Liberal Arts Faculty Books
Love, Magic, and Control in Pre-Modern Iberian Literature
Files
Description
This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.
ISBN
9780367697204
Publication Date
7-30-2021
Relational Format
book
Department
Modern Languages
Recommended Citation
Menaldi, Veronica, "Love, Magic, and Control in Pre-Modern Iberian Literature" (2021). Liberal Arts Faculty Books. 248.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/248