Escritura somática opens with an account of the miracle that followed Saint Ignatius of Antioch's death, when the name of Jesus was found inscribed in golden letters on each of the parts into which the saint's heart was divided for its postmortem examination. The miracle, taken from a fifteenth-century Portuguese compilation of sermons, encapsulates the conceptual framework of this collective volume, an exploration of the materiality of writing—that is, of the textuality of the body and the materiality of the text—in medieval and early modern Iberian literature. As the editors explain in their introduction, the book aims to map out a comprehensive episteme in which body and writing share the same materiality and signify each other. Such a broad framework allows for the analysis of the intersection of body and text in all its multiple and polysemic manifestations, from the literal to the symbolic, providing a useful theoretical angle from which to reflect on genre and gender, normativity and self-fashioning, technology, and corporality. Although the approach of the volume is not new—we could trace it back to Foucault, the bodily turn of the 1980s, or the material turn of the 1990s and 2000s—its use for the Iberian context should be welcome by scholars and experts as a valuable contribution to the field of medieval and early modern Iberian studies. The book consists of twelve essays grouped into four sections and preceded by an introduction. The first section focuses on the correlation between the corporeal and its textual abstraction. Folger studies that correlation in Fernán Pérez de Guzmán's Generaciones y semblanzas in the context of premodern cognitive perception and mnemotechnics; Casas Rigall offers a detailed analysis of early modern Spanish typography; Gutiérrez García examines the incarnation of Christ and corporality of Mary in several late medieval Iberian texts, connecting them to race, gender, and lineage debates of the time.

The second section approaches the physical signs of the heroic body and the body in pain as “embodied micro-stories” (10) with unexpected political and moral implications for the texts that contain those bodies. Barros Dias reads king Afonso Henriques's wounded body in the Portuguese Crónica de 1344 as corporeal lieu de memoire; Béreiziat-Lang offers an analysis of Teresa de Catagena's appropriation of the sick female body as a legitimate place of writing; Kroll studies the deformed body of the leper in Jaufré as a text within the text. The third section proposes a reading of the normative body as a fundamental sign for the understanding of masculinity in late medieval and early modern Iberian courtly literature. Palacios Larrosa analyzes emblems (motes and invenciones) in Spanish courtly lyric and mirrors of princes as self-fashioning devices both before the materiality of the text and after the editorial process; García Álvarez reads birth marks on the heroic body of Spanish chivalry romances as emblems; Santos Alpalhão analyzes clothing as signifier of masculinity on Francisco de Morais's Palmeirim de Inglaterra. The last section addresses the readability of the social body in early modern Spanish picaresca and Don Quixote. Gernet connects La lozana andaluza to Paracelsus's signatura rerum theory to demonstrate the feasibility of reading the body as sign in Delicado's book; García-Bermejo Ginar analyzes eating habits as corporeal and social signs in Lazarillo de Tormes; Sáenz tackles Cervantes's gestures of writing, or the novelist's self-presentation as the writer at work, in Don Quixote.

Separately, the twelve essays included in this volume are all fine pieces of research. However, their connection to their respective sections and to the theoretical framework of the volume as a whole is not always clear to this reader, who misses the cohesiveness of sections 2 and 3 in sections 1 and 4, and the fruitful commitment to that theoretical framework in contributions like Béreiziat-Lang, Kroll, or Gernet's in other contributions that approach that same framework from looser angles. That said, Escritura somática succeeds amply in underlining the need for a better understanding of the intersection of body and text in medieval and early modern Iberian literature, in proposing ways to enrich that understanding, and in suggesting new strategies to explore it.