About

Simone Pinet is a Professor of Spanish and Medieval Studies at Cornell University, with a PhD from Harvard University. Her teaching and research focus on medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, spanning from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Her work emphasizes the relationships between spatiality, economics, poetics, and translation, with particular attention to the long-term connections between medieval and modern periods in contemporary Spain and Latin America. Related areas of interest include visual studies, cartography, and political economy. Her scholarly contributions include the publication of books such as 'Archipelagoes: Insularity and Fiction from Romance to the Novel' (2011), which examines literature and cartography in Spain during the transition from the medieval to the early modern era through the figure of the island, and 'The Task of the Cleric' (2016), which discusses cartography, translation, and political economy in the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre. She is currently working on a book analyzing economic metaphors and rhetorical strategies in canonical Iberian works from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Pinet has been recognized as a fellow of the Society of the Humanities and a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.

Research topics

• Political Science

Selected publications

• Berceo’s Sound Garden: Aurality in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora

  Hispanic Review · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

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  ABSTRACT: In dialogue with sensorial studies, and with sound studies in particular, in this article I build on scholarship that has highlighted the musical elements and the calls for the audience in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora . Remarking on questions of voice and speech, on words as sound, and on different acoustic elements, I explore acoustic references, allusions, and structures to ascertain how sound in general works both in the introduction and in the miracles. I propose that the introduction’s soundscape works as an interpretive key that echoes across the collection, demanding that the audience perform different aural operations to engage with the text, among them aural supplementation and, especially, identifying with the listening characters, activating what I call deictic listening, a rhetorical role for sound that Berceo uses to structure his text.

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• Debt and the Miracle: On the Economy of Grace and Conversion in Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora

  Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos · 2025-12-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article reads two of Gonzalo de Berceo’s Miracles of Our Lady, tracing how different economic operations find a vocabulary in moral words and concepts that open up to economic metaphorization and become ambiguous and polysemic. The analysis proposes that Miracle X “The Two Brothers,” and Miracle XXIII “The Merchant of Byzantium,” both structured on debt, present a particular idea of conversion.

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• Soundscapes of the Self (Salamanca, 1554)

  2024-12-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The notable things that the “I” of Lazarillo wants to bring to the attention of many, are things “por ventura nunca oídas ni vistas,” that by chance have never been heard, or seen. What if we were to focus not on the visual, but on the sounds of these notable things? While this, the most intriguing of 16th-century works in Spanish, has been dissected in its generic possibilities, in its experiments with selfhood and subjectivity, what if we were to think again of confession and autobiography and instead of tracing models and sources, try to hear them as language registers? After all, the text’s most memorable moments are aural moments, adventures built on sound, structured by resonance and silence and volume: the din of the bull, the whistling of the key/snake, the refusal to tell the story of the friar, the job as town crier. In this chapter I want to focus on how the text builds on contrasts of noise and silence to stage curious voicings of that “I”: a soundscape of the self. A dozen of “dixe entre mí” or “dixe passo, que no me oyó,” are not thoughts, but voiced articulations in a frequency out of reach—out of earshot—away from authority.

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• Feminist Cyberlaw

  University of California Press eBooks · 2024

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.

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• Uno por otro: economía de la sustitución en los Siete Infantes de Salas

  Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies eBooks · 2022-12-31

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• Teaching the Female in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia : Introduction

  ˜La œcorónica/˜La œCorónica · 2022-09-01

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• Fernando Riva, <i>“Nunca mayor sobervia comidió Luçifer”: Límites del conocimiento y cultura claustral en el “Libro de Alexandre.”</i> (Medievalia Hispanica 27.) Madrid: Iberoamerica, and Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2019. Paper. Pp. 234; 1 black-and-white figure. €24. ISBN: 978-8-4919-2057-1.

  Speculum · 2021-06-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• For Love of Money

  2021-04-26

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• New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies

  2021 MLA Annual Convention · 2021-01-09

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• Bits and Pieces: On Heather Bamford's Cultures of the Fragment

  ˜La œcorónica/˜La œCorónica · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Bits and Pieces:On Heather Bamford's Cultures of the Fragment Simone Pinet We have all seen medievalism take its work with fragments into a more serious engagement with the idea and theory of them in recent years, with research groups, blogs, and collaborative websites and journals across Europe addressing medievalism's fragment(ary) cultures, but Hispanomedievalism had yet to collect pieces to compose a corpus. With this book, Heather Bamford tackles this corporal and archival incompleteness, proposing ingenious solutions to the multiple challenges and opportunities offered by this dispersion and lack of a critical thread. The five chapters, introduction, and afterword are followed by an appendix with different sections of Mohanmad de Vera's Breviario Sunni; a bibliography; and an index. I will go briefly through the chapters to underline those critical concepts that are mobilized in each, and that have in some form remained with me, working with each other to make me reconsider the texts Professor [End Page 27] Bamford studies. And already here, I want to highlight how curious I find it that Bamford's book speaks to its community of readers as individuals: first when reading and, now, when writing about it I am reacting to how I experience those processes Bamford describes, to my own sense of the practices of literary and cultural criticism, to my own considerations and methods, suggesting that the archive itself is a series of fragmentary, personal, approaches—one is convinced already, before one begins. Starting with the distinction between the fragment and the fragmentary text in the first chapter, Bamford asks us to open up the concept and consider the fragment not only as object but simultaneously as the practice of reading and commenting literary texts (and indeed, even beyond them), considering how much of our everyday critical practices are those of fragmenting, of cutting up and setting apart, of imagining wholes and parts, bits and pieces. In the second chapter, "From Bound to Metonym: Early Modern and Modern Disuse of Chivalric Fragments," Bamford puts to work this "metonymic philology" to discuss the Amadís fragments and their critical import. I found the name she gives to this critical process tremendously useful because of its conceptual simplicity and clarity, bringing with it a whole series of practices of scholarship that I began to see through this lens. This chapter also concludes that the disuse of these fragments both in the early modern period and in our own scholarly period might be due to an exhaustion of the fragments' possibilities beyond their material utility, and this idea of the exhaustion of matter, which necessarily limits their capacity to offer material for criticism, in critical key lingers still in the margins of my reading. "Used to Pieces: The Muwashshahas and Their Romance Kharjas from Al-Andalus to Cairo" brought in yet another instrumental phrase, "critical fragmentation" (the study of the romance kharjas as separate from their muwashshahas), a term that condenses the different practices (material, spiritual, intellectual) of fragmentation that scholarly work implies. Beyond research and writing, I think the transformative potential of this term will be felt most acutely in a pedagogical setting, thematized in class and recast as a critical opportunity. The fourth chapter, "Faith in Fragments," focuses on the spiritual use of fragments, understood now as pieces of different works in other materials, such as the inscription of [End Page 28] the names of God found in the rafters of the Aljafería in Zaragoza, and the well-known shingle with verses from the Poema de Fernán González found in Villamartín de Sotoscueva in the 1960s, pointing to what I understood as forms of prosthesis, or as excretions and insertions that become part of another body but remain somehow separate. Finally, the last chapter, "The Fragment among the Moriscos: Mohanmad de Vera's Culture of Compilation" focuses on intellectual fragmentation as an operation of collective memory, adding new terms and critical opportunities—prosthesis, spiritual and intellectual fragmentation, fragment as collective memory. Functioning as case studies, the chapters carry out different theoretical hypotheses laid out in the introduction. The focus on fragments forces the necessary questioning of central processes of scholarly study such as collecting, or...

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Frequent coauthors

• Christien Tompkins

  Cornell University

  9 shared

• Parisa Have

  Yale University

  9 shared

• Sarah Pickman

  Yale University

  9 shared

• Emrah Yıldız

  Northwestern University

  9 shared

• Abidin Kusno

  Cornell University

  9 shared

• Namita Vijay Dharia

  Cornell University

  9 shared

• Kirin Narayan

  Australian National University

  9 shared

• Anthony Fontes

  Cornell University

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Society of the Humanities (2008-2009)
• John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2010-2011)