“Realms of Affect in Medieval Iberia” investigates the narrativization of emotional experience in medicinal, political, juridical, and spiritual discourses. Reading representations of emotion across a range of genres and temporalities, the papers on this panel explore the mapping of affect across, and the mediation of affect within, the discursive spaces proper to distinct domains of cultural activity. The affective turn in medieval literary studies has produced varied and valuable scholarship in the wake of Barbara Rosenwein’s groundbreaking Emotional Communities (2007). The intricately intersectional and layered nature of community itself in Medieval Iberia, though, invites sustained attention to the mixtures of affect and entanglement that delineate bodies-in-the-world.

Another crucial aim of this panel is to maximize opportunities for the participation of under-resourced scholars, both as panelists and audience members, at the MLA by providing a venue for attendance without the expense of travel and lodging. The panelists thus comprise an independent scholar, an NTT faculty member, and an early career assistant professor. The senior scholar on the panel, Nuría Silleras-Fernández, is of such stature within the field (and has a book forthcoming on affect in medieval Iberian culture) that a healthy audience and robust discussion are all but guaranteed. Papers will be timed to conclude at 12 minutes, allowing ample time for audience discussion. Moreover, Zoom chat facilitates a sharing of contact information that enables audience members and presenters to connect with each other more easily than in face to face environments.

Maristela Verastegui’s “The Court and the Palace: Spaces of Affect in the Legislative Works of Alfonso X” begins the panel with an exploration the expansion of Alfonsine legislation from a system of numerous fora and charters to a consolidated and codified corpus that covered an ever-greater number of areas in the life of the Wise King and his subjects to become the place where subjective aspects of human experience take center stage, and the spaces where those experiences occur display strikingly different guidelines of licit behavior and affects as the expanded legal code touches upon emotional life and its outer manifestations. The two main spaces of royal behavior, the Court and the Palace, are also expanded as structural frameworks where the performance of affect is subject to the highest standards to make present the power and authority that emanates from them.

In “The Pathologies of Sorrow in Medieval Iberian Medicine and Culture” Luis F. López González turns to the somatization of emotion in medicinal discourses that defined melancholia as a pathological condition stemming the body’s surplus of black bile. This somatic illness generated a psychological condition marked by sorrow, fear, pensiveness, and scholarly activities. Premodern doctors posited that sorrow possessed the capacity to shrink the human heart and its will to live. López traces the interconnections between sorrow and physical and mental health through medieval Iberian medical and spiritual literatures (including Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María) to demonstrate that sorrow was seen as a dangerous condition that could engender an acute form of melancholia and madness, followed by death.

If sorrow is a threat to the integral person, Núria Silleras-Fernández takes up sorrow as a political threat in “The Golden Mean of Grief or The Limits of Consolation.” Her paper analyzes the intense grief that the death of Prince Afonso (1475–1491) caused his wife, Isabel of Aragon/Castile, and his father, João II of Portugal. Silleras-Fernández investigates the regulatory structures consolatory literature imposed around the experience of royal grief, how the Princess and the King reacted to it, and the goal of consolation in fashioning a politically expedient experience of mourning.

Finally, in “Between Hebrew and Romance: Joy and Sorrow in Judeo-Iberian and Italian Poetics,” Isabelle Levy challenges the temporal, geographic, and linguistic borders of medieval Iberia in her discussion of the sixteenth-century physician, philosopher, exegete, and poet Judah Abravanel (Leone Ebreo. His meditations on joy and sorrow reshape the carefully framed affective categories found in medieval Hispano-Hebraic lyrics to position him squarely within the philosophical tradition that emanates from the Golden-Age of Hebrew letters. Levy’s tandem reading of Abravanel’s Hebrew poem mourning his reveals that the two works stolen son alongside his reformulation of joy offers surprising insights into the literary afterlives of “generations vacillating between periods of thriving experimentation and forced migrations” and relocates the consolatory properties of literature from consumption to the sites of composition.