Dr Carlos Iglesias Crespo

About me

I am a literary, cultural, and intellectual historian of the early modern Hispanic world. I was educated at the Universidad de Extremadura (where I studied Classics and Spanish Philology) and the University of Cambridge (where I studied the MPhil in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures and completed my PhD in Spanish). Before coming to Oxford, I taught at Cambridge as Affiliated Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Literatures and Cultures. My research has been supported by the “La Caixa” Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Cambridge Trust.

Research

My research maps the evolving intersections between the period’s medical, rhetorical, theological, and political theories of memory in relation to the practice and poetics of Petrarchism. My first monograph project (Memory on the Line: Petrarchan Lyric, Intellectual Change, and Political Identity in Early Modern Spain) explores these topics chiefly through the work of three of the period’s foremost poets-scholars: Juan Boscán, a distinguished courtier at the court of Charles V and the Spanish translator of Castiglione’s Cortegiano; Fernando de Herrera, one of the leading figures of late sixteenth-century Sevillian humanism; and Juan de Jáuregui, an aristocrat and Crown censor under the protection of the Count-Duke of Olivares.

I am also interested in the literary and cultural history of the human body. My work in this area uses a transhistorical approach to theories of embodied cognition to enquire into the effects and responses to the literary representation of bodies in movement and bodies in pain. I have written on this topic in relation to Aristotle, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Giulio Camillo Delminio, Garcilaso de la Vega, Giovanni Pontano, Fernando de Herrera, and Viktor Shklovsky.

Recent publications

‘A Cognitive Poetics of Wonder: The Synthesis of Aristotelian Rhetoric, Grammar, and Psychology in Fernando de Herrera’s Anotaciones’, in Archimedean Levers and Rhetoric’s Common Grounds: Articles in Honor of James J. Murphy, ed. by Jordan T. Loveridge, special issue of the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, vol. 27, no. 1 (2024): 47-69 https://doi.org/10.5325/jhistrhetoric.27.1.0047

‘A la sombra de Salustio y Lucrecio: la translatio imperii et studii como estrategia de promoción el prólogo de Francisco de Medina a las Anotaciones de Fernando de Herrera’, Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, vol. 28, no. 1 (2023): 59-77. https://doi.org/10.5325/caliope.28.1.0059

“Que la beldad es vuestra, la voz mía”: A Cognitive Pragmatic Answer to a Gongorine Crux’, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 100, no. 2 (2023): 141-158 https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2023.12

‘Reading Garcilaso’s Love Sonnets in the Anotaciones: Relevance Theory and the Poetics of Failure’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol. 99, no. 2 (2022): 199-219 https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2022.2059865

‘Staging the Emotions in Giulio Camillo’s Theatre: Syncretism, Embodied Cognition and the Arts of Memory’, in Ars memorativa, ed. by Luis Merino Jerez and Marta Ramos Grané, special issue of Ágora. Estudos Clássicos Em Debate, vol. 24, no. 1 (2022): 83-103. https://doi.org/10.34624/agora.v0i24.1.29398

‘Energeia as Defamiliarization: Reading Aristotle with Shklovsky’s Eyes’, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, vol. 24, n. 3 (2021): 274 – 289 https://doi.org/10.1080/26878003.2021.1975465