setriplette
commented
8 years ago - This is something I wrote up to apply for funding. To explain the part at the end--I've been studying early modern medical texts for a different project and they contain some choice commentary on the emotions. The humoral theory of medicine divides the world and human beings into four elements, blood, choler (yellow bile), melancholy (black bile), and phlegm (snot), which are respectively hot and wet, hot and dry, cold and dry, and cold and wet. Illnesses are said to be caused by imbalances in temperature and moisture, which mean that the four elements are out of balance. The humors are gendered. Women are cold and wet, men are hot and dry. The emotions also align on humors, and some "diseases" from these treatises are what we would term emotional disturbances. Most of my treatises explain that women are stupid, beast-like, and incapable of thought or feeling because they are simply too cold and damp. Charming.
- I think it would be interesting to see whether Lope is in line with his time on thinking about the body, the mind/body connection and what, if anything, emotion has to do with the body or gender. I realize this is somewhat my thing, but let's add more questions or complicate and revise what I've got as you all read!
- I know my Lope play is contesting ideas about women's intellectual/emotional capacities, because it's about a female idiot (who in my opinion was pretending to be an idiot) becoming smart through falling in love. I have no idea what's in @msb81 's play or @ahunker's texts, but I will be interested to see.
The Lope de Vega Project examines a selection of texts available in the public domain by early modern Spanish playwright Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio. A figure comparable to Shakespeare, Lope de Vega wrote approximately 500 plays, of which 300 are extant. He also published epic and lyric poetry as well as short stories and a novel. Lope de Vega’s plays had a broad, popular appeal, and they indexed many of the particular phenomena of seventeenth-century Spanish culture. The Lope de Vega Project examines the co-occurrence of emotion, gender, the body, and honor in several different works. In his manifesto on theatre, “The New Art of Comedy,” Lope de Vega explained that the purpose of a play is to evoke strong emotion in an audience of ordinary people. Our project team aims to put this theory to the test by using TEI encoding to examine how Lope’s characters express emotion. We will determine whether emotion correlates with gender or class and whether the representation of emotion in Lope’s plays corresponds to the humoral theories expressed in early modern Castilian medical texts.
Our plan is to do data analysis on co-locations of these phenomena, asking questions like: