Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation.

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation

Agency and Appetite for religious Song: Vexilla regis prodeunt and its first thousand years

When James Joyce made two of his characters in ‘‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’’ refer approvingly to ‘‘Vexilla regis prodeunt’’ he was following in the footsteps of a long line of the Latin text’s admirers. Since Anglo-Saxon times English audiences had clearly appreciated the sonorous majesty of this processional hymn, largely because of the solemnity and craft with which it celebrated the nature of Christ’s martial triumph and sacrifice. This article offers a snapshot of different kinds of English appetite for Venantius Fortunatus’ famous religious song for the first thousand years of its existence, from the Anglo-Saxon period through to the mid sixteenth century.