Twomey, Lesley K. The Sacred Space of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Hispanic Literature, from Gonzalo de Berceo to Ambrosio Montesino

Abstract

Twomey, Lesley K. The Sacred Space of the Virgin Mary in Medieval Hispanic Literature, from Gonzalo de Berceo to Ambrosio Montesino. Woodbridge: Tamesis (Monografias A, 381), 2019. 484 pp. £70.00 / $115.00. ISBN 978–1–8556–6323–7. This ambitious and important monograph charts the ways in which medieval Spanish authors, writing in Castilian and Catalan, expressed and explored Marian attributes using the language and characteristics of given places and spaces. Twomey begins her study in the mid-thirteenth century, with Berceo and Alfonso the Wise, and passes through an array of poets, particularly those who feature in cancioneros from the late fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries, examining also some significant prose works, such as Sor Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi. The volume is not, however, patterned upon strict chronological lines, being structured instead in four thematic blocks: ‘Liturgy and Place’, ‘Places of Growth and Irrigation’, ‘Places of Entry and Exit’, and ‘Spaces...