Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• López González, Luis F

Titel

Rabid Melancholy in Cantigas de Santa Maria

Ist Teil von

• MLN, 2019-03, Vol.134 (2), p.203-224

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Bibliografía de la Literatura Española

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Human frailty is the bedrock of Alfonso X’s 420 hymns and miracles, known as Cantigas de Santa Maria (ca. 257–280). This collection of poems, written in Galician-Portuguese, uses infirmities and psychological conditions to set the stage for the Virgin Mary, on whose praise the poems were written, to display Her power and mercy upon the suffering. Cantigas de Santa Maria (Cantigas hereafter) covers a wide range of afflictions common in medieval European societies, including lovesickness, madness, and leprosy, all of which were linked to melancholic disorders.1 Striking a perfect balance between medicine and literature, King Alfonso’s Cantigas represents an informative portrait of thirteenth-century Castilian ways of life and belief systems informed by a well-defined set of shared sociocultural norms. Human illnesses, an ever-present concern in medieval daily life, affected all members of the social body. Even kings, who were believed to rule by divine grace as God’s vicars on earth and thought to have thaumaturgic powers, were as susceptible to the vagaries of human frailties as the most vulnerable in society. King Alfonso, who was falsely accused by his son Sancho IV of suffering from leprosy (“leproso”) and madness (“loco”), is the subject of five cantigas (209, 235, 279, 366, and 367) that depict him on the verge of death before Mary heals him (Keller and Kinkade 1983, Kinkade 1992).2 Because of the biographical elements that enshroud them, these personal poems have been of central concern to Alfonsine scholars and medical historians (Presilla 433–440, Kinkade 1992, Romaní et al. 2016, De Assis Aquino Gondim et al. 2018). The five cantigas (223, 275, 319, 372, and 393) recounting harrowing stories of six folks who suffer from the deadly condition of rabies have received less attention. In medieval medical lore, rabies was classified as a type of melancholy known as the disease of “fear of water” (hydrophobia). The etiology of rabies was either the bite of a rabid dog or the bite of another human carrier. This study aims to shed some light on the clinical epistemology of hydrophobia, including causes, effects, and common treatments in order to understand how the narratives of these victims fit into the fabric of King Alfonso’s Cantigas.