“The English,” wrote the fifteenth-century biographer Diego de Games, “have a liking for no other nation, and if it happen that some valiant knight visits them … the English try to seek some way of dishonouring them or of offering them an affront” (16). As the nine essays in this important addition to the Palgrave New Middle Ages series reveal, even before the Reformation ushered in global rivalry between England and the two dominant realms of Iberia, their relationships had not always been smooth. English xenophobia was compounded by the diplomatic effects of the Hundred Years’ War and by the Great Schism, as a result of which Richard II ordered his subjects to suspend any journey to recently excommunicated Spain. The essays by Cynthia Chamberlin (“A Castilian in King Edward's Court: The Career of Giles Despagne”) and by Amélia P. Hutchinson (“‘Os Doze de Inglaterra’: A Romance of Anglo-Portuguese Relations in the Later Middle Ages?”) reveal how the embattled isolation of Edward II's most fiercely loyal Spanish courtier was matched, later in the century, by that of the exiled Spaniards at the court of John of Gaunt, married to the Castilian princess Constanza. Not even the close-knit commercial relationship between the English and the Portuguese could prevent English ships from running aground the Lisbon-based Seintmarie de Portaferro, in what Jennifer Geouge describes as “a clear act of piracy” (in her essay “Anglo-Portuguese Trade during the Reign of João I of Portugal, 1385–1433,” 130).

Yet despite such animosities, and despite a curious insistence in the editor's introduction on the peripheral position of both regions within medieval Christendom, it is their multilayered interconnection that is the dominant motif in this collection. In the period addressed here, there are at least five forms of enmeshment. The first is crusade, which in fact brought England and Iberia into the thick of medieval colonialism. In the opening essay (“Medieval England and Iberia: A Chivalric Relationship”), Jennifer Goodman Wollock points out the role of both Scots and Englishmen in the 1147 occupation of Lisbon, “the one major success of the Second Crusade” (12). Iberia, as R. F. Yeager puts it in the closing essay, “was a continued focus of international crusading zeal” (190). Recent scholarship has shown how closely, in the Iberian context, crusade was allied with a second form of enmeshment, pilgrimage (see the articles by John K. Moore and Stephen Raulston in La corónica 36, no. 2 [Spring 2008]), and—in this collection—Ana Echevarría Arsuaga's “The Shrine as Mediator: England, Castile, and the Pilgrimage to Compostela” reinforces the centrality of Jacobean veneration in forging links between England and Iberia. Echevarría's article underlines the close association between pilgrimage and a third form of international connection, commerce: the textile industry actively supported the cult of Saint James. The preference of English pilgrims for the maritime route to Galicia reveals how the sea formed “part of the itinerary which linked Northern European ports with the Mediterranean” (48). Commercial links with Portugal, enshrined in the Treaty of Windsor (1386), fostered the presence of English merchants in Lisbon and a significant Portuguese community in England. This community must have come into frequent contact with the Spanish wine merchants in London, part of a mercantile world in which—Yeager speculates—Geoffrey Chaucer may have picked up a smattering of Spanish long before the journey to Navarre in the 1360s, which may have predisposed him to broader Continental literary influences. Cultural ties—the fourth form of interconnection—again reveal the way in which late medieval England and Iberia swim in European cultural currents. Both, as Lluís Cabré shows (in “British Influence in Medieval Catalan Writing: An Overview”), formed part of a Latin international circuit, an intellectual network in which a Franciscan student such as Francesc Eiximenes (ca. 1330–1409) might naturally travel to both London and Paris before settling down in Valencia and in which Arthurian motifs impregnated Europe through French mediation. Dynastic unions, fifth and finally, accelerated such forms of exchange. Rose Walker's study “Leonor of England and Eleanor of Castile: Anglo-Iberian Marriage and Cultural Exchange in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries” traces this acceleration of cultural motion both northward and southward: the 1170 wedding of the English princess Leonor to Alfonso VIII of Castile and the 1254 wedding of Eleanor of Castile, daughter of Fernando III of Castile-León and Jeanne of Ponthieu, to the future Edward I of England, both catalyzed “a new awareness of the foreign style or composition within five years” (73). Joyce Coleman's sensitive portrait, “Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal—and Patron of the Gower Translations?” adds further depth to this pattern, rescuing from the “armor-plated machismo” (157) of traditional historiography a wealth of detail for historians of the late medieval family, as well as for cultural historians.

Fulfillment of the postcolonial aspirations articulated in the book's introduction—inspired by an earlier volume in the New Middle Ages series, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's collection The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York, 2000)—may need to await the exploration of connections between Britain and Islamic Iberia. But, at a moment when medieval Iberian studies—for instance—still requires a conceptual leap beyond the frame of the peninsula, England and Iberia in the Middle Ages already makes an important gesture toward a more fully transnational approach to the history of both regions, and toward a richer understanding of the generative contact between them. Further engagement with Anglo-Hispanic hybridity will, as María Bullón-Fernández remarks, serve a valuable role as Spanish consolidates its position as the second national language of the United States. Such studies may also illuminate new forms of north-south engagement in the Americas and beyond.