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  • A New Reading of Sátira de infelice e felice vida by don Pedro, Constable of Portugal: The Influence of Seneca’s On Clemency
  • Ana M. Montero

Sadness is unsuited to seeing to the heart of things.

(On Clemency by Seneca)

Introduction

Sátira de infelice e felice vida, written first in Portuguese and translated by Don Pedro into Castilian around 1449–1453 is, at its simplest level (in a work in which nothing is simple), a highly fictionalized love narrative, a psychological chronicle of extreme emotions in the courtly love fashion. More than three decades ago, E. Michael Gerli called attention to this “neglected and little-read work” which he saw as “an important measure of the esteem in which emotions were held in late fifteenth-century Castilian [End Page 105] literature”, and “as a work deserving further critical scrutiny” by virtue of its links with the incipient genre of sentimental fiction (107, 117). While there have been a number of valuable studies done on Sátira de infelice e felice vida since E. Michael Gerli’s call to deepen our knowledge of this text, as one of its most enthusiastic readers, Michael Agnew, claimed, in 2003, “there is still much to be said about the matter” (298 n1).1 One of the reasons why this text was “virtually banished from contemporary scholarship” was its excessive sentimentality and facile erudition (Gerli 107). Indeed, the first editor of Sátira,2 Antonio Paz y Meliá, stated that serious readers could hardly be interested in the exaggerated laments and whining of a fourteen-year-old youngster who is moved to desperation and on the verge of suicide because a young woman does not reciprocate his love:

Es un texto de erudición, importante para la historia de nuestra literatura, y nada más. No pueden interesar á hombres de fines del siglo XIX los exagerados lloriqueos y lamentos de un mancebito de catorce años á quien impulsan á la desesperación y al suicidio los desdenes de una dama de doce abriles. Todo según los modelos de Dante y de Petrarca.

(vii)

Antonio Paz y Meliá here dismisses the sentimentality of Sátira as cloying, while doubly erasing one of its most salient –and disturbing– aspects, namely, the amount of violent imagery verging on horror that permeates the text. Interestingly enough, the violence in Sátira remains completely neglected in scholarship in spite of its intrusive presence in some of the glosses of the work.3 In this study, I will show that the brutal content is related to cruelty and mercy, and is a key feature in our understanding of Sátira.

Needless to say, violence by itself neither redeems this work, nor endows it with more scholarly value. However, it is an intriguing factor in the [End Page 106] composition of Sátira for many reasons. First, the author, probably under the influence of Dante’s Inferno, made a conscious decision that would have literary consequences: Don Pedro elaborated the imagery of violence to a degree that was unthinkable in one of his main models, Siervo libre de amor –the other groundbreaking work that, together with Sátira, marks the beginning stage in the development of what is generally known as sentimental fiction.4 This arguably led to violence as a trademark of subsequent sentimental fiction, since violence is linked to passion:

If we consider the corpus of fifteenth-century novelas sentimentales as a whole, we find a surprising configuration. Rather than culminating in melancholic courtly sentiment expressed by lovers who expire passively, there exists instead a surprising preponderance of violence.

(Brownlee 211)

Second, Don Pedro’s choice is neither accidental, nor simply idiosyncratic. His text can be considered part of a reawakening of interest in the issue of cruelty which ran parallel to the reception of Seneca towards the end of the Middle Ages. In fact, Daniel Baraz argues that “from the fourteenth century onward . . . cruelty increasingly becomes an important cultural issue: It is represented in numerous sources, and the representations become lengthier and more affective” (Medieval Cruelty 123). More precisely, as interest in Seneca’s writings grew, so did the preoccupation with cruelty (Baraz, “Seneca, Ethics, and the...

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