Bio

Montserrat Piera is a Professor of Medieval Iberian Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has published four books, two editions and a number of articles and book chapters applying the perspectives of contemporary historical and literary analysis to the study of gender, religion and society in Iberian Medieval texts. Her research areas are Catalan and Castilian chivalry books, medieval women’s texts, affective meditation and compassion in the genre of Christ’s Passio, medieval travel writing and food studies. In 2018 she received the Best Edited Collection on Food Studies Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) for her book Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe. On the same year, she became the Associate Editor of the foremost journal in Hispano-Medieval Studies, La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

Project

The chivalrous work Tirant lo Blanc is considered one of the key works of the classical canon in the Catalan language. Very often, however, interpretations have focused on the supposedly modern features of this medieval text, curiously influenced by two readers who expressed their admiration for it, Cervantes and Vargas Llosa, although neither read Martorell's work in the original language. By contrast, in Catalonia and in both social and intellectual spheres, Tirant lo Blanc has been used to corroborate certain modern nationalist ideologies that have little to do with the social context in which it was conceived. Piera's project seeks to analyse some of these ideological and decontextualised approaches, which speak to us both about Martorell's work and the ideas of his modern readers.