Reinventing Medieval Iberian Studies

Abstract

When I was invited by my colleagues at the Hispanic Institute to participate in this centenary celebration, I accepted with delight and then felt almost immediate trepidation at the remit: a critical reappraisal of my field of expertise, one that is diachronic in nature and also discusses the field’s relationship to Hispanism more broadly. What, I thought, is my field? (or perhaps the emphasis should be on the personal pronoun: what is my field?). As much recent writing on the practice of medieval studies has suggested, it is a field (or assemblage of fields) determined by personal identities and desires. Although academic medievalists in the past may have prided themselves on the empiricism of their practices, much recent work has shown that the lines between medieval studies, as academic discipline, and medievalism, as learned amateur endeavor are often quite blurry.1 The same can of course be said for work in early modern studies, since the two periods overlap frequently in both academic practice and popular reception. So, first, I will position myself as I enter into this centennial dialogue: I identify as a medievalist, an early modernist, a comparatist, a translator, and as a recent convert to the digital humanities. I have used the prefixes hispano and Ibero before medievalist, and have in the past even called myself a “Hispanist,” though the historical implications of this term now make its use problematic.2 I work mainly with Castilian, Catalan, French, Italian, and English texts produced from the thirteenth to the seventeenthcenturies. My research focuses on the intersections of gender, material hermeneutics, and studies on adaptation and translation, including neomedievalisms. I have also dedicated much of my energies over the past decade to bringing texts from the Castilian tradition to the notice of wider readerships through translation into English. I have long felt that we as Hispanists, Iberianists, and Latin Americanists—whatever we call ourselves—have a great deal of both academically oriented and publicfacing work to do because of the overwhelming dominance of the discipline of English in medieval and early modern studies in the United States. To put it very and overly simply, in a country with such a large Spanishspeaking population, study of