Montserrat Piera – författare

With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how Islamic and eastern cultural threads were weaved, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the “Renaissance.” Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and English works from a truly comparative and non-parochial perspective, to explore the transfer through travel of cultural and religious values and artistic and scientific practices, from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.During this period travel, military conquest and trade through the Mediterranean placed Western European citizens and merchants in contact with Islamic and eastern technology and culture, and travel narratives illustrate the converging and pragmatic dynamics of cultural acceptance. Perhaps the spread of “Renaissance” values and beliefs might have followed a trajectory the reverse of what is generally assumed, and that salient aspects of Renaissance culture traveled from the fringes of Islamic and eastern cultures to the midst of hegemonically Christian polities.This book is available as Open Access.

This book is devoted to medieval Iberian women, readers and writers. Focusing on the stories and texts women heard, visually experienced or read, and the stories that they rewrote, the work explores women’s experiences and cultural practices and their efforts to make sense of their place within their familial networks and communities. The study is based on two methodological and interpretive threads: a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and, a study of women’s writing, or, more precisely, women’s textualities, as a process of creating words but also acts, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected.