Jean Dangler

Professor Dangler’s research interests include the history of medicine, the history of the body, multicultural Iberia, theories of alterity, and the global Middle Ages. She is the author of Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Bucknell UP, 2001), Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (U of Notre Dame P, 2005), and Edging toward Iberia (U of Toronto P, 2017). Edging toward Iberia challenges research methods and models by offering new ways to imagine nonmodern Iberian history and literature through the principles of network theory and World-Systems Analysis.

Her latest book project, Reading Jaume Roig’s Espill, which is forthcoming in 2025 from Boydell & Brewer / Tamesis, examines readers’ annotations in many of the Espill’s (The Mirror’s) sixteenth-century printed copies. She considers the glosses as evidence of how readers interpreted the Espill’s misogyny, which they seemed to understand as harmonizing with the book’s religious message and materials. These findings shed light on the broader relationship between Roig’s Catalan Espill and Isabel de Villena’s proto-feminist Vita Christi, both of which evolved from the same late fifteenth-century social and professional milieu in Valencia. Critics think that Villena wrote her text in response to the antifeminist Espill and in favor of women’s character and status.