Dr Elizabeth Drayson
¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ is a cutting-edge, innovative, premier research and learning environment with a delightfully informal and friendly atmosphere. My subject is particularly well-served by outstanding holdings in Modern and Medieval Languages in the College library, and by a flourishing subject society, the Gabe Society.
Degrees and honours
- MA (Cantab),
- PhD (Cantab),
- and Dip.Trans.
Awards
- Newton Trust CTO research leave for the academic year 2015-16.
Research interests
- Medieval and early modern Spanish literature and cultural history.
- Medieval and early modern literature and culture in film and visual art.
- Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor.
- Relationship between Arabic, Jewish and Christian culture in the middle ages.
Biography
Elizabeth Drayson was an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge and is Emeritus Fellow in Spanish at ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ. She specialises in medieval Spanish literature and cultural history, and the relationship between Arabic, Jewish, and Christian culture during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.
Her forthcoming book Crucible of Light: Islam and Europe in War and Peace 711AD to the present reveals the crucial role played by Islamic civilization in shaping Europe as we know it today; it challenges the idea that the civilizations of Islam and Europe are alien to each other by showing how profoundly interrelated they really are. Crucible of Light will be published by Picador in 2025.
Elizabeth’s last book, , is a history of the city of Granada from prehistoric times to the present, published by Apollo in July 2021. Her previous book (London: Profile Books, 2017) charts the life and times of Boabdil, last Muslim king of Granada, and was reviewed in The Times, Sunday Times and The Guardian. It was one of the Times and Sunday Times Best History books of 2017, and appeared in paperback, and also in Spanish translation, in 2018.
Previous publications include Europe’s Islamic Legacy: 1900 to the Present, editor (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), The Lead Books of Granada (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013; paperback 2016) which evaluates the cultural status and importance of the mysterious Lead Books found on the Sacromonte of Granada in the late sixteenth-century, and The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) which explores the reception of the legend of Roderick, last Visigothic King of Spain, and his lover La Cava, from the Middle Ages to the present. Her translation and edition of Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor was the first to be published in England as The Book of Good Love, Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, Everyman Paperbacks (London: Orion, 1999).