From the Editor

Our journal was exceptionally active in 2013, thanks in large part to the hard work of our editorial staff and members of the MLA Division of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures. To begin with, we organized our first annual La corónica session at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, which will meet again this year, as usual, in April. With our annual gatherings in Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, our sponsored sessions at the annual convention of the Modern Languages Association, and now in Lexington, we continue to reach out to our colleagues and readers. Finding new scholars and meeting with old friends to share research and good company is one of the most gratifying parts of my job as Editor. Special thanks are due to Emily Francomano (Associate Editor), Isidro Rivera (Managing Editor), and Mark Johnston (Book Review Editor) for the initiative and planning that goes into all these events.

I had the pleasure of traveling to Buenos Aires last year to attend the Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, along with Emily Francomano, Simone Pinet, Ryan Giles and Lucia Binotti to speak about new trends in medieval studies, and the future of La corónica. In my brief talk I hope I impressed on the audience that La corónica is, as I put it, “una revista laica”, or a nondenominational journal. What I meant by this attempt at humor is that we will continue to be a publication that welcomes all the best research from multiple disciplines and theoretical approaches to the study of medieval Iberia. While this policy my lack the specialized focus we find today in so many new exciting publications on medieval studies, it does continue the spirit of inclusiveness that the founders of La corónica expressed in their early volumes.

We also discussed new avenues for increasing access to our pages, and I want to continue exploring options in open access with the Division and our readers. On this subject, I reminded the audience that our partnership with ProjectMUSE has greatly increased our readership online, and it provides a valuable service for its subscribers at variable rates for libraries around the world. Scholars can search over 200,000 articles, 500 journals and 20,000 books from nearly 200 presses, all from one online site, and the production value is excellent. But there are still more options for improving access, and I welcome your ideas and feedback. Readers of La corónica can visit us on Facebook, check our website (http://lacoronica.org/), and even send us a tweet (@La_coronica).

I also want to remind our readers of the recent call for papers from Jean Dangler, the Chair Designate of the Division, for our sponsored sessions at this year’s MLA convention in Vancouver. Our two guaranteed sessions are New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies and Objects of Memory in Medieval Iberia, and we have one non-guaranteed session that we expect will attract many good proposals: Remembering Medieval Iberia. I hope to see you all there.

As most of you know, there is sad news from 2013 as well. The lose of Samuel Armistead and Ángel Sáenz-Badillos is heartbreaking, and I want to give special thanks to Michelle Hamilton for writing such a beautiful necrology for Sam in this volume. I had the good fortune to be able to invite Sam to Ohio State to lecture at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His enthusiasm was contagious. He insisted on having lunch with graduate students, his lecture was magisterial, and his concluding rendition of Waltzing Matilda had the whole audience singing along. He is missed.

As a final acknowledgement, the senior editorial staff joins me in expressing our gratitude to Associate Dean Chad Allen and Dean Mark Shanda, College of Arts and Sciences, and to Glenn Martínez, Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University. We also thank Dean Danny Anderson, Associate Dean Ann Cudd of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Stuart Day, at the University of Kansas; and the...