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Studies in Book and Print Culture
The Prison of Love

The Prison of Love

Romance, Translation, and the Book in the Sixteenth Century

by Emily C. Francomano

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Series: Studies in Book and Print Culture

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

30 b&w illustrations

Digital download
9781442630529
Published: January 2018

Digital download
9781442630536
Published: January 2018

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

The Spanish romance Cárcel de amor blossomed into a transnational and multilingual phenomenon that captivated audiences throughout Europe at a time when literacy was expanding and print production was changing the nature of reading, writing, and of literature itself.

In The Prison of Love, Emily Francomano offers the first comparative study of this sixteenth-century work as a transcultural, humanist fiction. Blending literary analysis and book history, Francomano provides us with the richly textured history of the translations, material books, and artefacts that make this tale of love, letters, and courtly intrigue an invaluable prism through which the multifaceted world of sixteenth-century literary and book cultures are refracted.

Acknowledgements
List of Figures

Introduction: “A book that could not be read in peace”

Part One: Authors, Translators, Networks

Chapter 1: Cárcel de Amor, an Accessus Ad Auctores
Chapter 2: Translating Authorship
Chapter 3: “Easie Languages:” The Free and Faithful Translation of The Prison of Love

Part Two: Materialities

Chapter 4: Textual Material: Allegory and Material Epistolarity in The Prison of Love
Chapter 5: Prisons in Print: The Material Books
Chapter 6: Visual Rhetoric: Reading Printed Images in The Prison of Love, 1493 to 1546

Part Three: French Remediations

Chapter 7: ‘Private Treasures’: La Prison d’Amours Illuminated
Chapter 8: From Text to Textile: L’Histoire de Lérian et Lauréolle

Conclusion

Appendix A: The Translators’ Paratexts
Appendix B: Extant Printed Editions of The Prison of Love in Spanish, Italian, French and English 1492-1621
Appendix C: Extant Manuscripts of The Prison of Love

References

Emily C. Francomano is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University.

"In this highly original volume, Francomano traces the transformation of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (The Prison of Love) from a small-format, unillustrated book printed in Seville in 1492 to luxury French manuscripts and tapestries, considering other versions and translations along the way…Francomano’s theoretically engaged analysis of visual, material, and book culture will appeal to specialists in 16^th- and 17^th-century studies and beyond."
~P. W. Manning, Choice Connect October 2018 vol. 56 # 2

"Emily Francomano’s splendid case study of Carcel’s editorial, intellectual, material, and social history across Europe in the sixteenth century traces how it was transformed from a Castilian sentimental romance into a broad cultural multimedia phenomenon, which she calls The Prison of Love…[this] is a study that everyone interested in the history of literacy and material bibliography, and their effects on the formation of the early modern social and political imaginary, should read."
~E. Michael Gerli, University of Virginia, Renaissance Quarterly, vol 72 no 2