The term "queer" of the first part of the title does not refer only to homosexuality, as the second part more adequately expresses: queerness in this collection of essays refers to any kind of "otherness," from race, religion, and culture to geography and other marginalities outside the norm of the prevailing ethos. As Blackmore and Hutcheson explain in their introduction to this volume, Spain has been since Roman times "on the margins of Europe's consciousness, always the site of difference, always 'queer' Iberia." (2)
The fifteen essays in this collection propose new ways of regarding texts that are historical as well as literary, and are grouped into five general sections. The following is a necessarily brief account of the substance of each of the essays.
"Queering Iberia" is the first division of the book, and it begins with Mark D. Jordan's "Saint Pelagius, Ephebe and Martyr," which sees in the medieval accounts of Pelagius's martyrdom for refusing the sexual advances of the caliph of Cordoba a condemnation of same-sex desire, which was depicted as an enemy of Christianity imposed from an outside culture, and therefore repulsive. In Benjamin Liu's "'Affined to love the Moor': Sexual Misalliance and Cultural Mixing in the Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dezir," the author contemplates these slanderous texts that depict Moors not only as lascivious but possibly homosexual, thereby emphasizing both the religious and the sexual "otherness" of this culture, reproached for its deviation from the norms of Christian faith and behavior. Catherine Brown takes on fifteenth-century author Alfonso Martinez de Toledo in "Queer Representation in the Arcipreste de Talavera, or, The maldezir de mugeres is a drag," and finds that in the conflicted pleasure he takes in representing the repugnant speech of persons he deems outside the sexual order of society, the author has composed a text that "in fact resembles its made-up hypocrites, effeminates, and women" (95).
The second section is entitled "Iberian Masculinities." In her essay "'Tanquam effeminatum': Pedro II of Aragon and the Gendering of Heresy in the Albegensian Crusade," Sara Lipton explains that because this monarch sided with the Languedocian nobility and not with the papal forces during the Albegensian crusade, his detractors accused him of effeminacy, heresy, and the inability to control his "sexual and marital life" (116), due to his love for a married noblewoman of Toulouse. Louise O. Vasvari once again tackles Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita in her "The Semiotics of Phallic Aggression and Anal Penetration as Male Agonistic Ritual in the Libro de buen amor." She reconsiders four episodes of the book (the debate between the Greeks and Romans; the fate of the protagonist as he tries to attract the baker girl Cruz; Pitas Payas's return home; and the meeting in the sierra with the serranas) and concludes that in all these cases the male figures suffer humiliation at the hands of other men, and the victims "are much more humiliated than females would be in an equivalent role" (147). Roberto J. Gonzalez-Casanovas examines aristocratic male friendships in "Male Bonding as Cultural Construction in Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, and Juan Manuel: Homosocial Friendship in Medieval Iberia" and finds that these authors present such relationships as an ideal that transcends marriage and the family.
"Sources of Sodom" is the third division of this collection. Josiah Blackmore's "Poets of Sodom" returns to the cantigas d'escarnho e mal dezir for a study of thirty-six of them that contain same-sex sensual images, and observes that "these poems are at once indictful and playfully tolerant, double voiced, moving freely between the poles of abhorrence and indulgence." (196) Gregory S. Hutcheson turns to historical texts in "Desperately Seeking Sodom: Queerness in the Chronicles of Alvaro de Luna." He describes how Luna's perceived domination over Juan II of Castile was attributed by his contemporaries to his sexual perversion, all of which placed on him the blame for the numerous political, economic and social ills of fifteenth-century Castile. Daniel Eisenberg posits an unusual, if plausible, definition of "loco amor" in his "Juan Ruiz's Heterosexual 'Good Love.'" Instead of the generally accepted theory that mad love is the uncontrolled love of women, Eisenberg theorizes that it is Muslim homosexual love, necessarily abhorrent to the Christian ideal of sexual normalcy.
The section "Normativity and Nationhood" begins with Michael Solomon's essay entitled "Fictions of Infection: Diseasing the Sexual Other in Francesco Eiximenis's Lo llibre de les dones." Solomon finds that this treatise on disease and moral behavior strongly links sodomy and contagion, and that the author "effectively lodges sexual otherness firmly within the category of infectious diseases." (286) The sexual preference of Enrique IV of Castile is the subject of Barbara Weissberger's "'A tierra, puto!': Alfonso de Palencia's Discourse of Effeminacy." Weissberger shows not only that the king's perceived sexual deviance earned him accusations of impotency and ineffectiveness, but that the seeming "masculinity" of Isabel (that is, her strength and political ability), who succeeded him in the throne, was also cause for concern to chronicler Alfonso de Palencia. Linde M. Brocato contemplates sex, gender and the state in her "'Tened por espejo su fin': Mapping gender and Sex in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Spain." About the three works she studies, Brocato concludes that "in Laberinto [de Fortuna], Mena's epic call to Juan II to take up (phallic) arms serves as antidote and discipline to combat sexual ills and out-of- control women; in Celestina, the chaos that swallows up Pleberio's world proceeds from and is embodied in women, whatever their relationship to men. In Carajicomedia, the epic battle is between the sexes^Ê in which the male sex always loses, and the terrain it maps is a violent area of violation." (353) The last part of this book is called "The Body and the State." E. Michael Gerli reconsiders the two diametrically opposed descriptions of Melibea in "Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in Celestina." He demonstrates how Calisto's verbal portrait of Melibea corresponds to "aristocratic empowerment as it stands as an icon of lofty sensibilities, power, and courtly propriety," (377) while Elisa's and Areusa's depiction of her as physically grotesque and only improved by the use of cosmetics and rich clothing, is an expression of their resentment toward her social class, which is an undercurrent of Spanish society in general at the end of the fifteenth century. In "From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain," Mary Elizabeth Perry addresses the case of Catalina de Erauso, the so-called nun-lieutenant who escaped the convent, made her way to the New World, and fought as a man while masquerading as one as well. Perry sees Erauso as a metaphor for the Spanish colonial world, as s/he "shaped his own identity, established autonomy, and crossed into new territory." (413) Israel Burshatin takes up a most unusual case of hermaphroditism in "Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain," in which he reviews the circumstances of Eleno de Cespedes, born a mulata slave who claimed that while giving birth to a child, she also gave birth to a penis through her strenuous efforts. She later married a woman, but was discovered and tried by the Inquisition, who found her guilty of making a mockery of marriage, but she became "a fable of the malleability of genders, bodies, and desires." (451)