Ressenya del llibre de Peter Cocozzella 'Text, Translation and Critical Interpretation of Joan Roís de Corella's 'Tragèdia de Caldesa'

Cantavella, Rosanna

Repositori d'Objectes Digitals per a l'Ensenyament la Recerca i la Cultura

specifically with Metz. Anne Azéma closes the volume with a description of her musicalreinterpretation of the songs interpolated into the Tournoi de Chauvency, which occurredat the 2007 conference.The volume includes an index as well as a number of helpful tables and appendices; itis richly illustrated with seventeen full-color plates and many additional black-and-whiteimages. John W. Baldwin’s excellent preface explains the literary models for Jacques Bretel’sTournoi de Chauvency, and Chazan’s introduction provides accurate chapter summaries.A more comprehensive introduction or a proper conclusion could have helped to articu-late the important contribution this collection makes as a whole. Nonetheless, the volumeis sure to prompt further research on the culture of medieval Lorraine.Jennifer Saltzstein, University of OklahomaPeter Cocozzella, Text, Translation and Critical Interpretation of Joan Roís de Corella’s“Tragèdia de Caldesa,” a Fifteenth-Century Spanish Tragedy of Gender Reversal: TheWoman Dominates and Seduces Her Lover. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012.Pp. xvii, 251. $139.95. ISBN: 9780773426252. doi:10.1017/S0038713413003321Scholars of medieval Catalan literature are a small community. Without a real govern-ment of our own to promote it as it deserves, and with an enormous amount of worksto be studied—a literature of a size similar to those of the rest of western Europeankingdoms—our task ahead is still huge. Because of this we have a mainly no-nonsenseapproach to our objects of study: to publish unsupported opinions instead of proven factsis a luxury we cannot afford. We firmly move within Romance philology’s methodolog-ical patterns, and we publish to last; there is no time to lose and our resources are scarce.Most welcome are publications on the area’s subjects by English-speaking authors, as theyhelp spread its knowledge and therefore attract new scholars to help us manage this cul-tural treasure.Joan Roís de Corella was a famous Valencian master in divinity, the last of a series ofbrilliant fifteenth-century authors writing in Catalan. Unlike Ausiàs March or JoanotMartorell, he seems to have been all but forgotten in early-modern times and was onlyrescued from a reputation for a “flowery style” in the eighth decade of the twentieth cen-tury. There is still much about the production of this prolific author to be researched andlearned. His best-known and most-studied piece is a short narrative, the Tragèdia, usuallyknown as Tragèdia de Caldesa, even though no name is given within it to the main fe-male character—to any of the characters, really.It deals with a plot of love treason, narrated by the protagonist. He tells us he courtedfor a long time a noble maiden who finally allowed him to become her lover. Then oneday he visits her and she asks him to wait in a chamber while, she says, she attends somebusiness. She locks him in and leaves. Time passes by without a sign of her; he can ob-serve instead, from the chamber’s small window over the entrance patio, a servant un-known to him, pacing up and down. More time passes, and finally he sees coming intothe patio the young woman with another man, in an amorous attitude. She looks lovinglyat this new man, and they say goodbye with a lubricious kiss, as lovers do. Once he isgone, she washes herself at the patio’s well and comes to the narrator with a feigned lov-ing manner. The narrator declares that he renounces irrevocably her love. She, feeling her-self discovered, says she repents of her infidelity, and she asks him to give her the peni-tence he thinks fit for it: he can, she says, either kill her there and then or sentence herto a life of Magdalen-style sacrifice (the hermit part of her life we find in such hagio-graphical texts as the Legenda aurea). The narrator, unable to decide, chooses instead1074 ReviewsSpeculum 88/4 (October 2013)self-destruction: he goes home and begins this very text, which, in the end, we discoverhas been written with his own blood.No doubt such a story offers much to comment on. In his new book Peter Cocozzellabegins by pointing out admirably a piece of evidence: this plot is narrated by its protag-onist who impregnates it with his subjective mood. This is important to be remarked upon,as Corella has enough literary mastery to distance himself from the Tragèdia’s male nar-rator. This distancing had already been practiced by Ausiàs March, one of Corella’s liter-ary models, who in poems like number 56 (“Ma voluntat amant-vos se contenta”) showsthat the poetic voice is living a lie because, as a victim of the distorted perception of amorhereos, he believes himself in amor purus but actually is—as readers and author see frominformation the poem gives—at least in amor commixtus. So yes, this reviewer shares withCocozzella the idea of the narrator’s subjectivity in the Tragèdia. However, other sugges-tions in Cocozzella’s book are not persuasive as they are simply unproven, supported nei-ther by scholarship nor by any information given by the text itself. Sentences such as “Itis safe to assume . . .” abound instead. A good deal of text deconstruction is carried out,with bizarre results.Let us take, for example, his assertion that the female character does what she does onpurpose: she would have staged her infidelity scene for the benefit of the narrator, as akind of bold act of transgression (88). But why would she do that? The text gives no clue.Cocozzella justifies this absence of support with another speculation: the true, transgres-sive reply of the “historical Caldesa” (101) would have been hushed up, substituted withthe words attributed to her by the narrator. Leaving aside that this is fiction not history,the ideas of such a transgressive character and of an author willing to break away fromhis cultural tradition belong to the twentieth, not the fifteenth, century and cannot be re-lated to any European manifestation in Corella’s times.Another of Cocozzella’s suggestions is his belief that the Tragèdia was written to bestaged. And staged the Isidorian way: as a voice-over accompanying a hypothetical dumbshow (161–70). But in the absence of any kind of proof of it we cannot be convinced. Itis surprising, instead, that Seneca’s tragedies, translated into Catalan with Trevet’scommentaries—great bestsellers in the Crown of Aragon, as Tomàs Martínez Romero’spublications show—are not taken into consideration to explain Corella’s title; nor, for thatmatter, does he bring up the widespread use of group book reading (see Glending Olson’sworks), which is how Seneca’s tragedies (and most literary books) were usually read.Many other points in this book must be doubted, unfortunately. Cocozzella relates onpages 25–40 the Tragèdia to some Castilian texts (not documented at all in fifteenth-century Valencian society), apparently ignoring the fact that the lover-living-in-hell toposderives, at least in the Crown of Aragon, from a pervasive literary application of the med-ical vision of love’s passion: the ubiquitous idea of amor hereos, which has been broadlystudied by Antònia Carré, Michael Solomon, and this reviewer; a look at Ausiàs March’sexordium in his poem 39 would have been enough to dispel the doubt. The pointsCocozzella sees in common between the Tragèdia and the Libro de buen amor (155) referactually to varied expressions of erotic pseudoautobiography, the European genre ana-lyzed by G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny and Alan Deyermond. Tirant lo Blanc could not in-fluence the Tragèdia’s plot as the latter predates the former (Cocozzella would have ben-efited, in pages 136–49, from “‘Jo viu lo ray ab la nobla Leuseta,’” Josep Pujol’s 1995study of this particular story’s broad tradition, which explains both the basic plot of theTragèdia and Lauseta’s name choice in the Tirant). Humanism is far from being the maintopic of discussion in Corella’s studies: a search of the bibliographical database Bilicameshows only one item on this subject out of 284 on Corella. In brief, this book does notdeliver what its title promises because its hypothesis remains unproven.1075ReviewsSpeculum 88/4 (October 2013)I will not comment on the script and staging notes Cocozzella invents for the Tragèdia.I will only correct an architectural assumption made on page 87: according to the distri-bution of fifteenth-century Valencian noble houses, which indeed had an entrance patio(this can still be observed in Valencia’s carrer dels Cavallers and in the adjoining buildingof the Valencian Generalitat), the masters used to live and receive upstairs, while the groundfloor was used for service facilities (stables, storeroom, kitchen, etc.); this means the nar-rator is watching the patio scene from a higher—not the same—floor.Cocozzella includes also a translation of the Tragèdia; this is what I find most usefulfor would-be English-speaking students of Corella. However, its accuracy is not high (someexamples: afortunat (197) is not “momentous” but “fortuitous”; falda (199) is not “gown”but “lap”; manyeta (201) is not “hussy” but just “girl”), and this translation is thereforeinferior to the Tragèdia’s previous English translation by Curt Wittlin (1993). It wouldhave also benefited from consulting Lola Badia’s 1989 translation into Spanish. The readerwill find in Bilicame the bibliographical references for all Corellan authors cited in thisreview.Rosanna Cantavella, Universitat de ValènciaMartha M. Daas, The Politics of Salvation: Gonzalo de Berceo’s Reinvention of theMarian Myth. (Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 66.) London: QueenMary, University of London, 2011. Paper. Pp. 106. £17. ISBN: 9780902238688.doi:10.1017/S0038713413002893Martha Daas’s new book is a welcome addition to recent studies that have focused whollyor in part on the work of the best-known early poet in Spanish, Gonzalo de Berceo.Historically grounded and theoretically informed, the book provides new insights intoBerceo’s reworkings of the miracle narratives contained within his Milagros de NuestraSeñora, but perhaps not in the way that the title might lead the reader to expect. Whileboth politics and salvation play roles in Daas’s argument, neither is the clear focus. In-stead, the author compellingly calls our attention to the differences between Berceo’s Maryand other contemporary versions of the Virgin in order to situate them into coexistingChristian agendas within thirteenth-century Iberian society. Daas explores theories of myth-opoesis by both Roland Barthes and Antonio Gramsci in order to make sense of Berceo’svariations on medieval Marian theology. The central chapters of this brief monograph willbe required reading for scholars of mester de clerecía poetry interested in the emergingtheme of the cleric as mediator, while the contextualizing chapters provide excellent ma-terial for use in the classroom.The introduction sets forth three thematic divisions that structure the book’s six chap-ters. The first of these (chapters 1 and 2) is primarily contextual. The second section (chap-ters 3 and 4) elaborates the theoretical framework that will govern Daas’s reading ofBerceo’s text. The major part of Daas’s argument is presented in the third and final sec-tion (chapters 5 and 6).While the first two chapters provide useful background material for those unfamiliarwith the topic, the core of Daas’s argument begins with the third chapter, “The Creationof Myth: Hegemony and Its Discontents.” Here Daas explains her theoretical framework,and although more textual space is devoted to explaining Barthes’s ideas, it becomes clearthat Daas’s interpretation of Berceo’s Milagros fits more within Gramsci’s models. In aGramscian world, the artist can push back against the dominant ideology, and in laterchapters it becomes clear that Daas sees Berceo as doing this. This chapter also exploresthe evolution of ideas regarding virginity generally and the Virgin Mary specifically. Daasbegins this section by contrasting views of virginity in Judaism and the Greco-Roman world1076 ReviewsSpeculum 88/4 (October 2013)

Peter Cocozzella 'Text, Translation and Critical Interpretation of Joan Roís de Corella's 'Tragèdia de Caldesa'' [Ressenya]

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