HeLix - Dossiers zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft

Der weibliche Körper in der romanischen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit

Corinna Albert — 2024-12-20

„[Q]uant je ne pourrois avoir de vous que les os“. Verfügungsmomente über den weiblichen Körper in Marguerite de Navarres Heptaméron (1559)

Sofina Dembruk — 2024-12-20

The prominent role of the female body in Margaret of Navarra’s Heptaméron allows for complex and sometimes even paradoxical interpretations: if female beauty always completes the courtly ethical ideal of the virtuously chaste lady inspired by neo-platonic love doctrines, female charms are at the same time triggers of male desire, unbridled lust, and immoral delusion. To the extent that ambiguity seems to be inherent in the female body, it requires a male interpretative apparatus which, once discursively exhausted, seeks to seize the desired object by physical force. We recognize three scenarios of disposition in the Heptaméron, which we would like to examine in this article. All three ignite on the female body and reveal patriarchal patterns of disposition that manifest themselves in a bodily handling of women. However, in none of the three identified paradigms does Margaret of Navarra blindly reproduce patriarchal strategies of disposal over the female body without subtly counteracting them.

Shame or Agency? Perceptions of Modesty and the Female Body through Narratives of Rape and Sexual Violence in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron

Nupur Patel — 2024-12-20

This article considers perceptions of the female body in Marguerite de Navarre’s L’Heptaméron. In the early modern period, a woman’s body was administered by a patriarchal system which used virtues of silence, chastity, and modesty to control women’s sexuality. In Marguerite’s novellas 2 and 62, I argue that she problematizes these virtues. Influenced by her courtly setting of debate and discussion, she examines the female condition through questions of agency, shame, and silence in stories of rape and sexual violence: Does a woman remain modest if she has been raped and discusses it? Can something positive come out of such a tragic situation? Marguerite creates a more nuanced understanding of the female body which highlights a woman’s possible strengths and limitations in early modern society. She scrutinizes the cultural conditions which women experience.

Diskurs und Deformation. Vergewaltigte Körper in María de Zayas’ Desengaños amorosos (1647)

Corinna Albert — 2024-12-20

This article analyses three cases of rape in María de Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos (1647), and the forms of deformation that the female bodies of Isabel, Camila and Inés undergo as a consequence of sexual violence. This article does not only describe the diverse mechanisms of male control represented in those cases but it particularly examines Zayas’s use of emblematic Early Modern discourse traditions and strategies as a means of depicting the raped female body. While the act of rape itself is not allowed to be rendered discursively, the deformed female body as a consequence of rape, on the contrary, is described and intensively discussed. This corresponds to other, particularly baroque discourse traditions, which take the body as a reflection of the epoch’s instabilities; it also caters to the audience’s predilection for monstrous and deformed objects and bodies.

Die leidende Frau. Mitleid bei María de Zayas

Dirk Brunke — 2024-12-20

By means of a narratological analysis, this article explores the dynamics between the depiction of suffering women and the evocation of compassion in the novellas of Spanish Baroque author María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590-1661?). Zayas uses emotional and physical suffering to evoke compassion on the different layers of these narrative texts, i.e. in the fictitious world of the intradiegetic novellas and the framework story as well as in the extratextual world of the reader. As will be shown, evoking compassion follows different guidelines on these different layers, although Zayas pursues an all-encompassing educative agenda in the sense that the affective rhetoric that Zayas employs is stylized as a highly effective means of transmitting knowledge about vices and virtues. Therefore, compassion as an affective reaction to narratives of suffering women illustrates that fiction itself and the reception of fiction – both as a reader and as a listener – is considered as a privileged medium of discussing the situation of women in Early Modern Europe.

Mère, courtisane et martyre. Corps féminin et cruauté dans Les Tragiques de Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné

Giulia Lombardi — 2024-12-20

Agrippa d’Aubigné’s complex poem Les Tragiques (1616) relates through the perspective of a Huguenot narrator the distress in war-torn France during the time of religious conflicts in the 16th century. In this violent context, the female body plays a crucial role, both as victim and perpetrator of cruelty. It occupies in its concrete corporeality the poem’s imagery on different semantic levels. First in its role as a maternal body, experiencing a gradual and irreversible process of loss and negation of its functions and qualities related to motherhood. Second, as a caricatural representation of a courtesan, it embodies cruelty as one of the worst vices resulting from the corruption of morals. Finally, it is at the core of brutal depictions of martyrdom, expressing metonymically the struggles of the Huguenots. All these configurations relate to whether inflicted or suffered cruelty, but also to a significant political figure, seen as the origin of all ills: Catherine de’ Medici.

Schmerz und Leid. Der weibliche Körper und der Geschlechterstreit in Laura Terracinas Discorsi sopra le prime stanze de’ canti d’Orlando furioso (1549/67)

Rotraud von Kulessa — 2024-12-20

In the tradition of commentaries of Orlando furioso, Laura Terracina's Discorsi sopra le prime stanze de' canti d'Orlando furioso (1549/67) enters into a critical dialogue with the bestseller of the Italian Renaissance, the third version of Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric epic Orlando furioso (Ferrara 1532). Terracina's dialogue is aimed at the moral and socio-political dimension of the opening octaves of Orlando, whereby the poet displays a primarily pessimistic world view, which manifests itself not least in her re-reading of Ariosto's ambiguous positioning in the Querelle des femmes, which is deepened by Laura Terracina and decided in favour of women. The article uses exemplary passages to analyse the subversive recoding potential of the body discourse in Terracina's Discorsi in comparison to her reference text, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso.

Physician-Writers, Women Healers and the Suffering Body: Symphorien Champier, François Rabelais, Agrippa von Nettesheim and Francisco Delicado

Folke Gernert — 2024-12-20

In early modern times, the possibilities for a woman to practice a health care profession were rather restricted. The attitude in the medical ranks towards female professionals was quite ambivalent: While physicians such as Andrés Laguna or Paracelsus recommend learning from women healers, other doctors have a negative perception of women practicing medicine because they consider an academic background and knowledge of Latin and Greek indispensable for the healing arts. Of particular interest are the fields of obstetrics and gynaecology. This time I will study the fictionalization of this controversy in literary works of physician-writers like François Rabelais, Symphorien Champier who was particularly involved in the Querelle des femmes or Francisco Delicado who, in his Lozana Andaluza, creates the character of a female healer who, thanks to her orally acquired practical knowledge, seriously competes with academic medical practitioners.

Pedro Lemebel and the Latin American Chronicle: Memory, Archive, Cityscape

Marília Jöhnk — 2024-12-20

The following paper analyzes the importance of the chronicle in the writings of Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015). The Chilean author and performance artist embedded himself in the tradition of the Latin American chronicle and re-invented the format as radio broadcasts portraying Santiago de Chile from a queer perspective and showcasing the lives of marginalized populations. This article interprets Pedro Lemebel’s collection of chronicles De perlas y cicatrices [Of pearls and scars] by means of two concepts: ‘subterranean writing’, which aims to describe the perspective of the chronicles, and ‘ephemeral archive’, a concept that seeks to express the tension between urban transformation and testimonial memory. Departing from Pedro Lemebel, the present contribution argues in favor of a ‘memory turn’ in the Latin American tradition of chronicle writing.