Jean Dangler

Marie E. Kelleher’s book is a well-argued study of women’s role in the reception and interpretation of legal codes called the ius commune in fourteenth century Aragon. The ius commune consisted of a combination of Roman law and ecclesiastical canon law that began to serve as a conceptual framework for local and regional codes in the Crown of Aragon (7; 20). The rise of law faculties at universities and of university-trained jurists in the later Middle Ages facilitated the impact of the ius commune, as did the use of Roman law by kings and other territorial rulers to justify their claims to authority, thus replacing an older system of customs and privileges (4). Kelleher argues that rather than passively receive the concepts embedded in this legal framework, women and their representatives actively participated in their interpretation and application. Instead of subverting or avoiding legal assumptions about female gender, women and their lawyers used them in their arguments and justifications. Fundamental among those assumptions was an idea that stemmed from Roman law about women’s inherent vulnerability and incapacity, which rendered them in need of protection because they were believed to be physically and morally weak. Another crucial factor in the construction of women’s legal identity was their presumed relation to a man, including fathers and husbands. In her introduction, Kelleher frames the discussion within a larger revival of Roman law in late medieval realms. She clearly presents and justifies her methodology, which entails the analysis of law codes and a series of legal case records in sources at the Archive of the Crown of Aragon in which women appeared as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses (6–7). Kelleher emphasizes her approach to the law as ‘‘an ongoing dialogue’’ about women’s legal identity and status, rather than an imposed system of concepts about gender (14), an approach that I found ingenious and generative. Chapter 1 consists of a description of the legal environment in the Aragonese Crown during the reign of Jaime II (1291–1327), where Kelleher underlines a ‘‘multilayered legal system’’ consisting of the ius commune and local laws that varied within the Crown. She discusses the legal players at that time, such as the veguer and the batlle, both royal judges with different responsibilities and jurisdictions, as well as the procedural steps that cases followed in Aragon’s late medieval royal courts. Kelleher argues that most late medieval litigants would have initiated their claims in royal rather than local or seigneurial courts (30–31). A crucial focus of this chapter is the role of people’s community reputation (fama) in the outcomes of legal cases, compelling Kelleher to suggest that ‘‘justice was a community affair’’ (41). Kelleher emphasizes that the professionalization of the law was key to changing fama from a social to a legal category. In chapter 2, she examines the complex topic of women’s property law, focusing specifically on the ways that changes in legal assumptions impacted women’s control over their possessions. Late medieval Aragon inherited contradictory ideas from Roman law (that is, from the series of codes called the Velleian senatus consultum) about women and households. Kelleher observes that

ARCHER, ROBERT. The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature. Suffolk: Tamesis, 2005. 227 pages.This book is an effort to question critical assumptions about late medieval Iberian literature on women, in particular, the problem of "debate" as a conceptual framework for works by authors such as Francesc Eiximenis, Martin de Cordoba, Jaume Roig, Alfonso Martinez de Toledo, Juan Rodriguez del Padron, Joan Rois de Corella, and Pere Toroella (6). Archer rejects the facile divide between misogynist texts and works in women's defense and instead aims to show that discourse on women was varied and included a number of works whose authors demonstrated the "indeterminacy" of the notion of women. He claims that the pervasiveness of this literature was due to the need of presumably male writers to address the contradictions in the writings of the auctoritates, such as Aristotle, on women's makeup. While this explanation is certainly credible, it is also unsatisfying as an absolute account in the face of the plethora of texts on women (and men) that surfaced during the late fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries and beyond. Archer docs not address in a systematic way the nagging question of why they emerged at that time. Instead, he deals with it occasionally, as in the fifth and final chapter, "Toroella's Maldezir de mugeres and Its Legacy," where he opines persuasively that cancioncro poets were more concerned with the place of misogynist materials in the social code of cortesia than with their veracity or falsity, suggesting that the literate noble class produced writings about women not to deliberate on the latter's definition, but to find a way to place them in cortesia (185-86). In the book's fourth chapter, called "The Defences," Archer links Castilian writing on women to men's political advancement, as in the cases of Rodriguez del Padron (Triunfo de las donas), Diego de Valera (Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres), and Alvaro de Luna (Libro dc las virtuosos e dams mugeres). Yet this reasoning is not integrated into a broader discussion about the emergence of this literature as a whole.While I appreciated Archer's review of much of the main literature on women from late medieval Iberia, his book left me with many questions and doubts. The book's title was surprising, given the tremendous recent critical work on gender and language. The title's phrasing suggests agreement with the notion of "woman" as a lone, reified object, in contrast to, for instance, a statement such as "the late medieval problem ot defining women." In addition, to call "woman" a problem already implies complicity with the very statement, although undoubtedly this was not Archer's intent. Did women truly constitute a societal problem, or did some men perceive them as such? Did women during this period describe themselves as problems? Does not the literature on men at this time also suggest the "problem" of defining "man," albeit differently than defining "woman," a question that Archer treats only in passing? In the effort to answer these issues Archer's book would have been aided by historical data about women and by a more comparative approach to studying the discourses on women and men.Another vexation concerns Archer's notion of gender, since he leads us to believe that a study of gender will constitute part of his analysis when he argues that "an underlying concern with the question of how to define gender identity [. . .] pervades the texts as a whole" (7). However, his use of the term Js perplexing because he erroneously connects gender to women alone, without entertaining gender and men. His brief discussion of men on page nineteen portends some analysis of the relations between men and women: "In the texts to be studied here there are signs that already a need existed to confirm men's position in the face of the obvious ability ot women to operate effectively in areas authoritatively defined as male" (19). …

: In this thought piece I reflect on the essay I wrote in 2001 about using literature in a history of sexuality. There, over 20 years ago, I proposed that we have always been queer. The thought piece now explores the continued relevance of this proposal, along with the virtues of more contemporary trans theories. Queer and trans theories help us to articulate the significance of diverse examples of sex and gender that we encounter in Iberian literatures, especially when these examples are nonconforming and contradict the nonmodern binaries and norms that are often proposed by historians. The thought piece urges us to challenge the supposed realities of norms and binaries in light of these myriad examples, especially if we consider shifts in ourselves as reading subjects, and hence in our readings and interpretations of medieval Iberian texts.

This article contends that the figure of the woman neighbor in Ibn Quzmān's zajal 84 serves as a precursor to mediators we find in later literature in Castilian, including Trotaconventos in the "Libro del Arcipreste" (aka, "Libro de buen amor"), Celestina in the eponymous "Celestina," and Lozana in "La Lozana andaluza."

This article reflects on the role of nonmodern literatures in modern debates about love, sex, and Islam. It briefly exam ines fundamental nonmodern discourses on love and sex to demonstrate their challenge to portrayals of love and sex by orthodox religious authorities and others today as divinely connected to the idealized institution of marriage. It ana lyzes two works from the Maghreb to show their divergence from limited modern views: Tawq al-hamama, Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi' s eleventh-century love treatise, and Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujad fi kitab, the Tunisian Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi's thirteenth-century erotic book. The article pro vides historical grounding to this critical cluster on modern Islamic Africa and complicates the values often attributed to love and sex as moral, natural, and eternal.

En este trabajo hago un repaso no exhaustivo de lo que son, a mi juicio, interesantes estudios queer tanto en inglés como en español sobre la no-modernidad y cuyo impacto sigue reverberando en la actualidad. Asimismo, planteo una reflexión sobre la futura relación entre la teoría queer y los discursos ibéricos no-modernos, con el fin de complementar la propuesta de Mérida Jiménez (2008: 183-197) sobre el rumbo que deberían tomar los futuros trabajos de investigación relacionados con la teoría queer en el Medioevo ibérico. Me centro concretamente en laIn this article I summarize a selection of what are in my opinion interesting theoretical contributions in English and Spanish to queer studies in nonmodern periods that continue to have an impact on scholarly work today. I also reflect on possible future connections between queer theory and nonmodern Iberian discourses in an effort to complement Mérida Jiménez’s essay (2008: 183-197) on the future path of queer theory in the Iberian Mi...

The Literature of Misogyny in Medieval Spain examines the medical underpinnings of two major misogynist works from the fifteenth-century Iberian: Alonso de Martinez's Arcipreste de Talavera and Jacme Roig's Spill. Michael Solomon argues that these works gained their rhetorical ...

In the Spill o Llibre de les dones, the 15th century writer and physician from Valencia, Jaume Roig, uses the motif of pilgrimage to attack earthly women, particularly women healers. Roig undermines the salutary function of medieval pilgrimage in order to expose worldly women in their effort to harm male pilgrims. Since men cannot rely on earthly women, they must seek a healing encounter with the Virgin, whose salutary ministrations are always constant and efficacious. Roig's assault on women through pilgrimage relates to wider social attempts to marginalize traditional women healers from legitimate salutary practice, since he aims to dissuade male readers from seeking women's healing services in everyday society.

In an anonymous poem from the Candonero de Hernando del Castillo (1483-1511), a Jewish converso (convert), a cloth shearer called a tondidor, is favorably described as a devout Christian who prays and regularly attends mass:After reading the poem, its last stanza provides the reader with instructions to physically cut the poem in half with scissors between its two hemistichs. The cutting divides formerly whole lines into separate columns, which, when each column is individually read from top to bottom, give an opposite interpretation of the formerly devout convert, who is now transformed into a despicable man who cannot be trusted to follow the Catholic faith. The directions at the poem's end tell the reader that the trap of the truth will be revealed in the middle of the poem ("quenel medio esta la celada / delo cierto"), or in the cut, which will show that the convert is a man marked by false appearances and a duplicitous interior. Through the cut, the poem seeks to ...

... But, her ongoing pain also indicates the failure of Celestina's coital rem-edy, since, according to the medical parameters of mal de la madre ... For instance, a stunning account from Valencia in 1502, just three years after the dCbut of the earliest printing of Celestina, describes a ...

... Amparo Alba, Cecilia. "El debate de la espada y el calamo." Proyecci6n hist6rica de Espana en sus tres culturas: Castilla y Le6n, America y el mediterraneo. Ed. Eufemio Lorenzo Sanz. Vol. ... (Homenaje a Ram6n Menendez Pidal) 18.1 (1969): 61-102. Gibert Fenech, Soledad. ...