Activity

New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies

Presider: Isidro J. Rivera, University of Kansas

Economies of place in medieval literature

Simone Pinet  [email protected]
Cornell University

For this talk I want to explore the overlaps between two general fields of inquiry or methodologies of research that I am currently working with to investigate questions of political economy in canonical medieval Iberian texts. On the one hand, I have been interested for quite some time in theories of space and place, and for my new project I am working with a variety of theories of economics and debt to investigate economic clusters or sequences in Iberian literary texts. The project is (as all projects tend to be in their first stages) perhaps overly ambitious, and seeks to trace some of these sequences at the level of vocabulary (prez, onor, valer), others at work at the level of structure (gain and loss, repetition and variation), and perhaps even to gain some perspective on the economics of genre (hagiography and picaresque), in works from the 12th through the 16th centuries. For this panel, I want to propose a quick framing of what is at stake in putting these economic and spatial theories at work in medieval literature by way of a discussion, first, of the space/place of the market, especially in regards to sovereignty and debt, looking at specific scenes in the Libro de Apolonio, and second with an inquiry on the wasting of the yermo, the spending of the wasteland in relation to conceptualizations of sin and debt in the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca.

 

Fairies and pagan mythologies in the Romancero

David Wacks [email protected]
University of Oregon

Fairies that appear in the woods and give gifts of gold, enchanted deer that lead the hero to meet a fairy lover, and other such magical beings are well known to audiences of the Hispanic Romancero, especially those ballads sung in connection with the summer solstice or Día de San Juan. A cursory study of folkloric traditions of Northern Spain reveals a well-established fairy consciousness, productive in tales, songs, local geographical legends and toponyms, some of which have found a productive after-life in educational and/or commercial settings. Ethnographers have identified their origins in pre-Christian Celtic cults, more richly preserved in analogous medieval Irish and Welsh sources. These cults eroded and transformed over centuries of official Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, but continue as folkloric traditions well into the twentieth century in the more remote corners of the North, as well as in the pages of romances read (and sung) by centuries of Christian audiences.

What meaning might these pre-Christian traditions had for (officially) Christian singers, listeners and readers? What value can we assign to these remnants of Spain’s pagan past and present? If a fairy was once a supernatural personification of a force of nature, what is she now? Using a comparative methodology, in this paper I will read medieval romances featuring magical beings and church critiques of persistent medieval paganism against modern ethnographic evidence in order to come to some understanding of how to read these popular pagan traditions in the context of an officially Christian Iberian society.

 

Life Writing, Illness, and Gender: Autopathography in the Medieval Cloister

Joan F. Cammarata [email protected]
Manhattan College

Teresa de Cartagena (1425 Burgos, Spain), from a prominent convert family of Jewish heritage, entered a cloistered convent of the Cistercian Order where she was stricken with deafness, supposedly from an illness. This paper addresses Teresa’s two prose treatises, Grove of the Infirm and Wonder at the Work of God, as a response to the dual silence of her existence, one physical and the other social. The Grove of the Infirm, a meditation on illness, is written as an autopathography, a self-written narrative of personal isolation that deals with the influence of her deafness on her life. Her Wonder at the Work of God, perhaps the earliest feminist work by a Spanish woman, is a defense of her right to break the silence imposed upon women writers by the patriarchal order. Teresa’s solitude in her deafness, leaving her alone even in the company of many, prompts her need to be intelligible through an analysis of her innermost self. In the Grove of the Infirm, Teresa writes the life of the body as she is writing the life of the mind by affirming her inalterable bodily deficiency as a literary subject in her autopathography. This work functions as a formal means of introspection, as well as a method of having a written word communicate to others what the body cannot. Comprehending her deafness in its spiritual and emotional, as well as physical, dimensions she relates her deafness as a condition that threatens not merely to marginalize but to obliterate the self. Her corporal deafness penetrates her intellectual and spiritual life, her identity and self-image, and her relations with others. Having experienced a type of conversion that enlightens her understanding, she relates autobiographical incidents with an implicit didactic intention to remind imperfect beings that to suffer tribulation is the road to salvation. Motivated by an inner need that is more personal than literary, she is victorious in breaking her dual silence: she communicates her voice out of the stillness of her affliction and breaks the silence imposed by medieval society on the learned woman who expresses her thoughts in writing. Following the conventions of medieval literature wherein the written word should not be an unjustified expression of personal experiences but is meant to instruct and to inspire, Teresa overcomes silence to recount the adversity of her own life in her autopathography that advises suffering with resignation for the love of God to the larger community of those who endure infirmity. She reflects the Christian conscience of life, suffering, and death within the spiritual and social history of her times.

 

The Interpretation of the Mystical Gap in light of the American Cognitive Theory

Mustafa Binmayaba [email protected]
Indiana University

Past critics approached the poetic language and symbols of the medieval mystics as ordinary poetic language that uses metaphors, similes, and other figurative devices to reveal the inner meaning of a feeling or thing. Mystical symbols were assumed to be exclusive within the realm of poetry: they had no direct connection with culture, thought, or reality.  The symbols in mystical poetry were seen as puzzles that thought to have single solutions. As such, this paper introduces a new approach to analyzing the mystical symbols that the Iberian Arab mystic poets employed to express the experience of divine love. It sheds light on the way in which figurative language and expressions interface with cognitive, cultural, and spiritual experience.  The paper relies on the Cognitive Linguistic Approach of American linguist George Lakoff to reveal the relationship between (1) mystical thinking about the nature of God, (2) the secular language of love, and (3) the mystical idea of divine love. “Halt, Friend! Weep,” a love poem by the Iberian mystic Ibn ʿArabī (born in Murcia, Spain, in 1165 AD), will be used as a case study to introduce two key points. First, to argue that thoughts and feelings of human love inspired the mystics to express their ideas about their mystical experience of divine love through secular symbols that create gaps of indeterminacy in their poems. Second, to explain, in light of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, how these gaps of indeterminacy created by the mystical symbols can be closed and understood through mappings of the mystical symbols, as parts of the target domain of divine love, onto different entities of the source domain of secular love.