Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. The Scope of Illegitimacy

   • Geraldine Hazbun

   Pages 1-22

3. Epic Illegitimacy: The Cantar de Mio Cid and Las Mocedades de Rodrigo

   • Geraldine Hazbun

   Pages 23-73

4. Split Identity: Illegitimacy in the Romancero

   • Geraldine Hazbun

   Pages 75-142

5. Narrating Illegitimacy: The Novelas ejemplares

   • Geraldine Hazbun

   Pages 143-200

6. Lope de Vega’s Bastard Heroes: Pieces and Traces

   • Geraldine Hazbun

   Pages 201-258

7. Back Matter

   Pages 259-271

   PDF

Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society’s definition of what is acceptable. Through the medieval epic poems Cantar de Mio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo, the ballad tradition, Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, and Lope de Vega’s theatre, Geraldine Hazbun demonstrates that illegitimacy and legitimacy are interconnected and flexible categories defined in relation to marriage, sex, bodies, ethnicity, religion, lineage, and legacy. Both categories are subject to the uncertainties and freedoms of language and fiction and frequently constructed around axes of quantity and completeness. These literary texts, covering a range of illegitimate figures, some with an historical basis, demonstrate that truth, propriety, and standards of behaviour are not forged in the law code or the pulpit but in literature’s fluid system of producing meaning.

• illegitimacy
• legitimacy
• bastard
• pre-modern Spain
• middle ages
• medieval europe
• the Inquisition
• early Iberia
• spatial literary studies

“From the point of view of a historian like myself who works on illegitimacy, this is a fascinating and valuable book. Hazbun has captured the essence of illegitimacy and the fact that it is ambiguous and can be reshaped by parents, children, families, and society. … Her well-written analysis of all these different texts makes the literature she is using accessible to non-literary scholars and to students who might be interested in exploring this challenging theme.” (Grace E. Coolidge, Speculum, Vol. 98 (4), October, 2023) “This book offers a timely and illuminating insight into the theme of illegitimacy in early Spanish literature—a topic that, to date, has been almost completely overlooked by scholarship. Focusing on the Spanish epic and ballad traditions before moving on to discuss the treatment of illegitimacy in Lope de Vega and Cervantes, the book offers a judicious and methodical approach to its subject, forging a series of powerful and persuasive links between texts that have not yet been considered in parallel. It is likely in view of this to become a standard point of reference for the elaboration of future work in this area.” (Andrew M. Beresford, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of Durham, UK)

• University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

  Geraldine Hazbun

Geraldine Hazbun is Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at the University of Oxford and Ferreras Willetts Fellow in Spanish at St Anne’s College, Oxford, UK. She is the author of Treacherous Foundations: Betrayal and Collective Identity in Early Spanish Epic, Chronicle, and Drama (2009) and Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Medieval Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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