The Spanish romance Carcel de amor blossomed into a transnational and multilingual phenomenon that captivated audiences throughout Europe at a time when literacy was expanding and print production was changing the nature of reading, writing, and of literature itself. In The Prison of Love, Emily Francomano offers the first comparative study of this sixteenth-century work as a transcultural, humanist fiction. Blending literary analysis and book history, Francomano provides us with the richly textured history of the translations, material books, and artefacts that make this tale of love, letters, and courtly intrigue an invaluable prism through which the multifaceted world of sixteenth-century literary and book cultures are refracted.

"In this highly original volume, Francomano traces the transformation of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (The Prison of Love) from a small-format, unillustrated book printed in Seville in 1492 to luxury French manuscripts and tapestries, considering other versions and translations along the way…Francomano’s theoretically engaged analysis of visual, material, and book culture will appeal to specialists in 16th- and 17th-century studies and beyond." - Choice Connect October 2018 vol. 56 # 2

"Emily Francomano’s splendid case study of Carcel’s editorial, intellectual, material, and social history across Europe in the sixteenth century traces how it was transformed from a Castilian sentimental romance into a broad cultural multimedia phenomenon, which she calls The Prison of Love…[this] is a study that everyone interested in the history of literacy and material bibliography, and their effects on the formation of the early modern social and political imaginary, should read." - Renaissance Quarterly, vol 72 no 2