Cultures of the Fragment

Cultures of the Fragment places fragments at the center of reading and non-reading uses of Iberian manuscripts. The book contests the notion that fragments came about accidentally, arguing that most fragments were created on purpose, as a result of a wide range of practical, intellectual and spiritual uses of manuscript material.

Heather Bamford is an assistant professor of Spanish at George Washington University.

"Such a study in English that discusses many of the unique factors of manuscript and book culture in medieval and early modern Iberia is rare."

Simone Pinet, Cornell University:

"This is an original approach to a wide variety of texts produced in medieval and early modern Iberia that opens up interesting questions and lines of investigation, with a number of sparkling insights left for further exploration."

Matthew Bailey, Department of Romance Languages, Washington and Lee University:

"Insightful and engaging, Cultures of the Fragment allows for a much wider and more complex understanding of medieval and early modern Spanish literature, reflecting as it does a fragmented cultural heritage, a metonym of sorts of the society that produced these texts."

Michelle Hamilton, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota:

"Cultures of the Fragment is an ambitious study that covers a lot of territory chronologically, from Isidore of Seville to modern museum exhibits and from eleventh-century Hispano-Jewish lyric to the sociocultural realities of seventeenth-century Moriscos. The subject matter is a fascinating and productive category of analysis for the medieval Iberian literary and cultural tradition. With insightful close readings, Heather Bamford offers a theoretical way of framing that transcends a chronological or linguistic-based study."