Silence, orality, and medieval writing : the realization of the female corporality in the Libro de Apolonio

Abstract

It is widely known that one of the main peculiarities of Libro de Apolonio, a Castilian poem of the thirteenth century, is the new type of exemplariness that it promotes, bound by the critics to an “heroism of knowledge”. Such exemplariness seems to enthrone sapientia over an unworthy fortitudo, to raise the academic intellectual erudition over the strength that comes from the power exerted by the body. Nonetheless, moving the focus from the hero that gives name to the book to the main female characters, the idiosyncrasy of this knowledge exposes a new meaning. Through the female bodies, their ways, acts and proceedings, knowledge becomes a material subject, takes over the body, sinks its roots in the physical plane. In other words, it institutes dialectically itself in its relation with the corporal nature. Making room for this knowledge that impacts the body, that affects everyday living and, due to that matter, becomes material, is the purpose of this work. A non-innocent knowledge located in the body body, which never was so, a more human point of view, so characteristic of the thirteenth century.