This book is devoted to medieval Iberian women, readers and writers. Focusing on the stories and texts women heard, visually experienced or read, and the stories that they rewrote, the work explores women’s experiences and cultural practices and their efforts to make sense of their place within their familial networks and communities. The study is based on two methodological and interpretive threads: a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and, a study of women’s writing, or, more precisely, women’s textualities, as a process of creating words but also acts, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected.
Author(s): Montserrat Piera
Series: The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, 71
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 508
City: Leiden
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xxi
List of Figures xxiv
Introduction: A Space on the Page 1
Part 1. Reading Women
1. A Woman’s Dilemma: To Read or not To Read 21
2. What Every Woman Should Know: Women Readers and the Preachers 50
3. Fantasy and Resistance: Medieval Women and Romance 117
Part 2. Writing Women
The Court
4. Lettering Power and 'Auctoritas': Violant de Bar, Queen of Aragon, a 'dame sans per' 171
5. 'Es verdad que lo vi y pasó por mi': Leonor López de Córdoba’s Chronicle of Truth 227
The Convent
6. Forging an 'interior monastery': Constanza de Castilla’s 'Libro de devociones y oficios' 267
7. Disabling Rhetoric in Teresa de Cartagena’s 'Arboleda de los enfermos' and 'Admiraçión Operum Dey' 302
8. Isabel de Villena’s 'Vita Christi': Regendering Christ’s 'Passio' 356
Epilogue: Discarding the Distaff: Rewriting Minerva in Beatriz Bernal’s 'Cristalián de España' 410
Conclusion 418
Bibliography 427
Index 473
