Performance, Rhetoric, and Restraint: The Role of Emotions in Thirteenth-Century Iberian Elite Culture

Abstract

This thesis presents a framework for understanding the expression of emotions among the male secular elite of thirteenth-century Iberia. It assesses how emotions interacted with wider chivalric values like honour and shame to form a culturally specific approach to managing and utilising emotion within elite circles. By using case studies of the individual emotions of anger, fear, and grief, the thesis explores how pervasive ideals of restraint (or mesura) were when it came to elite emotional practice. It demonstrates that there was a significant impetus towards emotional restraint within elite culture, with individuals consciously emulating the chivalric ideal of mesura (as exhibited by the literary hero of the Cid) and holding one another to account when expressions of emotion veered outside of socially accepted boundaries. We can also perceive a strong religious current flowing through these vernacular texts, with religious values around moderation and temperance being internalised by the elite to such an extent that they became melded with lay culture. However, the secular elite are also shown to have strategically utilised emotions in a rhetorical or performative way in order to achieve their own social, political, and military aims. The expression of emotion thus seems to have formed a significant means of social and political agency for the elite, even when this conflicted with religious values. Emotions can therefore be seen to have taken on a life of their own within aristocratic culture, being either restrained in the interests of group goals, social adherence, and religious values, or else proactively utilised as a political tool. The specific framework of emotional expression that emerges from the thirteenth-century Iberian elite thus sheds light on the way emotions might interact with wider cultural values and play an important role in the negotiation of social and political power.