The Castell of Love: A Critical Edition of Lord Berners’s Romance

This is the first modern edition of John Bourchier, Lord Berners’s (c.1467–1533) translation of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor, a popular romance printed twenty-nine times in sixteenth-century Spain and translated into Catalan, Italian, French, English, and German in the 150 years following its initial publication. Berners’s romance is one of the earliest translations of a Spanish text into English, and it marks the first English appearance of the Spanish sentimental novel. Castell has a number of generic affiliations, namely the genres of the novela sentimental, cancionero lyric, epistolary fiction, speculum principis, and treatise, as well as tragedy, parody, and romance, each of which contributes to Castell’s inception, reception, and literary heritage. In her extensive and detailed introduction, the author explores the complicated ways in which Castell engages in dialogue with its literary inheritance and discursive environment. The introduction and comprehensive apparatus expose Berners’s usual composition practices, revealing that he translated simultaneously from both Spanish and French exemplars of the romance. This is a fascinating and significant edition of the mid-sixteenth-century publications of Castell with a valuable introduction and apparatus. The author has provided an essential service to the fields of English and Spanish medieval and early modern literature by making Castell available in an accessible and scholarly edition.