f “Ciencia y fantasía en el Libro de Alexandre”

After a brief consideration of the varying approaches to the text of the Libro de Alexandre adopted first by the late nineteenthcentury German philologists, then by the Spanish and American textual scholars of the 1930s and 1940s, followed by the structuralist interpretations from the mid 1950s to 1975 and the popular editions of the 1980s, up to the more contemporary neohistoricist approaches, the author begins by considering the theoretic problems of handling science and technology in the medieval and early modern periods. He goes on to analyse examples of the uniquely wide-ranging admixture of fantasy with sciences and pseudo-sciences in the early thirteenthcentury Spanish poem, and concludes that the Spanish poet takes a surprisingly rationalist view, and only admits with grave doubts the more fantastic stories in his sources when their inclusion is necessary to fill out the iconic biography of Alexander the Great with the reasons for his moral downfall.