Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature explores the ways Arabic, Jewish and Christian intellectuals in medieval Iberia (courtiers and clerics) adapt and transform the Andalusi go-between figure in order to represent their own role as cultural intermediaries. While these authors are of different religious, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, they use the go-between, an essential figure in the Andalusi courtly discourse of desire, to open up a secular, more tolerant intellectual space in the face of increasingly fundamentalist currents in their respective cultures. The way this study focuses on the hybrid discourses and identities of medieval Iberia as Muslim, Jewish and Christian responses to continual contact/conflict reflects a methodological approach based in Cultural and Translation Studies.

"Representing Others will be of great use in undergraduate courses on the Middle Ages, graduate seminars on Spain or al-Andalus, and for scholars who wish to understand the specific connections between Arabic, Hebrew, and Castilian within the itinerary of a complex example. With her analysis of the go-between, Hamilton does an excellent job of questioning accepted boundaries in early-modern Spain, and she makes a first-rate contribution to the exciting new wave of scholarship in medieval Iberian studies." - Speculum

"There is nothing in print quite like Hamilton's scope of medieval cultures and her will to make it all hang together in a unified vision of recurrent motifs.The documentation of the surviving historical record is substantial, and the narrative knits together the successive literatures studied.A lot here is new, or confronted in ways the profession simply has not synthesized and embraced before.Few scholars have the command of Arabic, Hebrew and medieval romance vernaculars that Hamilton demonstrates." - George Greenia, College of William & Mary"Hamilton's book provides a valuable study of identity formation in medieval Iberia using the figure of the go-between at its core . . . her book takes several important steps forward in this realm and truly broadens the scope of analysis in useful ways . . . [She] does an excellent job of questioning accepted boundaries in early-modern Spain, and she makes a first-rate contribution to the exciting new wave ofscholarship in medieval Iberian studies." - Speculum

Autorentext
MICHELLE M. HAMILTON is Assistant Professor of Spanish & Portuguese, and Medieval studies at University of California, Irvine, USA.

Inhalt
Palaces of Memory: Mediation, Court Culture, and the Caliphate Many a Zayd and 'Amr: Mediation and Representation in al-Andalus Translating Desire: The Violence of Memory in the Judeo-Iberian maqamat Turning Tricks: The Go-Between in the Western Europe Representing Others in the Libro de buen amor