Winner of the 2021 La corónicaInternational Book Award:
Sol Miguel-Prendes
Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain
(U North Carolina P, 2019)
- Sol Miguel-Prendes is Professor of Spanish at Wake Forest University. She conducts research in Medieval Spanish literature with a particular focus on sentimental fiction, the Latin tradition, and contemplative practices and pilgrimage for which she received an ACLS Contemplative Practice Fellowship (information from university profile).
In Narrating Desire, Miguel-Prendes explores how the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century “sentimental romances” in Iberia adopted the form of Boethius’Consolation of Philosophy and the many other medieval moralistic penitential works it inspired, but did so in order to express very different literary and social realities, including erotic desire, vernacular modes of expression, court culture, and the emergence of print culture and private reading. Miguel-Prendes works across several linguistic and geographic communities of the Peninsula, including the Catalan, Castilian and Latin, and notes how older medieval models of masculine, clerical penitential fiction were adapted in the era of early print by a larger vernacular-speaking audience (consisting of both sexes) who imbued the fictional dream vision of Boethius with private desires.
Traditionally, the award is announced at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, which takes place on the campus of Western Michigan University. In 2021, when the congress was held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic, the award has been announced on the Congress website (https://wmich.edu/