The Prison of Love: Romance, Translation, and the Book in the Sixteenth Century

"In this highly original volume, Francomano traces the transformation of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (The Prison of Love) from a small-format, unillustrated book printed in Seville in 1492 to luxury French manuscripts and tapestries, considering other versions and translations along the way…Francomano’s theoretically engaged analysis of visual, material, and book culture will appeal to specialists in 16^th- and 17^th-century studies and beyond."

P. W. Manning, Choice Connect October 2018 vol. 56 # 2

"Emily Francomano’s splendid case study of Carcel’s editorial, intellectual, material, and social history across Europe in the sixteenth century traces how it was transformed from a Castilian sentimental romance into a broad cultural multimedia phenomenon, which she calls The Prison of Love…[this] is a study that everyone interested in the history of literacy and material bibliography, and their effects on the formation of the early modern social and political imaginary, should read."

E. Michael Gerli, University of Virginia, Renaissance Quarterly, vol 72 no 2

"The Prison of Love is an important study whose originality lies in an insightful combination of literary and textual analysis, the materialist hermeneutics of book history, and the analysis of courtly material culture, to examine the historical reception of Cárcel de Amor. Emily C. Francomano offers a significant analysis of the process that transformed a late fifteenth-century Spanish romance into a European cultural text."

Sol Miguel-Prendes, Department of Spanish and Italian, Wake Forest University

"This is the first book, to my knowledge, to study The Prison of Love as cosmopolitan and humanist fiction. While Francomano’s deep and complex understanding of her subject honors all of the great work that’s been done on Cárcel, at the same time she provides new readings made possible by opening up the objects of interpretation and placing The Prison of Love on the European stage."

Lucia Binotti, Department of Romance Studies, UNC, Chapel Hill