Reading the Neighbor in Geoffrey Chaucer and Pero Lopez de Ayala

This article employs a neighborly model of literary-historical relations to analyze two medieval accounts of the controversial King Pedro I of Castile and Leon. Utilizing the neighbor as a conceptual category at the interstices of history writing, literary representation, and geographic textual relations, the argument charts Pedro's textual unrest in Geoffrey Chaucer's tragedy of Pedro in "The Monk's Tale" and Pero Lopez de Ayala's Coronica del rey don Pedro. Both Ayala's and Chaucer's accounts confront Pedro as their neighbor - a contentious figure whose ethical meaning is as forceful as it is unstable.