A Peninsula in Flames: War and Emotions in the Cantigas de Santa María

• Autores: Simon R. Doubleday
• Localización: A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton / coord. por Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo, 2023, ISBN 9789004425460, págs. 70-94
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • In articles such as “Traitors to the Faith”, Simon Barton underscored the permeability of the Iberian frontier with al-Andalus and the limitations of the appeal of the idea of ‘Crusade’, which had been gradually implanted in Iberia in the twelfth century. Other recent scholarship has further suggested that medieval European attitudes to war and violence were, in general, surprisingly ambivalent. Evidence from thirteenth-century Castile provides new perspectives on this issue. In one of his Songs to Holy Mary— Cantiga de Santa María 345—Alfonso X of Castile-León (whose admiration for Arabic culture was matched by relative reluctance to engage in holy war) relates a nightmare in which he saw the Virgin Mary, crying out in anguish in the castle chapel of Jerez, which his forces had recently conquered. Mary was carrying a small child, and running desperately to the chapel door, for the chapel was on fire. She cries out in terror, calling on him to save the child from the flames, but he cannot fulfil what we might read as his conventionally masculine responsibility to rescue the mother and son. In the cantiga, his traumatic experience remains unresolved. This article will suggest that Alfonso’s personal response to a culture of crusade was conflicted, contradictory and divided. If this was a “society built for war”, as Elena Lourie famously observed, one significant facet of this social architecture was the construction of emotional foundations that could support constant military activity. One of these foundations was the forging of martial masculinity, subsumed into a culture of chivalric heroism, and an accompanying emphasis on emotional restraint. Yet this structure could never fully contain, or restrain, the full range of psychological responses to violence and bloodshed.