Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor: Allegorizing the Role of Poets in a Well-Ordered State

A long-standing tradition of the theories of the passions of the soul informed medieval thinking about man’s emotions in general, and about love, the most important and powerful passion, in particular. St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiæ contains the most thorough study of passions in the Middle Ages. Considering the pedagogical influence of the Dominican order, and the resurgence of Thomism in fifteenth-century Castile, it is likely that Aquinas’s treatise influenced the representation of passions in Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor. In contrast to the postromantic celebration of love’s power, under the influence of philosophical naturalism that pervades the Aristotelian-Thomistic system of thought, love between a man and a woman was regarded as a deplorable expression of sensitive appetite guided by a desire for sexual intercourse. A comparative reading of Cárcel de amor and of Aquinas’s treatise reveals that San Pedro portrays characters who are subjected to amorous passions. Furthermore, San Pedro turns Dante’s synecdoche of Gallehault, the knight who mediated the disastrous love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, into a protracted and comical allegory of El Auctor’s inept mediation between Leriano and Laureola. San Pedro thus critiques the role of amorous fiction and of its authors in a culture that ascribes to literature a primarily didactic and mimetic function. He implicitly illustrates the Platonic idea about the perils of poetry due to the poets’ reckless representation and instigation of passions.