Alone Together

Alone Together reinterprets the explosion of sentimental poetry and prose in fifteenth-century Iberia.

Henry Berlin is an assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

"Every chapter of Alone Together is well-documented in sixty pages of notes and Bibliography… An extremely detailed and well-designed index usefully helps locate discussions of individual authors, poems, and concepts. For any student of late-medieval Iberian literature and culture, Alone Together will reward careful reading."

Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara:

"In this tour-de-force, Henry Berlin tackles two of the most difficult genres in late medieval Iberian literature, lyric and sentimental fiction, through the analysis of concepts such as ‘passion,’ ‘affect,’ ‘sentiment,’ ‘feeling,’ and ‘emotion,’ all of them notoriously hard to pin down. He does a superb job analyzing the classical and etymological roots of these terms and their development throughout the Middle Ages. What is more important, his book becomes a defence of the field of Iberian Studies. That is, he pays attention to the troubadour revival and love literature in Castile, Aragon, and Portugal at the end of the Middle Ages as stemming from the political and cultural interconnections of these regions. Dynastic history and royal patronage show the polyglot relations at play in the development of medieval Iberian literature."

Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, Professor of Spanish, University of Washington:

"A rich, nuanced, illuminating study of the role of emotion in one of the most prolific poetic periods, set against the backdrop of a complex political landscape. The depth of analysis and its wide-reaching scope make this an important, impactful study."

Jean Dangler, Professor of Spanish, Tulane University:

"Henry Berlin’s book challenges us to take stock of and reframe the ways in which late medieval courtly writers of the Iberian Peninsula employed the passions in their texts. Berlin’s skilful treatment of the passions makes a crucial contribution to theories of the emotions and truly enlivens that familiar debate. His beautiful study breaks new ground in the examination of intersections between literatures across several Iberian languages and is sure to be a touchstone for work on late medieval Iberian courtly literature."