Search results for ""Author Dr. Rachel Scott""

Explores Celestina's role as a key interlocutor in European literature and thought in the context of debates about the human condition. Winner of the 2015 Publication Prize awarded by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. Celestina by Fernando de Rojas is a canonical work of late medieval Spanish literature and one ofthe earliest European "best-sellers". However, while we have clear evidence of its popularity and influence, scholarship has not adequately answered the question of why it continued to hold such appeal for early modern audiences.This book explores Celestina's role as a key interlocutor in European literature and thought; it argues that the work continued to be meaningful because it engaged with one of the period's defining preoccupations: the human condition, an idea often conceptualised in pro et contra debates about the misery and dignity of man. Taking an ideological and comparative approach that focuses on Celestina's reception in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy, it reads Rojas's work against a network of texts that were translated and printed concurrently in both peninsulas yet which have not previously been examined in depth or detail alongside it, including Baldassare Castiglione'sIl Cortegiano, Fernán Pérez de Oliva's Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre, and Pietro Aretino's Vita delle puttane. Each chapter explores themes common to sixteenth-century debates about the human condition, such as self-knowledge, self-fashioning, the formative role of language, the tension between freedom and constraint, as well as the access to knowledge provided by vernacular fiction in the context of early modern censorship. Rachel Scott is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's College London.

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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.

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