Out of Love: Magic and Control of (an)Other in Premodern Iberia

Abstract

What do deviant clerics, meddling old ladies, queens, and Moorish necromancers have in common? These unlikely companions share the magical ability to bend people and spaces to their will resulting in amorous entanglements for themselves or their clients. These characters appear in some of Iberia’s most studied texts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries—Cantigas de Santa Maria commissioned by Castilian King Alfonso X; Libro del caballero Zifar written by Toledean cleric Fernand Martinez; Libro de buen amor written by archpriest of Hita, Juan Ruiz; Celestina by presumed Converso, Fernando de Rojas; and Inocencia castigada written by Maria de Zayas. While the literary characters (and their historical counterparts) in these texts hail from various social spheres and were reproduced by equally varied authors in a span of four centuries, a common thread linking them all is their use of love magic. These various amorous manipulations—regarding both the characters and the authors who created them—expose the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions. I view love magic as a dualistic cultural phenomenon; one that simultaneously claims power but also resists and subverts it. In premodern (Christian) Iberia, magic allows for the entrance of unorthodoxy and Islamicate knowledge while at the same time representing domination of another’s will, sexuality, and mental state. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian: a mixture of imitation and control with a pinch of destruction and acceptance.