The Department of Modern & Classical Languages’ Sixth Annual
Jeffrey T. Chamberlain Lecture
“The Morisco Prophecy in Cervantes’ Persiles”
will be delivered by Dr. E. Michael Gerli, Commonwealth Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia, in Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of Spanish Writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616).
Thursday, April 7th 5:00 – 7:00pm
Dewberry Hall North
Johnson Center
Xadraque Xarife's Prophecy on the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain marks Cervantes' last engagement with the subject of the Moriscos (Christians descended from Muslim progenitors) in his work and one of the most arresting moments in Cervantes' Persiles (III, 11). Yet critics have been more concerned with the utility of the prophecy for dating the composition of the Persiles than examining it as an expression of Cervantes' fiction and a long genealogy of texts endowed with historical, eschatological, and political significance that are imbued with an expectant vision of a new world order under messianic monarchy. Upon its perusal by any contemporary reader of 1617, the year the Persiles was published, Xarife's prediction would immediately have recalled the conflictive history of prophecies in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, but especially those at the center of the political and cultural controversy regarding the expulsion of the Moriscos and the claims that sustained both its partisans and critics in a protracted debate lasting almost 50 years. Although the prophecy comes true, as it was pronounced in the Persiles sometime late in the decade of the 1550s (the time in which the action of the romance is supposed to take place), the devastating effect it would bear on Xarife's own destiny, and the destiny of all Moriscos, Christians and Crypto-Christians alike, was never foreseen.
Prof. E. Michael Gerli received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UCLA in 1972. He is the author of some 150 publications on medieval and renaissance Romance literary and linguistic themes, serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals and presses in both the U.S. and abroad (Hispanic Review, Biblioteca Española del Siglo XV de la Universidad de Salamanca, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Journal of Hispanic Philology, La Corónica, Medievalia, Anuario de Estudios Cervantinos, Convivencia, Cancionero General, and others), and is the General Editor of Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003). The latest of his thirteen books, Celestina and the Ends of Desire, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011 and was awarded the Modern Language Association of America’s twenty-second annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. Professor Gerli’s Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995) was chosen as an “Outstanding Academic Book” by the American Association of College and University Libraries in 1996. He is also a recipient of the Hispanic Review’s Edwin B. Williams Prize (1981), the Modern Language Association’s Division of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature’s John K. Walsh Prize (1997), and in 2009 was named Distinguished Alumnus by the University of California, Los Angeles.
March 23, 2016
