"Entre él y mí grandes cosas pasaron": Secretary– Lord Friendship in Cárcel de amor

Abstract

Medieval male friendship, at the intersection of sociopolitics, rhetoric, and philosophy, is both a habitus of affect and a possibility for unification. In Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de amor (1483–1492), the bonding between el auctor and Leriano represents an Iberian late-medieval secretary–lord friendship that both constitutes el auctor's persona and persists throughout the story as the only certainty against passionate love, courtly enmity, and injustice. This article studies this friendship from the perspective of "virtue" and "unification," or "becoming one," the two principle dimensions of amiçiçia discussed by fifteenth-century moral philosophers—especially Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal and Ferrán Núñez. It argues that Cárcel incorporates these philosophical thoughts into its narrative-rhetorical design. By reading the paratexts of Cárcel, this article further contends that the pervasiveness of friendship creates a space of boundary-crossing in which the author, el auctor, and Leriano mirror each other and produce a conflated literary subjectivity.