Elizabeth Willingham

Welcome to this author page. If you are interested in text study, discourse criticism, the digital Humanities, women's writing, and visual culture, from medieval book art to film, you may find something here of value to your research.

My work as a text editor and a critic of literary and visual culture intersects with medieval Spanish and French culture and—for several good reasons—with the work of Mexican women writers and Mexico's Golden Age film. I've been a book reviewer (of academic books for academic journals) and a teacher for many years. Medievalists' and Latin Americanists' backgrounds and their work are often interdisciplinary and trans-Atlantic, trans-border, trans-cultural, etc.—as are mine. My graduate preparation in Spanish and medieval Romance languages (literature, translation, linguistics) and English (medieval language, discourse theory, and text) comes from The University of Texas at Austin, and my M.A. in English (literary criticism, bibliography, linguistics, and text) comes from Baylor University's Department of English.

My study of fifteenth-century printings and a manuscript of Columbus's 1493 Barcelona Letter, "The Mystical Indies and Columbus's Apocalyptic Letter" was published in 2016 (Sussex Academic Press, U.K.) and was awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize in American Bibliography for that year. The award was presented at the annual Bibliographical Society of America meeting in New York in January 2017.

"The Mystical Indies and Columbus's Apocalyptic Letter" traces the mysteries and implications of the Letter's production, including its forgeries, and presents evidence of its reception across Western Europe. Several of its chapters present evidence that contests traditional critical assertions on the Letter’s production and survival. The book includes a variorum edition of the Spanish Letter, an annotated English translation based on the edition, and a glossary of terms used in studies of bibliography, text, and early printed books and manuscripts. These elements, in addition to whatever critical value they possess, are meant to make the Letter and its critical work more accessible to readers at various levels of expertise. Color facsimiles of the Letter's two unique Spanish editions (Folio and Quarto [1493]) and of the only known contemporary Spanish manuscript of the Letter—not written in Columbus’s hand—make them accessible to members of the public with an interest in Columbus, as well as to specialists.

With a group of colleagues, I am involved in a collaborative project that also involves text and literary criticism, along with bibliography. We are editing an entire codex of late thirteenth-century "Lancelot" material known as Yale 229. With two editions released, we expect the third "Lancelot" edition, the "Agravains," to be released in two volumes in 2026–2027. The "Agravains" (l'Agravains) is the most lengthy book of the Old French Vulgate (prose) Lancelot and acts as a preface for events of the "Quest for the Holy Grail"—and it might be better named “The Quest for Lancelot.” (Thomas Malory, T. H. White, and Lerner and Loewe owe their material to the Old French Vulgate "Lancelot.")

A very different kind of project, "Laura Esquivel's Mexican Fictions" (Sussex 2010; paperback 2012), is a book I edited with a group of scholars in Latin American women's fiction and film. The fourteen essays of "Laura Esquivel's Mexican Fictions" form the only critical study of Esquivel's four novels and her screenplay of Like Water for Chocolate. The book contains a glossary of expressions in Spanish and Nahuatl and an extensive Works Cited that are meant to support the reading and research of students and scholars at various levels of expertise. Elena Poniatowska Amor's essay on Esquivel's fiction, Linda Ledford Miller's biographical essay on Laura Esquivel, and anthropologist Marķa Elisa Christie's color photographs of Mexican "kitchenspace" add value to the reading.

"An Earthy Entanglement with Spirituality," an edited collection of essays treating expressions of ethics, spirituality, and religion in English, U.S., and Continental literature and art from the Middle Ages to the 21st century was released by Liverpool University Press in late 2023 for 2024.

My work as a text editor and a critic of literary and visual culture intersects with medieval Spanish and French culture and—for several good reasons—with the work of Mexican women writers and Mexico's Golden Age film. I am a book reviewer (of academic books for academic journals). Medievalists' and Latin Americanists' backgrounds and their work are often interdisciplinary and trans-most-everything—trans-Atlantic, trans-border, trans-cultural, etc.—as are mine.

My work on Hispanic women's fiction, popular culture, and film focuses on gender, identity, and nation in discourse and images, and my pedagogical interests include presenting manuscripts and early books to students by means of digital Humanities and film in the university classroom. I have taught English and/or Spanish at The College of William and Mary, The University of Texas at Austin, Baylor University, and Texas A&M University. From 1994–2020, I was on the faculty of Baylor University in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. My teaching included Hispanic literary and film criticism, popular culture, the Hispanic novel, the history of the Spanish language, historical Romance language and linguistics, and Women in the Hispanic World, among other courses. I was awarded a Summer Seminar fellowship and have twice been a Fellow of The National Endowment for the Humanities for projects in medieval Romance text, literature, and language and received a research fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of America to work on the Agravains edition from Yale 229.