“Confession and the Rhetoric of the Passions in Late-Medieval Iberia”

The turn of the fourteenth century in Castile saw the dramatic rebirth of courtly poetry among the aristocracy and other lettered classes. This genre had already flourished centuries earlier in Languedoc, Portugal, and Aragon, and scholars seeking to explain its Castilian resurgence have described an essentially nostalgic and even anachronistic phenomenon. In contrast, through a reconsideration of the relationship between lyric poetry and confession, Berlin argues that the affective rhetoric of this corpus constitutes a mode of resistance to the emerging dominance of the individual ego.