How exciting to be back at Queen Mary, University of London!
This time as an invited speaker at The Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar on Friday 19 February 2016 at 3.30pm in Arts One, room 1.31.
For more information about the MHRS programme, click here.
I will present my current research on:
‘Emotional Memory and Medieval Autobiography: King James I of Aragon’s Llibre dels Fets’
The thirteenth-century Llibre dels fets (Book of Deeds of James I) has been widely regarded as the first secular autobiography attributed to a Western European Christian King, James I of Aragon (r. 1213-76) and it is a very unusual example of self-writing attributed to a layman who was also a political and military leader. The analysis of such an intriguing text will pave the way to examine how the processes of memory recollection, mediation and transcription became paradigms through which ‘private’ and ‘public’ discourses merged within the same historical and historiographical frameworks, supported by the manipulation and transformation of emotional memories, which were shaped through a process of both oral and written transmission. Emotional memories helped to allocate images from the past within wider personal and historical frameworks. Emotions have been an important locus for subjectivity in Medieval Studies and the analysis of sources such as King James I of Aragon’s chivalrous autobiography through this lens will certainly open new fruitful and interdisciplinary lines of enquiry.
James I of Aragon, as depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria 169, panel 3