- Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies,
King's College London,
The Virginia Woolf Building
22 Kingsway
London WC2R 2LS
Julian Weiss
King's College London, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Faculty Member
- I research and teach the literatures of medieval and early Renaissance Iberia. My research and teaching interests inc... moreI research and teach the literatures of medieval and early Renaissance Iberia. My research and teaching interests include: the history of book production, particularly mechanisms of canon formation and cultural control; and postcolonial approaches to medieval Iberia, and the idea of Muslim Spain in the European imagination from the Middle Ages to the Romantic period. I am currently Co-Investigator on a major reserch project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's 'Open World Research Initiative', entitled 'Language Acts and Worldmaking', as co-lead on the research strand 'Travelling Concepts' (www.languageacts.org). Currently, my major research project is a monograph on the reception of the Romanized Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in the Iberian world 1492-1687.edit
At a time when the discourse of a clash of civilisations has been re-grounded anew in scaremongering and dog-whistle politics over a Hispanic "challenge" to America and a Muslim "challenge" to European societies, and in the context of the... more
At a time when the discourse of a clash of civilisations has been re-grounded anew in scaremongering and dog-whistle politics over a Hispanic "challenge" to America and a Muslim "challenge" to European societies, and in the context of the War on Terror and migration panics, evocations of al-Andalus - medieval Iberia under Islamic rule - have gained new and hotly polemic topicality, championed and contested as either exemplary models or hoodwinking myths.
The essays in this volume explore how al-Andalus has been transformed into a "travelling concept": that is, a place in time that has transcended its original geographic and historical location to become a figure of thought with global reach. They show how Iberia's medieval past, where Islam, Judaism and Christianity co-existed in complex, paradoxical and productive ways, has offered individuals and communities in multiple periods and places a means of engaging critically and imaginatively with questions of religious pluralism, orientalism and colonialism, exile and migration, intercultural contact and national identity. Travelling in their turn from the medieval to the contemporary world, across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and covering literary, cultural and political studies, critical Muslim and Jewish studies, they illustrate the contemporary significance of the Middle Ages as a site for collaborative interdisciplinary thinking.
The essays in this volume explore how al-Andalus has been transformed into a "travelling concept": that is, a place in time that has transcended its original geographic and historical location to become a figure of thought with global reach. They show how Iberia's medieval past, where Islam, Judaism and Christianity co-existed in complex, paradoxical and productive ways, has offered individuals and communities in multiple periods and places a means of engaging critically and imaginatively with questions of religious pluralism, orientalism and colonialism, exile and migration, intercultural contact and national identity. Travelling in their turn from the medieval to the contemporary world, across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and covering literary, cultural and political studies, critical Muslim and Jewish studies, they illustrate the contemporary significance of the Middle Ages as a site for collaborative interdisciplinary thinking.
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The introductory study and works cited to the edition published in 2015 (Madrid: Polifemo)
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An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in medieval texts, art, and architecture. This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval... more
An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in medieval texts, art, and architecture.
This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architectureof subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past.
Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Räsänen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis
This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architectureof subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past.
Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Räsänen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis
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In the thirteenth century, profound changes in Spanish society drove the invention of fresh poetic forms by the new clerical class. The term mester de clerecía (clerical ministry or service) applies to a group of narrativepoems (epics,... more
In the thirteenth century, profound changes in Spanish society drove the invention of fresh poetic forms by the new clerical class. The term mester de clerecía (clerical ministry or service) applies to a group of narrativepoems (epics, hagiography, romances) composed by university-trained clerics for the edification and entertainment of the predominantly illiterate laity. These clerics, like Gonzalo de Berceo, understood themselves as cultural intermediaries, transmitting wisdom and values from the past; at the same time, they were deeply involved in some of the most contentious and far-reaching changes in lay piety, and in economic and social structures. The author challenges the predominantly didactic approach to the verse, in an attempt to historicize the category of the intellectual, as someone caught in the duality of the worlds of contingency and absolute values.
The book will have a broad appeal to medievalists, in part because of the topics covered (feudalism, gender, nationhood, and religion), in part because many poems are either adaptations from French and Latin or have counterparts in other literatures (e.g., the romances or Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary).
The book will have a broad appeal to medievalists, in part because of the topics covered (feudalism, gender, nationhood, and religion), in part because many poems are either adaptations from French and Latin or have counterparts in other literatures (e.g., the romances or Alexander and Apollonius, the miracles of the Virgin Mary).
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This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of... more
This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architecture of subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past. Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Studies, Sarah Salih Senior Lecturer in English, at King's College London. Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Rasanen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis
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Información del libro Reading and censorship in early modern Europe: Barcelona, 11-13 de diciembre de 2007.
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... El MS también tiene cabida para el tema del amor, sea abarcado desde la vertiente «pro feminista» de la Defensa de las virtuosas mugeres, sea desde la pers pectiva más didáctica del Tratado sobre cómo es necesario al orne amar,... more
... El MS también tiene cabida para el tema del amor, sea abarcado desde la vertiente «pro feminista» de la Defensa de las virtuosas mugeres, sea desde la pers pectiva más didáctica del Tratado sobre cómo es necesario al orne amar, atribuido al Tostado. ...
... sin más todas las alu-siones de los glosadores a la ignorancia del nuevo público lector. ... Lida de Malkiel, en su estudio sobre el comentario a la Coronación de Juan de Me-na ... Rosa sobre los cuatro mitos ovidianos (Filomena,... more
... sin más todas las alu-siones de los glosadores a la ignorancia del nuevo público lector. ... Lida de Malkiel, en su estudio sobre el comentario a la Coronación de Juan de Me-na ... Rosa sobre los cuatro mitos ovidianos (Filomena, Orfeo, Clicie y Sálma-cis), que Mena reelaboró en ...
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available online at Cervantes virtual, Alicante : Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2014. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmcm34p1
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This paper explores the possibilities—and the problems—entailed by a figurative reading of the Muslim/ Christian border as it is portrayed in the rich corpus of Sephardic balladry that accompanied Iberian Jews in their post 1492 diaspora.... more
This paper explores the possibilities—and the problems—entailed by a figurative reading of the Muslim/ Christian border as it is portrayed in the rich corpus of Sephardic balladry that accompanied Iberian Jews in their post 1492 diaspora. I argue that that the frontier between medieval Al-Andalus and Castile served as a ‘travelling concept’ for Sephardic Jews: a highly flexible verbal scaffolding for thinking about the tensions and paradoxes of diaspora. Through a close reading of selected Judeo-Spanish ballads preserved by the written and spoken word, I examine how the representation of the Andalusi frontier reproduces an ideological topology. This is to say, the fluidity and conflicts of the borderzone offer a way of thinking about, and narrativising, a series of thematic antonyms and tensions that characterise the diasporic condition: exile and return, identity and difference, the secret and the public, communal agency and ineluctable fate. Transposed into Sephardic oral and written lore, the poems capture the paradox of Jews who were not (militarily at least) represented as protagonists in the Muslim/ Christian conflict, but who were nevertheless implicated: they were ‘bystanders’ attempting to recover agency in a history that was, and was not, their own. My case study is constituted by ballads from the modern Moroccan tradition, situated in the context of Spain’s political treatment of Moroccan Sephardic Jews.
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Calderón adapted Barclay's best-selling political romance Argenis (Paris, 1621) with the title Argenis y Poliarco sometime between 1626 and 1636, the date of its first recorded performance. It was first printed in 1637, in the Segunda... more
Calderón adapted Barclay's best-selling political romance Argenis (Paris, 1621) with the title Argenis y Poliarco sometime between 1626 and 1636, the date of its first recorded performance. It was first printed in 1637, in the Segunda Parte of his plays. In comparison with other works from that collection, such as El médico de su honra or the two comedias palaciegas, El mayor encanto amor and El galán fantasma, Argenis y Poliarco is virtually unknown, with only a few critical studies and one recent edition by Alicia Vara López (2015). This edition, coupled with the renewed interest in Barclay's neo-Latin romance, should inspire critical reconsideration of a play that appeared in a transformative moment in Calderón's career. After reviewing the scholarship on how Calderón transformed the romance into his distinctive theatrical idiom, I investigate the play's political meaning and challenge the view that Argenis y Poliarco is above all a palatine play about love. While it is true that Calderón simplifies the plot, by eliminating or pushing offstage the overtly political action and by cutting Barclay's disquisitions on good government, I argue that the political element is not suppressed. It is, rather, recast in theatrical terms. Calderón's skillful stagecraft constitutes a dramatic representation of a European political order marked by ambiguity, plurality and contingency, where the destiny of a state is determined in large measure by what happens beyond its borders.