Conflict, Language, and Social Practice in Medieval Societies: Selected Essays of Isabel Alfonso, ed. Julio Escalona, Álvaro Carvajal Castro, and Cristina Jular Pérez-Alfaro. The Medieval Countryside, 24. Turnhout: Brepols, 2024, pp. 677.

This is an unusual festschrift. The honoree, a historian of medieval Spain, Isabel Alfonso, obtained her doctorate from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she also becameProfesora Titularof Institutional History, before assuming the position ofInvestigadora Científicaat the Instituto de Historia (an institution under the auspices of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas). She retired from this position in 2016. The editors and commentators, who assembled the festschrift, decided to reprint a selection of twenty essays from the more than fifty journal articles and book chapters that Alfonso has published since 1973. Although Alfonso herself is notable for her attention to foreign-language scholarship and in her essays has always sought to bring the contributions of scholars from outside Spain to the attention of her colleagues, as in the three bibliographic essays that close the volume under review here, most of her own work has appeared only in Spanish. Originally, the idea of the editors and commentators was to provide a collection of translations only for essays that had never appeared in English. In the course of discussions, however, the group decided that the book would be better served if the full range of Alfonso’s insights were revealed – and this meant reproducing some work that was already available in translation.