When the Political is Personal: Gendering Mourning in the Royal Courts of Castile and Portugal

Professor Núria Silleras-Fernández (University of Colorado Boulder)

Taking as a point of departure the second-wave feminist axiom, “the personal is political,” this paper argues that, while this is undoubtedly the case, in medieval monarchical courtly settings, the political was also personal. I will examine the interrelationships of royal power, emotion, and gender in two fifteenth-century Iberian courts: that of Isabel I of Castile (“the Catholic”) and João II of Portugal (“the Perfect Prince”). Focusing on the deaths of their respective sons, the paper analyses how the queen and king confronted and articulated grief, the emotional expectations placed upon them as sovereigns, and the purposes and limitations of the consolatory rituals and literature produced in response to their loss. By comparing these two cases, the paper demonstrates how emotional expression functioned as a zone where political authority was negotiated, while examining how such expressions were shaped by gendered norms.

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