Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Sol Miguel-Prendes (review)

Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain brings forth a new framework against which to explore the rise, techniques, and momentum of sentimental fiction. Sol Miguel-Prendes traces the origins of this uniquely Iberian genre to the ars dictaminis, Franciscan contemplative practices, and Catalan penitential consolations, which developed from the former two in the Crown of Aragon. Contrary to a general tendency amongst critics to read sentimental fictions against a courtly background and the materia de amore tradition, Miguel-Prendes highlights their Christian discursive fabric, first noticed by Deyermond. Building on her seminal article "Reimagining Diego de San Pedro's Readers at Work: Cárcel de amor" (2004), she proposes that sentimental fictions participated in a prayer-book mentality that stemmed from the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council. Narrating Desire unearths a genealogy that goes back to Augustine's Confessions and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, both of which were at the core of monastic practices of reading as affective meditation and moral conversion. At a time when the spread of literacy had begun to provide a more private and intimate connection with the written letter, these practices reached the laity through the liberal arts curriculum and the evangelizing efforts of the Franciscan order. In their distortion of the rhetoric of consolation due to the force of imagination, Sol Miguel-Prendes concludes, sentimental fictions came to life heralding the modern novel.

The book consists of three lengthy chapters, which in their turn are divided into in several sections. Throughout each chapter and its subdivisions, Miguel-Prendes uncovers the intellectual and literary roots of sentimental fiction. She delineates the genre's boundaries, cultural contexts, and motives in light of contemplative lay practices as they translated into Catalan and Castilian literature. Although she doesn't substantially alter the types of narratives traditionally considered as works of sentimental fictions, she redefines the parameters of the genre distancing it from the influence of the Italian triad—Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio—and bringing it closer to late-medieval educational works on virtuous living. Narrating Desire accounts for the uses and recasting of dictaminal compositional techniques (dream vision, pseudo-autobiography, the debate of Reason and Will, among others) and motives (such as maritime metaphors to signify the violence of desire) in Catalan and Castilian fictions and it traces a multilingual network of influence and exchange. Miguel-Prendes underscores the productivity of allegory, which—in her opinion—allows for the emergence of desire and individuality. In narratives of consolation, the blind seer Tiresias and Lady Philosophy have a therapeutic role, whereas the lovesick Orpheus, like the Muses, stands for the inspired madness of the poetic imagination. As Tiresias is displaced by Orpheus and Lady Philosophy and the Muses by a woman, the balance of desire and conversion tilts towards desire and imagination in ways crucial to the development of sentimental fictions and to the novel in general terms. Drawing from Bakhtin, Miguel-Prendes situates the precursory status of works of sentimental fiction in their disassociation of the moral gaze from the curious glance.

Chapter 1, "The Consolation of Schoolmen," focuses on the adaptation of classical authors to Christian ethics in the homosocial school environment, where the Augustinian-Boethian philosophy of contemptus mundi clashed with the violent eroticism of Ovidian and Pseudo-Ovidian narratives. Miguel-Prendes argues that the genre of the lover's consolation came into being as a result of the confrontation between a stoic model of masculinity that championed the rational man's power over his natural impulses and the lurid imagery of classical texts, which most likely prompted young minds towards the delights of carnal reading and of reading for entertainment. This chapter is key to her main thesis that sentimental fiction skewed the ethical reading practices proffered by their school environment. The author explores a wide variety of Peninsular literary consolations rooted in Boethius: among them, Petrus Compostellanus's De...