List Of Writers

MICHAEL, IAN

Scholar and critic. Ian David Lewis Michael was born in Neath in 1936 and educated there and at King’s College, London, where he graduated in Spanish after studying also at the University of Seville and the Menéndez Pelayo International University at Santander. He lectured at the University of Manchester between 1957 and 1970, was Professor of Spanish at the University of Southampton from 1971 until 1982, and was then elected the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Exeter College, Oxford, as well as chairman of the Faculty Board of Medieval and Modern Languages and Curator of the Taylor Institution. He has published extensively on medieval Spanish studies and in particular on Alexander the Great in medieval Spanish literature and on El Cid: his is the standard edition of this poem, in the Madrid series, Clásicos Castalia and he is currently finishing a new critical edition for the same series of Berceo’s Miracles of Our Lady, the most famous of Spanish hagiographical texts.

Since moving to Oxford, his academic interests have extended to the history of the manuscript and printed book, the formation of libraries in Spain up to the twentieth century, the sociology of literature such as prostitution in literary texts of the late medieval and early modern periods, and the socio–literary effects of the arrival of a virulent form of syphilis in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe in 1493–94, with the resultant fin-de-siècle gloom.

With Sir John Elliott, he is involved in the Gondomar Project of the Spanish State, which consists of cataloguing and digitising all the domestic correspondence of Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Spanish Ambassador to James VI & I, preserved in the Royal Library, Madrid.

Selected Publications:
Gwyn Thomas (Writers of Wales) (University of Wales Press, 1977)

Contributed to:
The Poem of the Cid: A Bilingual Edition With Parallel Text (co-writer) (Penguin Classics 1985) 
Sound on Vision: Studies on Spanish Cinema (co-writer) (Abingdon: Carfax / University of Glasgow, 1999)