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Professor Richard Hitchcock, MA PhD (St. Andrews)

Professor Emeritus

E-mail: r.hitchcock@exeter.ac.uk
Fax: 01392 264035

Professor Hitchcock spent his academic career at Exeter, from 1966 until his retirement as Professor of Hispano-Arabic Studies in 2003. He studied Spanish and Arabic at St. Andrews where he was taught by Professors L. J. Woodward, D. J. Gifford and A. Pacheco [Spanish], and A. M. Honeyman, C. E. Bosworth and M. A. Ghul [Arabic]. He was a student in Baghdad [1962], and Madrid [1964-5], and on two occasions has been Visiting Professor at the Université de Rennes II. After his PhD on the Mozarabs in 1971, and an article on the kharjas published in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies in 1973, he pursued both research interests concurrently, contributing articles to a wide range of scholarly journals and festschriften. He has been particularly concerned with the importance of terminology, proposing a distinction in the use of the word Mozarab that has since achieved wide acceptance. He also advocated a cautious approach when interpreting the problematic kharjas, and organized the first International Congress on the kharjas in Exeter in 1988. He has recently completed a book entitled 'Perspectives on the Mozarabs' and, in 2004, 'The 'Romance' kharjas in Retrospect', both forthcoming.

He has also published articles in Spanish and English on medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature, including Góngora and the Don Quijote, and a number of studies devoted to nineteenth-century Hispano-Arabic historiography. An adaptation of his translation of Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano ['Dog in the Manger'] was commissioned and performed in the Northcott Theatre, Exeter, in 1989. He published a translation of Cervantes's exemplary novel, Rinconete y Cortadillo, in 1992. In 1974, he edited the Letters of Richard Ford to Pascual de Gayangos and, in a number of papers and addresses, has sought to promote Ford as a pioneering Hispanist and writer, organizing a confernce in Exeter to mark the bicentenary of Ford's birth in 1996. He is a member of the George Borrow Society, and has published articles on Borrow and Ford in the Society's Bulletin, and elsewhere on other travellers to Spain, and to Galicia in particular. A fruit of his interest in the origins of hispanism in the UK was a study of the early writings on Spain of John Bowring [1993]. He has had an abiding interest in bibliography, is a member of the Bibliographical Society, to whose journal The Library, he has contributed a paper.

He is currently studying aspects of the relationship between Christians and Muslims in al-Andalus, and the question of religious adherence in the Iberian Peninsula in the medieval period.