Summer Reading: A Blog

Lauren MacDonald

Tag: sixteenth century

  • Frantic Accounts of Failed Exploits

    Reading: Kimberly C. Borchard, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715 (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021).

    This book has told the story of how colonial Appalachia emerged from the Spanish myth of Apalache, which quickly dissociated from the very real Apalachee people of the Florida panhandle in the early sixteenth century and migrated — along with the legions of European explorers who sought its fabled riches — north and east into the sprawling eastern mountains of the contemporary United States. This migration was the product of a protracted rivalry among three European empires, narrated in no less than five languages, as generation after generation of would-be conquistadors and fortune-seekers composed frantic accounts of their failed exploits to herald the imminent discovery of indescribable wealth just around the bend in the next river, just at the summit of the next mountain. [153]

  • The Dog of Alba

    Reading: Ana L. Méndez-Oliver, “Animal Imagery and Racial Marking in Coplas Del Perro de Alva,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 56, no. 2 (2026): 371–93. https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-12354374

    This article analyzes the fifteenth-century story of a mythic black dog who devoured the Jews of the Spanish town of Alba de Tormes. While the article ultimately concludes that the dog probably symbolized the hardline Dominican order, I liked how it foregrounds the weird ambiguity of how Christians saw dogs — beloved as man’s best friend, abjured as an antisemitic symbol — in the context of medieval Spain.

    “While Coplas del perro de Alva portrays the dog as the protector of Christians in the town of Alba de Tormes, its exemplary depiction is questionable, as it exposes the fissures of the boundaries between human-nonhuman as well as the human inhabitants of the town, Christians and Jews. Indeed, the poem presents a story in which the lines between human law and cultural practices, human and animal behavior, and dog as loyal protector or menacing beast are blurred.” [377]