Slander and the right to be an author in fifteenth-century Spain

Abstract

Versified slander, particularly that addressed to converted Jews or conversos, is best understood within a social exercise of rhetoric as ars bene dicendi that channels ethnic and religious tensions through the practice of maldecir. Slanderous discourse or maldecir is both a flexible and a dangerous tool in the hands of an author, who becomes aggrandized through the poet's ethical responsibility to denounce social evils. However, slander can destabilize authorship due to the required use of despicable language. The result is a complex interplay among slandered authors and their critics that shows the flexible uses of slander in the context of ethnic and social strife.

Keywords:

• Slander
• maldecir
• rhetoric
• cancionero
• fifteenth century
• conversos

Notes

1. For an insightful discussion on the relation of sátira and satire from this standpoint, see Weiss.

2. The same understanding of sátira is repeated by prose authors such as Fernando de la Torre: “aquella manera de fablar que se dize sátira, que trata de loar virtudes e reprehender viçios” (text in Díez Garretas 188).

3. For Hermanus, see Minnis and Scott (277–313). For an overview of Hermanus's biography and work, see Pérez González.

4. The Latin original reads: “Existit laus seu laudatio penes honestatem et virtutes. Vituperatio vero penes inhonestatem et vitia seu defectus” (in Langhade and Grignaschi 190).

5. As noted by Faulhaber in his introduction to Gil de Zamora 12, 41–88.

6. For poetry and praise in the Renaissance, see the classic study by Hardison 24–42. For the influence of Averroes on Italian Humanists, see Hardison 32–36.

7. For Humanism's ideas on poetry, see Trinkaus 88–139.

8. For the connection between poetry and ethics, see the classic study by Allen.

9. Libro de las veinte cartas e quistiones; text in Díez Garretas 188.

10. See the treatises on “maledicere,” including Gregory's Moralia, reviewed by Casagrande and Vecchio 305–15.

11. See the insightful studies by Bowman, Casagrande and Vecchio, as well as Madero.

12. For an overview of the uses of humor in Montoro's poetry, see Roncero López. For a study of Montoro as a caballero mediano, see Gómez-Bravo “Ser social y poética material”.

13. For important information on Román's life and works, see Mazzocchi's introductory study to the edition of Román's Coplas de la Pasión.

14. For classic and relevant analyses of social stigma, see Goffman and Heatherton et al.

15. There is ample bibliography on the subject of converso poetic disputes. For an excellent review, see Weissberger. For an overall appraisal of the political value of these disputes, see Perea Rodríguez. For previous studies on the verse exchanges between Poeta and Gómez Manrique, see Battesti-Pelegrin and Costa.

16. For an overview of the documentation on Poeta's life, see Costa 31–37.

17. As stated in the rubric heading ID3376 in MP3. In his Universal vocabulario, Alfonso de Palencia offers the following meaning for truhan under the entry Scurra: “Scurra. truhan. tragon que suele seguir a otros por comer conellos: escarneçiendo. y es el mesmo escarnio.” And further: “Scurronem. tambien dizian al escarnidor. Scurrilitas assi mesmo es truhania: & gasaido torpe: & sin prouecho loable. Scurrari. es entender en tales plazenterias & iuego.”

18. As Ciceri asserts, the “unmasking” of the converso was no playful game at the end of the fifteenth century, if indeed it can be argued to have been so before. See Gillet, Ramos, Robinson.

19. For figures of thought and flesh in cancionero and other texts, see Nirenberg.

Additional information

Autobiographical note

Ana M. Gómez Bravo (PhD, University of California at Berkeley) is a Professor and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Washington. Her main research areas are medieval and early modern Spanish literature, rhetoric and poetics, and theories of ethnic and gender difference. Her most recent book, Textual Agency: Writing Culture and Social Networks in Fifteenth-Century Spain, was published by the University of Toronto Press. She is currently working on a book-length project on the relation between food and ethnic identity, and in particular the attention paid by the Inquisition to food practices of Jews and Muslims leading to the exercise of racial profiling.