2009-

Prisons of Love: Translation and the Matter of Romance in the Sixteenth Century is an interdisciplinary exploration of the fortunes of a late medieval romance that circulated in Spanish, Italian, French, and English, in monolingual and bilingual editions, in print, manuscript, and even tapestry. Over 70 editions of the now all-but-forgotten international bestseller The Prison of Love appeared across Europe between 1492 and the turn of the seventeenth century. In this book, I seek to account for the startling cultural penetrance of The Prison of Love, first composed by Diego de San Pedro in the 1480s as Cárcel de amor for the entertainment of the Castilian elite in the Court of the Catholic Monarchs. It is an innovative and formally hybrid work—combining allegory, dialogue, debate, letters, and the first-person narration of a character called “The Author”—that tells the story of an ill-fated courtly lover, Leriano, who seeks the favor of a Macedonian princess, Laureola. One of the goals of this project is to increase understanding of the interconnectedness of literary culture in the European Renaissance. Even though the romance originated in Spain, my study treats it not so much as a “Spanish” work, but rather as a European vernacular cultural text. I read the romance and its translations contributing to the wider currents of humanist poetics, but theirs is a melancholy humanism tinged with dystopian visions of the futility of eloquence. Just as translations themselves challenge traditional disciplinary categories of national literatures and authorship, the study of the transmission and adaptations of The Prison of Love also challenges book history’s conception of text-objects and material texts. In order to meet such challenges head-on, this book blends the methodologies of book and literary histories with translation and reception theories. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to understand The Prison of Love not only as a captivating narrative, but also as a series of book-objects, each of which holds its own fascination.

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