In this book Michelle Hamilton meticulously examines a fifteenth-century “Judeo-Iberian” manuscript of romance and aljamiado Hebrew inscriptions on philosophy, poetry, and biblical commentary in order to fit it into an emerging new understanding of Iberian intellectual activity during the turbulent century between the mass conversions of 1391 and the expulsion in 1492. The manuscript, Parma 2666, was copied by and for readers who were educated in Iberian-Jewish philosophy and also cultivated Romance poetry in Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. Readers and copyists subtracted from the manuscript and added to it, until it is now a miscellany in 207 folios of seven distinct works. The largest of them, the Visión deletable, is an extensive allegorical dialogue, composed around 1450, between Reason and Understanding about ascent toward knowledge of God. The work is attributed to the converso author and graduate in theology from the University of Salamanca, Alfonso de Torre. The selection of Judeo-Andalusian philosophy in the Visión provides keys to the short pieces, as Hamilton demonstrates.

The longest of the short texts is a collection of Senecan sayings that Alfonso de Cartagena, a famous converso who became an eminent churchman, translated as Proverbios de Seneca or as Segundo Libro de la Providencia. Several very brief works include four fragmentary Hebrew and romance glossaries of Aristotelian philosophical terms and a two-page Arte a la memoria. There are also a one-page mystic poem, an eight-page section of the Danza general de la muerte, and a page of poetic debate taken from the well-known fifteenth-century poem Cancionero de Baena. Four other works that appear in the table of contents were removed when the collection was rebound.

The manuscript gives “a complex portrait of vernacular Iberian culture that defies the linguistic, national and confessional borders that often constrain modern scholars” (xxiv). Hamilton closely compares romance versions with the multilingual texts in the Parma manuscript. Earlier historical scholarship disregarded such texts or treated them as curious exceptions to linguistic or religious norms, but Hamilton’s resourceful, fine-grained tracing of the readings turns them into the profile of a distinct and influential group of Iberian readers and writers. Her thorough analyses of the texts combine to reconstruct the culture of the readers and writers who traveled among Iberian and European courts, “where Latinate, Italianate humanism was making inroads, but who . . . retained elements of the Judeo-Iberian philosophic tradition and the late-medieval modes of Iberian cancioneros” (xxiv). Comparison of the mixed-language texts in this manuscript with romance variants shows how these copyists occasionally distinguished their beliefs from Christian doctrine, as in passages where a prophet angel replaces a mention of Christ, or where the angel of death is more a figure from Jewish and Andalusian Arabic literature than a counterpart to the skeletons of Northern European dances of death.

Historians have long recognized that Jews and conversos were prominent movers of a distinctive humanism that included them among the disciples of Seneca, the ancestor and precedent for all writers who were loyal to Iberian rulers and states. Hamilton’s tracing of the assumptions implied in even the tiniest fragment in the manuscript prepares us to discern the ways that their background could be harmonized with whichever strategies for loyalty or escape they later took. Along with the contemporary scholars whom Hamilton frequently cites, her book provides a wide and deep understanding of the figures on whom the discussion touches. Her intention and execution are excellent, but evaluation of the work requires mention of the less successful qualities. The many sources in several languages and medieval dialects expose the work to risk of errors. None that I have found mislead the intended audience of the book or damage a reader’s confidence in the work. Hamilton has restored to Iberian history a distinctive group of influential scholars whom biographical study long missed.