The dramatic power of the contrast between the true and rightful king and the usurper who exiles him runs through many works of medieval Castilian literature. That power derives from the theme’s part in Biblical narrative, in folklore, and in the political life of the Middle Ages. It fits into a wide tradition of the divided nature of monarchy, which manifests itself in diverse ways. The division may be conceptual, most notably in the idea of the king’s two bodies – one physical and mortal, the other political and continuous – studied by Ernst Kantorowicz (1957). It may flow from...

The received wisdom about the role of women in Spanish epic, specifically in thePoema de mio Cid, has been that they have subordinate, submissive roles. In 1995, María Eugenia Lacarra wrote, ‘[l]a importancia de las mujeres se relaciona directamente con la política matrimonial de los protagonistas, de ahí que su presencia se deba a las relaciones de parentesco que tienen con ellos y que su papel se ciña a su función de madres, hijas o esposas’ (1995: 41). And in more general terms, Gloria Beatriz Chicote wrote in 1996 ‘la épica románica surge en la Edad Media europea como...

Among the numerous acute insights offered by Nicholas Round’s study of Álvaro de Luna is his awareness of the significance of the long afterlife of the medieval Spanish accounts of the Condestable, including the work of Michael Geddes (1715), which he describes as ‘an astute, well-documented political biography’, and which might, with good reason, be honoured as one of the earliest serious works of British scholarship concerning medieval Spain (1986: 218, n. 11). The use of medieval Spanish chronicles in later historiography and propaganda in Spain and elsewhere in Europe is, of course, common enough; less well known is the...

In an article which combines characteristically sharp textual analysis with wide-ranging elucidation of social and cultural context and astute observations on human behaviour, Nick Round showed how Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, used thenummustradition in theLibro de buen amorto satirize the power of money and its ability to distort human conduct and eternal truths.¹ The development of a monetary economy had been relatively slow in medieval Castile, but by the first half of the fourteenth century the process of change was well underway.² It seems appropriate, then, in this volume to use Nick Round’s study as...

The traditional division of Galdós’s novels into his early novels (‘de la primera época’) and those of his ‘segunda o tercera manera’ has been the subject of much discussion.¹ While some scholars such as Richard Cardwell seek a sweeping ‘total view’ that is sceptical about the validity of the distinction, the majority of critics believe there is reason to accept some differentiation. At the same time it has been convincingly argued, on the one hand, thatLa familia de León Roch(1879) is a transitional work, and on the other, thatLa desheredada(1881), habitually considered as the work initiating...

For several decades after its publication in 1909, Galdós’sEl caballero encantadowas dismissed by critics as a ‘curioso capricho’ (Gamero y de Laiglesia 1934: 368), or as evidence of ‘a decline in creative energy’ (Eoff 1954: 16).¹ By the 1970s, the novel was being taken more seriously as a reflection of the political and social context of the time of its composition, notably by Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas, who associates the work with post-1898 regenerationist literature, with the political events of 1909 (notably the Morocco expedition and the Semana Trágica) and with the concerns which led Galdós to assume leadership of...

Although critics often note that Galdós’s works depict Spain in a state of decadence, few have drawn attention to the direct connection between theTorquemadanovels andregeneración.¹ This is not altogether surprising since neither the term itself nor its derivatives feature in any of the novels. The closest references relate to ‘reformas’, which can be seen as representing the practical attempts atregeneración(frequently termedregeneracionismo), although the author does refer to its antithesis, in the form of ‘decadencia’ or ‘degeneración’.² However, as I have noted elsewhere, it was not uncommon for writers to avoid the direct use of...

In 1897 Galdós was elected to theReal Academia Española. By then, he was in his mid-fifties and had been writing novels for the best part of thirty years. The speech he made on that occasion – one of his few critical statements – was called ‘La sociedad presente como materia novelable’. On the face of it, what he has to say about the nature of the novel is disappointingly trite:

Imagen de la vida es la Novela, y el arte de componerla estriba en reproducir los caracteres humanos, las pasiones, las debilidades, lo grande y lo pequeño, las almas...

This essay focuses on how the techniques of literary realism bridge the gap between our time and the nineteenth century. It proposes a complexly interactive model of realism, set within a similarly dynamic model of cultural studies. The scope and purposes of cultural studies are framed here in terms of the biosphere, ‘an interacting web of plants and rocks, fungi and soils, animals and oceans, microbes and air, that constitute the habit of life on our planet. To understand the biosphere,’ writes Freeman Dyson, ‘it is essential to see it from both sides, from below as a multitude of details...

In 1534 Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in his prologue to Juan Boscán’s translation of Castiglione’sIl libro del cortegiano:

tengo por muy prinçipal el benefiçio que se haze a la lengua castellana en poner en ella cosas que merezcan ser leídas; porque yo no sé qué desventura á sido sienpre la nuestra, que apenas á nadie escrito en nuestra lengua sino lo que se pudiera muy bien escusar, aunque esto sería malo de provar con los que traen entre las manos estos libros que matan hombres.

(1534: fol. 3^v)

In writing off the dead-weight of medieval killer-books as a...

The ending of a play almost invariably provides a decisive indicator of its overall meaning, and in consequence eighteenth-century European theatrical practice laid stress on the outcome of dramatic works in terms of their agreement with prevailing conceptions of moral justice. Revivals of works from earlier periods, as is notorious in England in the case of Shakespeare’sKing Lear, might have tragic endings re-written to prevent an apparent injustice being visited on a basically good character. Although Spanish theatrical theory from the mid-eighteenth century emphasized the classical division between comedy and tragedy, theoretical orthodoxy was often countered in practice by...

Twenty-first-century readers may be surprised at the ease with which the poems of Gil Vicente (1465?–1536?) continue to travel across temporal, spatial and linguistic borders, thus becoming new – or renewed – lyrics for the enjoyment of successive generations. One Vicentine poem in particular illustrates this phenomenon, ‘En la huerta nasce la rosa’, included in theAuto de los cuatro tiempos, written and performed for the court of D. Manuel I and first translated into English just over three centuries ago.

En la huerta nasce la rosa

quiérome ir allá

por mirar al ruiseñor

cómo cantaba.

Por las riberas...

The possibility that the practical interests of those engaged in second-language-related activities may afford a distinctive insight into language theory has fairly recently been endorsed by Stephen Levinson, who, in his influentialPresumptive Meanings, specifically commends the concern of students of translation and second language learning with ‘a great body of language lore beyond knowledge of grammar and semantics’ (2000: 23). Appropriately encouraged, I embark here on discussion of some applications of a particular area of discourse pragmatics – that of argumentation – to a field to which the dedicatee of this volume has made important contributions: the interface of...

When Nick Round remarked at an examiners’ meeting that ‘marks are a metaphor’ he demonstrated that, for him, the discourse and lexicon of assessment are inseparable from those of teaching and learning; the untidiness and subjectivity of assessment are ill-matched to numbers and mathematical operations.² When – after another examiners’ meeting – Nick celebrated the anecdote of the man who looked for his lost keys underneath a lamp-post because that’s where the light was, rather than further down the road in the darkness at the place where he first discovered they were missing, he was again recognising the problematic character...

Nick Round wrote these words a quarter-century ago, commenting on the 1980 Modern Languages Association Presidential Address, by Professor Philip Thody, of Leeds University. Essentially, Thody considered university modern languages education, as then constituted, to be inadequate for the modern world (because of the stranglehold of mediaevalists and historical philologists). Echoing the fears expressed by Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century about the overthrow of civilized culture, Thody feared that the perceived cultural deficiency of graduates was likely to hasten the future emergence of a centralized bureaucratic state. His proposed remedy was modern language studies based on three elements: increased...