In The Epic of Juan Latino, Elizabeth R. Wright tells the story of Renaissance Europe’s first black poet and his epic poem on the naval battle of Lepanto, Austrias Carmen (The Song of John of Austria). Piecing together the surviving evidence, Wright traces Latino’s life in Granada, Iberia’s last Muslim metropolis, from his early clandestine education as a slave in a noble household to his distinguished career as a schoolmaster at the University of Granada. When intensifying racial discrimination and the chaos of the Morisco Revolt threatened Latino’s hard-won status, he set out to secure his position by publishing an epic poem in Latin verse, the Austrias Carmen, that would demonstrate his mastery of Europe’s international literary language and celebrate his own African heritage. Through Latino’s remarkable, hitherto untold story, Wright illuminates the racial and religious tensions of sixteenth-century Spain and the position of black Africans within Spain’s nascent empire and within the emerging African diaspora.

In Mulatto · Outlaw · Pilgrim · Priest, John K. Moore, Jr. presents the first in-depth study, critical edition, and scholarly translation of His Majesty’s Representative v. José Soller, Mulatto Pilgrim, for Impersonating a Priest and Other Crimes. This legal case dates to the waning days of the Hapsburg Spanish empire and illuminates the discrimination those of black-African ancestry could face—that Soller did face while attempting to pass freely on his pilgrimage from Lisbon to Santiago de Compostela and beyond. This bilingual edition and study of the criminal trial against Soller is important for reconstructing his journey and for revealing at least in part the de facto and de jure treatment of mulattos in the early-modern Iberian Atlantic World.

Discusses and illustrates 300 of the most important manuscripts, books, maps, prints, photographs, and ephemera held at the New York Public Library.

"In the first book to examine the verse produced by Tudor and Stuart monarchs, eight Renaissance scholars demonstrate how monarchs used verse to reflect on their monarchic status and to assert royal policy. As almost all of the poetry of these regal authors is inaccessible, the volume includes a selection of their verse in modernized and newly edited texts, offering an ideal study volume for specialists and the classroom. The contributors examine the nexus of poetry and power from an unconventional New Historicist perspective: from that of the person in power who writes poetry rather than that of the suitor of power. Their approaches to the subject are interdisciplinary, combining literary studies, women's studies, history, the history of sexuality, and manuscript studies." --