Article
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The Latin Middle Ages and Nature: the image of the garden in the Roman de la Rose
Adriana MARTÍNEZ
Original title: El Medievo latino y la Naturaleza: la imagen del jardín en el Roman de la Rose
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Garden, Middle Ages, Roman de la Rose.
The image of the garden, synecdoche of nature, which traverses the Latin middle ages is base don judeo-christian culture that makes the concept of Paradise. However, in the 12 th century a renewal is produced in thinking nature not only as a reality outside, inteligible, and in the following century, a text like the Roman de la Rose installed a concept of nature where the garden becomes privilegeg stage of love, a new Paradise.
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Andreas Capellanus (XII century) and The game of Love
Nicolás MARTÍNEZ SÁEZ
Original title: Andrés el Capellán (siglo XII) y el juego del Amor
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Andreas Capellanus, Court Love, Game, Segle XII.
Andreas Capellanus writes De amore at the end of the 12th century in a context of interweaving of traditions such as the Christian clerical, the feudal courtesan and the troubadour poetry. In this work, a new aesthetic sensibility is represented in love that acquires a playful dimension. The dialogues that arise between people of different social classes and the so-called Love´s Court reveal this game where men and women argue in favor of a love that does not obey social classes. De amore is composed of three books. The first two are those where seriousness and play seem to mix in a work that is both a scientific treatise and a practical manual of the rules governing worldly relations between men and women. The last book can be understood in a playful dimension where it is possible to win in only one way: by giving up.
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Dialectic of Love: about the Far-near
Ernesto MANUEL ROMÁN
Original title: Dialéctica del amor: sobre lo Lejos-cerca
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Far-near, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Love, Margarita Porete, Mystical literature, Troubadour poetry.
In this text we seek to explore The Mirror of simple souls that are annihilated and that only dwell in wanting and wanting love focusing on the problem of the Far-near. This concept, and its particular way of rationing with the image and the word, will allow us to draw relationships between Marguerite Porete and other writers of the period. We will also seek to explore the philosophical questions that arise from Marguerite's book and her conception of love. We will begin by seeing how, for Plato, love occupied the place of the demonic, that is, of the threshold between mortals and immortals. Then we will stop to analyse the love of far from the troubadour poetry, where the relation of distance-closeness of love that will characterize the Far-near is forged. Finally we will dwell on the use of this logic made by Hadewijch of Antwerp and Marguerite to think about their annihilation. The latter is also an abandonment of the virtues and an overcoming of the Reason in Love.
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The configuration of the beloved body in medieval romance: idealization and eroticism in Le Chevalier de la charrette by Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1135-1185)
María ESTRELLA
Original title: La configuración del cuerpo amado en el roman medieval: idealización y erotismo en El caballero de la Carreta de Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1135-1185)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Body, Chrétien de Troyes, Medieval romance, Wound.
The main purpose of this article is to analyse the configuration of the body in Le Chevalier de la charrette (1176/1181), written by Chrétien de Troyes, which narrates the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen Geneva. We are interested in observing the survival of the doctrine of courteous love in the construction of the chivalrous hero and the character of the beloved woman, who is worshiped as a superior being. A "religion of love" is outlined, which, according to Denis de Rougemont, is one of the axes that articulates this doctrine. At the same time, this idealization is combined with the physical presence of the body, especially in the description of the sexual encounter of the couple. We will explore a conception of love that is delineated as pleasurable suffering and characterized by an eroticism that combines joy and pain, which is represented in the topic of the wound.
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Body metaphors in goliardic poetry: Altercatio cordis et oculi (The dispute between the eye and the heart) and Alte Clamat Epicurus (The cult of the stomach)
Mariana BLANCO
Original title: Metáforas corporales en la poesía de los goliardos: Altercatio cordis et oculi (La disputa entre el ojo y el corazón) y Alte Clamat Epicurus (El culto del estómago)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Body images, Carmina Burana, Goliards, Medieval Latin poetry, Middle Ages.
Born in the twelfth century, in the literary world of medieval schools, goliardic poetry is considered one of the most original manifestations of the Medieval Latin lyric for its rebellious vitalism, its celebration of the body and its irreverent criticism of the social order. In this article we propose to analyze some body images and corporal metaphors recurrent in the poetics of goliardism, focusing on the dialectical relations between soul-body and virtue-vice, characteristics of the medieval worldview. We will take into consideration the anonymous poems Altercatio cordis et oculi (The dispute between the eye and the heart) and Alte Clamat Epicurus (The cult of the stomach) and we will study the tensions between the noble and ignoble parts of the body, between the ascetic ideal and excess, between the exaltation of sensual pleasures and the condemnation of the flesh as the origin of sin. Likewise, we will examine the way in which body representation is mediated by the intellectual formation of poets in its double aspect: the classical Latin and the biblical-ecclesiastical traditions.
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The parody of the trip to the underworld in Novella di Ferondo (ottava della terza giornata), in Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313-1375) Decameron
Liliana NOEMÍ SWIDERSKI
Original title: La parodia del viaje al inframundo en la Novella di Ferondo (ottava della terza giornata), del Decameron, de Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Boccaccio, Carnivalization, Ferondo, Parody, Trip to the underworld.
The Novella di Ferondo develops two plot-lines typical of the medieval tradition, but whose joint approach shows the passage to the Renaissance worldview. On the one hand, the topic of adultery characteristic of the fabliaux, with their main characters: the stupid and vigilant husband, the seductive and submissive wife, the astute and lustful lover. On the other hand, the trip to the underworld to be purified by corporal punishment, which is related to the serious and moralizing line of the exempla and the Divina Commedia. However, the parody of the sacred discourses, the irony and the rupture of the stylistic isotopy constitute a burlesque eschatology. The humorous references to death, purgatory, the resurrection of the flesh and even the Annunciation show, in Bakhtin's terms, how laughter relaxes the fears imposed by official culture. The corrective violence that Ferondo suffers, as well as the exaltation of free erotic enjoyment and the identity mutations caused by disguise, reveals the resistance against disciplinary mechanisms. The ending of the story, a utopia of freedom conquered by deception to power, represents a victory of Renaissance hedonism over medieval asceticism.
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Approach to the theatrical use of the body in La Farce de Pathelin (c. 1470)
Alejandra DA CRUZ; Juan Cruz ZARIELLO VILLAR
Original title: Aproximación al uso teatral del cuerpo en La Farce de Pathelin (c. 1470)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Body, La Farce de Pathelin, Medieval Theater, Scenic resources.
In this paper, we will try to examine the functions of the body in La Farce de Pathelin (c. 1470), a significative text in French profane theatre in the Low Middle Ages. Despite the moral and formative intentions of the religious representations, the farce seeks the spectator’s laugh, with a simple plot and scenic resources related to the disguise or violence. Our analysis focus on body’s representations in three dimensions: body and knowledge and the figure of the doctor; the interactions between both sick body and mind; the relationship between body and religion. We will highlight the theatrical simulation of Maese Pathelin in order to fool the draper.
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The control of the bodies in The Physician’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)
Candela ARRAIGADA
Original title: El control de los cuerpos en The Physician’s Tale y The Wife of Bath’s Tale, de Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Arthurian subject, Canterbury Tales, Control over the Body, Literature of the Middle Ages.
In Una historia del cuerpo en La Edad Media (2005), Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong point out that the oscillations between rejection and exaltation, humiliation and veneration, cross the medieval Christian body. In line with this approach, our paper aims to examine two stories belonging to The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, in which the conflicts between old age and youth are glimpsed, articulated mainly around the ideals of virginity and chastity, which reveal the links between eroticism and control over bodies. Both stories will establish a counterpoint between two models of women. The Physician’s Tale offers a paradigmatic perspective of the physical and psychic virtues of a young woman and reveals the absolute value given to virginity. On the other hand, in The Wife of Bath’s Tale the Arthurian subject and the structure of the quest will serve the analysis of the power relationships between oldness / ugliness and youth / beauty, in intimate relation with the Prologue that precedes it, focused on the modern notion of experience.
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Semblance of Arabic Poetry
Juan BRANDO
Original title: Semblanza de la poesía árabe
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Al-Andalus, Arabism, Islamic Law, Middle Ages, Poetry.
We propose a brief approach to the Arabic Poetry of the later Middle Ages with a Reading key centered on the metaphors alluding to wine, wáter, tears, dew and flowers. Prohibition and desire, postponenment and melancholy by the absence of the beloved or exile, the pains drowned in wine, are the ways by which poetry becomes a consideration of trascendence and primordial unity.
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Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) and the Aesthetics of his Age
Antonia Javiera CABRERA MUÑOZ
Original title: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) y la Estética de su Tiempo
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Aesthetics, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Renaissance.
Contrary to other writers in the Spanish Golden Age, such as Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo and Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is considered as being an autodidact by experts. From the publication of La Galatea (1585) on, Cervantes begins to devote himself fully to Literature. His journey through several genres and subgenres makes him both pertaining and alien to his own time, since he starts to deal in his works with a variety of aesthetic topics (authorship, reading, literary creation, etc.) that put in question particularly the previous age, the Renaissacence. The aim of this study is to survey some of those aesthetic topics in Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), in order to establish Cervantes’s worldview as the author of the most ingenious work in Spanish Literature.
