Just what is it about fame that so alienates women? or, why is it that famous women often speak of their experience of celebrity as something that is ultimately lonely and a shabby substitute for love? And why are these statements of loneliness in celebrity attenuated for mothers? Whether it is a famous American author of the nineteenth century and mother of seven, Harriet Beecher Stowe; an iconic and volatile star of the mid–twentieth century and mother of three, Judy Garland; or a twenty-first-century reality celebrity and mother of eight, Kate Gosselin, these women suggest that the experiences of fame are isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. To paraphrase Stowe, it is not fame and celebrity that satisfies the heart of the female star; it is the old-fashioned comforts of love. Their combined comments are thus a corrective to fans' implied perception of famous people as happy, when, indeed, their celebrity seems to have alienated them from love. Whether the female celebrity seeks romantic or familial love is not clear, and we would do well to realize that the abstract palliative is actually a culturally imagined comfort that probably has little to do with either these women in particular or stardom more broadly. But the consistent remarks about fame as a condition of loneliness establish a discursive imperative that the famous woman speak of longing for affective completion, in turn suggesting that public ardor cannot satisfy the woman's heart. In other words, fame cannot replace love.

As few hispanists have failed to notice, early modern Spain is more often appearing as an alternative term for what we used to call the Spanish Golden Age. University catalogs still advertise courses on Golden Age poetry, but lectures are more apt to bear titles such as “The Crisis of the Gift in Early Modern Spain.” Although some recent books—Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Keitt), Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (Taylor), and An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain (Martín)—display Golden Age in their titles, they share shelf space with offerings such as The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (Bass), Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (Middlebrook), and Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada (Casey). The preference for early modern is showing up even in genres in which traditional usage might be expected. An anthology by Barbara Mujica, published in 1991, is subtitled Renacimiento y Siglo de Oro, but the cover of an anthology edited by her and published thirteen years later reads Sophia's Daughters: Women Writers of Early Modern Spain.

When Students of Western European Medieval Literature speak of the rise of the vernacular, they often do not mean what you might think they mean—neither the continued use of Latin as a written vernacular for over five hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire nor the first texts in Celtic, Germanic, and Semitic languages, from the fourth to the tenth century. They mean something later and geographically narrower—the writing that emerges from the breakup of Latin into distinct regional speech patterns, the Romance languages and literatures, primarily in the territories of modern France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Although understanding the rise of Romance-language literature as the rise of vernacular writing misrepresents medieval European literature, it has an important rationale. The twelfth-century literature of what is now France—Old French romance in the north, Occitan (formerly Provençal) lyric in the south—establishes continent-wide norms, thereby giving European literature a coherent set of forms and themes for the first time.

These days, it is impossible to look at the news without finding Facebook in one headline or another. Many are prompted by the leaking of personal information. But a few critics have also called attention to a different kind of problem, having less to do with privacy than with the nature of Facebook as a social medium. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen makes much of its genesis in an Ivy League dorm room: “While Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.” He goes on to analyze the ethos of the site as the digital equivalent of the preppie look: well scrubbed and well behaved, prankish on occasion but in the end clean and safe and bland. The site's juvenile “principle of in loco parentis” has given way to the “authoritarian building codes” of the suburbs, with more legroom perhaps but no less supervised and no less homogeneous, a “chilling and puritanical atmosphere” (9–10).

The emergence of Spain as a world power in the early sixteenth century compelled a radical change in its language and literature. reflecting the country's global expansion, Spanish culture moved beyond its medieval belatedness to compete with Renaissance Italian culture, whose superiority was based on the humanist rebirth of ancient values. The cultural rivalry between Spain and Italy is documented in the prefaces that follow, written by the Catalan poet Juan Boscán (1490?–1542) and the Toledan noble Garcilaso de la Vega (1499?–1536). Through these poets' efforts, Spain became the first European nation-state not only to appropriate Italian versification and prose style but also to displace Italy from the political and literary spheres of power (King 240–41). The political and cultural significance of Boscán's and Garcilaso's revisionary poetics makes their prefaces the first literary manifestos of early modern Spain.

Dante refers persistently in his writing to the great injustice of his exile. Up until his last years, he continues to lament his inability to return home. Originally banished for two years after being indicted by his political enemies for corruption and graft in 1302, he was subsequently sentenced, along with his sons, to death by fire if he ever dared to reenter Florence. The animosity toward his fellow citizens he expresses in his writing, alongside his frustrated sense of betrayal, is thus easy to understand. In works such as De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio, he bitterly evokes the conditions of his banishment, while in the Latin epistles he succinctly and tellingly identifies himself as an exul immeritus (“undeserving exile”).

As a professor of French Studies, I had often wished to develop a course in which students could mount a play in French. Its pedagogical value seemed obvious: performing in a foreign language and managing a theatrical production could help students increase their knowledge of French society while improving pronunciation and vocabulary. However, my lack of expertise in the theory and practice of theater stymied me. I had also often longed to teach a course about the Dreyfus affair. The story of a French officer falsely convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans, which tore apart French society for a decade, it contains plenteous teachable issues about France: nationalism, anti-Semitism, the birth of intellectuals, treason and raison d'état, the rise of the modern press and public opinion, the separation of church and state, Third Republic politics, military justice, Franco-German rivalries, and even handwriting analysis. But I doubted that a French department would welcome a whole course just on the Dreyfus affair.

Charismatic celebrities have open wounds. Fans have probing fingers. Drawn together by doubt, as in Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, they collaborate in hopes of reassurance. The baroque painter shows Christ guiding the hand of the doubting apostle, who finds the bloodless hole and inserts his index finger up to the second knuckle. The quizzical expression on Thomas's face highlights by contrast Christ's patient indulgence as they come together in an impromptu ritual of verification, initiating what a recent theorist of celebrity calls the Saint Thomas effect, which describes the need of fans for intimate authentication, insisting, as they tend to do, on all the gory details (Rojek 62). The deep contradictions at the heart of celebrity incite this relentless probing: a divine being, apparently not at all like them (having risen from the dead, for instance), may prove in crucially titillating ways to be just like them after all. But what the millions of fingers seek they never satisfactorily find. For the celebrity to remain celebrated, the contradiction that defines his or her mystery must remain in continual uncertainty, flickering between highlight and shadow, visibility and invisibility, teasing the eyes of the beholders and leaving them in doubt, like the searing effect of Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, which catches Saint Thomas at a moment of suspense, still undecided between skepticism and belief.

In Córdoba, Argentina, a library of books once banned by the military junta's censors (1976–83) now resides at a center called the Espacio para la Memoria (“Space for Memory”). The site, where prisoners were once held and tortured, houses workshops inviting schoolchildren to think about this terrifying period in their history. Under the junta, even children's books were banned, and after reading a few of these titles with the children who visit the center, the workshop leaders ask them why they think the books were prohibited. One of the reasons the censors gave for prohibition was that these books offered “unlimited fantasy.” To explore this idea, in one workshop the kids sang the song “The Backward Kingdom” (“El reino del revés”), by the well-known Argentine singer María Elena Walsh. After hearing the charming lyrics (birds swim, fish fly, babies have beards, 2 + 2 = 3, etc.), students brainstormed to generate their own inside-out or upside-down examples. One child mentioned raining up, another suggested that big kids nap while little kids play, and a third proposed cars driving on the sidewalk while kids play in the street. Upset by this disorder, one of the children exclaimed, “No, that's impossible!” until the boy who imagined cars on sidewalks explained, “But we're just imagining!” His classmate responded, “Oh, okay, in that case it's possible.”

Celebrity relies on a gaze, a collective or public regard that, in gazing, confers value. Celebrity also demands a face to celebrate—faciality is a sine qua non of “celebrification.” The historian Peter Brown demonstrates in The Cult of the Saints that late antiquity introduced the overriding importance of saints' images, bodies, relics, or tomb sites in a Christian worship that emphasized the mediation of saints between heaven and earth and in place of angels; celebrity had its origins in the woodcut portraits and wayside shrines that proliferated as well as in the professionally wrought iconic images of the saints. Against David Hume's judgment of this phenomenon as “vulgar” and a remnant of pagan folk religion, he argues that the rise of the cult of the saints was as influenced by elites, including Augustine, as by supposedly lesser folk, and that the latter, especially women and the poor, were thus able to participate in a democratizing of culture profoundly indebted to graveside practices that promoted personal relationships, even friendships, with the dead saints and the circulation of their faces in imagery and their body parts as relics (17). Moreover, far from introducing vulgarity into Christian rituals, Brown shows how the cult was imbued with the culture of classical antiquity and with values associated with Athenian democracy and the philosophy of nous, a non-rational intelligence linking us to the divine (48). That we deploy the term celebrity icon for such figures as Oprah or Angelina Jolie only underscores the vestiges of public religious ritual that remain embedded in celebrity practices and the nimbus of the sacred that haloes even seemingly debased celebrity discourses.