With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Gendering Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

HOFSTRA CULTURAL CENTER and DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES present

With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Gendering Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberia Núria Silleras-Fernández, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Colorado at Boulder This presentation investigates the intersection of madness, power, excessive behavior, grief, and reputation in medieval and early modern Iberia. It focuses on the social and cultural environment in which Queen Isabel of Portugal (1428-1496), wife of Juan II of Castile, and her lady in waiting, Beatriz de Silva (1424-1492), lived. As recorded, their relationship was difficult, and, while Beatriz de Silva became a religious figure, the founder of the Monastic Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, and is celebrated as a saint of the Catholic Church,Isabel of Portugal, the mother of Isabel the Catholic, was marginalized as mentally unbalanced.This presentation opens a window on the early development of the notion of propriety and sanity, in an age that predates Foucault’s 17th century Age of Confinement and Philippe Ariès’ notion that intense emotion in mourning only developed in the Romantic period.

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 2:55-4:30 p.m. Leo A. Guthart Cultural Center Theater, Axinn Library, South Campus

Co-sponsored by European Studies Program and Center for "Race," Culture and Social Justice.

For more information, contact the Hofstra Cultural Center at 516-463-5669 or visit hofstra.edu/events.

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With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Gendering Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

Published on Jan 29, 2020

Hofstra University

This presentation investigates the intersection of madness, power, excessive behavior, grief, and reputation in medieval and early modern Iberia. It focuses on the social and cultural environment in which Queen Isabel of Portugal (1428-1496), wife of Juan II of Castile, and her lady in waiting, Beatriz de Silva (1424-1492), lived. As recorded, their relationship was difficult, and, while Beatriz de Silva became a religious figure, the founder of the Monastic Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, and is celebrated as a saint of the Catholic Church,Isabel of Portugal, the mother of Isabel the Catholic, was marginalized as mentally unbalanced. This presentation opens a window on the early development of the notion of propriety and sanity, in an age that predates Foucault’s 17th century Age of Confinement and Philippe Ariès’ notion that intense emotion in mourning only developed in the Romantic period.