Pérez de Hita
Las guerras civiles de Granada
Edited by Shasta M. Bryant

This book is considered to be the first historical novel. It is an ingenious combination of fact and fiction, prose and poetry, in which the internal strife and intrigues which led to the fall of Granada in 1492 are imaginatively told. A large part of the action deals with individual combats between Moors and Christians, and the love affairs of Moorish knights and their ladies.

This new edition is important in two major ways. First, it is based on the princeps of 1595. Most of the other editions have been based on the defective Seville edition of 1613.

Secondly, the Guerras civiles is the repository of a vast number of romances fronterizosy moriscos unavailable in any other source. Scholars will find the book a genuine treasure trove of ballads in context.

Professor Bryant has kept the text very close to the original, only modernizing spelling and punctuation, breaking up long paragraphs, and adding a few missing words. This is the complete text of the celebrated Part I of the Guerras civiles.

“Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada [is important] as a document of the strangely ambivalent attitude of Renaissance Spaniards towards their recently defeated Hispano-Moslem neighbors… and [it] is also one of the most important collections of early Spanish ballads… the publication of this new edition of the Guerras civiles [is] a boon to Hispanic studies.”
    Samuel G. Armistead

“Professor Bryant’s edition of Las guerras civiles de Granada [fills] a need long felt by Hispanists for a good edition of this important but virtually unavailable work.”
    John E. Keller

Ediciones criticas, No 2; xiv+324 pp.
Originally published in 1982.
ISBN: 0-936388-14-5 (paperback), $22.95