ABSTRACT

This article focuses on portrayals of imagined eastward journeys, specifically those in Egypt, in the three poems that make up Manuscript K-III-4 of the Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial: the Libro de Apolonio (a romance of nautical adventures in the Eastern Mediterranean), the Vida de madona Santa María Egipciaqua (the hagiography of a sixth-century “holy harlot”), and the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient (a tale whose central focus is the Holy Family's flight to Egypt). This article seeks to untangle the web of signification that produced these imagined Egyptian journeys in the period of the composition of the poems in the mid-thirteenth century and in the period of their compilation into a single manuscript in the late fourteenth century. The historical reality and literary landscape of Iberia changed much in the intervening period and so the reception of the poems would have changed as well. This article contrasts the original place of eastern journeys in the individual poems with their increased importance due to their later interrelation in the context of an Iberian imaginary in which the place of Egypt and the Levant had dramatically expanded.

Keywords: Escorial Manuscript K-III-4, Libro de Apolonio, Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, Libre dels tres reys d’Orient, St. Mary of Egypt, Aragon

TALES OF TRAVEL to unfamiliar lands have captured the imaginations of Spanishlanguage readers for centuries. While “eastern” journeys (those in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Far and Middle East) in late medieval and early modern Spanish literature have been an in vogue topic in criticism since the beginning of the new millennium, such journeys imagined prior to the late fourteenth century have remained in relative obscurity. In order to begin to remedy this situation, this article focuses on portrayals of eastward journeys, specifically those in Egypt, in the three poems that make up Manuscript K-III-4 of the Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial: the Libro de Apolonio (a romance of nautical adventures in the Eastern Mediterranean), the Vida de madona Santa María Egipciaqua (the hagiography of a sixth-century “holy harlot”), and the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient (a tale whose central focus is the Holy Family's flight to Egypt).