Dr Rosa Vidal Doval

Profile

I work mainly on late medieval and Renaissance Spanish history, particularly religious minorities and heterodoxy. My research looks at the role of texts in establishing religious difference and in fomenting persecution, and in theorizing conversion to Christianity. My main research project at present is an edition and English translation of Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei in collaboration with Anthony John Lappin. I am also working on representations of religious conversion in the writings of Juan Luis Vives and the uses of Visigothic law in late medieval Castile.

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach modules on medieval Spanish literature; comparative medieval literature; and medieval Spanish history.

Research

Research Interests:

I am the director of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures and one of the co-directors of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Publications

Books

• 'Misera Hispania': Jews and 'Conversos' in Alonso de Espina's 'Fortalitium fidei', Medium Aevum Monographs, 31 (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2013).

Edited volumes and special issues

• Hacia una poética del sermón, co-edited with Rebeca Sanmartí­n Bastida & Barry Taylor (= Revista de poética medieval, 24 (2010)).

• Las metamorfosis de la alegorí­a: discurso y sociedad en la Pení­nsula Ibérica desde la Edad Media hasta la Edad Contemporánea, co-edited with Rebeca Sanmartí­n Bastida (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert; Iberoamericana: Madrid, 2005).

Articles and book chapters

• ‘Discernment of Spirits and Spiritual Authority: Tractatus de vita spirituali and Its Afterlife’, in Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. by María Morrás, Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and Yonsoo Kim, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, 79 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 112–35.
• ‘“Qui ex Iudeis sunt”: Visigothic Law and the Discrimination against conversos in Late Medieval Spain’, in Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Pre-Modern Iberia and Beyond, ed. by Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazier-Eytan, Numen, 164 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 60–85.
• ‘Bishops and the Court: The Castilian Episcopacy and Conversos, 1450–1465’, in Dominus Episcopus: Medieval Bishops in their Dioceses, ed. by Anthony J. Lappin & Elena Balzamo, KVHAA Konferenser, 95 (Stockholm: Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2018), pp. 217–40.
• ‘Modelos de asesinato ritual: La influencia de Fortalitium fidei en el caso del Santo Niño de la Guardia’, in Comunicación y Conflicto en la Cultura Política Peninsular, siglos xiii al xv, ed. José Manuel Nieto Soria & Óscar Villarroel González (Madrid: Sílex, 2018), pp. 169–87.
• 'La matriz medieval de la disidencia en Castilla: la herejí­a judaizante y la controversia sobre los conversos', in Disidencia religiosa en Castilla la Nueva en el siglo XVI, ed. by Ignacio J. Garcí­a Pinilla (Toledo: Almud, 2013), pp. 13-28.
• "'Nos soli sumus christiani': Conversos in the Texts of the Toledo Rebellion of 1449", in Medieval Hispanic Studies in Memory of Alan Deyermond, ed. Andrew M. Beresford, Louise M. Haywood & Julian Weiss (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013), pp. 215-36.
• 'Predicación y persuasión: Vicente Ferrer en Castilla, 1411-1412', in Hacia una poética del sermón, co-edited with Rebeca Sanmartí­n Bastida & Barry Taylor (= Revista de poética medieval, 24 (2010)), 225-43.
• 'Erotismo, amor y violencia en Celestina: consideraciones a la luz de La llama doble', Celestinesca, 33 (2009), 233-45.
• 'El muro en el Oeste y La Fortaleza de la Fe: alegorí­as de la exclusión de minorí­as en la Castilla del siglo XV', in Las metamorfosis de la alegorí­a: discurso y sociedad en la Pení­nsula Ibérica desde la Edad Media hasta la Edad Contemporánea, co-edited with Rebeca Sanmartí­n Bastida (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert; Iberoamericana: Madrid, 2005), pp. 143-68.

Translations

• Alberto Montaner Frutos, Robert E. Lerner, 'The Aljamiado Version', in John of Rupescissa, Vade Mecum in Tribulatione: Translated into Medieval Vernaculars, ed. by Robert E. Lerner and Pavlína Rychterová, Dies nova, 4 (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2019), pp. 277–95.

Supervision

I welcome applications from candidates wishing to undertake research in:

- Late medieval and Renaissance Spanish history, particularly religious, cultural, and intellectual history

- Late medieval religious minorities and heterodoxy

Current PhD students:

Sahin Baykal - 'Ibn Ḥazm’s literalism and his concept of Islamic Legal Theory'

Abtin Eslahpazir Esfandabadi - tbc

Thomas Hendrik Kaal - ‘Religious Diversity and Religious Scepticism: Doubt and Unbelief among Castilian Converts in the Late Middle Ages’

Past PhD students:

Bert Carlstrom - ‘Shepherding the Stranger: Pastoral Care of New Christians in Fifteenth-Century Castile’

Catherine Maguire - ‘Motherhood in Early Modern Spain’

D.C. McDougall - ‘Linguistic Variation in La fazienda de Ultramar’

Cecil Reid - ‘A Society in Transition: Jews in the Kingdom of Castile from Settlement to Expulsion (1248–1492)’