I am a lecturer in the English Department at The Ohio State University, Mansfield, who teaches courses on Shakespeare and the literature and culture of early modern Europe. I have a PhD in medieval and early modern English and Spanish literature with an emphasis on global Shakespeare, the history of the novel, comparative literature, and transnational approaches to the Renaissance.
My research uncovers Anglo-Spanish relations in Tudor and Jacobean England, with particular attention to writers’ use of chivalric discourse to describe the ideological binaries of good and evil during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). This war, which was never formally declared, took the form of a series of protracted battles between England and Spain, including the infamous clash of the English navy with the Spanish Armada in 1588, which contemporary thinkers described as a new crusade for Christendom.
Beginning in part with Margaret Tyler’s 1578 translation of Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra’s Espejo de prínciples y cavalleros (The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood), Iberian romances of chivalry not only became popular on the English print market, but also influenced prominent writers including Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. I attribute the turn to Iberian romances to both contemporary Anglo-Spanish politics, which increased Spanish literacy and drew attention to (and concerns about) Spain, and also to the qualities of chivalric romance that made it particularly amenable to politicization. As quasi-histories that blended reality with fantasy, these texts provided important cultural capital for negotiating social problems and racial anxieties. Writers of chivalric romance could approvingly recall a bygone (but, in fact, illusory) world under medieval feudalism that was organized according to clearly defined class barriers and legible binaries of good and evil. However, because of their idealized tone, mass appeal, and Iberian roots, Spanish romances of chivalry were also regarded as déclassé among certain members of the literary elite even as prominent prose writers, poets, and playwrights frequently drew influence from these texts, especially The Mirrour of Knighthood and Amadis de Gaule. My research thus engages with Anglo-Spanish politics and literary and cultural exchanges, Black Legend discourse, literary history and the development of the European novel, and translation history and theory during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.