A new translation of two medieval Spanish versions of the tale of Apollonius, a story central to the premodern literary imagination and a source for Shakespeare’s Pericles.

Incest, riddling, piracy, prostitution, shipwreck, Lazarus-like resuscitation, and seductive musical performances—the story of King Apollonius and his wanderings, with its riveting plot twists, has been told and retold in many languages since its late antique composition. No conventional romance hero, Apollonius proves his mettle not on the battlefield but through study, sport, music, and courtliness. The equally studious and courtly heroines of the romance—Luciana and Tarsiana, Apollonius’s wife and daughter—embark on their own adventures before the family reunites. Throughout, the king’s trials are cast as a Christian allegory of fortune.

Two Castillian versions are included in The Iberian Apollonius of Tyre. The thirteenth-century poem known as The Book of Apollonius, a creative adaptation by an unknown cleric, focuses on Apollonius as a pilgrim figure and Christianizes the narrative. The fifteenth-century prose Life and History of King Apollonius, a highly literal translation of the Latin Gesta Romanorum text by an anonymous Aragonese translator, is representative of vernacular humanism and linked with the genre of the short chivalric tale.

This volume presents new editions and English translations of these two complete, standalone medieval Spanish versions of the ancient legend.

With an empire stretching across central Mexico, unmatched in military and cultural might, the Aztecs seemed poised on the brink of a golden age in the early sixteenth century. But the arrival of the Spanish changed everything. Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture chronicles this violent clash of two empires and shows how modern Mestizo culture evolved over the centuries as a synthesis of Old and New World civilizations.

Colin MacLachlan begins by tracing Spain and Mesoamerica’s parallel trajectories from tribal enclaves to complex feudal societies. When the Spanish laid siege to Tenochtitlán and destroyed it in 1521, the Aztecs could only interpret this catastrophe in cosmic terms. With their gods discredited and their population ravaged by epidemics, they succumbed quickly to Spanish control—which meant submitting to Christianity. Spain had just emerged from its centuries-long struggle against the Moors, and zealous Christianity was central to its imperial vision. But Spain’s conquistadors far outnumbered its missionaries, and the Church’s decision to exclude Indian converts from priesthood proved shortsighted. Native religious practices persisted, and a richly blended culture—part Indian, part Christian—began to emerge.

The religious void left in the wake of Spain’s conquests had enduring consequences. MacLachlan’s careful analysis explains why Mexico is culturally a Mestizo country while ethnically Indian, and why modern Mexicans remain largely orphaned from their indigenous heritage—the adopted children of European history.

As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to the Americas are longstanding and complex. Intercolonial Intimacies interrogates the legacy of the Spanish Empire and the cultural hegemony of the United States by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin/o American writers and diplomats who often read one other and imagined themselves as kin. The relationships between the Philippines and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas were strengthened throughout the twentieth century by the consolidation of a discourse of shared, even familiar, identity. This distinct inherited intercolonial bond was already disengaged from their former colonizer and further used to defy new forms of colonialism. By examining the parallels and points of contact between these Filipino and Latin American writers, Paula C. Park elaborates on the “intercolonial intimacies” that shape a transpacific understanding of coloniality and latinidad.

Of the communal institutions elaborated by medieval Spaniards, the most significant and longest-lived were the irrigation communities which the Muslims had established centuries earlier in the Valencian region.

The objective of these remarkably democratic communities was justice and equity in water distribution; and the irrigators succeeded in combining traditional rules with consensual authority to maintain their systems with a minimum of conflict. Above the community level, however, regional powers including king, nobles, church, and town all sought to derive, at each other's expense, the maximum benefit from the available water supply. The resultant interplay of power politics was a sharp contrast to the democracy of the communities.

Thomas F. Glick has drawn on original documents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to present in this volume a thorough and lively study of Valencian irrigation and society. In Part One Glick describes medieval Valencian irrigation in the epoch of its fullest documentation (1238-4500), focusing on the institutional dynamics of both the local irrigation communities--those irrigating from a single main canal--and the larger regional units, the huertas. He examines the huerta environment and the administration of the irrigation communities and then discusses intracommunity conflict, the city's role in irrigation development, the search for new sources of water, and regional arrangements for irrigation.

Part Two is concerned generally with the spread of Islamic irrigation technology and, more specifically, with cultural diffusion and the persistence of cultural forms during the transition in Spain from Islamic to Christian rule. Here the author examines the antecedents of medieval Valencian irrigation on the basis of Islamic survivals in medieval Christian institutions and of comparative data from other Islamic irrigation systems. He also touches on aspects of acculturation and cultural transition that extend beyond the geographical and temporal bounds of this study, explaining that "the history of Spanish irrigation is but one example of the administrative creativity and genius for cultural synthesis which characterized Iberian culture at the dawn of themodern age."

Spanish Arabism was a touchstone of the major intellectual and political issues facing Spain as it emerged from its imperial past into its current form as a modern nation-state. James T. Monroe’s survey of four centuries of Spanish scholarship on the cultural history of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) establishes Spanish scholars on the forefront of European scholars confronting the Orientalism and colonialism at the heart of their national projects.

This reissue of James T. Monroe’s classic study of Spanish Arabism features a new foreword by Michelle M. Hamilton and David A. Wacks that offers an overview of its impact and of how the investigation of Spanish Arabism has blossomed since the publication of Monroe’s pathbreaking study.

This collection explores current issues in the phonology and morphology of the major Iberian languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish. Most of the essays are based on innovative theoretical frameworks and show how recent revolutions in theoretical ideas have affected the study of these languages.

Distinguished scholars address a diverse range of topics, including: stress assignment, phonological variability, distribution of rhotics, the imperative paradigm, focus, pluralization, spirantization, intonation, prosody, apocope, epenthesis, palatalization, and depalatalization.