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Emeritus Professor Richard Hitchcock

MA PhD (St. Andrews)

Professor Emeritus

Professor Hitchcock spent his academic career at Exeter, from 1966 until his retirement as Professor of Hispano-Arabic Studies in 2003. He studied Spanish and Arabic at St. Andrews where he was taught by Professors L. J. Woodward, D. J. Gifford and A. Pacheco [Spanish], and A. M. Honeyman, C. E. Bosworth and M. A. Ghul [Arabic]. He was a student in Baghdad [1962], and Madrid [1964-5], and on two occasions has been Visiting Professor at the Université de Rennes II. After his PhD on the Mozarabs in 1971, and an article on the kharjas published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies in 1973, he pursued both research interests concurrently, contributing articles to a wide range of scholarly journals and festschriften. He has been particularly concerned with the importance of terminology, proposing a distinction in the use of the word Mozarab that has since achieved wide acceptance. He also advocated a cautious approach when interpreting the problematic kharjas, and organized the first International Congress on the kharjas in Exeter in 1988. He published Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Influences, in 2008, and Muslim Spain Reconsidered.  From 711 to 1502, in 2014'.

He has also published articles in Spanish and English on medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature, including Góngora and the Don Quijote, and a number of studies devoted to nineteenth-century Hispano-Arabic historiography. An adaptation of his translation of Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano ['Dog in the Manger'] was commissioned and performed in the Northcott Theatre, Exeter, in 1989. He published a translation of Cervantes's exemplary novel, Rinconete y Cortadillo, in 1992. In 1974, he edited the Letters of Richard Ford to Pascual de Gayangos and, in a number of papers and addresses, has sought to promote Ford as a pioneering Hispanist and writer, organizing a confernce in Exeter to mark the bicentenary of Ford's birth in 1996. He is a member of the George Borrow Society, and has published articles on Borrow and Ford in the Society's Bulletin, and elsewhere on other travellers to Spain, and to Galicia in particular. A fruit of his interest in the origins of hispanism in the UK was a study of the early writings on Spain of John Bowring [1993]. He has had an abiding interest in bibliography, is a member of the Bibliographical Society, to whose journal The Library, he has contributed a paper.

He is currently studying travel books on Spain in English, on which topic, he gave a paper in the British Library in May, 2014.

Recent publications

Muslim Spain Reconsidered.  From 711 to 1502, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 219 pp., with three maps and 8 pp. coloured illustrations


Gallardo and Gayangos: Reflections on Matters Unresolved’, in Text, Manuscript, and Print in Medieval and Modern Iberia: Studies on Honour of David Hook, edited by Barry Taylor, Geoffrey West, and Jane Whetnall, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2013, pp. 415-432


Reflections on the Vogue for Spain in England, 1800-1850’, in Interrogating Gazes.  Comparative Critical Views on the Representation of Foreignness and Otherness, eds Montserrat Cots, Pere Gifra-Adroher & Glyn Hambrook. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 23-33

Keith Whinnom and the Korean Alphabet', in Keith Whinnom after Twenty years: His Work and its Influence, ed. Alan Deyermond, University of London: Queen Mary, 2011, pp. 19-23

Richard Ford en Sevilla’, in Las cosas de Richard Ford. Estampas varias sobre la vida y obra de un hispanista inglés del siglo XIX, eds Carmelo Medina Casado y José Ruiz Mas, Jaén: Universidad, 2010, pp. 193-208.  Spanish version of ‘Richard Ford in Sevilla’, George Borrow Bulletin, 24, Autumn, 2002, 69-81

New introduction to J. A. Conde, The Dominion of the Arabs in Spain.  A History, Translated by Mrs. Jonathan Foster (1854), 3 vols, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009, Vol. I, pp. xv-xxix

Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern SpainIdentities and Influences, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, 151 pp. (Reviewed, inter alia, by Ann Christys in Al-Masāq, Volume 21, Number 3, December 2009, 336-338)

‘Gayangos in the English Context’, Pascual de Gayangos.  A Nineteenth-Century Spanish Arabist, Edited by Cristina Álvarez Millán and Claudia Heide, Edinburgh: University Press, 2008, pp. 89-105

‘Christian-Muslim Understanding(s) in Medieval Spain’, Hispanic Research Journal, Volume 9, Number 4, September 2008, 314-325
The first version of the above was delivered as the R. B. Tate Lecture at the University of Nottingham, 21 February, 2007

‘The “Romance” kharjas in Retrospect’, in Muwashshah!  Proceedings of the International Conference on Arabic and Hebrew Strophic Poetry and its Romance Parallels, School of Oriental & African Studies [SOAS], London, 8-10 October 2004, Edited by Ed Emery, London: School of Oriental & African Studies, 2006, pp. 165-172

‘A Manuscript Chronicle form the Bibliotheca Phillippica’, in Manuscripts, Texts, and Transmission form Isidore to the Enlightenment, edited by David Hook, Bristol: HiPLAM, 2006, pp. 1-10

‘Spanish Literature’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English.  Volume 3.  1660-1790, Edited by Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, Oxford; University Press, 2005, pp. 406-415

‘Mozarabs and Moriscos: Two Marginalized Communities in Sixteenth-Century Toledo’, in Historicist Essays on Hispano-Medieval Narrative, In Memoriam Roger M.Walker, Edited by Barry Taylor and Geoffrey West, London: Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2005, pp. 171-184

‘¿Traducir o interpretar?  Un comentario sobre algunas traducciones del Quijote al inglés en los siglos XVII y XVIII’, Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo, Año LXXXI, Enero-Diciembre 2005, 206-225.

‘Algunos viajeros finiseculares a España: ensayo literario-bibliográfico’, in Prensa, impresos, lectura en el mundo hispánico contemporáneo, Homenaje a Jean François Botrel, Edición de Jean-Michel Desvois, Bordeaux: PILAR, Octobre, 2005, pp. 165-177

‘John Walker, George Borrow and Gypsies in Spain’, George Borrow Bulletin, Number 31, Autumn 2005, 58-64

‘Hispano-Arabic Studies in the New Millennium: the UK’, Al-Masāq.  Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean, Volume 16, Number 2, September, 2004, 197-204

‘Cervantes, Ricote and the Expulsion of the Moriscos’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, LXXXI, Number 2, 2004, 175-185

‘J.-F. Peeters-Fontainas, E. M. Wilson, and Some Golden-Age Texts’, The Library, The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, Seventh Series, Volume 5 Number 1, March 2004, 63-72

‘The Conquest of Granada in Nineteenth-Century English and American Historiography’, in Medieval Spain.  Culture, Conflict and Coexistence.  Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, Edited by Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 242- 265

Reviews and others

Review of Miguel Ángel Álvarez Ramos and Cristina Álvarez Millán, Los viajes literarios de Pascual de Gayangos (1850-1857) y el origen de la archivística española, Madrid: C.S.I.C., 2007, in The Library, Seventh Series, Volume 9, Number 4, December 2008, 489-490.

Review of John V. Tolan, Saracens.  Islam in the Medieval European Imagination,  Newark: University of Delaware, 2003, in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, LXXXII, Number 1, 2005, 106-108.

Review of Ian Robertson, Richard Ford, 1796-1858.  Hispanophile, Connoisseur and Critic, Norwich: Michael Russell, 2004, in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 82, Number 4, October 2005, 529-531.

Review of Text & Manuscript in Medieval Spain.  Papers from the King’s College Colloquium, Edited by David Hook, London: King’s College, 2000, in Modern Language Review, 99, no. 4, 2004, 1073-1075.

Review of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Islam y cristiandad: España entre dos culturas, ed. Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2001, 2 vols, in Hispanic Research Journal, Vol. 4, No..2, June 2003, 181-183.

‘Memoir of Madrid’ [autobiography], in Alexis at 70.  A Celebration, January, 2010, pp. 67-72.

Various conference papers and addresses

 

 

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