Literacy, Space, and Cultural Production in Late Medieval Iberia

FAIN: FT-51815-03

Ana Gomez-Bravo
Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN 47907-2040)

My project studies some key aspects of the cultural context that facilitates a thriving literary activity in late-medieval Iberia. It takes into consideration the intersections of politics and society, and their relationship with developments in literacy, reading and writing modes, book production, and the practices of authorship. A central argument for this study is my contention that literary and cultural activities were tightly dependent on the differentiation and diversification of a public and private space at the end of the Middle Ages. This fostered and was fostered by a growth in literacy and a shift in the spatialization of the court that responded to social and political changes.

Associated Products

Textual Agency: Writing Culture and Social Networks in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Book)
Title: Textual Agency: Writing Culture and Social Networks in Fifteenth-Century Spain
Author: Ana N. Gomez-Bravo
Abstract: Textual Agency examines the massive proliferation of poetic texts in fifteen-century Spain, focusing on the important yet little-known cancionero poetry--the lartest poetic corpus of the European Middle Ages. She situates this cultural production within its social, political, and material contests. She places the different forms of document production fostered by a shifting political and uran model alongside the rise in literacy and access to reading materials and spaces. At the core of the book lies an examination of both the materials of writing and how human agents used and transformed them, giving way to a textual agency that pertains not only to writers but to the inscribed paper. She explores how authorial and textual agency were competing forces in the midst of an era marked by the institution of the Innquistion, the advent of the absolutist state, the growth of cities, and the constitution of the Spanish nation.
Year: 2013
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781442647206
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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