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  • Escape from the Prison of Love: Caloric Identities and Writing Subjects in Fifteenth Century Spain
  • Christopher Kark
Robert Folger . Escape from the Prison of Love: Caloric Identities and Writing Subjects in Fifteenth Century Spain. Chapel Hill, NC: U.N.C. Department of Romance Languages, 2009. Print. 190 pp.

Robert Folger's Escape from the Prison of Love: Caloric Identities and Writing Subjects in Fifteenth Century Spain is a landmark study on pre-Enlightenment subjectivity based on primary texts from the Early Modern period. Referencing an array of literary works, Aristotelian faculty psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and recent scholarship on the concept of self during the Renaissance, the author contends that Diego de San Pedro's sentimental work Cárcel de amor signals a transition from a premodern to a decidedly modern selfhood, stemming in part from the impact of the printing press. While previous studies on the topic draw from 20th century continental philosophy, epitomized in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Folger is loath to force early [End Page 1167] modern subjectivity into a postmodernist framework. Instead, his central claim is that premodern selfhood emerges from a way of seeing and being seen, one that potentiates self-formation out of gazes and images. This process consists of an accumulation of an individual's mental structures, which underlies questions of gender anxiety and subjectivity throughout Cárcel.

Escape takes a two-pronged approach to premodern selfhood, first unpacking the concept itself and then relating it to lovesickness in Cárcel. Folger notes that in faculty psychology, the self is not conceived in the Cartesian terms of interiority and exteriority, but is instead interlocked with its immediate environment. In other words, the premodern self rises out of the penetration of forms (species) emitted by physical objects into the brain, passing from the imagination, then onto judgment, after which they settle in the memory as mental imagines. This markedly Aristotelian model of perception treats images as sine qua non for thought, a stark contrast with the Cartesian subject, for whom images are visual deceptions. That worldly images are part and parcel of the premodern self suggests, as faculty psychology's exponents stress, that sight and selfhood are inextricably linked. Whereas in the modern age sight is purely ocular, in premodern faculty psychology it is a visual and tactile interaction between a sensing body and the species it perceives. Put another way, if modern selfhood hinges on the separation of interiority from exteriority, where the former always supersedes the latter, its premodern counterpart is a speculum mundi structured by an imbrication of images that throw that separation into question.

After outlining faculty psychology's conception of the human mind, Folger homes in on its relation to lovesickness and the "caloric" definition of gender. Those struck with a bout of lovesickness (amor heroes) contemplate a member of the opposite sex, whose appearance is refracted as a mental image. The beholder affixes judgments to the image, the result of which is a pathological infatuation with the image rather than the original desideratum. Sustained contemplation of the mental image upsets the natural balance between the humors, which, if left untreated, leads to melancholy. According to Folger, lovesickness is a template for premodern subjectification that sheds light on Cárcel de amor's opening scene. The young nobleman Leriano has a chance encounter with Deseo, a savage knight, who in lieu of sword carried a stone-cut image of Laureola, the princess of Macedonia. Transfixed by the image's beauty, Leriano falls into the throes of lovesickness. In encountering his beastly alter ego and image of desire, he steps into a field of gazes that spur his headlong rush into passion and, consequently, shape his subjectivity.

In order to flesh out the "caloric" nature of Leriano's lovesickness and, by extension, premodern selfhood, Folger takes a brief detour to Grimalte y Gradissa (1495), a visionary sequel to Giovanni Boccaccio's Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (c. 1343) authored by Juan de Flores. Just as Leriano has his unruly double in Deseo, Flores' protagonist Grimalte scours Asia's backlands for a quarter-century before finding Pamphilo, now an unkempt hermit. In recognizing themselves in a beastly double...

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