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Abstract
“Epistemology of Love: Ethics, Animality and Conversion in 15th-century Love Discourse. Towards a Relational Ethics.”, explores the discourse of love in 15th-century Iberian texts and its role in emerging disputes on questions such as animality, otherness, free will, natural law, conversion, or sovereignty, pointing to the epistemological role of the liminal figure of the lover as it relates to different faces of “otherness”: the animal, the savage, the banished and the converso. I claim that works on love in the Renaissance should be read as primarily involved with ethics (or moral philosophy) and that we find in those works an early-modern example of what we would now call relational ethics (following the ideas of “ethics of care” for instance). The ethical model embodied by the lover represents an “involved subject”, whose capacity to acquire knowledge depends not on autonomy and distance (the way a scientific observer would gain knowledge through a gaze from a distance) but on participation, interrelation, and engagement with both others and environment. This kind of subjectivity counters the ideal of the autonomous and disengaged subject, a model of rationality and moral agency that both modernity and postmodernity privilege.
The first chapter, “Between Love and Conversion”, analyzes the political value of cancionero poetry written by converso authors (Jewish converts to Christianity) during the reign of Catholic Monarchs. I demonstrate how the logic of desire typical for courtly love, which constitutes the imperialist and anti-converso rhetoric of the time, is appropriated by the conversos to denounce their political situation, drawing for instance from the tradition of medieval Al-Andalus love poetry of loss and longing. The second chapter, “The Natural Love”, explores the representation of different conceptions of human nature (Aristotelian-Thomist vs. Augustinian- pre-Hobbesian) in 15th-century love treatises and shows how these texts, through the idea of “human as animal”, develop a dynamic model of virtue which is based on nature as objective moral standard. I demonstrate how the ideas on natural law that those works develop lead to the establishing in the 16th century of the political concept of natural law. The third chapter, “The (Un)civilized Love and the Ethics of Exile”, considers love as a state of exception and explores its political value in the Renaissance by analyzing the self-exile of the rejected lover into wilderness, a recurrent trope in the late 15th-century love fiction. I use Giorgio Agamben's idea of the structure of the “ban” and Roger Bartra's work on the myth of the wild man to point at the self-exile as a gesture towards radical otherness that has shaped the Europe´s self-image from its foundations. The last and fourth chapter, “What Only a Captive Heart Can Perceive”, draws parallelisms between, on the one hand, medieval and Renaissance and on the other hand, contemporary conceptions of human nature, dependency, vulnerability and reason. It explores the relations between crisis, animality and ethics, and explains how ideas analyzed in the previous chapters develop into the conception of relational ethics as a paradigm whose ethical model would be “the lover”.
