Thirteenth-century King Alfonso X of Spain was one of history’s wisest rulers. In more than 400 songs in his greatest work, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, he constructed an ideal kingdom full of learned, talented, and prosperous subjects. Our Lady’s Troubadour adapts ten of the best of these miracle tales to share the joys and sorrows of medieval Spain with modern readers… An innocent musician sings his wonderful songs for the wrong people. Will he pay for his error with his life? A brave knight rides hard through a narrow mountain pass, his enemies in hot pursuit, intent on ending his life. Can he find salvation at the hermitage on the hill? A lord abandons his castle on the border only to be kidnapped by invading enemy soldiers. Can his wife protect the castle and everyone in it? In this collection, the critically acclaimed author of Seven Noble Knights offers historical fiction lovers imaginative retellings of these and other extraordinary tales to paint a vivid picture of life in the Middle Ages. In this tribute to Alfonso X, el Sabio, on the occasion of his 800th birthday, a new audience will discover the delights of a beloved artifact of a golden age ruled over by a legendary king and scholar. "The author has created a rather wonderful bit of alchemy here: the reader enters each story with twenty-first-century sensibilities, but somehow by the end is firmly in a medieval mindset. This is a rare reading experience, as close to time travel as one can get. Here there are no thinly disguised modern people in costumes, but the real thing. The background information is rich and colorful and adds a great deal to the reading experience." — Tinney Sue Heath , author J. K. (Jessica) Knauss graduated as valedictorian of her class with multiple honors from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She first seriously studied the works of Alfonso X, el Sabio, for her MA in medieval studies at the University of Leeds, England. She earned her PhD in medieval Spanish literature from Brown University with a dissertation that has been published as Law and Order in Medieval Spain: Alfonsine Legislation and the Cantigas de Santa Maria. In the course of her academic career, she has studied and researched in Córdoba, Sevilla, and Salamanca, Spain. She's the author of the short story collection, Our Lady's Troubadour and Other Miraculous Tales in Honor of Alfonso X, el Sabio (Encircle Publications, 2021), as well as another tribute to Alfonso X's literary legacy, the critically acclaimed medieval epic Seven Noble Knights (Encircle Publications, 2020). Her 2012 translation of The Abencerraje has been adopted as a college textbook, she contributed a story to the bestselling anthology We All Fall Down: Stories of Plague and Resilience (2020), and published a one-act play based on a Zamoran legend, Trout Riot (2020). Writing as Jessica Knauss, she's also the author of the "quirky, intriguing" novella Tree/House (2008), "exuberant, never cloying" Dusk Before Dawn: Poems (2010), the contemporary paranormal Awash in Talent (Kindle Press, 2016), and the science fantasy novella The Atwells Avenue Anomaly (2021). Many of her contemporary short stories and flash fiction have been published in literary magazines. She collected these short works in Unpredictable Worlds: Stories (2015), which has been compared to the works of Bradbury, Kipling, Saki, and O. Henry. Her translation of Lidia Falcón's Camino sin retorno was published as No Turning Back (Loose Leaves Publishing, 2013). Visit her website, www.JessicaKnauss.com.