This thesis explores the transmission and reception of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels, a twelfth-century Hebrew travel narrative. Scholarship of the Book of Travels is fragmentary, descriptive and largely focused on what the narrative can tell scholars about the twelfth-century Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. This study presents a methodological shift away from an intra-textual examination of the text by seeking to answer how the text has been transmitted, how successive copiers and printers have changed the text, and how readers interpreted and used the text between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. It begins with an outline of the extant manuscripts through a codicological examination and textual comparison. Based on a close reading of the manuscripts, it illustrates how the Book of Travels has survived in four separate textual witnesses. This study, however, highlights the centrality of the Jerusalem manuscript, which carried the transmission of the Book of Travels from manuscript into print. Whilst scholars have argued that the text has been edited and redacted, this thesis offers a more nuanced argument for scribal intervention as copyists, and later printers, altered the text through error and deliberate omissions and additions. Consequently, there is no single transmission of the Book of Travels. Although the core of the text remained unchanged, readers would have encountered different texts through the lens of copyists and printers. The second half of the thesis addresses the medieval and early modern reception of the Book of Travels. It argues that the narrative was used in a variety of contexts, from polemics, to biblical geography and history by medieval Jewish scholars. The early modern reception, discussed more broadly, indicates that the printed Hebrew editions of 1543 and 1556 were read by an Sephardic audience for the purposes of connecting to their Iberian heritage, with an additional layer of interpretation which linked the text to the hope for redemption and the coming of the Messiah. As the text becomes introduced to Christian readers in both Hebrew and Latin, the Book of Travels was initially understood and used in a similar manner. The 1583 Hebrew edition and first Latin translation of 1575 also applied the text to history and biblical geography. This study thus illuminates the continuity in the way in which the Book of Travels was understood – as an eye-witness and authoritative source which found contemporary resonance with later readers. The second Latin translation of 1633 represents an evolution in the way in which the Book of Travels was interpreted, as the text was now engaged polemically to attack the Jews. This study also investigates the censorship of the Book of Travels. It analyses not just the text which has been excised through self-censorship, and the prohibition and expurgations proscribed by both the Italian and Spanish Inquisitions, but also how this impacted the transmission and reception of the narrative. It is shown that whilst Inquisitorial censorship was seemingly systematic, it was unevenly applied and did not impact on the Book of Travels’ transmission. This thesis is ultimately a pioneering study of the afterlives of a Hebrew travel narrative which enjoyed a rich manuscript and printed tradition. In attracting both Jewish and Christian readers alike, the Book of Travels endured and continued to find relevance amongst audiences. As a result of its versatility the Book of Travels achieved a prominent position within the Jewish and Christian worlds crossing cultural and religious divides between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.

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This thesis explores the relationship between the plurality of polyphonic and independent voices and consciousnesses, a Mikhail Bakhtin's concept, in two plays by Lope de Vega. El maestro de Danzar y El bobo del colegio are two of his least known and studied. Both plays present protagonists, simple citizens, which pretend to court two noble ladies. Under these circumstances, they are forced to avoid social rejection, issue guaranteed by their humble lineage. In order to complete their undertaking, they disguise as a dance teacher and a university fool. This process shields them from, the above mentioned, traditional disapproval they are subject to. It also entitles them to become, symbolically and virtually, the main dialogic executors in the play. Bakhtin depicts the process of embracing an alternate identity, different from their own, as a vital part of carnival. It compels the leading characters, El maestro and El bobo being no exception, to undergo two changes. First, they become a new individual, recognizable only to those who are aware of their masks. Second, their voices attract attention to the point of influencing the preeminent nobles of the comedy to follow their lead. Further, their ideas come to matter more than those of any other voice in the comedy. In the beginning they follow an ideal, and are subdued by social hierarchy. At the conclusion, they finish leading and controlling the polyphonic relationship between the independent voices and consciousnesses of the other characters in the play. And rather than a conflict, both comedies depict a harmonic social interaction of all their characters. Although scholarship exists analyzing individual plays, a comprehensive study of the effective association between language and disguise favoring a villano over high-class citizens has never been undertaken. This is Lope's strategy to plainly contrast the traditional social differentiation of classes.