Professor Rosa Vidal Doval

Background

I was educated in Pontevedra, Spain, and Mbabane, Eswatini, before reading for a BA in Medieval Studies at the University of Manchester. I stayed on to complete an MA in Medieval History and a PhD on religious persecution in fifteenth century Spain. I have taught at Merton College, Oxford (2005–6), the University of Liverpool (2006), Aberystwyth University (2006–7), Queen Mary, University of London (2007–23), and at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (2022) as visiting lecturer. I joined Magdalen College in 2023 as Tutorial Fellow in Spanish.

Research

I work on the culture and history of late medieval and Renaissance Iberia. I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of religious conversion and in the role of texts in fomenting and sustaining religious intolerance, chiefly with regard to converts from Judaism to Christianity (conversos).

I am currently working on two main projects. Firstly, a monograph (Purity of Blood in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Genealogy, Discrimination, and Race), charting the creation of a racialised system of religious exclusion (limpieza de sangre) that turned doubts about the bona fides of converts from Judaism and Islam into an inherited defect carried in the body of the believer. This is supported in the academic year 2024–25 by a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust. Secondly, with Anthony J. Lappin (Stockholms universitet), the first modern edition and English translation of Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei (1464).

Teaching

I teach the Spanish Prelims (first year) course and Final Honours School (second and final year) options on Medieval literature and culture (Papers VI and IX) as well as translation from contemporary and medieval Spanish (Papers II and III). I welcome applications from potential graduate students working on medieval and Renaissance Spanish literature and culture.

Recent Publications

‘Conversion as Education: Persuading the Jews in Juan Luis Vives’s De veritate fidei christianae’, Medieval Encounters, 2025.

‘St Paul, the Apostolic Age, and the Status of Conversos in Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium fidei (1464) and Hernando de Talavera’s Católica impugnación (1480)’, Converso Paulinisms, ed. by Claude Stuczynski and Yosi Yisraeli (= Hispania Judaica Bulletin), forthcoming.

‘Discernment of Spirits and Spiritual Authority: Tractatus de vita spirituali and Its Afterlife’, in Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. by María Morrás, Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida and Yonsoo Kim, The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, 79 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 112–35.

‘“Qui ex Iudeis sunt”: Visigothic Law and the Discrimination against conversos in Late Medieval Spain’, in Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Pre-Modern Iberia and Beyond, ed. by Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazier-Eytan, Numen, 164 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 60–85.

‘Bishops and the Court: The Castilian Episcopacy and Conversos, 1450–1465’, in Dominus Episcopus: Medieval Bishops in their Dioceses, ed. by Anthony J. Lappin & Elena Balzamo, KVHAA Konferenser, 95 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 2018), pp. 217–40.

‘Modelos de asesinato ritual: La influencia de Fortalitium fidei en el caso del Santo Niño de la Guardia’, in Comunicación y Conflicto en la Cultura Política Peninsular, siglos xiii al xv, ed. José Manuel Nieto Soria & Óscar Villarroel González (Madrid: Sílex, 2018), pp. 169–87.

‘La matriz medieval de la disidencia en Castilla: la herejía judaizante y la controversia sobre los conversos’, in Disidencia religiosa en Castilla la Nueva en el siglo xvi, ed. by Ignacio J. García Pinilla (Toledo: Almud, 2013), pp. 13–28.

‘Misera Hispania’: Jews and ‘Conversos’ in Alonso de Espina’s ‘Fortalitium fidei’, Medium Aevum Monographs, 31 (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2013). 

‘“Nos soli sumus christiani”: Conversos in the Texts of the Toledo Rebellion of 1449’, in Medieval Hispanic Studies in Memory of Alan Deyermond, ed. by Andrew M. Beresford, Louise M. Haywood, and Julian Weiss (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013), pp. 215–36.