The Libro de Alexandre is an epic poem about the life of Alexander the Great, written by an anonymous Spanish cleric in the thirteenth century. It is the most substantial poem (and almost certainly the first) composed in the learned cuaderna vía verse form and provides a unique insight into the intellectual world from which it sprang.
The Alexander Romance, a fabulous pseudo-history of the life of Alexander the Great compiled in late Antiquity, was one of the most popular secular texts in Europe during the Middle Ages. Its subsequent influence on the development of French and German literature has been significant. Professor Ross was a leading authority on the history and transmission of the Latin and French versions of the Romance, and his work has done much to clarify the spread of the Alexander legend in medieval European literature. This volume brings together all of David Ross's papers on the Alexander Romance, dealing separately with the Latin versions and their French and German reworkings. These include the first publication of a number of original texts in Latin and in German. There is also a valuable section on the development of the accompanying picture-cycle to the Romance, which derives from late-antique sources.
Explores the sophisticated ways in which medieval Castilian clerics and monarchs recreated stories set in the ancient, pagan past to shape cultural memory and monarchic culture in the Iberian kingdom.
Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come. Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
