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In 1566, Queen Elizabeth I visited Oxford for the first time. She toured the colleges, gave lectures, and attended a play in her honor at Christ Church. She was presented with a companion—a handbook made specifically for her and now fully reproduced as Queen Elizabeth's Book of Oxford.

 

Newly translated, the book's Latin verse is written in a conversational tone as a lively discussion between the revered Queen and a knowledgeable guide. The volume also includes exquisite pen-and-ink drawings of Oxford's most famous buildings and an illuminating introduction by Louise Durning that places the text in its proper historical context. As Durning relates, Queen Elizabeth's Book of Oxford served several purposes, the most important of which was Oxford's interest in the Queen's potential patronage of a new college. Although Elizabeth never honored the request, she was eventually honored as the "founder" of Jesus College.

 

Queen Elizabeth's Book of Oxford offers a glimpse into the process of patronage during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will be treasured by scholars of Elizabethan history as well as by anyone interested in the historical development of universities around the world.

Martyred saints, Moors, Jews, viragoes, hermaphrodites, sodomites, kings, queens, and cross-dressers comprise the fascinating mosaic of historical and imaginative figures unearthed in Queer Iberia. The essays in this volume describe and analyze the sexual diversity that proliferated during the period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries when political hegemony in the region passed from Muslim to Christian hands.

To show how sexual otherness is most evident at points of cultural conflict, the contributors use a variety of methodologies and perspectives and consider source materials that originated in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Catalan, and Galician-Portuguese. Covering topics from the martydom of Pelagius to the exploits of the transgendered Catalina de Erauso, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive historical examination of the relations among race, gender, sexuality, nation-building, colonialism, and imperial expansion in medieval and early modern Iberia. Some essays consider archival evidence of sexual otherness or evaluate the use of “deviance” as a marker for cultural and racial difference, while others explore both male and female homoeroticism as literary-aesthetic discourse or attempt to open up canonical texts to alternative readings.

Positing a queerness intrinsic to Iberia’s historical process and cultural identity, Queer Iberia will challenge the field of Iberian studies while appealing to scholars of medieval, cultural, Hispanic, gender, and gay and lesbian studies.

 

Contributors. Josiah Blackmore, Linde M. Brocato, Catherine Brown, Israel Burshatin, Daniel Eisenberg, E. Michael Gerli, Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Mark D. Jordan, Sara Lipton, Benjamin Liu, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Michael Solomon, Louise O. Vasvári, Barbara Weissberger