From the Editor

I often say that it is an honor to be able to serve our readers and our profession as Editor of La coránica, but I am specially pleased and proud to have been able serve in the production of this volume. I feel that it gives the reader a good sense of who we are as a tightly connected and caring professional community. We have here a well-rounded and intellectually challenging collection of serious scholarship from around the world, with new colleagues publishing for the first time in La coránica and respected senior scholars who have returned to our pages to teach and share their latest research. From cover to cover we find a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches to medieval literature, history and culture, an intelligent review and introduction to a burgeoning field, and a rigorous assessment of recent scholarship on medieval Iberia. It has been extremely satisfying to help bring all these authors together in what I hope you will discover to be an engaging and balanced publication.

In 2012 we lost a cherished mentor, and one of our most inspiring scholars. The news of María Rosa Menocal’s death saddened us all, and as the new editor of La coránica I knew that we had to open our pages to share our sadness and celebrate the life of a beloved colleague. I want to express my sincere thanks to Lourdes Alvarez and Ryan Szpiech for putting together this eclectic cluster in memory of a pioneer who challenged all medievalists “to play the crucial role of restoring the faith of our society in the Academy’s traditional responsibility to provide intellectual leadership of a compelling public nature” (6). More than a critical cluster, the collection of postcards, poems and essays is a beautiful, and sometimes provocative expression of María Rosa’s capacious approach to medieval studies.

Turning now to the business of our journal, the Executive Committee of the Division of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures and Cultures met at the Modern Language Association convention in Vancouver, and among many agenda items we discussed a few points that I want to share with our readers. La coránica states that English and Spanish are its languages of publication, but as our Editor-at-Large, George Greenia, wrote in volume 35.2, “[t]he distinction between castellano and the other Iberian tongues of the Middle Ages is of limited utility” for our scope and mission, and the language in our Editorial Policy, particularly regarding “scholarship that transcends the linguistic and/or cultural borders of Spanish”, certainly gives us the “wiggle room” George had in mind for the future of La coránica (2). I encouraged the Executive Committee to go one step further, and we voted to suspend the language requirement all together. Our decision will certainly not be the last word on this question, and I always welcome your feedback, but for as long as my term as Editor lasts, I want to invite submissions in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan.

The Executive Committee continues to discuss the question of access. In particular, we explored the idea of allowing authors to store and share pre-production, revised typescripts of their work, but some of these terms are slippery, to say the least, so I will continue to ask for leadership from the Executive Committee on this issue. Meanwhile, I can clarify some of our policies here. Copyright for materials published in our pages is shared with the author. This means that authors need only ask for permission to reissue their work. Authors may also need to have permission from third parties for images and illustrations. Again, I welcome any and all feedback from our readers on this important question.

Finally, 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 Schofield of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Chair of the Department of...