The Critique of Toxic, Noble Masculinity in Los siete Infantes de Lara

Rebecca De Souza

La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring 2020, pp. 41-68 (Article)

Published by La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cor.2020.0019

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/776141

[ Access provided at 1 Oct 2021 20:15 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] THE CRITIQUE OF TOXIC, NOBLE MASCULINITY

THE CRITIQUE OF TOXIC, NOBLE MASCULINITY IN L O S SIETE INFANTES DE LARA

Rebecca De Souza THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Abstract: The legend of Los siete infantes de Lara as redacted in the Estoria de España and Crónica de 1344 stands out from other extant Castilian epics in its focus on cross-border alliances and relationships with al-Andalus, as well as its positive characterization of Muslim Andalusi characters. This article focuses on the obverse of this dynamic and suggests that their favorable portrayal is in fact one of several literary devices that work to emphasize the degenerate behavior of their Castilian counterparts; a critique that heightens from one chronicle to the next and is at times expressed by way of irony. The legend presents a panorama of different Castilian masculinities, from young mozos to established members of the nobility, all of whom exhibit toxic behavioral patterns that have pathological, violent outcomes. This toxicity takes hold in different ways, from an inability to control their pasiones to a covetous pursuit of power and wealth. Their behavior explicitly contradicts the mesura and moral benevolence advocated by theoretical

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models of masculinity formulated from the classical era to the early fourteenth century, as well as the established therapeutic tradition in medieval medical texts.

Masculinity has long been considered a contextually contingent concept rather than an ahistorical absolute.1 Much work has been done by medievalists to demonstrate “divergent notions of masculinity, constructed in historically specific contexts” (Hadley 2) through literary and historiographical sources (Lees et al.). No studies of masculinities in medieval Europe have however considered instances in which men, in their embodiment of behaviors peculiar to their sociocultural milieu and historic context, explicitly contradict contemporaneous medical and theoretical discourses on male behavior; a (de)formation of masculinity that can be characterized as toxic masculinity, for its consequences cause physical harm. One such instance is the medieval Castilian epic legend Los siete infantes de Lara (SIL), in which Castilian noblemen demonstrate destructive behaviors that have fatal consequences for almost all involved. SIL in its earliest extant forms does not survive as a poem in verse but is found in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century chronicles: it is redacted in prose in the versión primitiva of Alfonso X’s Estoria de España (1270-4) (EE) and in an elaborated form in the Crónica de 1344 (C1344).2 A third version of SIL was created between the versión primitiva of EE and C1344, found in the versión crítica of EE, also composed under the auspices of Alfonso X from 1280-84 (Fernández-Ordoñez 14). Here I do not refer explicitly to the versión crítica, as it is my view that it does not place as great an emphasis on the degeneration of the male Castilian nobility as in the primitiva and C1344. Moreover, this article constitutes a dual rather than strictly comparative analysis of EE (versión primitiva) and C1344.

1 Ronald Levant has shown “there is no single standard for masculinity nor is there an unvarying masculinity ideology . . . ideals of manhood may differ for men of different social classes, races, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, life stages, and historical eras” (260). 2 I accept Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s hypothesis that a cantar de gesta of unknown length did exist of the legend, supported by traces of versification in the chronicle redactions studied here (415-32).

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The legend tells of seven noble sons of Lara, or Salas,3 who are killed in battle as revenge for murdering their aunt Doña Lambra’s cousin and servant. Their uncle Ruy Velázquez orchestrates their death in alliance with the Andalusi ruler Almanzor, and they are avenged by their half-Andalusi half-brother Mudarra. As a story of dishonor, vengeance, Muslim- Christian alliances, and crossed bloodlines on a territorial frontier with al-Andalus, of the known epic corpus SIL’s singularity is clear: it is an epic on a personal and familial—rather than regional or national—scale and is interwoven with alliances across frontiers with the Umayyad kingdom of Córdoba. The prevailing critical reading of SIL is that of a moralistic epic that centers on the importance of blood ties and the horror of an internal familial treachery purportedly caused by one woman’s desire for vengeance. Doña Lambra is often read as the “witchlike” villain and sole instigator of the tragedy (Montgomery, “E sobre esto” 883); Marjorie Ratcliffe suggests Lambra is “dramatizando su supuesta pérdida de honor” (133) after the murder of her cousin and servant while Menéndez Pidal refers to her as “la orgullosa y vengativa duena” (23). Scholarship has also taken a particular interest in the legend’s portrayal of gender relations: Martha Krow-Lucal views Lambra as a non-conformist; “a shrewish wife who is taking far too much interest in revenge—which is (or should be) a masculine concern” (357) while for Bluestine, “Lambra is systematically presented as the evil, immoral temptress” (207).4 Others insist on a sexual motive behind the conflict and have suggested Lambra’s planned assault on her nephew Gonzalo with a phallic, blood-filled cucumber is an act of emasculation (Burt 350; Ross 85). Peter Mahoney views SIL in EE in light of Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas and suggests it centers on the denigration of Ruy Velázquez by demonstrating

3 Lara and Salas have been conflated in the legend’s transmission: Gonzalo Gustioz and his sons were de Salas, a town located in the alfoz of Lara (Menéndez Pidal 179). See Julio Escalona Monge (161) for an explanation of the Lara/Salas confusion.

4 See Dale Knickerbocker for a further discussion on the diametrically opposed characterizations of Lambra and Sancha.

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“la constante contraposición entre su personaje y los Infantes de Lara” (“La diferencia” 185). In a later study Mahoney reads the two EE versions of SIL transcribed under Alfonso X’s patronage biographically: “loyalty to, and the security of, Castilla and its inhabitants are the salient themes of the story” (“The Infantes” 98). A reading of SIL solely in light of the earliest extant version and the ideas of its patron—that is, the versión primitiva of EE and Alfonso X—does however fail to retain the possibility that SIL was an orally-composed legend of unknown and unknowable authorship, composed as early as the turn of the eleventh century.5 A further fertile line of inquiry is the representation of religious and racial identity. Irene Zaderenko traces the roots of early modern literary maurophilia to SIL, as it highlights “los aspectos positivos de los moros” (“Maurophilia” 82).6 Zaderenko also notes the comparison of Christian-Castilian and Muslim-Andalusi masculinity: “Frente a la pasividad o deslealtad de los personajes que deberían ser líderes entre los cristianos, se erigen las figuras de Almanzor y Mudarra, quienes van a decidir el destino de los otros personajes de la leyenda” (“Maurophilia” 73). Zaderenko notes that Almanzor and Mudarra are portrayed more positively than Count Garcí Fernández and Ruy Velázquez, neither of whom are able to exact vengeance (“Maurophilia” 70). However, a lacuna in scholarship still persists: an acknowledgment of the legend’s consistent critique of the male nobility present in EE and C1344. The denigration of Castilian noble masculinity has been touched upon but not elaborated in scholarship. Montgomery identifies the youngest Infante Gonzalo’s gratuitous violence and the similarities between his rage and

5 The policies of Alfonso X are insufficient to explain the ethos of SIL in the primitiva, as we do not know to what extent it diverts from its unknown source. 6 I would caution that applying maurophilia, cogently defined by Barbara Fuchs as literature that privileged “aristocratic cultural compatibility over the suspicion of religious difference” (8), to the medieval epic is inappropriate. “Maurophilia” denotes an idealization of Andalusi nobles that is plausible in the early modern period because an exoticized portrayal is triggered by spatial and temporal distance. Yet it is arguably misleading to ascribe to the medieval epic a literary mode predicated upon the exoticization of Muslim Andalusis, a present reality on the Iberian Peninsula. Rather than evidence of maurophilia, I propose that the moral superiority of Andalusis is instead a thematic device used by the chroniclers to emphasize the degeneration of the Castilian nobility.

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that of Dona Lambra: “when Gonzalo kills her cousin her anger, like his, seems exaggerated and arbitrary” (Medieval Spanish Epic 19). Fernando Gómez Redondo reads SIL as an “‘exemplo’ historiografico para analizar la conducta social de la clase caballeresca” though proposes only Ruy Velázquez is portrayed negatively (179). Zaderenko persuasively finds that the positive portrayal of Andalusi characters reveals “el ‘verdadero peligro’ que amenazaba al reino, el de los traidores y usurpadores dominados por sus pasiones” (“La imagen” 163-64). Here I contend that it is not solely the “traidores y usurpadores” who fall foul of instinctive “pasiones,” but rather all Castilian noblemen, bar the Count. They are unable to control their emotions and resort to instinctive reactions and conduct that ultimately leads to death or a narrow escape. No scholar has yet identified the consistent and systematic moral degeneration of all levels of Castilian nobility, from the gratuitous violence of the Infantes led by Gonzalo González, to the sexual violence perpetrated by their father, Gonzalo Gustioz, and Ruy Velázquez’s covetousness, which in C1344 afflicts Mudarra. These behaviors are configured in contemporaneous legal and sociopolitical texts as well as in medical treatises as physically harmful, and thus toxic to the body. What then is toxic masculinity, and how can it operate usefully in the medieval context? The term was first coined informally by Shepherd Bliss, though its transformation into an operable framework in gender studies came with Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, which went beyond the idea of a monolithic toxic masculinity by theorizing the existence of multiple masculinities in any one sociocultural context, though one dominates as a result of systemic factors.7 This dominant, hegemonic form of masculinity “is always constructed in relation to women and subordinated masculinities” (Gender and Power 296). Connell and James Messerschmidt refined the definition of “toxic masculinity” to its modern form, defined as “the currently most honored way of being a man . . . and it

7 Bliss used the term in the context of his co-leadership of the “mythopoetic” men’s movement that sought a return to a pre-industrial masculinity unshackled from the pressures of capitalist society, on which he elaborates in an interview with Daniel Gross (11-14).

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ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men” (832). This formulation can be adapted to the Middle Ages, as Connell, following Messerschmidt, has clarified, stating that “[hegemonic masculinity] may mutate in different directions in different environments” (854). While hegemonic masculinity refers to a behavioral system that enables a group of men to dominate in society and over women, “toxic” is a pathologized term that has come to refer to the negative impact of hegemonic masculinity in society.8 Toxic masculinity is cogently defined by Bryant Sculos as “a loosely interrelated collection of norms, beliefs and behaviors associated with masculinity, which are harmful to women, men, children and society” (1). These behavioral norms can thus be reinterpreted in each sociocultural context, as masculinity’s toxic deformation is similarly contextually contingent and flexible. Sculos’ general definition is thus workable in multiple historical contexts, including the Middle Ages. The toxic Castilian masculinities depicted in the two versions of SIL are behaviors that explicitly contradict the counsel provided by medieval medical treatises and the theoretical ideals for the nobility in legal texts and literature. The roots of gender difference in the Middle Ages can be found in humoral theory, derived from Hippocratic medicine and later developed by Galen and Aristotle, whose thought remained influential into the thirteenth century (Allen 7). Woman was conceived of as cold and wet, while man was hot and dry and able to burn off excess humors and thus control his desires (Gardenour 182-84). Aristotle asserted both the intellectual and, crucially, moral superiority of men over women (Bullough 31), and Isidore of Seville later emphasized these spiritual differences, describing men as fundamentally stronger than women who were also inherently lustful (Park 86-87). Women were thus physiologically less able to control desires or pasiones, while men were expected to resist them. In SIL we conversely witness noblemen uncontrollably yielding to their passions and appetites, that together with affections were later secularized

8 Debbie Ging explains that the origins of the use of toxic masculinity in academic discourse are unclear, though its current usage relies heavily on Connell’s conception of hegemonic masculinity (640).

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into the blanket term “emotions” (Dixon 2).9 In Galenism emotions or passions were considered res non naturales or forces alien to the body that enter from outside and can thus be controlled (Frutos and Guerrero 420). Both Augustine and, later, Thomas Aquinas also maintained that passions and appetites were subject to free will, following the views of Plato and Aristotle who differentiated man’s unemotional intellect from the lower parts of the soul driven by emotion. There was thus a clear connection between agency and health, and to succumb to a passion or appetite was “a sign of deficiency and imperfection” as well as “[a symptom] of the sickness of the soul and of the disordered nature of man” (Dixon 42, 56). Such behavior was pathologized and physically dangerous in the society contemporaneous to SIL. Many works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries assert the importance of controlling the passions. The medieval therapeutic tradition, exemplified by the Regimen sanitatis ad regem aragonum (c. 1308), edited by Arnau de Vilanova, advised controlling anger to promote wellbeing (Frutos and Guerrero 421). Alfonso X’s General Estoria explicitly cautions the reader that “ya muchos sabios fizieron grandes yerros por sseguir sus pasiones naturales” (5: fol. 35), while the treatise Castigos from the reign of Sancho IV reinforces that “ninguno non se puede bien gouernar sy non sopiere quales pasiones ha de seguir y de quales se ha de aredrar” (Palmer and Frazier, fol. 162v). To cede to one’s emotions moreover contradicts the discourse that theorized an ideal noble masculinity in medieval Castilla. H.R. Oliva Herrer has shown how masculinity in the early medieval Castilian context was understood as virilidad, “the behavior that was expected of a man” (162), stemming from varón which Isidore of Seville defined as “la virtud de la fuerza” (40). Etymologically virilidad is predicated upon moral

9 Augustine deems both passions and appetites passiones anime, including all forms of desire, fear, joy and sorrow (City of God, Book IX, chp. 5; Dixon 40). Thomas Aquinas later identified eleven passions, six of which were either concupiscible appetites (that the soul is inclined to pursue, including love, hate, desire, aversion, joy and sorrow) or irascible appetites (ways the soul attempts to avoid obstacles, including hope, despair, courage, fear and anger) (Summa I.2).

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virtud, as well as physical prowess. A delicate balance is thus advocated between virtud and fuerza which then persisted into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas (c. 1265) strikes a similar balance between physical strength and mental mesura: the second Partida emphasizes the need for noblemen to embody “esfuerzo, honra y poderio” (2.21) and describes four main virtues of noblemen as “cordura y fortaleza y mesura y justicia” (2.21.4).10 SIL in C1344 can be read in light of Gómez Barroso’s pedagogical Libro del consejo e de los consejeros (c. 1306) which likewise promoted moral conduct over physical prowess in the case of noblemen who took the post of royal advisor. An ally to the Lara family in the reign of Alfonso XI in the early fourteenth century, magnate Don Juan Manuel, in his Libro de los estados (1327), echoes the second Partida in its model for nobility, explaining how “loyalty, generosity or honesty were embodied in physical characteristics such as strength and dexterity” (Pedraz 36). Antonio Carreño notes that Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (1335) defines manhood “como esfuerzo físico y moral” (62). From the era of Isidore through to the context of EE and C1344, noblemen were to temper physical prowess with mental mesura to keep their emotions in check. Yet this ideal proves unrealistic in practice for the nobility of SIL who cannot control their base drives.11 The ensuing behavior has pathological, “toxic” outcomes, for it leads to violence within the Castilian milieu. Though “toxic masculinity” was coined in the twentieth century, since medieval discourse clearly pathologizes the self-destructive behaviors displayed by the Castilian noblemen of SIL, “toxic” is an apt descriptor for their conduct. Toxic, from the Latin toxĭcum, was rendered in medieval Castilian as both tóxico and tósigo. Only the latter appears in Covarrubias’ 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana, defined literally as veneno (50). Both

10 All references to the Partidas refer to the Biblioteca Virtual Universal edition (2006) in the format (Partida. Title. Law). 11 The incongruity of contemporaneous theoretical models for nobility and its literary portrayal in SIL suggests the chroniclers take a pessimistic view of the “social hope” that such discourse attempted to define (Rodríguez Velasco 7). Rodríguez Velasco views pedagogical texts on chivalry or nobility to be “oriented toward the creation of controls for social violence” (7). The disparaging portrayal of S I L’s Castilian noblemen could even be read as justification for such pedagogical models.

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terms were in concomitant use in the thirteenth century. The earliest usage of tóxico in the Corpus Diacrónico del Español is in two translations from Arabic attributed to Alfonso X’s patronage: Lapidario (c. 1250) and Judizios de las estrellas (1254), though in both cases it is used literally. More interestingly for the present study, tósigo is used literally and metaphorically in the 1251 anonymous translation of Calila e Dimna: on two occasions tósigo is used to refer to verbal deception (157, 175). Given that yielding to pasiones is universally pathologized as harmful in medieval medical theory and other contemporaneous writings, it is therefore no surprise that tósigo is used here to allude to amoral behavior. In SIL we witness Castilian noblemen consistently failing to control basic pasiones from anger to sexual desire, as well as being driven to treachery and violence motivated by covetousness, conduct that would have made them appear quite literally bodily defective or diseased to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century audiences. S I L’s critique of Castilian noblemen is, finally, foregrounded by profound social and economic changes that crystallized across Western Europe in the thirteenth century: the rise of the monetary economy and the growth of urban centers which threatened the hegemony of the landed aristocracy (Le Goff 14-16). In Castilla specifically this is exemplified by the relationship of the monarchy to the nobility and relations between noble families at the end of the thirteenth century through to 1344. The noble revolt against Alfonso X in 1271 as a result of the king’s legal reforms to curtail the nobility’s power, including the promotion of the urban caballeros villanos, leads the aristocracy to pursue “alternating strategies of resistance and rebellion” towards the crown (Doubleday 81). The real Laras were still prominent at court; in 1269 Nuño González de Lara allied himself with the Haro family against the king, before the full-scale noble revolt of 1271. They continued to oppose the monarchy and other noble families in their quest for territorial expansion towards the end of the thirteenth century (Doubleday 83). In light of the continual power struggles of the landed aristocracy during Alfonso X’s reign, it is unsurprising that the most depraved nobleman of SIL, Ruy Velázquez, is increasingly motivated by the acquisition of power and wealth. His covetousness, also echoed in Mudarra’s

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portrayal in C1344, is moreover symptomatic of the increasing concern in thirteenth-century ecclesiastical works with avarice and the “moral anxiety about the social costs of the commercial revolution” (Young 72). C1344 coincided with further noble-monarchical tension in the reign of Alfonso XI in Castilla due to his continued centralization, notably through the eventual promulgation of the Siete Partidas in 1348 which limited the nobility’s power (Deyermond, “Written by the Victors” 66).12 From the analysis that follows it is clear C1344 pursues a more critical line in its portrayal of the nobility, with additional instances of toxic behaviors versus EE. It is a criticism that is framed ironically in places, coming to a head with Gonzalo Gustioz’s lament for his sons. In suggesting the chronicles ironically portray the Castilian nobility, I propose SIL has traces of medieval romance which Dennis Howard Green has found to be inherently ironic.13 Green effectively historicizes irony to the medieval European romance with the following definition: “Irony is a statement or presentation of an action or situation in which the real or intended meaning conveyed to the initiated intentionally diverges from, and is incongruous with, the apparent or pretended meaning presented to the initiated” (9).14

12 While C1344 has long been assumed to be a Portuguese translation (Pattison 391), as a result of Lindley Cintra’s edition, Ingrid Vindel’s thesis casts doubt on Cintra’s methodology given C1344 is a complex compilation of sources, not all of which are Portuguese (52). C1344 can thus be read in light of the events of Alfonso XI’s reign. 13 Deyermond proposed the existence of medieval Iberian romance, distinct from the epic, defined as “a story of adventure, dealing with combat, love, the quest, separation and reunion, other-world journeys, or any combination of the above” (“The Lost Genre” 233), features that can undeniably be found in SIL, though it is still