La ropa da la pena: The materiality of love, language, and representation in 'Question de amor'.

摘要

This dissertation studies Question de amor, an anonymous sentimental romance first published in 1513 in Valencia. In particular, it addresses the role in the novel of the invencion, a brief, enigmatic poem worn on clothing that depended on a visual trigger such as the color scheme or pattern of the courtly garment. The invencion provided the court with the ideal vehicle---a material surface that could be shed and replaced---upon which to talk about crucial issues of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: the essential role of the visual image in the imagination and memory; the materiality of courtly desire; the contingency of sign systems; the mortality of language; and the instability of material representation. Despite the playful nature of these textual and visual conceits, which work through double entendre, puns, and wordplay, they reflect a culture that has become increasingly skeptical about the systems they inhabit and adopt to express themselves through words, signs, and clothing. The writers and wearers of the invencion in Question de amor consistently use the space of their clothing to test the limits of signs, expose the supposedly 'natural' relationships between material signs and their immaterial referents as mere convention, and transgress the very rules---linguistic, cultural, and social---that they are obliged to follow. These highly modern statements of indeterminacy are studied within the context of sociocultural changes that take place between 1450 and 1550, namely the cultural transformations effected by print technology, the efforts of Antonio de Nebrija to codify and domesticate the Castilian language, and the increasing frequency of sumptuary laws that regulate the use of certain colors and fabrics.