Controlling Passions

Control of one’s emotions was a recurring theme in the conduct literature that became increasingly popular in Europe in the aftermath of the fourteenth-century crises of famine, plague, and war.¹⁰ These didactic texts were intended to enlighten the reader while providing useful advice, and generally advocated for moderation and self-control. Indeed, since antiquity, temperance was counted as one of the four cardinal virtues, along with fortitude, prudence, and justice. To these, Christian theologians would add three other virtues necessary for achieving salvation: faith, hope, and charity.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics reached Latin Europe in the twelfth century by way of Arabic editions and commentaries, and quickly became a fundamental text among the Scholastic philosophers who reshaped medieval Catholicism. Aristotle’s view was that virtue was a habit, or disposition (hexis), that helped maintain the “golden mean”—an equilibrium between extreme emotional or physical states. Pierre Bourdieu proposed habitus as a set of socially established norms or tendencies—“a durable, transposable system of definitions” assimilated since childhood— that changes over time and which serves as a guide for thought and behavior.¹¹ Following Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) characterized virtue also as a state of being (habitus), not a quality: “a habit perfecting man so he may act well.”¹² In this light, virtue is by nature performative—no less so than gender, which according to Judith Butler, emerges from “a stylized repetition of acts”—in this case by repeating socially sanctioned virtuous acts.¹³

The root of “virtue” is the Latin vir, or “man”—an inherently gendered concept, rooted in what is considered manly. For instance, Saint Isidore of Seville’s late sixth-/early seventh-century encyclopedia, The Etymologies (Etymologiae), associated the feminine (femina) with lust and desire: “Women are more libidinous than men, both in human beings and in animals.”¹⁴ Aristotle’s conception of women as “imperfect males” was a proposition he claimed to have proved by observing nature. This, together with the deeply ingrained anti-woman bias of Christian doctrine and belief, which can be traced back to the story of Eve and then through the teachings of Saint Paul and the Church Fathers, such misogynistic attitudes thoroughly permeated medieval society. Even though some Christian theologians, such as Aquinas, tempered the notion that women were a defective species on the grounds that they had been deliberately created by God from Adam’s rib, no scholars disputed women’s secondary status. As Aquinas put it, “Woman is by nature subject to man, because in man there is by nature a greater abundance of discretion and reason.”¹⁵ Like Aristotle, Aquinas saw passions of the soul (passiones animae) as a natural and necessary part of human virtue, when checked by reason. For him, the Fall represented a deviation from the natural order of the garden of Eden, where the human mind was subordinate to God and human passion subordinate to reason.¹⁶ The theological, doctrinal, philosophical, and medical knowledge of the time all reinforced the notion that women were by nature irrational and prone to vice, and therefore should not be allowed to fully participate in society.

The medical theory of the bodily humors, which is attributed to the fifth-century BCE Greek physician Hippocrates, held that good health arises from the equilibrium of the four humors or bodily fluids. Blood, black and yellow bile, and phlegm were each characterized as either hot or cold and either wet or dry. Women were believed to embody the less desirable characteristics of cold and wet, while men were associated with heat and dryness. For women, sexual activity was considered a necessary matter of health, while for men, sex was seen as dangerously debilitating. Medical theory reinforced theological prejudices; as Michael Solomon pointed out, “Clergyman and physicians together … show a complicity between practicing medicine and preaching morality … composing sermons and compounding medicine are analogous activities.”¹⁷ Because universities were controlled by the Church, any university-educated physician was also in minor orders and enjoyed the legal protection of the clergy. As Naama Cohen-Hanegbi contends, from the fifteenth century there was a tendency in medicine to give religious advice and make moral judgments, in particular, as concerned women.¹⁸ For example, the Treatise on the Habits of Women (Tratado de los usos de las mujeres), a medical text written in 1568, notes, “Coitus in moderation discharges and alleviates the fullness of the body, cheers the spirits, calms anger, and distracts from ill thoughts.”¹⁹ This point of view probably became entrenched in this period—when medical schools were professionalized, and the establishment of licensing made medicine an exclusively male and Christian profession—and continues to this day.

Prince Juan (1478–97), who was the only male heir of Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon, and whose premature death provoked the dynastic crisis that ultimately ended Trastámara rule, was believed to have died as a result of his sexual excesses with his newly wedded wife, Marguerite of Habsburg. Thus Carlos V wrote secret instructions to his recently married son and heir, Felipe, in 1543, advising him to be cautious in his encounters with his wife, Maria Manuela of Portugal, and to safeguard his health to avoid Prince Juan’s destiny:

For given that you are of a young and tender age and I do not have any other son but you, nor do I wish to have any others, it is very important that you take care [when engaging in sexual relations] and that [the two of] you do not push things too far at the beginning, because going too far is often harmful, in that exciting the body in order to give it strength often leaves it so weak that it makes it more difficult to have children and can lead to death, as happened to the prince, Don Juan, which is how I came to inherit these kingdoms.²⁰

But if women were seen as more active sexually, their role in reproduction was considered secondary and passive: they provided the vessel that facilitated the reproductive process, but little more.²¹ Such theories were common knowledge and were disseminated in the misogynist literature of the day. Pere Torroella (d. ca. 1492), a Catalan courtier and poet who wrote in Castilian and Catalan and circulated among several Iberian courts, echoes these medical and philosophical ideas in a stanza of his popular “Slander against Women” (“Maldezir de mugeres”):

Torroella’s Slander against Women was seen as crossing a line, not so much because of its content, but because although in the Castilian tradition it was acceptable to attack women in prose, such attacks were not allowed in verse. To rehabilitate his damaged reputation, Torroella responded with The Defense of Ladies against Disparagers (Razonamiento de Pere Torroella en defensión de las donas contra los maldezientes). There he claimed to come to the defense of women against those (like himself) who attacked them, but even so, he could not resist reiterating that women were inferior by nature: “Now, even if our claim that men are more perfect by nature be true, then women’s goodness should be counted all the more, and their evil less, while our evil be counted more than our goodness.”²³

Nor was Torroella the only one who expressed such ideas. His contemporary, Diego de Valera (d. 1488), voiced similar views in his Treaty in Defense of Virtuous Women (Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres):

What could be more virtuous than for those [women] in whom Nature made slight of frame, tender of heart, and generally slow of wit, to be lacking in many virtues in comparison to men, who by natural gift, were ascribed robust bodies, assiduous minds, and resilient spirits? What [more] could we want of women? After all they have accrued more virtue through their efforts than nature endowed them with.²⁴

In the Middle Ages, the answer to Valera’s question “What more could we want of women?” was for women to become more manly. This response reflected the conception of gender as performative. On the assumption that men were superior, didactic texts presented masculine attributes as a performative model for women. Acting more manly would make women more virtuous. Hence, in The Garden of Noble Maidens (Jardín de nobles doncellas), the Augustinian friar Martín de Córdoba (d. 1476) counseled young Isabel the Catholic to aspire to this goal: “So, the Lady, although she may be female by nature, can strive to be male in virtue, and so she would do better not to puff herself up in vainglory, but rather, bow in humility.”²⁵ For Martín de Córdoba, if this was sound advice for women in general, it was all the more important for a princess like Isabel: “And if all women ought to strive for such a synthesis, a princess needs to all the more, given that she is more than a mere woman, and she ought to carry a masculine soul in her feminine body.”²⁶ In his view, women did everything in excess; the Aristotelian golden mean was beyond their grasp whatever efforts they devote to attaining it. Martín de Córdoba wrote this tract for Isabel in 1468, a year before she secretly married Fernando, at a time when she seemed the most likely heir to the throne of Castile. His goal was to prepare her to serve as queen, and he explicitly advised her to let her husband, whoever he might be, have authority over both her realms and her person.²⁷

Despite the fact that Isabel did not take Martín de Córdoba’s advice and served very much as a ruling queen and coequal to her husband, her historical reputation was built around her piety rather than her politics. For instance, The Chariot of Ladies—a 1542 translation/adaptation of Eiximenis’s Libre de les dones that was dedicated to Catalina of Habsburg, Queen of Portugal—incorporates a biography of Isabel I (Catalina’s grandmother), who is praised for her work funding monasteries, her policies against Jews and Muslims, and her roles as wife and mother, but not as a ruler. Juan Pérez Moya takes the same view in his Histories of Holy and Illustrious Women (Varia historia de la sanctas e illustres mugeres; 1583), in which he describes an episode in which certain noblemen tried to cause trouble between Isabel and Fernando because they felt that “as a man, the king ought to govern.”²⁸ Pérez Moya emphasizes that Isabel was able to exercise power only because Fernando was aware of his wife’s “great natural discernment,” such that “in all important matters, he referred to the great knowledge and judgment of the queen.”²⁹ However, Pérez Moya’s anthology, which catalogs the achievements and characters of Spain’s most remarkable women, does not even mention that Isabel ruled over Castile, in spite of the fact that the third section of the book is dedicated to “strong women of government.” For Pérez Moya, women “ought to be praised and thanked all the more, given that they are less able in general [than men].”³⁰

In the medieval and early modern periods, gender was imagined as performative—as Butler defined it, an “identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.”³¹ Women who had to rule (like Isabel) were expected to de-feminize themselves by acting more like men, and thereby behaving more rationally and virtuously. But they had to this without transgressing the rules and expectations that came with being a woman. They had to present themselves as pious and devout, and as obedient wives and dedicated mothers. If they did not, there would be consequences. As Butler states, “As a strategy of survival within compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences… . Indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do the gender right.”³² And as Bourdieu put it, “Manliness … is a kind of fear of the female, firstly in oneself.”³³

To what extent, then, were women punished for not meeting gender expectations? The next chapters examine the consequences that Isabel of Portugal, Isabel of Aragon, and Juana I suffered for not performing “properly” as women, for not controlling their emotions, and for failing to recover from grief in a timely manner. But it should be remembered that these were not ordinary women; they were queens. Women cannot be treated monolithically, and other factors, such as class and wealth, intersect with gender to shape women’s experiences and opportunities. As Kimberlee Crenshaw notes, intersectionality allows us to address “the manner in which racism, patriarchy, class oppression and other discriminatory systems create background inequalities that structure the relative positions of women, races, ethnicities, class, and the like.”³⁴ In the case of the princesses and queens who are the focus of this book, gender intersected with social standing, royal prerogatives, religious beliefs, and the construction of sickness and well-being, and of virtue and acceptability. These intersections, along with other political considerations, must be measured against the specific behavioral and emotional modes of the royal court.

Contemporaries were well aware of this, and we have clear evidence that women were very concerned about their display of emotions, even in extreme situations, such as during the pain of childbirth. For example, when Isabel the Catholic was in labor, she asked for her face to be covered with a veil so that those present would not see how she was suffering.³⁵ Royal authority depended on perceived dignity. Isabel’s granddaughter, Empress Isabel (1530–39), the wife and occasional regent of the queen’s grandson, Carlos V, also understood this. As she remarked to one of her ladies-in-waiting, “I would die first. Do not let me speak out, because I would die rather than cry out.”³⁶

Of course, for a queen, giving birth was a public event; witnesses were required to be on hand to testify that the queen had actually given birth and that the child was therefore legitimate.³⁷ As a result, royal women were under considerable pressure to go “against their nature” and control the outward manifestations of their emotions. In an age in which the pursuit of the Aristotelian golden mean was seen as a social ideal, being perceived of as lacking in self-control could have catastrophic consequences, as the cases of the women studied here will show.

For Aristotle, emotions included “all those affectations which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgments, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain.”³⁸ This is not to say medieval society was one of unwavering moderation; emotional excess was acceptable and even appropriate in some contexts, but there were rules that governed it. As we will see in the next chapters, the safest arena of emotional excess for women was through conventional expressions of piety and support for the Church. Thus, Saint Beatriz da Silva (ca. 1424–92), who was famous for her extreme piety and who is celebrated as the founder of the Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, and Teresa Enríquez, “The Mad Woman of the Sacrament” (“La Loca del Sacramento,” ca. 1450–1529), a noblewoman who almost bankrupted herself in support of the poor and the Church, may have been regarded as unbalanced or controversial, but each was eventually redeemed by her piety.³⁹ “Divine insanity,” as Elizabeth Clark referred to such irrational and unbounded piety, could be seen as something positive.⁴⁰

Indeed, this was an age in which intense religious ecstasy was the hallmark of visionaries, such as (Saint) Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), whose supernatural experiences were tested by the Inquisition and held to be miraculous, as well as countless others, whose visions and mortifications were judged instead to be symptomatic of insanity or diabolic inspiration. Demonic possession and prophetic ecstasy were not considered madness, although their outward manifestations could be difficult to distinguish, as the biblical stories of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and King Saul illustrate.⁴¹ To borrow from Simone de Beauvoir’s axiom regarding how social constructions shape gender and what it is to be female, we might observe, “One is not born mad; rather, one becomes mad.” It was society that determined whether one’s actions qualified as crazy or not—and the concept of locura (madness) itself was so nebulous and imprecise that it was used to describe anything from serious mental disability to foolishness or lack of judgment to the deliberate antics of jesters and buffoons.⁴²

Disease and Melancholy

In contrast to mental disorder, physical disease seems more clearly rooted in objective physical events. There is very little that is “constructed” in a case of acute appendicitis or smallpox. But the definitions of both sickness and well-being are not fixed; they vary according to time and place. As Andrew Cunningham states, sickness is always experienced socially because “different societies, separated culturally by space or time, will have different views as to what states constitute disease and what its causes are.”⁴³ C. E. Rosenberg goes so far as to propose that “in some ways, disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it.” In his view, a disease is “at once a biological event, a generation-specific repertoire of verbal constructs reflecting medicine’s intellectual and institutional history, an occasion of potential legitimization for public policy, an aspect of social role and individual– intrapsychic– identity, a sanction for cultural values, and a structuring element in doctor and patient interactions.”⁴⁴

In the medical, philosophical, and theological discourses of the Middle Ages, body and soul were presented as a clear dichotomy, but were seen, nevertheless, as closely connected, and both were associated with morality. The soul may have been immaterial and immortal, but it could be cured by working on the body as well as on the mind.⁴⁵ Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, and Avicenna were considered the most important medical figures, but medieval thinkers like Arnau de Vilanova (d. 1311) and Bernard de Gordon (d. 1330) also made important contributions to the field.

Following the Hippocratic humoral model, good health was seen as requiring a balance of the four bodily humors, each of which was associated with a particular disposition of character. Black bile brought about melancholy, yellow bile led to choleric disposition, blood provoked sanguinity or confidence, and phlegm produced indifference. The four humors were also affected by the “six non-naturals”: diet, sleep, excretion, exercise, air quality, and passions or emotions. In any given individual the levels of these humors fluctuated, and disequilibrium could provoke illness or particular emotional states. In humoral theory, melancholy was considered the result of an overabundance of black bile, which provoked sadness, fear, and despair.⁴⁶ “Mania” (mania), on the other hand, was thought to be a symptom of an excess of yellow bile. In either case, treatments included diet, herbs, and medicines, and purging through sweating, vomiting, and diarrhea. The English term “depression” would not be coined until 1725, when it was identified by the poet and physician Richard Blackmore in his A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours.⁴⁷

Galen is credited with the first treatise on melancholy, and his understanding of the subject dominated medical discourse for centuries. He distinguished melancholia, the illness (caused by black bile), from melancholic temperament (caused by yellow bile), and divided the latter into three categories: general melancholy, melancholy of the brain, and hypochondriacal melancholy. For her part, Hildegard of Bingen, who claimed to be a natural melancholic, conceived of melancholy as a disease connected to brain sickness, but also to original sin, “due to the first attack by the devil on the nature of man since man disobeyed God’s command by eating the apple.”⁴⁸ In a similar case, Johannes of Milano was diagnosed by Bartolomeo Montagnana (1380–1452), a physician from Padua, as suffering from “sorrow of the soul” (tristitia anime) provoked by the death of his daughter. Johannes’s intense grief caused his health to deteriorate: he suffered from a bad complexion and exhibited irregular, indecorous behavior in public as a result of cold and dry in the head.⁴⁹ Much later, but relying on the same medical sources, Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), classified melancholy as either a disposition or a habit, retaining Galen’s tripartite categorization but speaking instead of melancholia of the head, melancholia of the body, and hypochondriacal or “windy” melancholia.⁵⁰ Following Hippocrates, he considered sorrow (insanus dolor, “unhealthy pain“) the “mother and daughter” of melancholy, “both cause and symptom of this disease.”⁵¹ Consequently, he cautioned against immoderate grief, reminding his readers that death is the ultimate fate of all.⁵² Burton even included Juana I “the Mad,” who will be studied in detail in chapters 7 and 8, as one of his case studies of jealousy, melancholy, and sorrow.⁵³

Unfortunately, first-person accounts of the effects of sadness in the premodern era are rare. The most notable example from the Iberian Peninsula is King Duarte of Portugal (1433–58), known as “the Philosopher” or “the Eloquent,” and author of two treatises, The Loyal Counselor (O leal conselheiro) and The Book of Instruction on Riding Well in Every Saddle (Livro da ensinança de bem cavalgar toda sela), together with a few poems and some miscellaneous snippets of advice included in his Book of Counsel (Livro dos conselhos). The Loyal Counselor (ca. 1438), written at the request of his wife, Leonor of Aragon, bluntly recounts the melancholy that afflicted him for almost three years. There he evokes the concept of saudade—a feeling of nostalgia and longing that has come to popularly characterize the Portuguese and Galician disposition.⁵⁴ Chapters 18–25 of this work focus on tristeza (sadness), while chapter 19 is entitled “How I Suffered from the Humor of Melancholy and How I Got Cured” (“De maneira que fui doente do humor menencorico, e del guareci”). The king begins by explaining his condition, known to doctors as “melancholic humor” (humor menencorico), which he also calls “the sin of sadness” (pecado de tristeza) and “the suffering of sadness” (padecimento de tristeza).⁵⁵ By his own account, the king decided to share his experiences because he knew that many in the past and his own time had suffered from the same illness, and many would continue to do so in the future. His eventual cure, he wrote, left him in a state of contentamento—satisfied with his existence, just as everyone should be content with what they have. The Loyal Counselor is quite literally a consolatory treatise, intended to give hope to fellow sufferers by showing them that even a king can be afflicted, but ultimately recover.⁵⁶

The circumstances of Duarte’s melancholy (perhaps what we would now call “depression”) were explained as follows. When he was twenty-two, his father, João I, left on campaign against Ceuta in North Africa, leaving the prince, who described himself as “youthful and with little knowledge,” overwhelmed with responsibilities and with no time for the hunt or other diversions. With “all of my will broken,” he retreated to his chambers, having lost his joie de vivre (“not feeling any pleasure”). When his father died in 1433, Duarte was plunged more deeply into despair and began to reflect on the nature of life and death: “He who is afraid of death loses the pleasure of life.”⁵⁷

Physicians, counselors, and friends intervened to try to make him feel better, but he found no consolation. To lift his spirits, doctors recommended drinking unadulterated wine, having sex with women, and seeking out entertainment, but he refused all of this, turning to God and the Virgin Mary for guidance. It was at his point that he understood that God was testing him, so that he might “make amends for my sins and faults.”⁵⁸ Thus, he came to understand that he should patiently and virtuously suffer his sickness, and it was then, with God’s help, that he finally recovered.⁵⁹

Duarte’s melancholy started as dissatisfaction and ended in despair— a consequence of his refusal to accept the divine will. Seen in such a light, melancholy implied a lack of fortitude and temperance, and could easily descend into sin. The monarch was well aware of the medical implications of his sickness. As in the case of the biblical Job, it was faith, self-discipline, and the cardinal virtue of prudence that helped him achieve the contentment that came with acceptance of his situation. From a theological point of view, mental well-being was tied to a virtuous life and the avoidance of sin, and that was precisely what Duarte pursued as a cure.

There were other ways of conceiving of melancholy. For instance, the pseudo-Aristotelian Problem XXX.1 drew a connection between genius and melancholy (although without indicating a cause), as follows: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened to Heracles among the heroes?”⁶⁰ The connection between genius and melancholy in men (because it was gendered) was strengthened by Marsilio Ficino’s and Philip Melanchthon’s work in the late fifteenth century, which marked the beginning of what Jean Starobinski called the “golden age of melancholy,” which is to say, the Renaissance.⁶¹

Ficino’s Three Books on Life (De vita libri tres; 1489) portrays men like him, who are under the influence of the planet of Saturn, as melancholic and gifted.⁶² Ficino, who drew on the classical past, should be credited for presenting melancholy as an occupational hazard of the intellectual life. Consequently, melancholy (or the affectation of melancholy) became fashionable among elites. This melancholic trend came to be reflected in art, as can be seen in Michelangelo Buonarroti’s sculpture of a dourly pensive Lorenzo de Medici for the latter’s sepulcher in the church of Saint Lorenzo in Florence. Lorenzo “the Magnificent” (1449–92) was a banker, the ruler of Florence, a pupil of Ficino, and a patron of the arts (Michelangelo included). Consequently, Michelangelo chose to represent Lorenzo—whose career had been a triumph—as a contemplative thinker in the effigy he carved of him in 1531–34 commissioned by Lorenzo’s son, Pope Leo X (1513–23). Melancholy was seen as a symptom of talent and genius; it became, as Elena Carrera notes, a “fashionable malady among intellectual and political elites in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe,” but it was also associated with madness, extreme sadness, fear, and helplessness.⁶³

In this light, although King Duarte’s intellectual pursuits and his self-description as a melancholic seem to fit Ficino’s characterization of “genius,” the monarch, unlike the Italian philosopher, portrayed himself as “sinful.” Duarte’s case shows that even before genius and melancholy became linked sadness was already associated with aesthetic sensitivity, and seen as a sign of refinement and privilege. Unfortunately, Duarte’s detailed and personal account of his feelings is rare, and we do not have anything similar for the three case studies that follow in chapters 4–8, which focus mainly on women. As Juliana Schiesari points out, whereas we find a long tradition of men of letters construed as “great melancholics”—which is to say, geniuses, such as Petrarch, Ficino, Tasso, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hölderlin, De Quincey, Nerval, Dostoevsky, and Benjamin—women have been excluded from the “canon of melancholy.”⁶⁴ This resonates with Virginia Woolf’s contention in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”⁶⁵

Returning to Iberia, by 1611, in his Treasury of the Castilian Language (Tesoro de la lengua castellana), the first monolingual dictionary in Spanish, Sebastián de Covarrubias (d. 1613) presented melancholy not as tied to genius, but to sadness and sorrow. The entry read: “A well-known sickness, and common passion, which leaves little pleasure or happiness … but not any sadness can be called melancholy in this sense, although we say one is melancholic when one is sad and thinking of something which provokes sorrow.”⁶⁶ Hence, Rosenwein underlines the importance of sorrow in Europe in this same period, pointing to a renewed emphasis on despair during the Reformation.⁶⁷ For instance, melancholy was so prevalent in seventeenth-century England that for Burton it became an “epidemical disease” that impacted both body and mind. Known as “the English malady,” it reached its literary culmination in the Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century.⁶⁸ In the eighteenth century, medicine had downplayed the connection between grief and melancholy, but by the nineteenth the two were once again seen as related.⁶⁹ Today, as the controversies and the revisions of the DSM show, we are still grappling with this issue.⁷⁰ Clearly, medicine is embedded in culture.

Regulating Death

Because dying is inevitable, caring for the dead has become a defining characteristic of humanity. Ritualized burial practices go back some 300,000 years, predating even the emergence of homo sapiens as a species. As Thomas Laqueur has observed, “The dead make civilization …, everywhere and always: their historical, philosophical, and anthropological weight is enormous and almost without limit and compare.”⁷¹ Sociologists like Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a pioneer in considering death a social problem with social implications, and his disciple and nephew, Marcel Mauss, observed that we experience two deaths: a natural one, when our body dies, and a cultural one, which involves particular funeral rites, mourning, and memorialization.⁷² A short life expectancy, a high infant mortality rate, and the presence of recurrent disease would have meant that people of the premodern era were more accustomed to early death, but this did not make mourning less painful, only ever present. The dead could not be forgotten, and their remembrance was expected in the form of prayers, masses, and the preservation of their names and deeds.⁷³

The accounts of grief and other intense emotions that survive from this era were penned almost entirely by men, and are highly gendered, reflecting the different standards regarding what was considered an appropriate display of emotion for men and women. As Sara Amed has observed, “Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement.”⁷⁴ Simultaneously, intense passions, like love or mourning, also have implications in politics, the exercise of power and authority, and public display when those involved were members of the royal family. Every society defines what is acceptable or normal and what is unacceptable or abnormal, and has its own “emotionology”—“the attitude or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression; ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct.”⁷⁵

In any case, death, whether of oneself or a loved one, had three possible outcomes from a Christian point of view: heaven, hell, or purgatory. Souls in purgatory could have their sentences alleviated and eventually lifted through the singing of masses and the saying of prayers, and from indulgences. This belief ended, however, for many Christians with the Reformation, as Protestant churches did not recognize purgatory. In practical terms, this meant, for Protestants, that the living were more clearly set apart from the dead: the Virgin Mary and the saints could not intercede on behalf of the living, and, similarly, the living could not help the souls of the deceased.

Yet, while the emotional crises that mourning provoked and the expected social performance of grief encouraged ostentatious displays, these demonstrations ran against the tenor of scripture and the teachings of the Church. The Old Testament inveighed against such excesses: “You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks on you: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 19:28). In the Iberian Peninsula the Third Council of Toledo (589), the Provincial Council of Valencia (1255), the Council of Toledo (1323), and the Council of Alcalá (1335) all reflected the Church’s intent to control the ritualization of death, by prohibiting, for example, the singing of laments at funerals.⁷⁶ Such prohibitions spoke directly to the funerary customs of the Roman Empire, in which mourners, including women, publicly lamented, sang dirges, and cried out, pulling at their hair and scratching their faces until blood flowed, beating their heads and bare chests, and covering their heads in ashes. Sometimes slaves or paid mourners were enlisted.⁷⁷ Consequently, excessive sorrow came to be associated with paganism; it implied an unwillingness to accept God’s will and the neglect of what really mattered: the immortality of the soul. As Saint Paul said,

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. (1 Thessalonians 4.13–14)

The crucifixion of Jesus was seen as the model for the acceptance of death and suffering and of submission to God’s will. Cynthia Robinson observes that, unlike in other European traditions, fifteenth-century Castilian artistic representations of the passion tended to be rather abstract and focused on the meaning of Jesus’s sacrifice rather than his physical suffering.⁷⁸ Robinson ties this trend to the long tradition of religious diversity in Iberia, and the concomitant effort made by Christians to present the passion and Jesus’s humanity in a form more palatable to Muslims and Jews. This is reflected in texts like Eiximenis’s Vita Christi, which was translated from Catalan to Castilian by Hernando de Talavera (1428–1507), confessor to Isabel the Catholic and first archbishop of post-conquest Granada. Talavera’s translation was the first book printed in Christian Granada, thus setting the tone for how death would be presented going forward.⁷⁹

Few women participated in the debates regarding death and mourning. Constança de Castilla (ca. 1405–1478) wrote a Devotionary in which, when discussing the crucifixion of Jesus, she presents his disciple Saint John (rather than the Virgin Mary) performing the despair of grief: pulling out his hair, hitting his face and chest, groaning, crying profusely. “That day,” she concludes, “he was a martyr.”⁸⁰ For her part, Isabel de Villena (1430–1490), the abbess of the Poor Clares’ Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Valencia and the illegitimate daughter of the magnate and author Enrique de Villena, composed a lengthy Vita Christi in Catalan. The work is unusual because it focuses on the female characters of the Gospels: principally the Virgin Mary, but also her mother, Anne, and Mary Magdalene. In Isabel’s vita, Mary endures great pain and suffering, which is why after his resurrection Jesus is compelled to show himself to these women before anyone else.⁸¹ Isabel’s text is quite remarkable. For instance, when recounting the Annunciation, instead of following the Gospel of Saint Luke and portraying the Angel Gabriel informing Mary that she will become the mother of Christ, in Isabel’s telling Gabriel explicitly asks for her consent. That is to say, Mary is given a choice regarding her pregnancy and demonstrates agency vis-à-vis her role in divine salvation:

Since the will of Our Lord God is this: that your Lady, if you wish to consent to that which I say on behalf of His Majesty [si consentir volrà al que de part de sa Majestat jo diré], might conceive within your own womb, and the nine months that women usually bear their children for having passed, your Excellency will give birth to a son who will be called Jesus, which means “Savior,” because this Lord will save His people.⁸²

After Isabel’s death, Aldonça de Montsoriu, her successor as abbess, added a prologue and epilogue to this Vita Christi, in an edition published in 1497 at the request of Isabel the Catholic. Because the vita advocates for women, because it focused on a woman (the Virgin Mary), because it was written and later edited by a woman, because it was intended to be read by a community of nuns, and because it was published by a queen, it has been referred to as a “feminist text par excellence.”⁸³

Following the lead of the Church, the Crown also intervened in the regulation of funerals. In the mid-thirteenth century, Alfonso X’s Roman-style codification of Castilian law, Las siete partidas, set out to regulate and limit public mourning, under the rubric “How Mourning for the Dead Is Not Beneficial, but Injurious.”⁸⁴ The law code warned against the excessive practices of the pagans, some of whom “became insane with grief; and those who did not go to such extremes as this, disheveled their hair and cut it off, and disfigured their faces by gashing them and scratching them; the devil, by driving them to despair, causing them to be afflicted with this blindness.”⁸⁵ Such customs were dismissed as “irrational,” and were forbidden, as were any loud expressions of grief, or displays such as kissing or throwing oneself on the body, or even laying a corpse to rest in vigil with its face uncovered. In the event of any of these, the priest was to halt the funeral mass and expel the offenders or prescribe penance. Should a priest hear loud lamentations coming from the house of the deceased, he should not enter.⁸⁶

And yet, forbidden or not, all of these manifestations of intense suffering and physical pain appear in the literature and the art of the period. For instance, in Alfonso X’s own Cantigas de Santa María, and on the tomb of his brother, Felipe, in Villalcázar de Sirga (Palencia), there are images of mourners pulling their hair out in despair.⁸⁷ In the face of this, Juan I reiterated Alfonso’s regulations at the Cortes (the meeting of the estates) of 1380 in Soria, again forbidding excessive wailing and lamentations, the disfiguring of the face, and the wearing of mourning dress for longer than the period stipulated by the king.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, this practice continued throughout the peninsula in spite of such prohibitions, as we will see in chapter 5 in the funeral observations of Prince Afonso of Portugal in 1491.

On the other hand, dressing in rough black cloth became an accepted mode of expressing grief, this color being associated with humility, abstinence, and moderation, but also with the clergy, specifically Benedictines and Dominicans, and with academic attire.⁸⁹ In the fifteenth century, black became more common as a color of mourning in the Iberian Peninsula and across the West, having already become customary in Castile in the thirteenth.⁹⁰ In 1502 the Catholic Kings promulgated a pragmatic that reinforced black as the color of bereavement, and also codified and limited both the forms public manifestations of grief could take and for how long it could be expressed.⁹¹

Such regulations to control grief were by no means unique to Castile. For instance, Carol Lansing’s study of Orvieto in Tuscany shows that the local commune prohibited the pulling out of one’s hair, loud lamentations, and other “effeminate” expressions of grief. In Lansing’s view, these regulations advocated for a masculine performance of sorrow predicated on restraint and the containment of emotion.⁹² Likewise, Diane Owen-Hughes points to the efforts of late medieval Italian civic authorities to put an end to the long but indecorous Mediterranean tradition that associated women with public mourning, attempting even to forbid close female relatives of the deceased from attending funerals.⁹³ Similarly, Fabrizio Titone’s study of Sicily recounts how from 1309 to 1324 a regulation banned reputatrici (professional mourners) in particular, and women in general, such that they were forbidden from escorting the coffin to the church. Singing and playing musical instruments was also forbidden.⁹⁴ Finally, in 1330 Frederick III (1295–1337) reiterated his previous legislation against excessive mourning and the use of reputatrice, whose exhibitions were seen as offensive to God.⁹⁵

Death and Consolation

The ritualization of death figures as part of the gradual recalibration of manners in the late Middle Ages.⁹⁶ For Philippe Ariès, mourning had two main goals in the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century: it gave the family of the deceased an opportunity to express their sorrow, and provided rituals that protected them from abandoning themselves to excessive grief thanks to the concerted efforts of relatives, neighbors, and friends, who helped the bereaved reestablish emotional equilibrium.⁹⁷ We can see, however, a change of attitude emerging toward the end of the fourteenth century that is reflected in wills, literature, and art. Alberto Tenenti has noted a cultural shift between 1450 and 1650 wherein death became part of life, constituting a sort of “religion of death” that paralleled the “religion of love” paradigm discuss in chapter 1.⁹⁸ Similarly, Pierre Chaunu, sees a change regarding death and judgment in the early modern period—the emergence of a “new eschatology”—followed by a growing secularization of death in the eighteenth century.⁹⁹ In his classical study of Burgundian court culture, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga, a pioneer in the study of emotions, stated that “no other epoch has laid so much stress as the expiring Middle Ages on the thought of death.”¹⁰⁰ Huizinga notes “a somber melancholy [that] weighs on people’s souls” in that era, as reflected in iconography and literature.¹⁰¹ Michel Vovelle’s studies tie such late medieval changes to the growing importance of purgatory; while for Patrick Geary, the turning point was the Reformation, “when reformers rejected the involvement of the dead in the affairs of the living.”¹⁰²

As it was, the mid-fourteenth century heralded an age of war, famine, and plague in Europe that provoked catastrophic social and economic changes, together with traumatic episodes of large-scale mortality that affected people of all ages, gender, and social class. It also stirred transformations in the attitudes toward death that made conduct treatises all the more important in establishing codes of behavior during bereavement. The major contributing factor was of course, the bubonic plague, or Black Death, which arrived in Europe in 1347 and 1348 and saw recurrent outbreaks until 1722.¹⁰³ Estimates vary, but in its initial manifestation the disease seems to have carried off between one- quarter and one-third of the European population. However, this reflects an average—in some locales the mortality rate was significantly higher.¹⁰⁴ Between the primitive medical understanding of the day, the lack of sanitation and institutionalized medical care, and religious beliefs that were reluctant to see contagion as a vector, the plague was difficult to mitigate. It was highly contagious and highly mortal. Nor did it respect social privilege—the rich, except for those who were able to flee and take refuge on rural estates, were just as vulnerable as the poor. For example, Queen Leonor of Portugal, the second wife of Pere the Ceremonious, died of the plague in 1348, and Alfonso XI of Castile was killed by it two years later at the siege of Gibraltar. The recurring waves of plague in the subsequent centuries ensured that people remained well aware of the fragility of life and the caprice of fate, even within royal circles.

When Juan Fernández de Valera, a royal scribe in the household of Enrique, Marquis of Villena (d. 1434), lost his family to plague in Cuenca in 1422, he found himself spiraling into a crisis of grief. Hitting bottom, on December 13, 1423, he wrote a remarkable letter to his patron, telling Enrique de Villena how he felt “persecuted and tormented by sorrow and vain thoughts that bring no remedy,” and asking for help.¹⁰⁵

Sadness and anger, thoughts and preoccupations, hold me down and torture me, and my heart, so afflicted, saps my strength much more than the suffering of my illness… . Begging you must humbly and with the greatest reverence I can, that it may please Your Mercy, that I may be relieved of this, consoled, and supported.¹⁰⁶

In answer to Valera’s request, Enrique wrote a treatise for him that Derek Carr has described as the first Spanish-language consolatio mortis that follows classical models.¹⁰⁷ Consequently, Villena’s treatise can be considered a precursor of a consolatory genre that became very popular in Iberian letters.

This was a time of sadness, pessimism, and a sense of affliction. The final years of the reigns of the Catholic Monarchs, in particular, were marked by the death of family members and uncertainty regarding both the future of the royal line and the dynastic union of Castile and Aragon. The royal family confronted a great deal of grief in a short period. Isabel of Aragon lost her husband Afonso in 1491, and Isabel and Fernando lost several heirs in rapid succession, including their son Juan (d. 1497) and his posthumous child by Marguerite of Habsburg, their daughter Isabel (d. 1498), and their grandson, Miguel da Paz (d. 1500).¹⁰⁸

By the late fifteenth century a veritable cottage industry of writing consolatory texts specifically dedicated to different members of the royal family had emerged. Several treatises were written for Isabel and Fernando, and particularly for the queen, to help her endure the passing of her only son and male heir, Prince Juan. As we will see in chapter 6, Isabel of Aragon also received a series of consolatory texts in Castilian and Portuguese and in both prose and verse. As the genre developed, it seemed to imbue literature with medicinal and spiritual powers. Literature could not only teach, edify, and entertain, but also console, and even cure the afflicted, whether this was the writer or reader. Thus, texts were composed with the aim of comforting grieving Christians and alleviating their anguish. The idea that grief was something to be overcome in good time and that “normality” would be restored had taken root. The development of this idea was all the more important because grieving was increasingly viewed as an opportunity to demonstrate one’s true character. Temperance gained importance, and patience was clearly associated with enduring in the face of worldly problems as did Job, and with serenity, thereby showing acceptance of God’s will.

While bespoke compositions were written for specific recipients, such as Isabel the Catholic or her daughters, generic consolatory materials were available for common consumption. This insistence on consolation is also tied to humanism; and a number of genres together contributed to the establishment of a new and proper way of grieving— a sort of “emotional regime” (as William Reddy would put it) that focused on self-control and acceptance of death, and intellectualized mourning. George McClure defines Renaissance humanists as “doctors of the mind”: the body was for the physician to cure, the soul for the priest, but the mind and the exploration of despair were the realm of humanists, who could offer another type of consolation.¹⁰⁹

A literary genre devoted to consolation had existed since antiquity, aimed particularly at those who had lost children, and taking the form of letters, treatises, and orations. Classical consolatory texts tended to exhibit a three-part structure. First, an exordium identified the problem and gave advice. Next, the text addressed the person in distress and turned to the cause of their suffering. Finally, the text’s conclusion encouraged the acceptance of one’s fate and meditated on the themes of truth, resolve, and the role of philosophy in recovery. One of the earliest examples of an ancient consolatory text is Cicero’s (d. 43 BCE) now-lost philosophical tract Consolatio, composed in memory of his daughter, Tulia, who died in childbirth, and later reprised in the Tusculan Disputations (ca. 45 BCE), where Cicero focused on the issue of emotions (or, as he called them, “perturbations”).¹¹⁰ Although only parts of his works on consolation were preserved, Cicero would emerge as a model when classical consolatory texts were reexamined as part of the general revival of Roman letters in the Renaissance and later Middle Ages, as manifested in the work of Petrarch (d. 1374), who presented human dignity and the immortality of the soul as two important rejoinders to despair. Likewise, it is present in the writings of the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati (d. 1406), who contributed to a new model of grieving that went beyond Stoic ideals of indifference, proposing instead the active acceptance of death..¹¹¹ Plutarch’s (d. 119 CE) work was also influential, notably his Consolation for a Wife (Consolatio ad uxorem), the letter he wrote to Timoxena on the occasion of the death of their infant daughter (the third of their children to die), and his Consolatio ad Apollonium, to a friend who had lost a son.¹¹²

Fathers of the Church, such as Tertullian and Cyprian of Antioch, whose On the Benefit of Patience (De bono patientiae; 356 CE), brought classical patience into the Christian realm of virtues, which they considered universal, associating it with charity and tying it to Christ’s example.¹¹³ For his part, Augustine, in his On Patience (De patientia; 415 CE), established that suffering and patience are connected to God, echoing Psalm 40:1, “I waited patiently for the Lord.”¹¹⁴ Although patience was not considered one of the cardinal virtues (which included prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance), it was closely connected to fortitude, as well as to hope and perseverance. The most important and influential consolatory text was undoubtedly On the Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae) by the polymath martyr Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (d. ca. 525 CE)—although the text presented a case of forbearance regarding Boethius’s own impending death, rather than his grief at another’s passing. This text was first translated into Catalan around 1360 by the Dominican friar Pere Saplana, with copies recorded in the possession of Carlos, Prince of Viana (1421–61), and his uncle, Alfons the Magnanimous of Aragon (1416–58).¹¹⁵ As Jaume Riera has demonstrated, Boethius’s text was clearly popular, given that it appears frequently in Catalan testaments, inventories, and letters. It had been circulating in Latin for many centuries: in Castile the earliest and most important manuscript dates from the eleventh century. A Spanish copy is attested in the hands of Pedro, Constable of Portugal (the Catalan pretender, 1463–66), and an Italian edition in the possession of the Castilian poet and courtier Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana (d. 1458).¹¹⁶ Boethius’s Consolation figured in the university curriculum through the mid-thirteenth century, after which his work was translated and continued to be read widely throughout Europe.¹¹⁷

For Margaret Williams, patience in the Middle Ages “was cognate with passion, the act of suffering, undergoing, submitting as patient to agent, being passive under action. It involved humility and obedience, an acceptance of the right order of things, especially the right order between creature and creator.”¹¹⁸ For instance, illness or disability was constructed as an opportunity to appreciate the divine. In the Iberian tradition, this was very clearly formulated by the fifteenth-century nun Teresa de Cartagena, who, in her Grove of the Ill (Arboleada de los enfermos), argued that her own deafness had brought her closer to God. Job, and Job-like figures, such as Boccaccio’s Griselda—a character that appears in the last tale of the Decameron, and who endures the most horrible tests of obedience and patience at the hands of her husband—became very important in the European imagination of the time thanks to the numerous translations of the Decameron. Petrarch translated Boccaccio’s Griselda from Italian to Latin, whence it was further translated into and adapted in other languages, including English by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Catalan by the humanist and courtier Bernat Metge (d. 1410).¹¹⁹ A broad consensus emerged that chastity, obedience, and patience were the feminine virtues par excellence. Virtue itself was not only gendered, but like gender was performative, given that it involved the repetition of prescribed virtuous acts.

Generally, the goal of consolation literature was to bring relief to readers by making them forget about their worldly troubles by focusing on the transitory nature of possessions, reputation, and wealth, and contrasting this with the eternality and omnipotence of God. Following this line, the Aragonese anti-Pope Pedro Martínez de Luna (Benedict XIII; 1328–1423), or “Papa Luna,” advocated for the acceptance of death in his Consolations for Human Life (Consolaciones de la vida humana; ca. 1414). He cites Augustine: “God mixed the bitter with the blessings of this world, that we might search for that other blessing which is found in the other world.”¹²⁰ Thus, consolation came to be seen as intersecting with patience and resilience—hence the growing popularity of the biblical Job as a model of forbearance, as we will see in coming chapters in the case of Isabel of Aragon, the widow of Prince Afonso of Portugal, and her mother, the Catholic Queen. As Robin Waugh defines it, patience literature “features and praises, explicitly or implicitly, the ‘ability to endure,’ to keep on being the same person despite oppressive suffering”—a genre he characterizes as “loosely conceived and constantly evolving.”¹²¹

The Christian tradition insisted on preparing for death by following the teachings of the Church: avoiding sin, performing good works, and taking part in the sacraments. The Treatise on Dying Well (Tractatus artis bene moriendi) and The Art of Dying (Ars moriendi)—an adaptation of the second chapter of the former—were popular Latin manuals written at the beginning of the fifteenth century to teach Christian believers how to die virtuously.¹²² Both were inspired by Jean Gerson (1363–1429), who wrote The Science of Dying Well, or the Medicine of the Soul (La science de bien mourir or la medicine de l’âme; 1400–1404), translated into Latin as On the Science of Death (De scientia mortis), while participating in the Council of Constance (1414–18), which resolved the Western Schism.¹²³ Gerson’s book became a contemporary bestseller: more than 300 manuscripts and around 100 printed editions of the book have survived, including translations into German, Dutch, Italian, French, Castilian/Spanish, and Catalan.¹²⁴ The aim of Gerson’s La science was to inculcate the reader with a fear of death in order to inspire greater devotion—a strategy reflected in the gory illustrations that decorated the printed editions.

Time was limited and death was certain, thus planning for death was essential. This included not only living virtuously but preparing a last will and testament that specified one’s funerary instructions, allotted donations to charities and religious foundations, and commissioned requiem masses—all of which would help to ensure one’s salvation. This ideal came to be celebrated also in literature, which praised those who “died well,” which is to say, stoically and secure in the understanding that even death was a gift from God. Hence, in his Verses on the Death of His Father (Coplas a la muerte de su padre; ca. 1476), the poet-knight Jorge Manrique portrays his father, Rodrigo Manrique, Maestre de Santiago (d. 1476), dying with serenity. Over the course of forty stanzas Manrique reflects on his father’s life, fame, and fortune, concluding

Álvaro de Luna was given similar treatment in his eponymous late- fifteenth century Crónica, as was the converso bishop Alonso de Cartagena (d. 1456) in his biography, De actibus Alfonsi de Cartajena episcopi Burgensi (1456), and Alfons the Magnanimous in Diego del Castillo’s, Visión de la muerte del rey don Alfonso, to cite a few well-known examples.¹²⁶

This, however, was a recent development and one that was not universally respected at the time. Only a generation before Jorge Manrique composed his coplas, his uncle, Gómez Manrique (d. ca. 1490), expressed despair at the passing of his kinsman and fellow author Iñigo López de Mendoza (1382–1469), Marquis de Santillana. He admitted that, as he wallowed in his desolation, he had torn at his hair, wailed, and performed other acts more proper to infidels (gentiles) and women, than to a Christian nobleman of his stature.

He shared a similar account of the grieving for the nobleman García Lasso de la Vega, who died in 1458 (or perhaps 1455).¹²⁸ Here, Gómez Manrique recounts relatives and friends screaming, rending their clothes, and scratching their faces. He recalls Lasso de la Vega’s sister, Elvira, in particular:

Regarding the other ladies present, Gómez Manrique says,

Their performance was followed by the theatrics of the plañideras, or paid mourners, whose histrionics were finally interrupted by the mother of the deceased, who intervened to restore Christian modesty and discretion to her son’s funeral. Such plañideras were clearly a staple of elite funerals. Previously, in 1434, the Marquis of Santillana had mentioned them in a poem he had composed to commemorate the passing of fellow writer and nobleman Enrique de Villena, Grandmaster of the Order of Calatrava and author of the abovementioned Treatise on Consolation. He noted their extravagant theatrics: their “clamorous voices,” their “eyes that never seemed to stop weeping,” and their crying as “they scratched at their faces so cruelly.”¹³⁰ Such professional mourners can also be seen on contemporary funerary monuments of the royal and aristocratic elite.

All this is to say that Gerson and his emulators were whistling past the graveyard; in fact, death was increasingly feared rather than accepted or welcomed as a divine mercy—a shift reflected in the increasingly macabre iconography of death in this period. This change had been anticipated in the late twelfth century by none other than Cardinal Lotario de Segni, who would go on to reign as Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). The future pope’s On Contempt for the World or On the Wretchedness of the Human Condition (De contemptu mundi or De miseria condicionis humane; 1194–95) presented life as a tribulation and meditated on the corruption of the mortal body and the eternal anguish of the damned. In the Iberia Peninsula this work remained popular through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, read in both Latin and its Castilian translation, The Book of Human Misery (Libro de miseria de omne).¹³¹

Another popular late medieval literary and artistic motif was the Dance Macabre or the Dance of Death. Here Death, personified as a gamboling skeleton, summons an entourage from among the living, whether peasants or prelates, merchants, magnates, or kings, to join his dance. The Dance Macabre functions as a memento mortis—a reminder of the brevity of life. The mural of the Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris, painted around 1425, and “Le respite de la mort,” a late fourteenth- century poem by Jean le Fevre (d. 1380) that melds imagery of death and dance are considered the earliest examples of this motif.¹³² The Dance of Death likely had appeared in Catalan literature and was perhaps performed by the end of the fourteenth century, while the General Dance of Death (Dança general de la muerte), an anonymous Castilian-language poem dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century, was printed in 1520.

Giving Condolences

In royal circles, however, fears and emotions could not be given free rein. Rulers were considered models for their subjects and could not indulge their grief openly and without decorum. Their station obliged them to maintain a stoic demeanor. Even “private” or “personal” royal letters were public documents, dictated and read for the most part before members of the court, thus they displayed restraint, even when the writers were clearly affected by emotion. For example, when Fernando of Antequera died in 1416, his son and heir, Alfons the Magnanimous, wrote a series of epistles to inform his relatives of the king’s passing and make arrangements relating to the succession. To Juan II of Castile, “the King and very dear and much beloved cousin,” he wrote: “With great sadness of heart We confirm to you that today, Thursday, at the twelfth hour, the lord-king, Our very dear father and lord, passed on from this life, a death that has left Us greatly disconsolate and in not a little sorrow and confusion.” The only solace Alfons finds is in Fernando’s Christian death and in the knowledge that his father’s “soul was on the path of salvation.”¹³³

Fernando had been the first Trastámara to rule over Aragon, and Alfons was unsure about the protocol to follow, so when he wrote to his wife, María of Castile, he asked her to wear the same clothes that Violant de Bar—the dowager of Joan I of Aragon—had worn when her father- in-law, Pere the Ceremonious, had died in 1387.¹³⁴ He also asked her to endure his father’s death with dignity, just as his mother and the newly widowed queen, Leonor of Alburquerque, was doing: “And We pray you not to give Us displeasure, but console yourself well, because We guarantee you that the lady-queen, Our mother, is taking it with great strength.”¹³⁵ When the dowager Leonor, who from then on signed her letters “The sad Queen” (La tryste Reina), moved back to Castile and settled in Medina del Campo, she asked Juan II of Castile and his regent and mother, Catalina (Catherine) of Lancaster, not to give her a lavish royal entry because “we are coming in great sorrow and sadness on account of the passing of the said lord [Fernando].”¹³⁶ From this time forward “the sad Queen” became something of a customary title for Trastámara widows. Leonor of Aragon, the daughter of Leonor of Alburquerque and dowager of Duarte I of Portugal, together with her granddaughter, Juana III of Naples, the sister of Fernando the Catholic and dowager of Ferrante I of Naples, and Fernando the Catholic’s widow, Germana de Foix, each signed their letters “la triste Reina.”¹³⁷

María of Castile was married to her cousin Alfons of Aragon, while María’s sister, Catalina, was married to Enrique, Alfons’s brother. The sisters were close, such that when the latter died in Zaragoza in childbirth on October 19, 1439, the former was deeply affected “with great pain and tears.” Nevertheless, María understood that accepting the will of God was essential, in spite of her “great sadness and pain.”¹³⁸ Similarly, after Joan II of Aragon’s death in 1479, his son, Fernando the Catholic, wrote to his father’s officials to make his burial arrangements, noting his own sadness with constraint:

God knows that We had much affection for Him, as We enjoyed great obedience from Him as a son. And although We had as much of that affection as Nature obliged, We are nevertheless consoled by His glorious end and that he has given over His soul to His Creator as a great Catholic.¹³⁹

In other words, self-control in the face of grief was expected in royal circles. When monarchs and important members of a dynasty died, rituals of mourning were put into play. There would be a funeral, often provisional and less formal, until such a time as the deceased could be moved to a permanent tomb, at which point a second more public ceremony might be held. The court schedule and protocols would be adjusted to reflect the grief of the royal family and their subjects, and a large number of masses and prayers would be commissioned from clergy around the realm. That is, such displays of grief as were allowed were extremely ritualized. Self-restraint was required, and resilience was expected. But, as we will see over the course of this book, not every royal had the capacity or desire to constrain their sorrow, and the consequences for the queens and princesses who did not were very significant, particularly for those who were destined to inherit the throne of the kingdom.

1. See the introduction; Pietikainen, Madness, 3.

2. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”, 837; Moore, The Erotics of Grief, 1–23.

3. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 4.

4. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions,18; and Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 3.

5. Delgado, Fernández, and Labanyi, Engaging the Emotions, 7.

6. As Truran has pointed out, “Feminist and queer studies scholars question the notion that emotion and affect are distinct, and that emotion is purely personal.” Truran, “Affect Theory,” 29. This is what Ahmed defines as “feminist cultural studies of affect.” Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 13. For a critique of affect theory, see Leys, “Turn to Affect”; Leys, The Ascent of Affect, 307–49; and Garcia-Rojas, “(Un)Disciplined Futures,” 254–56. For an overview of the history of emotion in psychology, see Gendron and Barret, “Reconstructing the Past.”

7. Frijda and Scherer, “Affect,” 10; Truran, “Affect Theory,” 26.

8. Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect Theory, 1.

9. Hogan and Irish, The Routledge Companion, 2. For a discussion of terminology, see Berlin, Alone Together, 17–23.

10. Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living Soul, 10.

11. Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 134.

12. Pansters, Franciscan Virtue, 26, 29, and 32.

13. Butler, Gender Trouble, 396.

14. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, XI, II, 24.

15. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 92, a. 1.

16. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 157.

17. Solomon, The Literature of Misogyny, 8–9.

18. Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living Soul, 14. For today, see Jackson, Pain and Prejudice, passim.

19.Tractado de los usos de las mujeres, ed. Hispanic Seminar.

20. Fernández Álvarez, Corpus documental de Carlos V, II:90–103. See García-Bermejo, “Carlos V,” 107–8; Silleras-Fernández, “Sois a chave que une as duas coroas,” 245. Alonso Ortiz echoes these ideas regarding Prince Juan; see chapter 7.

21. Albertus Magnus, following Avicenna’s revision of Aristotle, considered women to have a more important role in reproduction than previously thought, but still a role secondary to that of the male. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 21–26.

22. Francomano, Three Spanish Querelle Texts, 60–61, stanza 11.

23. Francomano, Three Spanish Querelle Texts, 73. Torroella became so well known that he is a character in Juan de Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella (1495).

24. Diego de Valera, Tratado en defensa de las virtuosas mujeres, 55.

25. Martín de Córdoba, Jardín, 107.

26. Martín de Córdoba, Jardín, 87.

27. Weissberger, Isabel Rules, 44–53; Silleras-Fernandez, Chariots of Ladies, 183.

28. BN: R/6306, Pérez Moya, Varia Historia, 203v.

29. BN: R/6306, Pérez Moya, Varia Historia, 203v.

30. BN: R/6306, Pérez Moya, Varia Historia, 201r.

31. Butler, “Performative Acts,” 519.

32. Butler, Gender Trouble, 394.

33. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 80.

34. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 17.

35. Pulgar stated that Isabel I “did not speak to or show that pain that women feel and show in such moments,” while Marineo Sículo noted, “And the queen was not of such weak constitution not to suffer physical pain whether the pain she suffered in illness, or in childbirth, which is a thing worthy of great admiration, that she was never seen to complain, and before which she showed such incredible and marvelous strength as she suffered them and hid her pain.” Ladero Quesada, “Isabel vista por sus contemporáneos,” 234–35.

36. González-Doria, Las reinas de España, 92; Sánchez Molero, “El príncipe Juan de Trastámara,” 886.

37. When Isabel I gave birth to Prince Juan in Seville on June 30, 1478, King Fernando instructed several officials from the city—Garci Téllez, Alonso Pérez Melgarejo, Fernando de Abrego, and Juan de Pineda—to be present. See Bernáldez, Historia de los Reyes, 591.

38. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, book 2; Plamper, The History of Emotions, 12; Rosenwein and Cristiani, What Is History of Emotions? 8.

39. For Saint Beatriz da Silva and Teresa Enríquez, see chapter 4; Silleras-Fernandez, “Mystical Traditions Are Political,” 223–29; Rotman, Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium, 3–6; Katajala-Peltomaa and Niiranen, “Perspectives to Mental (Dis)Order,” 6–11.

40. Clark, “Sane Insanity,” 211–30.

41. As Petteri Pietikainen observes, “If their lives had taken different paths, most of them might not have been burdened with mental illness.” Pietikainen, Madness, 10.

42. Carrera, “Madness and Melancholy,” 11.

43. Cunningham, “Identifying Disease in the Past,” 14.

44. Rosenberg, “Introduction: Framing Disease,” xiii.

45. For Galen the diseases of the soul were corporal in nature, but through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, psychological treatment was mostly restricted to priests and theologians. González de Pablo, “Medicine of the Soul,” 491, 506.

46. Katajala-Peltomaa and Niiranen, “Perspectives to Mental (Dis)Order,” 3–4.

47. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours.

48. Hildegard of Bingen, “Causae et curae,” 35; Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” 159; Radden, The Nature of Melancholy, 80.

49. Cohen-Hanegbi, “Mourning under Medical Care,” 38–39.

50. Menninger, Mayman, and Pruyser, The Vital Balance.

51. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 162.

52. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 318–19.

53. Juana I is included in three sections of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “Symptoms of Jealousy, Fear, Sorrow, Suspicion, Strange Actions, Gestures, Outrages, Locking Up, Oaths, Trials, Laws, &c.”; “Prognostics of Jealousy. Despair, Madness, to make away themselves and others,” and “Cure of Jealousy; by avoiding occasions, not to be idle: of good counsel; to condemn it, not to watch or lock them up: to dissemble it, &c.”

54. Chapter 25 is devoted to “Disgust, distress, contempt, abhorrence, and saudade.” Duarte, Leal conshelheiro, 286–89. McCleery points out that this is the first time that saudade is documented in writing in Portugal. McCleery, “Wine, Women, and Song,” 186; McCleery, “Both, Illness and Temptation”; Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living Soul, 170–71.

55. Duarte, Leal conshelheiro, 272–75.

56. Duarte, Leal conshelheiro, 273.

57. Duarte, Leal conshelheiro, 274.

58. Duarte, Leal conshelheiro, 275.

59. Duarte, Leal conshelheiro, 275.

60.Problemata XXX.1953a10–14; Forster, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2; Wittkower, Born under Saturn.

61. Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy; Starobinski, “Histoire du traitamement de la mélancholie.”

62. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 7.

63. Carrera, “Madness and Melancholy,” 2. Gerolamo Cardano (d. 1576), Reginal Scott (d. 1599), and physicians Johann Weyer (d. 1588), and John Webster (d. 1682)—contemporaries of the European “witch craze”—all believed that witches were victims of melancholic visions. Gowland, “The Problem,” 93–94.

64. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 3–4. Klibnasky, Panofsky, and Saxl saw Petrarch as “perhaps the first of a type of men who are conscious of being men of genius.” Klibnasky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 248.

65. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, chap. 3.

66. Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 544.

67. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 248–54.

68. Gowland, “The Problem,” 77.

69. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 320.

70. See the introduction.

71. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 11.

72. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, 10.

73. Tomaini, “Introduction,” in Dealing with the Dead, 1; Geary, Living with the Dead, 2; Binksy, Medieval Death.

74. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 3.

75. Stearns and Stearns, “Emotionology,” 813.

76. Valera, La muerte del rey, 30; Vivanco, Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile, 155.

77. Erker, “Gender and Roman Funeral Ritual,” 44–46. It should be noted that some elite and philosophically inclined Romans eschewed such practices as vulgar.

78. Robinson, Imagining the Passion, 10–22; McNamer, Affective Meditation, 2–4.

79. Only the first of the two volumes expected to be published came out on April 30, 1496. BNE: Inc. 1126, Eiximenis/Talavera, Vita Christi, f. 170v.

80. Sor Contanza de Castilla, Selección de textos, 75.

81. Cortijo, “Amores humanos,” 15–22.

82. Villena, Vita Christi, 117–18 (emphasis added). Isabel de Villena’s view challenges Luke’s Gospel, in which Mary had no agency (Luke 1:30–33).

83. Twomey, The Fabric of Marian Devotion, 22; Cantavella and Parra, Protagonistes femenines a la Vita Christi, VII and XIX–XXVII; Hauf i Valls, “La Vita Christi de Sor Isabel,” 105–64.

84. Scott and Burns, Las siete partidas, I:35.

85. “Los duelos que face los homes en que se mesan los cabellos, o se rompen las caras et las desafiguran, o se fieran de guise que venga a lisión o a muerte.” Scott and Burns, Las siete partidas, I:35.

86. See the rubric “What Punishment Those Who Mourn for the Dead Are Liable to, According to the Holy Church.” Scott and Burns, Las siete partidas, I:36.

87. Pereda, “The Oblivious Memory of Images,” 253–54.

88. Colmeiro, Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, part II, chap. 18, “Reinado de Juan I”; Lawrence, “La muerte y el morir,” 17–18.

89. González Arce, “El color como atributo simbólico del poder”; Harvey, The Story of Black; Nogales Rincón, “El color negro,” 227–28 and 244–45.

90. Pastoureau, “Les couleurs de la mort,” 103; Nogales Rincón, “El color negro,” 231–32.

91. García Gallo, ed., “Pragmática sobre la manera en que se puede traer luto y gastar cera por los difuntos (Madrid, January 10, 1502),” vol. II, ff. 308v–309v.

92. Lansing, Passion and Order, 58–72; Lansing, “Gender and Civic Authority,” 33–59.

93. Owen-Hughes, “Mourning Rites,” 23–38.

94. Titone, “Bewailing the Death,” 240–41.

95. Titone, “Bewailing the Death,” 242; MacKay, “Rituals and Propaganda”; Royer de Cardinal, Morir en Espana, 261–64; Haywood, “Sola yo, la mal fadada,” 21–40.

96. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead; Amelang, “Mourning Becomes Eclectic,” 20; Nogales Ricón, “Duelo, luto y comunicación,” 347.

97. Ariès, Western Attitudes, 66.

98. Tenenti, “Ars moriendi,” 466.

99. Chaunu, La mort à Paris.

100. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 124. The title is also translated as The Autumn of the Middle Ages.

101. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 124.

102. Vovelle, Piété baroque; Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident; Geary, Living with the Dead, 2. More recent edited collections pursue this topic from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective; for example, Classen, Death in the Middle Ages; Rollo-Koster, Death in Medieval Europe, 1–30.

103. Green, “On Learning How to Teach the Black Death”; Varlık, Plague and Empire, 1–5.

104. For the latest on the origin and introduction of the plague, see Green, “The Four Black Deaths.”

105. Villena, Tratado de la consolación, 6.

106. Villena, Tratado de la consolación, 5.

107. Carr, “Prólogo,” in Enrique de Villena, Tratado de la consolación, LXXVII; Cátedra, “Prospección del género consolatorio,” 1–16; Cátedra, “Modos de consolar por carta,” 470.

108. See chapter 7; Silleras-Fernández, “Isabel’s Years of Sorrow,” 254–78.

109. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 4.

110. Cicero’s approach to grief is in the tradition of other ancient thinkers, including Seneca and Lucretius. See, for example, Baltussen and Adamson, Greek and Roman Consolations. Another of Cicero’s consolatory works was the letter to his friend Titius on the death of the latter’s children. See Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 313.

111. McClure, Sorrow and Consolation, 17, 106–9; Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living, 186–88.

112. For example, Boys-Stones, “The ‘Consolatio ad Apollonium,” 123–37; Carr, “Prólogo,” LXXVIII.

113. Schiffhorst, The Triumph of Patience.

114. Delbrugge, Summa, 17.

115. Briesemeister, “The Consolatio Philosophiae,” 63–65; Riera, “Sobre la difusió hispànica,” 297–327.

116. Escorial: MS E-II–1; Briesemeister, “The Consolatio Philosophiae,” 61–62.

117. Léglu and Milner, “Introduction: Encountering Consolation,” 3.

118. Williams, The Pearl-Poet, 32; Schiffhorst, The Triumph of Patience, 5.

119. See chapter 3; Silleras-Fernandez, Chariots of Ladies, 76–80.

120. Benedict XIII, Consolaciones de la vida humana, 564.

121. Waugh, The Genre of Medieval Patience Literature, 7–8.

122. González Rolán et al., Ars moriendi, 30; O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well; Sanmartín Bastida, El arte de morir.

123.The Science of Dying Well, or the Medicine of the Soul, and his works Miroir de l’ame and Examen de concience, were translated into Latin and incorporated into another text, A Small Word in Three Parts (Opusculum tripertitum). González Rolán et al., Ars moriendi, 22. Gerson is also credited as the author of The Great Dance of Death of Men and Women (La grande dance macabre des homme et femmes).

124. González Rolán et al., Ars moriendi, 23; Chartier, “Les arts de mourir”; Feros Ruys, “Dying 101,” 55.

125. Manrique, Coplas, 386.

126. For instance, Diego del Castillo’s Visión de la muerte del rey don Alfonso also includes a section devoted to his queen, María of Castile, and to his servants. Ochoa, Rimas inéditas, 357–79.

127. Gómez Manrique, Cancionero, 2:50–51.

128. Deyermond, “La Defunzión del noble,” 94.

129. Gómez Manrique, Cancionero, 112–13. See Vivanco, Death in Fifteenth-Century Castile, 156; Lawrence, “La muerte y el morir,” 18. Gómez Manrique also wrote a poetic consolation for his sister, the Countess of Benavente. Beltrán, “Poesía, ideología, política,” 23.

130. From The Death of Don Enrique de Villena (Defunsión de don Enrique de Villena) by López de Mendoza, Obras completas, 156–63; see Lawrence, “La muerte y el morir,” 5; Pereda, “The Oblivious Memory,” 253–56.

131. Rodríguez Rivas, “El ‘Libro de miseria de omne,’” 178.

132. Infantes, Las danzas de la muerte, 22–23; García Herrero, “En torno a la muerte.”

133. Alfons wrote two drafts of this letter: ACA: CR, reg. 2410, ff. 60v and 61r-v (Igualada, April 2, 1416), ed. ACA, La muerte, 254–56, doc. 255.

134. ACA: CR, reg. 2410, f. 59r (Igualada, April 2, 1416), ed. ACA, La muerte, 250, doc. 253.

135. ACA, La muerte, 250.

136. Cañas Gálvez, “La correspondencia de Leonor de Alburquerque,” 196, 200.

137. ACA: Col. Autógrafos, I-1-p (b), ed. ACA, La muerte, 360, doc. 347. Croce, “La corte delle tristi regine a Napoli”; Scandone, “Le tristi reyne di Napoli Giovanna III e Giovanna IV.”

138. García Herrero, “La muerte de la infanta Catalina,” 234.

139. ACA: CR, reg. 3520, ff. 48v-49r, first numeration (Trujillo, January 30, 1479), ed. ACA, La muerte, 352, doc. 339.