Desire Against the Law

The churches and manuscripts of medieval Europe incessantly juxtapose imagery depicting sacred themes with likenesses of the crudest and basest nature. This book examines such contrasts in six major works of pre-1350 Spanish literature, arguing that medieval writers and artists subscribed to the classical belief that one must introduce the contrary of a concept in order to elucidate it fully. To explain this play of opposites, the author draws on the contrast between Bakhtin s concept of the carnivalesque, which embodies and portrays the realm of desire, and the domain of the law, which imposes the social and behavioral restraints upon which civilized conduct is based. Four of the works in question the Poema de Mio Cid, the Raz-n de amor, the Libro de buen amor, and the Libro del Conde Lucanor clearly display such contrary elements. The remaining works covered the Auto de los reyes magos and the Milagros of Gonzalo de Berceo would, on the surface, appear merely to affirm contemporary orthodoxy. The author argues, however, that even these works must be understood intertextually, that elements within them refer to a strongly contrastive other beyond their textual confines. When this theory is applied back to the other four texts, they, too, prove to bear within them allusions to an outside system of supplementary meanings.