Andrew M. Beresford

'Una oraçión, señora, que le dixeron que sabías, de Sancta Polonia para el dolor de las muelas': Celestina and the Legend of St Apollonia

Legend has it that the martyrdom of St Apollonia took place in Alexandria on 9 February 249, during the height of the persecutions of Decius, the Roman emperor.1 Although there are a number of conflicting and even contradictory accounts of the circumstances that surrounded her death, in the majority of extant versions the central assumption is that she was at first submitted to a series of gruesome tortures—the most celebrated being

The poetry of medieval Spain.

This first comprehensive history of Spanish literature to be published in English since the 1970s brings together experts from the USA, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Together, the essays cover the full range of Spanish poetry, prose, and theatre from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The classics of the canon of eleven centuries of Spanish literature are covered, from Berceo, Cervantes and Calderon to Garcia Lorca and Martin Gaite, but attention is also paid to lesserknown writers and works. The chapters chart a wide range of literary periods and movements. The volume concludes with a consideration of the influences of film and new media on modern Spanish literature. This invaluable book contains an introduction, more than fifty substantial chapters, a chronology (covering key events in history, literature, and art), a bibliography, and a comprehensive index for easy reference.

Postcolonial Theory and the Traditional Castilian Lyric: The Morenita as Epidermal Stereotype

Abstract This article is the revised text of the twenty-fifth Kate Elder Lecture, delivered at Queen Mary University of London, on 27 March 2014. This lecture series com-memorates the life of Kate Elder, who died while a student at Westfield College, and is generously funded by her family. Discussions of the morenita, whose white skin turns almost black as a result of exposure to the searing heat of the sun, have traditionally been dominated by factors intrinsic to her status. This paper, which examines her legacy in the light of postcolonial theory, offers a series of fresh interpretations of the corpus of morenita lyrics, focusing on the epidermalization of identity and the complex relationship between mimicry and menace. It argues that, while the traditional Castilian lyric stands to benefit from an engagement with theory, theoretical explorations of phenotypic identity also have much to learn from an appreciation of the morenita’s peculiar ontological ambivalence. Estudios de la morenita, cuya piel blanca vuelve casi negra como conse-cuencia de su exposición al calor abrasador del sol, han sido dominados tradicionalmente por factores intrínsecas a su estado. Este artículo, que examina su fortuna a la luz de la teoría postcolonial, ofrece una serie de interpretaciones nuevas del corpus de poemas sobre la morenita, enfocán-dose en la epidermalización de la identidad y la relación entre el mimetismo y la amenaza. Propone que, mientras la lírica tradicional castellana podrá aprovecharse de un encajamiento con la teoría, exploraciones teóricas de la identidad fenotípica también podrán desarrollarse a base de un análisis de la curiosa ambivalencia ontológica de la morenita

Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile: The Virgin, Christ, Devotions, and Images in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries by Robinson, Cynthia (review)

Whether Europe’s borders end at the Pyrenees or the Straits of Gibraltar is a question that will be familiar to Hispanists working in a range of disciplines. Robinson’s study, which offers an absorbing insight into problems of cultural specificity, argues strongly in favour of a uniquely Castilian religious identity distinct from that of Europe. Her central contention, which is put forward with conviction in a series of chapters devoted to Christ and the Virgin, is that late-medieval Castilian representations of the Passion display a marked aversion towards engagement with scenes of somatic violence. While in Europe, meditations on the humiliations, torments, and death of Christ had reached mystical, even feverish heights, culminating in personalized passion imagery, designed to elicit procedures of mimetic identification, such devotion was not fashionable in Castile before the final decade of the fifteenth century.

Dreams of Death in Medieval Castilian Hagiography: Martyrdom and Ideology in the Gran Flos Sanctorum

Critical discourses dealing with the explosion of oneiric and visionary activity in the Middle Ages have offered crucial insights into questions of symbolism and representation, the systems of theory and classification that inform and underpin the development of individual narratives, and the relevance of visions and dreams to broader psychological, sociological, and theological discussions. A salient element of these discourses, however, is that, almost without exception, they have tended to deal with texts, whether verbal or pictorial, in terms of the primacy of the oneiric or the visionary within the global structure or intellectual fabric of the narrative. The pioneering work of Constance B. Hieatt and A. C. Spearing, for instance, focuses on the dream as a meta-framework, and engages with texts in which oneiric experience functions as the essential unifying device. Later contributions, such as those of Kathryn L. Lynch, Steven F. Kruger, and Isabel Moreira, have provided