A Catalan 'Cobla Sparsa' of the Fifteenth Century: An Icon of Ambivalence in the Misogynistic Background of Celestina, Act I

Abstract

Summary: A short one-stanza poem, identified by the rubric «Cobla sparsa de lahor he deslaor,» is emblematic of the ambivalence that informs the «Maldezir de mugeres,» signature piece of Pere Torroella, renowned Catalan writer of the fifteenth century. The present essay is an attempt to demonstrate how the alternation of laor (‘praise’) and deslaor (‘unpraise’) plays a paramount role within the wide context of the debate about women in both Castilian and Catalan literature of the 1400s. For a background of that debate, I adduce evidence in the poetry of the troubadours and in the cants of the nonpareil Valencian bard, Ausiàs March. Ultimately, the paradoxical laor/deslaor conflation reflects a two-pronged phenomenology: 1) the tradition of dysfunctional rhetoric that comes to a head in the fractious dialogue illustrated in Act I of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as Celestina; 2) the definition of Torroella’s self-fashioning in terms of the process of coming to grips with the authenticity of a lover’s experience. [Keywords: «Gender debate»; irony; maldit; misogyny; repetitio; «textual community»]