Article
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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.
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Stupid, drunks and giants: satire, carnivalism and hedonism in Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and François Rabelais (c. 1483-1553)
Mariano OLIVERA
Original title: De estultos, beodos y gigantes: sátira, carnavalismo y hedonismo en Erasmo de Rotterdam (1466-1536) y François Rabelais (c. 1483-1553)
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Carnivalism, Epicureanism, Grotesque, Hedonism, Satire.
Satire was genuinely expressed as the disruptive and irritating power against the status quo of medieval and Renaissance society. A unique rhetorical and poetic element, loaded with critical expressions of a political, moral and pedagogical nature, associated with a hedonistic and impulsive vision of vitality. Consequently, related to the common and happy sense of the vulgar, the plebe “estulta” or “foolish” in front of the ascetic, the reflection and the mortified and rationalistic experience of the wise or solitary scholar. A biblical sentence illustrates it: Stultorum infinitus est numerus (“The number of fools is infinite”). Satire presents the world upside down, society upside down, the world revolutionized, happiness as foolishness. Finally, it shows us another perspective in which the pleasure and the hedonistic expression of the body have their privileged place in front of the rule and the monastic and ecclesiastical moral regulations. The writings Praise of the Madness of Erasmus of Rotterdam and Gargantúa and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (sixteenth century), mark important antecedents of satire (and its grotesque derivation) in philosophy and literature, where it is expressed in the first work a recovery of the epicurean philosophy and in the second the extreme hedonism in its grotesque character. The aim of our work is to indicate the carnivalesque-hedonistic vision and moral criticism expressed in such works.
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The five senses, the body and the spirit
Eric PALAZZO
Original title: Les cinq sens, le corps et l’esprit
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Body, Five senses, Spirit.
According to the Christian authors of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the general tendency in the appreciation of the symbolic meaning of the five senses rests on the consideration of the fundamental unity in man, between the body and the spirit, allowing to establish the doctrine of the corporal senses and the spiritual senses. From the first centuries of Christianity, theologians and philosophers endeavored to convey the Greek concept of “man” or the balance between body and spirit, or soul, as a superior source, following in this, on the one hand, the philosophical ideas of Plato and, on the other hand, those of Aristotle. The biblical passage that we have considered as the founding text of this conception of the unity of the body and spirit in man, in Christian perspective, is an excerpt from the first epistle to the Corinthians. The third century Christian sees, in the same way, the Christian concept of the five spiritual senses and their correspondences with the five corporal senses. Origins (185?-253?) Has been the initiator of the concept of the spiritual senses leading, mainly, to the reconciliation of the soul and the body by the establishment of correspondences between the bodily senses and the spiritual senses whose place is established by the Incarnation of the Word. Some expressions of human anatomy in the manuscripts of the second half of the Middle Ages, show strong similarities with the ideas of Lactantius regarding the relationship between the outer man and the inner man and as to the place given to the head in both site of the soul and where the main organs of the senses reside. As in most areas of theology, the thought of Augustine of Hippo has had a considerable influence on the Christian understanding of the five senses, which implies a deep reflection on the relationship between body and mind in Christianity. We can also mention Pedro Damiano in whom we find a pronounced interest in the metaphor of the Man-city where the senses are compared with doors and windows that give access to the outside world and their knowledge. A famous drawing contained in a manuscript realized in the German abbey of Heilbronn, in century XII, summarizes, in himself, a long part of the explored elements on the relation between the body and the spirit in the Christian theology of the Middle Ages from the exploration of the five senses. As we will see, the drawing also suggests a deep reflection on the sensory dimension in the journey of man on earth and in the perspective of what he will have to do in the future, guided by the model of Christ and the Christian virtues. On folio 130v, we see a final full page drawing where the role of the five senses in the journey of man on earth and in the hereafter is essential. In some aspects, the iconography of the drawings in folio 130v continues the reflection on the theme of the persecution of the Church or, in a broader way, the struggle between good and evil, which is at the center of the image of the mentioned folio. It expresses the theme of the path of life of the good and the bad or the two paths of human life. In the lower right part of the composition, the bust of the personification of nature brings out a naked man who begins to climb a staircase whose first five steps are assimilated to the five senses by their inscriptions. In the middle part of the image, the staircase separates into two paths offered to man to continue his course on earth and beyond. At the crossing of roads, man can choose between good and evil. The character who chose the path of evil is mounted by an imp that pushes down with the help of a fork in which is inscribed, in Latin, the maxim: “depraved behavior.” It will not escape the attentive observer that the character who chose the “depraved behavior” dresses as a prince and continues the “ascent” of his ladder resting on the bars identified by imprudence, intemperance, inconstancy and injustice. In the lower part of the image, the “evil man” is expected in hell by the demons and the devil himself who has in his left hand some types of phylacteries that allude to the “seven demons” that are the negative counterpart of Seven gifts of the Holy Spirit represented, too, in the form of phylacteries in the hands of Christ enthroned in majesty in the upper register of composition. The iconography of the folio 130v of the Heilbronn manuscript is, in many aspects, a unique case in Christian images of the Middle Ages. Certainly, the commentator of the thirteenth-century liturgy does not associate the five senses with the degrees on which he lectures. In spite of this, one has the right to suppose that, in the image of the German manuscript, the five senses are considered, also, virtues, in the same way as the other steps, the four cardinal virtues of the “positive” staircase presented by Man on the condition that he manifests the desire to reach the vision of God with a good intention and thanks to his will.
