco Polo and the global Middle Ages, or the literary patronage of aristocrats and urban patricians, their interlocutions throw new light on connected and contested literary cultures in Europe and beyond.

Mester de clerecía is the term traditionally used to designate the first generations of learned poetry in medieval Ibero-Romance dialects (the precursors of modern Castilian and other Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula). In its time, this poetry was anything but traditional. These long poems of structured verse reappropriate the heroic past through the retelling of legends from Classical Antiquity, saints’ lives, miracle stories, Biblical apocrypha, and other tales. At the same time, the poems recast the place of their authors, and learned characters within their stories, in the shifting dynamics of their thirteenth and fourteenth century present. Contributors are Pablo Ancos, Maria Cristina Balestrini, Fernando Baños Vallejo, Andrew M. Beresford, Olivier Biaggini, Martha M. Daas, Emily C. Francomano, Ryan Giles, Michelle M. Hamilton, Anthony John Lappin, Clara Pascual-Argente, Connie L. Scarborough, Donald W. Wood, and Carina Zubillaga.

Memory and Identity in the Learned World offers a detailed and varied account of community formation in the early modern world of learning and science. The book traces how collective identity, institutional memory and modes of remembrance helped to shape learned and scientific communities. The case studies in this book analyse how learned communities and individuals presented and represented themselves, for example in letters, biographies, histories, journals, opera omnia, monuments, academic travels and memorials. By bringing together the perspectives of historians of literature, scholarship, universities, science, and art, this volume studies knowledge communities by looking at the centrality of collective identity and memory in their formations and reformations. Contributors: Lieke van Deinsen, Karl Enenkel, Constance Hardesty, Paul Hulsenboom, Dirk van Miert, Alan Moss, Richard Kirwan, Koen Scholten, Floris Solleveld, and Esther M. Villegas de la Torre.

Drawing on decades of research on Alexander literature from all over the world, this book is bound to become a medievalist's best companion. It studies Alexander romances from the East and the West in literary form and content.

In Reconsidering (Post-)Yugoslav Time: Towards the Temporal Turn in the Critical Study of (Post-)Yugoslav Literatures, authors outline a concept of (post)-Yugoslav temporality and scrutinize its analytical value in the memory and cultural studies.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.

The articulation of collective identity by means of a stereotyped repertoire of exclusionary characterizations of Self and Other is one of the longest-standing literary traditions in Europe and as such has become part of a global modernity. Recently, this discourse of Othering and national stereotyping has gained fresh political virulence as a result of the rise of “Identity Politics”. What is more, this newly politicized self/other discourse has affected Europe itself as that continent has been weathering a series of economic and political crises in recent years. The present volume traces the conjunction between cultural and literary traditions and contemporary ideologies during the crisis of European multilateralism. Contributors: Aelita Ambrulevičiūtė, Jürgen Barkhoff, Stefan Berger, Zrinka Blažević, Daniel Carey, Ana María Fraile, Wulf Kansteiner, Joep Leerssen, Hercules Millas, Zenonas Norkus, Aidan O’Malley, Raúl Sánchez Prieto, Karel Šima, Luc Van Doorslaer,Ruth Wodak

The volume deals with historical ontology from several angles: the historicity of understanding (Françoise Dastur, Arbogast Schmitt, Samuel Weber), the limits of making (Emil Angehrn, Nicholas Davey, Jan-Ivar Lindén) and the future of memory (Jayne Svenungsson, Christoph Türcke, Bernhard Waldenfels).