“This edition fills a very important vacuum. Scholars have long lamented the fact that h.I.13 is ignored in the study of medieval Spanish literature due to the fact that we have no readily available reading edition of the text. Moore’s work solves that problem.”

— Thomas D. Spaccarelli, author of A Medieval Pilgrim’s Companion: Reassessing “El libro de los huéspedes” (Escorial Ms. h.I.13)

2007 / 244 + xxv pages, 148 ills. / ISBN: 978-0-86698-394-5 / MR 346 / $63, £44

The Castell of Love: A Critical Edition of Lord Berners's Translation, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary
Edited by Joyce Boro (Université de Montréal)
This is the first modern edition of John Bourchier, Lord Berners’ (born c. 1467) translation of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor, a popular romance printed twenty-nine times in sixteenth-century Spain and translated into Catalan, Italian, French, English, and German in the 150 years following its initial publication. Berners’ book is one of the first Spanish romances translated into English, and it marks the first appearance in English of what is recognized in its Spanish form as a sentimental novel; and it is also the first epistolary novel in English. Castell has a number of generic affiliations, namely the genres of novela sentimental, cancionero lyric, epistolary fiction, and treatise as well as tragedy, romance, and parody. Each plays an important role in Castell’s literary heritage, inception, and reception. In the long and detailed introduction, the author explores the complicated ways in which Castell engages in dialogue with its literary inheritance and discursive environment. The novela is the genre to which the Spanish text has the closest affinities at the time of its creation and initial publication, while at the time of its translation Berners’s Castell responds to, and partakes in, the tradition of counsel literature. This is an interesting and important work with a valuable introduction and apparatus, and the author has done early modernists a service by making it available in a modern edition.
2007 / 298 pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-384-6 / MR 336 / $42, £29

Díaz de Luco’s Guide for Bishops: Spanish Reform and the Lazarillo
Translated by Clark Colahan (Whitman College) and Roberto Masferrer III, with a foreword by David Brauer-Rieke
This work, unpublished in any form since the early 16th century, offers on facing pages the Spanish text and a carefully annotated translation of a handbook designed for new bishops. As the introduction documents clearly and fully, the author, Juan Bernal Díaz de Luco, was one of Spain’s most important reformers of the period — a forthright reporter of social and ecclesiastical corruption as well as an expert on and proponent of canon law enforcement. Though practically unknown in the United States, he has attracted attention in recent years in Spain as part of that newly democratic country’s rediscovery of its reforming tradition. While taking his degree at the University of Salamanca, Díaz de Luco received training in both classical literature and law, but primarily he became a widely read bishop whose detailed and practical writings advocating that the church return to its original mission connect him with his contemporaries and friends Bartolomé de las Casas and Ignacio de Loyola. The Guide for Bishops is the earliest in a lifelong series of calls for change by a social critic who later became Spain’s most outspoken representative to the epoch-making Council of Trent. As a result, the book’s value is partly as social documentary that provides new evidence for Spain’s role in Europe’s Age of Reform. To bring out the similarities and differences of Spanish reformers vis-à-vis the better known northern Reformation, the introduction has been complemented by a forward written by a Lutheran pastor.
2007 / 165 + ix pages / ISBN: 978-0-86698-379-2 / MR 330 / $30, £21

Don Juan Pacheco: Wealth and Power in Late Medieval Spain
By Nancy Marino (Michigan State University)
The is the first book-length study of fifteenth-century Castilian courtier Don Juan Pacheco. The biography uses contemporaneous and modern histories as well as unpublished archival materials to trace Pacheco’s long and controversial career at the court of Enrique IV of Castile. It explores how the powerful nobleman exploited his position as the king’s favorite in order to satisfy his political and personal ambitions and became the wealthiest and most titled courtier of the period. Through Juan Pacheco’s actions and objectives, the reader is given a portrait of the most successful of the fifteenth-century noblemen who competed with each other for power and riches in the era just before the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.
2006 / pages / ISBN-10: 0-86698-356-2, ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-356-3 / MR 311 / $42, £33

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Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens: Transatlantic Readings
Eyda Merediz (University of Maryland at College Park)
During the “Age of Exploration and Discovery,” the Canary Islands became an important Atlantic post for European colonial experimentation before the encounter with the New World. This event, in turn, changed forever the way Europeans wrote history and conceived of other cultures, which inevitably influenced the Old World. The Canary Islands, geographically at the midway of a transatlantic passage, a “contact zone” par excellence, appear in this book as an important symbolic locus of imperial transactions at the turn of the seventeenth century. Three works--a historiographic text by Alonso de Espinosa, an epic poem by Antonio de Viana, and a play by Lope de Vega, provide the main analytic corpus of this study. By reinventing and contesting the historical and cultural identity of the Canaries, these works illustrate how the islands become an alternative space of negotiation where Spanish imperial history could be exposed or mitigated. With an interdisciplinary angle and through a New World detour, this book seeks to fill an important void by re-mapping a far more inclusive and interdependent Hispanic Atlantic.
2004 / 181 pages / 86698-319-8 / MR276 / $30, £24