Legal Fiction: Law and Literature in Grisel y Mirabella
Since the Enlightenment knowledge has been differentiated into discrete categories such as the scientific or the expressive, the instrumental or the aesthetic (Steiner 2). It follows that the artificial separation between legal and literary practices and processes has its roots in the development of literature into two “antithetical directions,” classified by Scholes and Kellogg as the empirical, “historical, fact, the actual past” and the mimetic, “allegiance not to truth of fact but to truth of sensation and environment” (13).
An intimate relationship between literature and life - and their mutually evocative influences - is especially evident in the parallel development of literary and legal narratives in the Middle Ages. Joseph E. Gillet, referring to Grimalte y Gradissa, was the first to credit Juan de Flores with creating a relationship between text and reader in his romances. In them “fiction overflows its frame into the reality outside” and reality “may suddenly emerge from fiction”(180). Romance in general, and Flores’ works in particular, certainly personify the truly symbiotic relationship between literature and life in the Middle Ages. To the medieval mind, the frontiers between ‘legal’ and ‘literary’ matters were more fluid than we perceive them to be today. Scholars, and by association writers, were clearly conscious of the “reciprocity of influence” between law and literature (Balsamo, xiii).
Among the corpus of medieval literature, romance was indisputably the major secular genre from the time of Chretién de Troyes to Chaucer (c. 1180-1480) and that predominance continued well into the sixteenth century (Brownlee, Marina Scordilis viii). Not only one of the most long-lived genres in Western European literature, romance is also the literature which most faithfully personifies the symbiotic relationship between literature and life. Deyermond observes that “the effect of the genre on life was even stronger than its literary influence” (239).
With that in mind, this paper will inspect the problematic and fascinating portrayals of the relationship between jurisprudence and fiction in Juan de Flores’s sentimental romance, Grisel y Mirabella (1495). Here art imitates life in capturing a moment during which the frontiers between the two disciplines were shifting and re-defining themselves. Flores has created a text in which he demonstrates that he was conscious of the relationship between fiction and romance, law and patronage, testimony and narrative, which makes patent the anxieties created by the contemporary fifteenth–century re-alignment of the Castilian legal system by the Catholic Kings.
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