MA, DPhil (Oxford)

Teaching

The relations between History, Language and Literature

General

David Hook is our Professor of Hispanic Studies, and is the General Editor of the Bristol book series, Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Monographs (HiPLAM; for details of titles published, see the separate Publications section of our website).  During his career he has served on the editorial committees of various journals and publication series (including the Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature [Oxford], Syntagma: Revista del Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura [Salamanca], The Medieval Chronicle [Utrecht], and King's College London Medieval Studies).  He is currently a member of the editorial committee of the eBLJ, the electronic journal of the British Library.

Research Interests

Professor Hook's research is concerned mostly with aspects of the medieval period in the Iberian Peninsula, but principally in Spain. He works on both its history and its literature, and has particular interests in the history of manuscripts, the book, and texts from medieval and early modern Spain. Topics on which he he has published articles include epic poetry and heroic legends (e.g. El Cid), chronicles and their manuscripts, and Peninsular Arthurian material, as well as the texts and manuscripts of individual literary works such as the Auto de los Reyes Magos, the Libro de buen amor, Jorge Manrique's poetry, Diego de Valera's Memorial de diversas hazañas, the enigmatic late medieval Celestina, and Spanish ballads.

Supervision can be offered for MPhil/PhD research on medieval Spanish literature, including historiography, and the history of the book in the Iberian Peninsula.

Selected recent Publications

• The Destruction of Jerusalem: Catalan and Castilian Texts, King's College London Medieval Studies, XVI (London: King's College London, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2000).

• (editor) Text & Manuscript in Medieval Spain. Papers from the King's College Colloquium (London: King's College London, Department of Spanish & Spanish-American Studies, 2000).

• (editor) From Orosius to the 'Historia Silense'. Four Essays on the Late Antique and Early Medieval Historiography of the Iberian Peninsula (Bristol: HiPLAM, 2005)

• 'La Bibliotheca Phillippica y sus problemas', in La memoria de los libros. Estudios sobre la historia del escrito y de la lectura en Europa y América, edited by Pedro Cátedra et al., 2 vols (Salamanca: Instituto de Historia del Libro y dela Lectura, 2002), II, 403-414.

• 'Verbal Economy and Structural Ecology in the Poema de Mio Cid', La Corónica [USA], XXXII:2 (Spring 2005), 97-109.