Reimagining Diego de San Pedro's Readers at Work: Cárcel de Amor

Abstract

Envisioning Diego de San Pedro's readership has proved a vexed question. The difficulty in objectively reconstructing any sentimental fiction's readership dirough documentary sources leads Carmen Parrilla in a recent article to resort to complementary principles. Under the influence of reader-reception theory, in particular the outlining of the horizon of expectations to hypodiesize a Model Reader who de- codes the textual cues proposed by the authorial function, Parrilla presumes a public analogous for that of cancionero poetry. It is fully acquainted wiui the religio amoris fhat articulates erotic desire in terms of Christian love and stresses die contemplation of the lover's suffer- ings. The social environment for these sentimental reflections is die royal or nobiliary courts or ofher culturally refined circles (La ficcion sentimental y sus lectores 22). Determining die audience for cancionero poetry dirough documen- tary sources, however, presents similar difficulties. A possible solution to this quandary may lie in Ana M. Gomez-Bravo's examination of cancionero poetry as a group practice within the limits ofnoble patron- age. She advocates a re-evaluation of premodern audiorship as a so- cial process through an analysis ofthe culture, social groups, historical development and the material conditions ofwriting. I propose to combine diis notion ofsocial audiorship widi an analy- sis of the cues provided in the works themselves to reimagine die intended readership for Diego de San Pedro's most celebrated mas- terpiece, Carcel de amor, and, more generally, to explain the reading habits ofdie patrons who commissioned sentimental fictions as part of the network of practices diat produced literary texts at die Isabelline