:Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

Abstract

This crisis manifested itself both socially and politically. In addition to the agrarian crises and the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, protests against excessive taxation and abuses by the nobility gave rise to various revolts. Such protests resulted many times in the persecution of the Jewish population in Castile and Aragon. Despite the flourishing literary production that constitutes the archive of the book in question, the Castilian court is marked by dynastic intrigues and clashes between different factions of the nobility. In this context, the texts studied in the present book are concerned with the dialectical relationship between experience and reason that produces passions. The passions would not in turn be mere subjective reactions to the environment, but the product of an experience that allows the individual consciousness to understand itself as such. Hence, the rhetorical importance of deixis in songbook poetry insofar as it establishes a basis on which to build forms of intersubjectivity. Passions give content to this intersubjectivity, demarcating the boundary between the collective and the individual, between the political and the personal. The definition of the passions is produced through an incessant questioning of the poets and their readers. What kind of experience is love? What kind of knowledge does this experience produce? What are its ethical, orienting dimensions in a world that seems characterized by instability and the instrumentalization of personal relationships?