Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Literatures

For more than a thousand years, numerous populations - Roman, Visigothic, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian - overtook the Iberian Peninsula. With each successive wave of conquest and settlement, the overlapping civilizations produced cultural crossroads. How could the new ruling elites incorporate pre-existing customs, languages, and religions into a new society? How could storytellers construct coherent narratives out of Iberia's discontinuous past? In this course, students will trace how diverse authors 'compiled' Iberia in the medieval and early modern periods. Compiling refers to the act of bringing together previously separate parts in a way that is coherent enough to give a sense of a unified whole. Students will closely analyze a wide variety of literary artifacts and consider their various political and social contexts. We will ask how the production and organization of poetry and prose enforced a sense of unity or separation among the different parts that comprised the Iberian world (Hispania, Sefarad, Al-Andalus, Castile, Catalonia, Portugal, Anahuac, Tawantinsuyu, etc.) Taught in Spanish.