Death Gets Personal: Inventing Early Modern Grief in 15th Century Spain

Abstract

This essay examines Pleberio's lament for Melibea in order to reflect upon how grief, as conceived by Rojas, initiates a personalized narrative of substitution that entails an apparent paradox: the deceased serves as the catalyst that triggers this response, and yet is displaced as protagonist in favor of the survivor who becomes the center of this exposition of grief. Pleberio's verbal response to his loss takes the form of a narrative that emphasizes the living “I” rather than the deceased «she», thus reflecting a shift from collective to individualized responses to death. Additionally, Pleberio's lament illustrates how Rojas makes sense of death by proposing a model of grief that not only challenges generic manifestations of mourning but also reveals a turn that invokes the metamorphosis of medieval pain into early modern suffering by reformulating the traditional relationship among the bereaved, loneliness, and language.