The Cultural History of an Emotion in Pre-modern Iberia
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Francomano, Emily
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Georgetown University
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2020
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
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232
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
Georgetown University
Text preceding or following the note
2020
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
This dissertation explores literary and visual representations of shame with a particular focus on the 14th to 16th centuries. Through a survey of prose literary works and Early Modern visual culture, this project argues for an understanding of shame as a social construction of the period connected to different cultural factors. In medieval conduct manuals, authors prescribe and proscribe feelings of shame based on gender, and the societal institutions of honor and virtue. In his Crónica Sarracina, Castilian writer Pedro de Corral constructs a shame experience around the figure of Florinda La Cava and the 711 Fall of Spain that echoes that of Lucretia and the fall of the Roman Kingdom. Additionally, as fifteenth-century historiographers seek to reckon with that Fall, they use literary texts and representations of the port city of Ceuta as a means of finding redemption for national shame. During the period of imperial expansion, however, when European understandings of emotions came face to face with those of indigenous communities of West Africa and the New World, cultural differences as they pertain to emotion led to the othering of indigenous and black bodies as "shameless," as is the case the chronicles of Gomes Eanes de Zurara and Pêro Vaz de Caminha. Finally, I turn to representations of public shaming as a punishment used in the Spanish Inquisition, and I examine the connections between emotion and power structures in paintings from Pedro Berruguete to Francisco de Goya.