Lesley K. Twomey

The Serpent and the Rose: The Immaculate Conception and Hispanic Poetry in the Late Medieval Period

Drawing on scholastic defence of the Immaculate Conception and on liturgies in medieval Iberia, this book examines how poets took apocryphal stories and biblical figures, like Eve confronting the serpent, to express how Mary was preserved from original sin.

'Una qüistión [...] sobre la conçebçión de Santa María': The Cancionero de Baena Debate on the Immaculate Conception

Abstract This study examines six poems included in the Cancionero de Baena (ID1449, ID1450 R1449, ID1451 R1450, ID1452 R1451, ID1453 R1452, and ID1454 R1453 in Dutton & González Cuenca 1993). This series of poems occupies an important place in the development of immaculism in Spain and is characterized by the theological themes that animate the poetic debate, in which Fray Lope del Monte confronts Diego Martínez de Medina, thus demonstrating the influence of scholastic methodology on the poetry of the fifteenth century. This study reveals the influence of scholasticism on cancionero poetry, focusing on the ways of appealing to patristic authority. This examination of patristic authority and its reflection in poetry enables us to state precisely how scholastic methodology influenced religious poetry in the fifteenth century, and to reach conclusions on the incorporation of theological methods in Castilian poetic debate.

Mary Magdalene and Martha: Sor Isabel de Villena’s Self-fashioning through Constructing her Community

1 For studies on Mary Magdalene in Villena’s Vita Christi, see Rosanna Cantavella and Lluïsa Parra, eds., Protagonistes femenines a la Vita Christi: Isabel de Villena, Clàssiques Catalanes 15 (Barcelona: LaSal, 1987), 44–9; Rosanna Cantavella, “Medieval Catalan Mary Magdalene Narratives,” in Saints and their Authors: Studies in Medieval Hagiography in Honor of John K. Walsh, eds. Jane E. Connolly, A.D. Deyermond, and Brian Dutton (Madison, wi: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990), 27–36; Dominique de Courcelles, “En Mémoire d’elle et en mémoire du sang: la Vita Christi de Sor Isabel de Villena, abbesse des clarisses de Valence au XVe siècle,” Journal de la Renaissance 1 (2000): 111; Albert Guillem Hauf i Valls, “La Vita Christi de Sor Isabel de Villena y la tradición de las Vitae Christi medievales,” in Studia in honorem Prof. M. de Riquer, ed. Dámaso Alonso (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema: 1987), 136–8; Albert Guillem Hauf i Valls, “El mon cultural de Isabel de Villena,” in D’Eiximenis a sor Isabel de Villena: aportació a l’estudi de la nostra cultura medieval, ed. Albert Guillem Hauf i Valls, Biblioteca Sanchis Guarner 19 (Valencia: Institut de Filologia Valenciana/Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat: 1990), 303–21; Albert Guillem Hauf i Valls, La Vita Christi de Sor Isabel de Villena (s. XV) como arte de meditar: Introducción a una lectura contextualizada (Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana y Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, Educació i Esport: 2006), 78–80; and Montserrat Piera, “Mary Magdalene’s Iconographical Redemption in Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi and the Speculum Animae,” Catalan Review 20 (2006): 313–28. 2 All references to Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi are from Ramón Miquel y Planas’s edition. All translations, unless otherwise stated are my own. chapter 11