The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

By Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason.

Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in medieval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501773877

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of Power, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna.

Book preview

The Politics of Emotion

Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Nuria Silleras-Fernandez

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

To Brian

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.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Note on Names and Translations

The Politics of Emotion: An Introduction

1. Love and Excess/Love as Excess

2. Regulating Death, Grief, and Consolation

3. Love and Sexuality as Power: Isabel of Portugal, Queen of Castile

4. Contested Agency: Isabel of Portugal and Saint Beatriz da Silva

5. Portugal, 1491: A Princess and a Kingdom in Mourning

6. Consoling the Princess of Portugal, or the Price of Remarriage

7. Juana and Isabel: The Tale of a Prodigal Daughter

8. Madness in the Age of Empire: Juana I, Queen of Castile

Conclusion: Love and Death and the Politics of Emotion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

In the many years that it has taken to research and write this book I have counted on the guidance, advice, and support of countless colleagues, friends, and family members. The list is so long I will undoubtedly omit some names, and for that I apologize.

First, I would like to thank Mahinder S. Kingra, my editor at Cornell University Press, for his many suggestions, for his support for this project, and for securing the excellent reviewers who helped make this a better book.

Over the years, I have presented parts of this project at several conferences and colloquia, benefiting from comments and encouragement from various audiences. I owe particular thanks to Teo Ruiz for his sound advice and his invitation to participate in the colloquium Iberia, the Mediterranean, and the World in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, held in 2018 at UCLA. I also thank Michelle Hamilton and Vicente Lledó-Guillem for their suggestions and for their invitations to present my work at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Hofstra University, respectively. These talks took place in early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic made in-person presentations impossible and put grieving, funerary practices, and mental health (subjects that are a focus of this book) at the forefront of our collective social anxieties.

I have also gained insights workshopping parts of the book at various venues, including the introduction at CU Boulder’s Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (thanks to Rebecca Maloy), and chapter 4 in the CU Mediterranean Studies Group, where I benefited from comments from four respondents: two of my colleagues, Céline Dauverd and Suzanne Magnani, as well as Cristina Guardiola-Griffiths and Isidro Rivera. I also presented a paper on the expulsions from Portugal at Purity, Pollution, Purification, and Defilement in the Premodern Mediterranean, the Mediterranean Seminar Summer Workshop organized by Naama Cohen-Hanegbi and Moshe Blidstein at the University of Haifa in June 2022. Finally, I workshopped sections of chapters 6 and 8 with a most inspiring group of gender historians who started meeting regularly via Zoom when the pandemic began: Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Janna Bianchini, Roisin Cossar, Theresa Earenfight, Judith Evans-Grubbs, Alexandra Gerson de Oliveira, Emily Hutchinson, Marie Kelleher, Amy Livingstone, Susan McDonough, Miriam Shadis, and Dana Wessel Lightfoot.

The opportunity to develop particular aspects of this project in the form of contributions to edited volumes has also helped focus and refine my ideas, and for that I thank Michael Gerli and Ryan Giles (editors of Routledge’s Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia) and Hilaire Kallendorf (editor of A Companion to the Queenship of Isabel la Católica).

I also want to thank the other members of the Monastic Landscapes group at the University of Barcelona, in particular, my friends and colleagues Blanca Garí de Aguilera, Marimar Graña Cid, and Núria Jornet Benito. Ana Maria Rodrigues has graciously hosted me in Lisbon on several occasions and has been a resource for all matters Portuguese, while Ellie Woodacre’s insights on queenship have been invaluable. Others who have offered advice and support include James Amelang, John Dagenais, Frank A. Dominguez, Peter Elmore, Emily Francomano, Jerry Hauser, Clara Marías Martínez, the late Nancy Marino (rest in peace), Sol Miguel-Prendes, Diana Pelaz Flores, Felipe Pereda, François Soyer, and Rebecca Winer.

The University of Colorado Boulder has supported my research, awarding me a series of fellowships to travel to archives and libraries in Spain, Portugal, and England: a LEAP Individual Growth Grant from the Office of Faculty Affairs, a small grant and The Hazel Barnes Flat and Schawlbe Travel Grant to London from The Center for the Humanities and the Arts, the Dean’s Fund for Excellence, and Kayden Research Grants for summer research. I am a firm believer that teaching and research go hand in hand and enrich each other. I have already taught parts of this book at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and I thank my students for that enriching experience.

And last but not least, I thank my friends and family, who will undoubtedly be relieved that they no longer have to ask me how the book is progressing. Their enthusiasm and support were crucial to keeping my spirits up over the many years it has taken to bring this project to fruition. My most heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Luis and Estrella, my children, Alexandra and Raymond, and as always to my husband, Brian Catlos, to whom this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations

Note on Names and Translations

Any study of the Iberian Peninsula in the premodern period faces a dilemma regarding the names by which to refer to persons and places. Through most of the premodern period, the peninsula was politically fragmented, under the rule of various polities, both Christian and Muslim: the Crown of Castile, Navarre, the Crown of Aragon, Portugal, and Granada, for example. These patrimonial divisions corresponded roughly to ethno-linguistic divisions: Castilian, Navarrese, Aragonese and Catalan, Portuguese, and Arabic. In addition, individuals and families from elsewhere—Germans, French, and English— made their way into the region and became part of its political and cultural landscape. Certain of these individuals and families also often moved within several dynastic and cultural environments and spoke several languages. The many overlapping dynasties in the premodern period, each generating successions of Johns, Peters, Marys, Henrys, and so on, can be challenging for readers to untangle and follow.

To mitigate confusion and to acknowledge and respect the culturo-linguistic variety of the medieval Spains, in this book individuals are referred to, in general, by the form of their name in what might be characterized as their native land or culture. Hence, kings of Castile are Pedro and Juan, but Juan is João in Portugal and Joan in the Catalan-speaking House of Aragon (where Pedro is Pere). A Mary from Castile is María, but Maria if she is Catalan, Aragonese, or Portuguese. Blanche of Navarre of the Evreux dynasty is Blanche, but her Aragonese Trastámaran daughter is Blanca.

Exceptions are made for individuals who are better known by a particular name that may not follow this schema. Thus, both de Antequera and the Catholic are Fernandos (rather than Ferrans), whereas their intermediates are Alfons and Joan (as opposed to Alfonso and Juan). With the exception of Joan II, Fernando de Antequera’s male offspring, the Infantes de Aragón, are called by the Castilian variants by which they are usually referred to. In the interest of consistency and recognition, when the Castilian queen Catalina of Lancaster is referred to as daughter, she is Catherine, while Catherine of Aragon, queen of England, is Catalina in the context of her parents. Otherwise, foreigners are referred to by their native linguistic variant. Princes and princesses (including queens) are typically referred to as of the kingdom of their origin, as in María of Castile, whereas noblemen and women are referred to in reference to their family or domain with de, as in Blanche de Bourbon or Leonor de Albuquerque (with the exception of English nobility, for whom de is of).

Generally speaking, places are referred to by the modern variant of their regional language, unless there is a standard modern English place-name. Thus, Lisbon is not referred to as Lisboa.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations to English are the author’s. Translations of verse are not necessarily literal; rather, an effort was made to convey the sense of the poems. As per the policies of the press, the untranslated original text is included only when it is required to clarify meaning or to support an argument. An exception is made for the chapter epigraphs, which are left in the original to better convey their spirit and tone and to reflect the linguistic variety and richness of the documents.

Map of Iberia, ca. 1500

Map 1.

Iberia, ca. 1500

The Politics of Emotion

An Introduction

¡Quién podría decir las muchas lágrimas! Nunca se desnudó; estuvo quarenta días que nunca comió bocado de pan y, por fuerça, el rey su suegro y la reyna su suegra, que siempre estaban allí con ella, le daban ellos mismos de comer… . Nunca se echó en cama más de tres meses; nunca se desnudó, vistiose de xerga, el manto por encima de la cabeça, que nadie le podía ver la cabeça, que nadie le podía ver la cara; púsose tocas negras y en este maltratamieto rescisbió su salud mucho detrimento.

Who can say how many tears she shed! She never undressed; for forty days, she did not eat more than a bite of bread, and by force, the King, her father-in-law, [João II of Portugal] and the queen, her mother-in-law [Queen Leonor de Viseu], who were by her side through this, personally fed her… . She never lay down in bed for more than three months; never did she change her clothes, but dressed in mourning, a shawl drawn over her head, so that no one could see her face, and due to this abuse, her health suffered great detriment.

Carro de las donas/The Chariot of Ladies

This account of the dowager princess Isabel of Aragon’s mourning—a rare testimony of regal female sorrow in the late Middle Ages, and one that seems to teeter on the brink of madness—is what sparked my interest in the politics of emotion and inspired me to write this book. Sensational as it may have been, Isabel’s case was all the more remarkable because of its outcome. After she was driven to a breakdown by the death of her husband, Afonso, heir to the kingdom of Portugal, Isabel’s in-laws and parents rushed to her aid, bringing her back from the verge of irrevocable psychological collapse, and repackaged her as a viable, marriageable princess. It was a conclusion that contrasted dramatically with that of her own maternal grandmother, Isabel of Portugal, and that of her sister, Juana I the Mad of Castile, each of whom suffered similar episodes of extreme grief, and each of whom was judged to be beyond remedy and relegated to a life of solitude and marginalization. These three women—Isabel of Portugal (1428–96), Isabel of Aragon (1470–98), and Juana of Castile (1479–1555)—the mother and daughters of Castile’s most famous medieval queen, Isabel I the Catholic (1451–1504), are the main subjects of this book, together with other historical personalities and literary characters who populated the court culture of medieval and early modern Iberia.

Yet this book is by no means a biographical study of three queens and the individuals who surrounded them. Rather, through these three individuals, their families, and their entourages, writers, chronicles, courtiers, and physicians, this book focuses on broader questions relating to how these women and their observers contributed to and participated in the development, and in some cases the reconsideration, of notions of grief, love, excess, mental instability, and melancholy over the course of the transitional era from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. It connects these historical individuals to the imaginary of their time, its literary production, and to contemporary medical, philosophical, and religious views. As case studies, these episodes from the lives of these three individuals enable us to better understand issues relating to gender and ideas regarding rationality, the role of emotions, grief, physical and mental health and disability, politics, and the literary representation of women—particularly, of dangerous women.¹

Isabel of Portugal was the second wife of Juan II of Castile (1406–54), who after her husband’s death lived out most of her life as an isolated dowager. Her granddaughter Isabel of Aragon married twice: briefly in 1490 to Afonso, the heir to the throne of Portugal, and seven years later to Afonso’s cousin and uncle, who would reign as Manuel I of Portugal (1495–1521). Isabel’s other granddaughter, Juana of Castile, married Philippe the Handsome, the Habsburg heir, and joined him in Flanders before returning to the Iberian Peninsula, where she was recognized as heir to the Crown of Castile (from Isabel I) and the Crown of Aragon (from Fernando II). After the death of her mother in 1504, Juana inherited Castile together with its New World colonies, but shortly after her husband’s death in 1506, she was placed in confinement, where she lived out her remaining forty-six years. Juana’s four daughters and two sons all became kings and queens, the most famous and prestigious being Carlos V, King of Spain (1516–56) and Holy Roman Emperor (1519–56, d. 1558).

These three queens, Isabel of Portugal and her two granddaughters, Isabel of Aragon and Juana of Castile, had many things in common. All three seem to have been in love with their husbands—something not at all usual in a period in which royal marriages were arranged between children who often had never met each other in person by parents with the goal of building political alliances. All three lost their husbands unpredictably, the two granddaughters at a young age. Twenty-one-year old Isabel of Aragon’s first husband was only seventeen when he died, while Juana of Castile’s was twenty-eight, like her, when he passed away. Each of the three fell into deep despair as a result of their loss—a despair that was manifested inwardly as grief, but outwardly in dramatic and very public mourning that had a clearly performative element. Each went through a period of bereavement that contemporaries considered excessive and even as madness or (to use the terminology more current in the period) profound melancholy. Each of them seems to have retreated into isolation, at least for a time, manifesting what nowadays might be diagnosed as complicated grief or prolonged grief disorder—a state seen as related to major depression.² Complicated grief is more commonly associated with women, and particularly individuals on the spectrum of the so-called grief-prone personality.³

Through these expressions of sorrow and loss, love, and death—Eros and Thanatos—became entangled not only with each other but with politics, power, court culture, gender, and sexuality. This was an era in which the Virgin Mary’s sorrow at the suffering and death of her son was seen as a model of virtue, and for women especially, ostentatious tears, dramatic wailing, and public prayer were accepted and expected as demonstrations of grief up to a certain point. Rules of decorum and propriety set unwritten but widely understood limits on grieving, which each of these women was seen as exceeding. One could venture that their state of unprocessed grief kept them from healing, such that the performance of their mourning drew opprobrium rather than admiration. As Sigmund Freud observed, mourning allows one to progressively move from sorrow toward acceptance of one’s loss, while melancholy takes on a pathological aspect as a depressive disorder. Freud differentiated between grief or mourning—a time when it is the world which has become poor and empty to the sufferer—and melancholy—when the ego itself is experienced as poor and empty.⁴ In his words,

Although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment. We rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time, and we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.⁵

Nevertheless, when Freud himself had to deal with his own personal grief, he changed his initial point of view. On January 25, 1920, Freud’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Sophie, died of influenza. On April 12, 1929, nine years after her passing, Freud wrote a letter to his friend Ludwig Binswanger in which he reflected on the pain of his loss. In his missive, Freud connected grief with love; he even conceived of it as a way of holding on to love. Consequently, he said, it was better not to completely let go of grief, because, as he now understood, sadness and melancholy had a role to play in mourning and both were linked to love:

My daughter who died would have been thirty-six today… . Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.⁶

Unfortunately, it is Freud’s first take on mourning, his theoretical view of grief as a pathological condition, that is usually remembered, and not his later assessment, which was written from a practical and personal point of view. A similar tension affected influential individuals who were expected to show restraint in public in the face of devastating emotional despair—particularly if they needed more time to recover. Politics intersects with emotions—and this with motivations, goals, and intentions—and with restraint. Julia Kristeva elaborated on this issue, noting, Depression, like mourning, conceals an aggressiveness toward the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of mourning.⁷

Modern Medicine and Grief

To better analyze how grief was conceived in the premodern past, we can begin by reviewing how we understand grief and its relationship to mental health in our own time from a scientific point of view. Modern medicine allows grieving individuals comparatively little time for recovery before classifying their condition as an affliction. Since 1952 the American Psychiatric Association has standardized and classified mental disorders in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), periodically revising its criteria and discarding, redefining, or establishing what the psychiatric profession considers to be mental disorders.⁸ The DSM-5 (2013) took the controversial step of removing the so-called bereavement exclusion (BE) in the diagnosis of major depression. Thus since 2013 the profession has considered grief to have the potential of evolving into major depression after as few as two weeks of post-bereavement depressive symptoms. Those psychiatrists who disagree with this revision argue that it mislabels grief as a mental illness and will therefore contribute to medicalizing loss. As Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield put it, our society suffers from loss sadness—that is, the inability to perceive of sadness as a normal and healthy part of life—and therefore sadness tends to be mislabeled as a depressive disorder.⁹ Those in favor of the revision, on the other hand, maintain that patients in bereavement should not be precluded from a diagnosis of major depression if their behavior is of concern and if the indicators are similar to those of depression. The death of a loved one, they note, is a common trigger for a major depressive episode.¹⁰ For his part, Richard Bryant observes that there is strong evidence for a diagnosis of prolonged grief that is distinguished from depression and involves marked impairment affecting 10 to 15 percent of bereaved people.¹¹ Bryant also notes that those who meet the criteria for prolonged grief reactions are most likely to experience other psychological problems.¹² For her part, psychologist Leeat Granek points out how over the last hundred years the emphasis on productivity, individualism, logic, and efficiency, and on progress and happiness, is behind the reconfiguration and medicalizing or psychologizing of grief as potentially pathological and excessive.¹³

Clearly, grief can manifest symptoms similar to depression, including sadness, loss of appetite, weight loss, and insomnia; and, in fact, these signs can also be indicative of post-traumatic stress disorder. On the other hand, a depressed mood is more durable and normally does not include moments of positive feelings or self-esteem as grief might. Whether in a social or a clinical context, an individual in bereavement is expected to eventually experience acceptance of their loss, or closure. Those who cannot come to terms with the loss of their loved one and keep yearning for him or her, and who show the other depression-like symptoms, are seen as suffering from a major depressive disorder. That is to say, nowadays grief is considered a temporary affliction, which if persistent or inordinately intense can lead to depression and should be treated through therapy and medication. Similarly, scientists see grief not only as psychological, but also as physical and biological.¹⁴ The DSM-5 was updated in March 2022 and again underlined how difficult it was for a small percentage of those afflicted to recover from grief, and these individuals are now labeled as suffering from prolonged grief disorder if their symptoms persist after a year of bereavement. In other words, North American psychiatrists today do not agree on the relationship between grief and mental illness: what some see as natural is associated with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder by others.¹⁵

Half a century ago, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed that the process of dying (and later, grieving) could be charted in five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—but noted this progression was not necessarily linear or predictable and varied among individuals.¹⁶ Psychologists, who still debate emotions as part of a nature versus nurture or biology versus culture controversy, do not advocate for linear models of cognition, and some do not even see a firm distinction between thought and affect.¹⁷ Nowadays, waves seem to be the preferred metaphor to describe grief—waves of sadness that are supposed to become less intense and less frequent over time. Modern memoirs written by women who have experienced grief seem to favor that term. Joan Didion’s best-selling The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) describes her own grief over her husband’s passing as coming in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the deadliness of life.¹⁸ Likewise, in 2011, psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, relating her own experience after her spouse’s passing, differentiates grief from depression or the bipolar disorder she herself suffers from, describing grief as hitting in waves—a wave of longing I could scarcely stand. She distinguished the two, noting, In grief, one feels the absence of life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise: one cannot access the beat of life.¹⁹ A more recent take on the subject, The After Grief by Hope Edelman (2020), reflects not only on the impossibility for many people to let go, but why this should even be expected. Edelman echoes Freud’s own personal feelings after the death of his daughter, Sophie, discussed above: The death of a loved one … isn’t something most of us get over, get past, put down, or move beyond.²⁰

It is obvious that our understanding of mental and physical health is not only subjective, but also evolves over time and varies among different societies and cultures, and that the vocabulary we use to describe and classify these states is continuously developing. Modern categories do not correspond to medieval and early modern understandings of mind and body. In fact, our current understanding of mental health does not coincide with even recent ideas and remains controversial and contested. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, there was a shift away from considering mental illness as rooted in one’s physical condition to seeing insanity as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Subsequently, there was something of a swing back to seeing it as a problem of body chemistry. Both clinical diagnosis and social perceptions of mental health are highly variable and highly subjective, not only over time and among different cultures, but with each particular case within the same period and social environment, depending in part on the clinicians’ or observers’ biases, presumptions, and prejudices regarding the individual subject.

Medieval and Early Modern Subjects

As this book will show, for all the apparent similarities between Isabel of Portugal, Isabel of Aragon, and Juana I of Castile’s conditions, not only were their outcomes quite different, but so were the perception of them among contemporaries and the reputation that has been imposed on them by the historiographical tradition. For instance, Isabel of Portugal was all but forgotten by her contemporaries, Isabel of Aragon was rehabilitated as a functioning princess, and Juana I of Castile was incarcerated, to be remembered infamously and enduringly as Juana the Mad (la Loca). In the Middle Ages, mental and physical health were bound up with an individual’s moral condition, and this was of particular consequence for members of the royal family, for whom the distinction between private life and the public sphere was all but nonexistent, and whose health and virtue were seen as matters of general interest and political importance.²¹

Indeed, as we will see, the divergent fates of these three women have less to do with how their conditions were constructed than with how their political potentials were understood. The experiences of these three queens, and their peers’ reactions to them, open a window onto the expression and function of grief in particular, and of emotions in general, and on the development of notions of sanity in an era that predates Michel Foucault’s watershed Age of Confinement of the seventeenth century.²² Foucault contended that the modern state produced repressive social, political, and medical regimes that contributed to particular constructions of deviance, disorder, and mental illness, and consequently established coercive institutions, such as prisons, workhouses, and asylums, intended to cure or rehabilitate those affected. These spaces, destined to contain individuals whose behavior was seen to fall outside the normative, are what he called heterotopias of deviation.²³

Yet the experiences of these three queens not only precede Foucault’s age of mass confinement, but also defy Philippe Ariès’s thesis that intense emotion in the context of mourning developed only in the Romantic period of the nineteenth century, when, in his view, there arose a refusal to accept the death of the individual.²⁴ Anthropology has demonstrated that different cultures express mourning by different means and develop distinct rituals of grieving—engaging with a panoply of emotions, ranging from pity to horror to suffering to rage to sorrow. Robert Levy proposed a common set of emotions that could be either hypercognized, which is to say, emphasized, expressed, rehearsed, and discussed, or hypocognized, denied, masked, not named.²⁵ As William Reddy put it, and as many psychologists contend, emotions operate like overlearned cognitive habits influenced by culture, because for the individual, culture is itself a set of overlearned cognitive habits.²⁶ Because grief has a public dimension, the acceptable expression of mourning is also a matter of decorum and is related to social expectations regarding what is appropriate or inappropriate, and this is especially true as it relates to people who belong to the ruling elite and are, therefore, public figures.

Goals and Objectives

This book is based on the analysis of a variety of published and unpublished archival documents, manuscripts and incunabula, literary texts, and medical and philosophical treatises. It aims to explore the intersectionality inherent in gender, grief, melancholy, madness, disease, the feminine, and political power in the Iberian Peninsula in the period of transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. Emotions or passions are analyzed as social and cultural practices, not as interior psychological states, which is to say, in this study what emotions do and how they are seen and understood by others are more important that what they are. As Susan Matt and Peter Stern have observed regarding the history of emotions, the idealized but never fully attainable goal is to strive to know how history felt to those who lived through it.²⁷

Of the three queens who are the focus of this work, the experiences of Juana I have been studied most extensively and she has become a popular historical figure. The life of Isabel of Aragon, on the other hand, is lesser known, while that of Isabel of Portugal is quite obscure. Juana’s life, in particular, and to some extent that of her grandmother, have been distorted both by history and by popular culture—the caricatured and fictionalized historical personas that bear their names have only a tenuous relationship with the historical individuals. Moreover, to the extent that these three women have been analyzed, it has been separately, within a biographical framework or in reference to the particular political history of each woman’s time. No single study has focused on these women as a group with the aim of understanding how medieval society understood grief, mourning, widowhood, queenship, royal power, excess, and madness—which is somewhat surprising considering their historical and personal proximity and the similarity of their conditions.

Yet they are eminently comparable. All three women lived within the same culture and kingdoms and in the same century, and were members of the same family—the Trastámara-Avis. All were dowagers whose extreme manifestations of grief caught the attention of their contemporaries. In other words, they comprise an excellent dataset. Because they were princesses and queens of the royal houses of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal (and in Juana’s case also of the Habsburg dynasty) we have voluminous and varied documentary evidence of their lives, including chronicles, letters, accounts, and works of fiction and romance.

Beyond our principal subjects, most of the other individuals discussed in this book were either members of the Trastámara dynasty or married into it or were attached to its households and courts. In 1366 the illegitimate prince, Enrique de Trastámara, murdered his halfbrother, Pedro the Cruel (1350–66), and seized the throne of Castile. In 1412, Fernando de Antequera, the uncle and co-guardian of Enrique’s great-grandson, Juan II (1406–54), was elected king of Aragon at the Compromise of Caspe following the extinction of the royal line of Barcelona. These two branches of the family were then united in 1469, when Isabel of Castile married Fernando of Aragon. The marriage of the Catholic Monarchs, as they were later known, was the historical accident that ultimately led to the dynastic unification of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, the annexation of Navarre, and, through the marriage of Juana I to Philippe the Handsome, the imposition of Habsburg dominion over the peninsula and the establishment of the Spanish Empire. Indeed, Isabel sits at the nexus of these three women—as daughter and mother—and the Catholic queen herself suffered from the effects of love and loss, although not to the extent that it imperiled her rule or undermined her legacy.

It is not the goal of this study to engage in a retrospective diagnosis of the medical or psychiatric conditions of these women—a practice of dubious reliability and historical importance, which would degenerate too easily into a trivial and distracting parlor game. Historians of medicine hold a range of opinions as to how the study of disease should be approached. For some, the key is to focus on sociocultural dimensions, avoiding modern biological labels, or as Andrew Cunningham put it, accepting that you die of what your doctor says you die of. Others, like Jon Arrizabalaga and Piers Mitchell, are willing to explore potential diagnoses with caution. Still others emphasize the importance of historicizing scientific evidence when such retrospective diagnoses are suggested. For instance, in 1913 Charles Singer (1876–1960) diagnosed the German abbess and visionary Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) as a migraine sufferer, which, as Katherine Foxhall shows, is a conclusion that related less to Hildegard herself than to nineteenth-century ideas regarding migraines. For her part, Monica Green advocates for interdisciplinary approaches including paleopathology, genomics, molecular genetics, and history to venture beyond what our textual evidence reveals about disease in the premodern era. Similarly, Juliette Vuille stresses interrogation of the interconnectedness of literary, medical, and religious discourses to avoid inaccuracies.²⁸ This book will very occasionally suggest potential diagnoses, but only when these might help illuminate the actions of these women or how they were seen or interpreted, or to draw comparisons. Our subjects are too distant in time to do more, and the only sources we have at our disposal are texts that are fundamentally unreliable in this regard.

The object of this book is to analyze how contemporaries viewed these women through perspectives shaped by gender, class, religion, medicine, and politics, and to consider the impact of these perspectives on how the afflictions of these women were imagined and presented. Ideas of grief and sorrow were highly gendered, bound up in notions of masculinity, femininity, social standing, rationality, and virtue. As we will see, the expectations for dowager queens, queen consorts, and queens in their own right were substantially different from those for their male counterparts, other nobles, and common folk. Emotions have a social and socializing function, and while no historian can claim to have accessed the inner emotions of an individual, the experiences and expressions of those emotions are, as much as Butlerian gender, ingrained in performativity and repetition to the point that they become what Pierre Bourdieu defined as habitus— emotions as practice, and at the very least, the audience’s reactions to them can be analyzed.²⁹ As Joan Scott reflected, History is a chronology that makes experience visible, but in which categories appear as nonetheless ahistorical; desire, homosexuality, heterosexuality, femininity, masculinity, sex, and even sexual practices become so many fixed entities being played out over time, but not themselves historicized.³⁰ In this spirit, historicizing the experiences of these women and making them visible are among the ultimate goals of this book.

Overview of the Book

I began to conceive of The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia in the course of completing my second scholarly monograph, Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, a study of the dissemination of ideas regarding feminine virtue and piety through the medium of books for women and mirrors of princesses.³¹ While reading Carro de las donas (The Chariot of Ladies), an adaptation of Francesc Eiximenis’s Llibre de las dones (Book of Women, ca. 1392) by an anonymous Franciscan in 1542, I was intrigued by the adapter’s description of extreme grief in the biographical sketch of Isabel of Aragon, which appears as this introduction’s epigraph. The portrayal of Princess Isabel as a martyr for love, her overwhelming sorrow, and her performance of anguish was unusual, to say the least. In the course of writing my first book, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), I had come to understand how crucial public image was for powerful royal women in this period, and how carefully their personas were curated so as to not provoke masculine anxieties that could have political consequences.

The Politics of Emotion is a book about love and death. The emotional equation is love plus death equals grief, and the greater the measure of love, the more intense the resultant grieving. Chapter 1, Love and Excess/Love as Excess, and chapter 2, Regulating Death, Grief, and Consolation, lay the necessary contextual groundwork for the case studies that follow. They focus on contemporary notions surrounding love, sexuality, medicine, philosophy, and gender, as these relate to death, melancholy, and mourning. They also examine the norms associated with grief and consolation in the Crown of Aragon, the Crown of Castile, and the Kingdom of Portugal. Understanding the intersection of emotion, political power, class, and gender is crucial to this subject. Chapters 3–6 revolve around the three case studies that are the core of this book: two chapters per queen, each examining both the woman in question and her cultural environment and social milieu. The chapters are neither structured nor intended as biographical accounts, but rather, as studies that focus specifically on the expression and perception of love and grief and the gendering of excess and madness and its consequences.

Chapter 3, Love and Sexuality as Power: Isabel of Portugal, Queen of Castile, analyzes Isabel of Portugal’s emotionally intense relationship with her husband within the framework of the courtly culture of her time, which was characterized by the idealization of chivalry, the popularity of love poetry, and constant noble feuding. Chapter 4, Contested Agency: Isabel of Portugal and Saint Beatriz da Silva, explores the construction of Isabel of Portugal’s reputation as a sick and melancholic dowager and considers the reasons behind her retirement from court. It also examines her allegedly fraught relationship with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Beatriz da Silva, who was eventually canonized. The hagiographic narratives written to promote Beatriz’s order and her canonization present a violently jealous and insane Isabel pushing Beatriz toward sainthood. In both cases, the chronicles and hagiographic texts of the time deprive these women of the agency they had in real life.

Chapter 5, Portugal, 1491: A Princess and a Kingdom in Mourning, and chapter 6, Consoling the Princess of Portugal, or the Price of Remarriage, focus on the Catholic Monarchs’ eldest daughter, Isabel, who in 1491 was severely stricken by grief following the death of her husband, Afonso, the heir apparent of Portugal. Indeed, it was not only the princess who sank into mourning, but also her in-laws, the king and queen, João II and Leonor de Viseu, who had lost their only child and heir, as well as the people of their kingdom, who had lost their future king. This era marked the transition to the early modern age; Afonso was said to have had the last medieval royal funeral in Portugal. By this time the culture of grief was changing. At his death, Isabel was still young and childless, and as second-in-line to the thrones of Castile and Aragon was an important asset to the dynasty. This meant that her rehabilitation was politically necessary. This recovery was possible thanks to the efforts of the court, which included the production of a series of consolatory texts dedicated to her that in turn developed a new culture of grieving in the Iberian Peninsula. Tangentially, Isabel’s distress is directly tied to the expulsion of the Muslims, Jews, and heretics from Portugal in 1496—the consequence of the precondition of marriage she put to Manuel I, her deceased husband’s uncle, when she was betrothed to him.

The final two chapters turn toward the best-known case of sorrow and grief in Spanish history, that of Juana I—an individual whose reputation in both scholarly and popular culture has been sensationalized and exaggerated to the point that it is difficult to discern fact from legend. Chapter 7, Juana and Isabel: The Tale of a Prodigal Daughter, examines what inheriting the crown entailed for a woman, not only because of the patriarchal culture of the time, but because the previous queen, Isabel the Catholic, had been tremendously admired. Beginning with Juana’s difficult relationship with her mother during the aging Catholic Queen’s years of sorrow (1497–1504), the chapter moves on to a detailed analysis of Isabel’s last will and testament and Juana’s relationship with her husband, Philippe the Handsome, and father, Fernando the Catholic. Finally, chapter 8, Madness in the Age of the Empire: Juana I, Queen of Castile, concentrates on Juana’s ostentatious grieving at the loss of her husband and on the construction of her madness and unfitness to rule by her own family and courtiers. Juana’s madness was used as a rationale to deprive her of the throne of Castile, which she had inherited from her mother, and of her father’s royal titles in the Crown of Aragon, and most dramatically, forced her into reclusion for the rest of her life. The practice of grieving in the courtly context shifted in the sixteenth century. Restraint was now of paramount importance. Intense sorrow was meant to be suffered discreetly and in solitude, and ideas regarding mental health had evolved. Moreover, the stakes were higher: Spain was now a global imperial power. Consequently, Juana’s conduct and character would be judged very differently from her grandmother’s, two generations earlier, and her sister’s just fifteen years before.

Because of their status, it is impossible to disentangle the emotional experiences of these women—and the way their experiences were interpreted and presented—from their political context. To understand the political dimension of the experiences of these women requires an understanding of the practica of their careers, and a detailed study of documents relating to their political activities and those of their courts. For the upper aristocracy, particularly princesses and queens, the boundary between private and public life was elusive. Matters of personal, physical, and mental health, affairs of the heart, and religious devotion were also affairs of state. They were observed, mediated, and recorded by servants, courtiers, and peers, each of whom reported events and attempted to influence outcomes and perceptions with an eye to their own agendas. Because of the high status of these women, the quantity and nature of the surviving archival and textual evidence are such that the historian can often reconstruct at the very least the reactions and thoughts of their peers and kin.

Triangulating models of feminine comportment and love, as portrayed in literary texts, with medicine, and the actual lives and careers of these women as presented in archival documentation, help to illuminate both the potential and the limitations of female power at this time. This enables us to better understand the expectations and demands placed on these women by male-dominated society, and to assess their own agency, both as active and perhaps as conscious protagonists in these ostensible episodes of illness. As Sarah Ahmed has contended, emotions are cultural practices, not psychological states.³² Through this lens, these queens are revealed within the masculine world of late medieval and early modern politics as not only powerful, but sometimes disempowered. This book does not approach these three individuals as defective or sick women, but instead considers their episodes of emotional distress as these were observed and subsequently perpetuated in their popular and historiographical legacies.

As important as the political environment is for analyzing the phenomenon of grief among these queens, the cultural context must also be taken into account. Consequently, the historical narrative of their illness is compared to both the prose and the poetic literary traditions of the time, particularly the genre of sentimental fiction, which linked love to sickness and the beloved to God. The literary culture and social conventions of the chivalric court informed and influenced each other in something akin to a feedback loop, and the precise relationship between the two must be established in order to assess how these women were judged by their contemporaries. Grief, like love, was gendered, and to some extent the actions of these queens may have been performed with a view to others’ expectations of them as women. We cannot continue to uncritically accept contemporary accounts of their illnesses as trustworthy observations, but must consider to what extent they served to echo and reinforce stereotypes, as well as the possibility that they were deployed at times to deprive women of their authority.

The royal court—the environment within which all three of these women lived and moved—constituted what was, in Barbara Rosenwein’s words, an emotional community, and is reminiscent of what Pierre Bourdieu defined as a field. Each such community had its own set of rules, because—as in the case of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities—each one of these communities developed within its own particular historical and cultural context. Emotional communities are social groups that have their own particular values, modes of feeling, and ways of expressing those feelings or groups of people who share the same or similar valuations of particular emotions, goals, and norms of expression.³³ In other words, a community maintains a consensus or set of norms regarding how emotions are viewed and the appropriate ways to express them. In the royal court, emotions were performed according to a particular set of expectations shaped by gender and social standing. These ways of thinking established, as Raymond Williams put it, a structure of feelings—a series of common values or shared exercises that shape subjective experience and are recorded not only in social practices, but also in works of art and literature.

In sum, the study of these three mad queens will contribute to our understanding of queenship, of feminine power and authority, and of the expectations placed on queen consorts and queens in an age where women across Europe were moving into positions of explicit and independent political power. The reigns of ruling queens, such as Isabel the Catholic, Mary of Scotland, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I, and the ascent of duchesses, viceroys, lieutenants, proxies, and regents, such as Empress Isabel of Portugal, Marguerite of Austria, and Catherine and Marie de Medici, to name only a few, challenged masculine monopolies on formal authority. The rise of ruling queens and other women in positions of authority provoked anxiety and reaction among the courtly and clerical classes and challenged deeply ingrained views of women as inherently weak, irrational, and sinful—and undoubtedly contributed to the portrayal of powerful women who were seen to exceed the bounds of established propriety or to present a danger to the political status quo as crazed.

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1. As the three queens were construed as defective and sick, this book engages with disability studies and the examination of the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that define and respond to difference. See, generally, Metzler, Fools and Idiots? ; and Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe .

2. Horowitz et al. Diagnostic Criteria for Complicated Grief Disorder. For the psychology of grief, see Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement .

3. See, generally, Granek, Mourning Matters: Women and the Medicalization of Grief; and Granek, Mourning Sickness.

4. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression , 322.

5. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 14:248.

6. Fichtner, The Sigmund Freud-Binswanger Correspondence , 196.

7. Kristeva, Black Sun , 11.

8. This process of reconsidering and redefining psychiatric conditions did not originate with the DSM. It can be observed with the embrace and eventual dismissal of hysteria as a medical condition. See Scull, Hysteria .