Multicultural Iberia: Language, Literature, and Music. Ed. Dru Dougherty and Milton Azevedo. Berkeley: U of California at Berkeley, 1999. 258 pages. This tome suits a wide range of interests. One informative chapter introduces uses of digitized media (Faulhaber 9-25); while others are clearly linguistics chapters (Rogers 154-64, Rasico 165-74, and Sempere-Martinez 175-97). Other essays examine homoerotic poetry in two languages, a religious text, music, and various other contributions. Cortijo-Ocana (40-56) proposes an "inane hypothesis" suggesting that Luis de Lucena (or a member of his Salamanca literary circle) may have written the first anonymous act of the Celestina. Bower i Font's chapter (57-67) on a brief devotional text (originally published in Catalan), and all its various translations, is of interest to the non-specialist. My only editorial comment regarding these essays is the following: I question the universality of Marcos-Marin's top-down pattern (23) of "regarding... a human creature," especially men viewing women (hair first, feet last, in a top-down pattern). The rest of the chapter constitutes a serious comparative study. McNerney (68 - 80) describes the lives and works of writers from various centuries and "autonomies" (as they are now officially called). She boldly asserts that many Galician-Potuguese troubadours who wrote in a woman's voice actually sang songs authored by women (68). Fernandez-Vega (81-92) seems to agree with McNerney's contention (74) that widowhood was often the best social and economic possibility for women, for many centuries, in Iberia. Fernandez-Vega recounts the life and work of Jeronima de Gales, twice-widowed, and famous for her high-quality printing. Bergmann's chapter (93-108) on Martin Gaite's El cuarto de atras and Roig's El temps de les cireres, combining a variety of themes, remains accessible to teh 'lay reader." I admit to postponing reading Robles-Saez's "Mental Houses in Catalan and Castilian Women Writers of the 1990s" (109-22), mistakenly believing that the essay focused on "Women in Mental Institutions." I confess to preparing myself for reading a potentially depressing article. Circumventing the title, one finds that Robles-Saes demonstrates a rare combination of humor and literary analysis. Godoy (123-53) follows the gay discourse in Spain from the Generation of '27 to the present. Expressing a preference for the "homotexts" of Mesquida (written in Catalan) to those of Villena (a Spanish-language writer), he contrasts the former's straightforward sexuality to the latter's idealized view. Altisent's chapter (134-53) on Mendoza's novel Una comedia ligera presents a dilemma for this reviewer. Altisent skillfully draws us into the labyrinthine world of Mendoza's novel, only to leave us questioning whether we should waste our time reading this "trivial" work (135). …