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Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

2022; Columbia University Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00358118-9812604

2688-5220

Albert Lloret,

Early Modern Women Writers

Alone Together studies the pervasiveness of emotions in fourteenth- and (primarily) fifteenth-century courtly literature of the Iberian Peninsula. As Henry Berlin ponders in the introduction, the study of emotions in the late Middle Ages is a complex field that eludes a systematic approach based on either the superposition of premodern theories of emotion, affect, and sentiment, or the basis of modern psychological concepts. Berlin thus begins his book by arguing for the use of a concept that aptly focuses his discussion. He chooses passion as the most productive, one that is rooted in the thought of the period, that can be identified in a variety of works drawing on Aristotelian and Stoic ideas of emotion, that is present, too, in rhetorical works, and that enjoys well-recognized ethical, political, and devotional uses. For Berlin, the passions of late medieval Iberian texts are not just innocuous themes around which courtiers exercised their wittiness, jockeying for symbolic capital. They rather stand as discursive indices of a cultural crisis affecting aristocracy, to which the troubadour revival of the period is sometimes attached, and in which use of, and reflection on, passion is embedded. Through seven chapters divided into two sections, Berlin shows how passions are linked to crucial questions involving social, ethical, and political issues that are foundational in the textual constitution of the subject and its relationship to the community. This is an ambitious study that tackles a wide range of texts written in many genres and in three different Romance vernaculars, Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan. The first three chapters of the study make up a more theoretical section, mostly but not exclusively dedicated to political and theological treatises (“Friendship and Pleasure”). The second, longer part of the book (“Compassion and Consolation”) contains four chapters on lyric verse, religious poetry, and fictional prose.Chapter 1 (“Classical Rhetoric and Vernacular Theories of Social Integration”) focuses on Castilian and Portuguese works of political theory by Diego de Valera, Pedro de Portugal, and Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, although Berlin also refers in his endnotes to the slightly earlier work of Francesc Eiximenis. This chapter studies how social cohesion is theorized as dependent on the management of passions under Stoic political and moral precepts. Passions retains cognitive value (as markers of of what must be avoided), while other emotional concepts, such as friendship and mercy, emerge as key virtues to be cultivated among rulers and subjects alike. Berlin shows how this theorizing of public and private emotion management runs parallel to the consolidation of the power of the Trastámara and Avis dynasties to which those authors served. Chapter 2 is devoted to “Alfonso Madrigal, el Tostado, and the Politics of Friendship.” It explores Madrigal’s ideas of “shared emotion and shared language, articulated under the concept of friendship,” also touching on the concepts of love and compassion. Madrigal’s ideas have Aristotelian roots (the Nicomachaen Ethics and the Politics) that, on occasion, are subverted. Through them, friendship (as communication and sharing) arises as a category that allows to conceive of interpersonal relationships as well as of one’s relationship with the divine. Friendship is, thus, tied to ideas of community and communication—not only to the ethical but, mainly, to the political. Chapter 3 (“Reason and Its Discontents”) tackles prose theoretical works (like King Duarte’s Leal Conselheiro), prose disputations (by Pere Torroella and Pedro Jiménez de Urrea), and lyric works in Catalan and Castilian (by Pedro de Santa Fe, Carvajal, and Romeu Llull, among many others). In all of these, Berlin recognizes an encompassing view of love as passion, sentiment, immoderate feeling, and suffering that needs to be ascetically tempered, refrained by reason, and so rationalistically regimented.Chapter 4, “Impassibility, Pity, Community,” centers around Pedro López de Ayala’s Rimado de Palacio and the Marquis of Santillana’s Gozos de la Virgen. Berlin notes that compassion and consolation play a key role in these two works and remarks how, ultimately, both emotions are linked to monastic pursuits of impassibility in the ascesis of divine contemplation. As a privileged emotion that was often modeled on the figure of Christ, compassion—participating in God’s tribulation—was a form of consolation, and Berlin shows how the language of both emotions, while rooted in the practices of monastic communities, eventually found its way into vernacular moral treatises as much as in love lyric. In chapter 5, “Passionate Quotation,” passion is reflected upon as an intersubjective feeling. The poetry of Galician author Macías, famously and tragically dead due to love, and his numerous appearances as a literary character in Iberian lyric both serve Berlin to survey Catalan and Castilian examples of passionate quotation. Berlin argues that quotation, a common device in late medieval love lyric, activates common knowledge, and thereby the reader’s identification with the poet, opening a path to both spiritual and ethical knowledge. Chapter 6, “The Impasse of the Courtly Reward,” focuses on Juan Rodríguez del Padrón’s Siervo libre de amor, Pedro Constable of Portugal’s Sátira de felice e infelice vida, and Tragédia de la insigne reina doña Isabel. This chapter furthers Berlin’s approach of chapter 5 by transposing his discussion to sentimental fiction, a hybrid prose genre that incorporates lyric poetry, letters, glosses, and chivalresque and allegorical features. Berlin explores conflicts between compassion and discretion, and compassion and cruelty in them, as foundations of moral discourse. Chapter 7 is entitled “Confession, Consolation, and the Poetics of Hylomorphism” and is devoted to the poetry of Valencian author Ausiàs March. Berlin offers a close analysis of March’s poetics of introspection, recognizing a less dichotomic problematization—in fact, at times, a clearly triadic approach to the emotional troubles of the lover’s soul, beyond passion and reason. According to Berlin, March added a middle ground between both passion and reason, enriched by the perspective of the beloved’s death, its ensuing grief, and, eventually, by the consequences of March’s hylomorphism in imagining his enduring love beyond the Judgment Day. Finally, the book’s conclusion looks into Joan Roís de Corella’s poetry and prose and his move away from collective emotion as a symptom of a changing, Renaissance-bound emotional regime.One of the accomplishments of Berlin’s study is that it traces the genealogy of the traditions it studies, harking back to the authors’ sources, models, and the continuities and transformations that those experienced, while, at the same time, his attention is ultimately set on determining the underpinnings of the general emotional landscape that arises from looking at utterly diverse works from the same period. Another of Berlin’s accomplishments is that his propositions are based on careful close readings of extensive sources, revolving around certain questions that coalesce in the chapters, but not always in a linear, argumentative fashion (perhaps more so in chapters 6 and 7). As may be apparent from my concise summary above, this is very hermeneutical book. It deploys a synchronic, totalizing approach in every bit of a carefully measured prose. Just as this monograph presents a hermeneutics of passion, it also asks for a hermeneutic engagement with it to fully grasp its depth. Those who will reread the chapters of Alone Together will better realize its tightly knitted thought, composed of threads that can lead us to multiple other sections of the book. Berlin’s lines of thought always open up perspectives on large issues, be it the emotional correlate of a crisis discourse in fifteenth-century authors, or passions as cognitively valuable, or the links between emotions, subjectivity, and modernity. Last but not least, it is also fair to praise Berlin’s effort in offering a pan-Iberian scope to the questions under discussion. To mount his analysis of quotation, Berlin chooses Macías, a Galician author, relevant for both Castilian and Catalan poets. His analysis of fifteenth-century political thought in Castilian and Portuguese is counterpointed with references to works in Catalan. To conclude, this is an admirable book. It offers a novel account of passion and emotion as means to interpellate and convince, but, more than anything, to create social relations and build communities in courtly settings. Berlin puts passion and emotions under a new intellectual light that helps us appreciate them not primarily as displays of subjectivity and the progressive emergence of discursive forms of modernity, but rather as widespread attempts of bringing people together.