2 - The Image of the Phoenix in Catalan and Castilian Poetry from Ausiàs March to Crespi de Valldaura

Summary

Alan Deyermond discussed the phoenix in two important articles: one in Galician (2002), concerning four bestiary birds in Spanish medieval literature; and the other, in Castilian, on bestiary images in the Catalan poetry of Roís de Corella (2007: 119–31). My purpose is to expand upon this research within the confines of fifteenth-century Castilian and Catalan poetry. exploring the spectrum of symbolic meanings that the phoenix had, beginning with poems addressed to Lucrezia d'Alagno at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso the Magnanimous, surveying the Petrarchan image of the phoenix in Castilian poetry from Santillana to Boscán, examining this symbol in more detail in the love poetry of Juan de Mena and Roís de Corella, and ending with the way in which this image was applied to Queen Isabel by Pedro Marcuello, Gerónimo Pinar, and Crespí de Valldaura.

In Jungian terms, the phoenix is a universal cultural archetype, found in China, India and the Arab world as well as in Western Europe (Zambon and Grossato 2004). Even in European literature and art, this myth has a multiplicity of variants (Mermier 1989). In most accounts, this beautiful bird is associated with India, or ancient Egypt, and its nest, made of spice twigs or palm fronds, is ignited by the sun's rays; the bird fans the flames with its wings and is quickly consumed, and a new phoenix is born from the ashes, in a cycle that is repeated every five hundred years or more.