Bio

Núria Silleras-Fernández is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with affiliations in Humanities, History, and Women and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. She is also particularly interested in Catalan Studies. She is the author of three scholarly monographs, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna (Palgrave: 2008 and in Spanish CSIC: 2012); Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell UP: 2015), and The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell UP: 2024). She is currently working on two book projects; one relates to gender, sexuality, and emotions, and the other one to cultural capitals, exchange, polyglossia, patronage, translation, and gender

Project

Núria Silleras-Fernández will deliver a paper, exchange ideas with colleagues, and work on a chapter on fifteenth-century Barcelona that will form part of her book in progress.

The title of her paper is: “Against Pompeu Fabra: Miret i Sans and a fifteenth century Celestina from Barcelona.” The paper is part of Courtly Sex: Virtue and Transgression in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World, a book in progress that examines the idealization and realities of sexuality in late medieval and early modern Iberia. This paper explores a detailed legal inquest into a procuress (alcavota) – a flesh-and-blood Celestina in fifteenth-century Barcelona, accused of arranging for liaisons between her nobleman client and minors. The case was studied in the nineteenth century by Joaquim Miret i Sans (1858-1919), a leading Catalan scholar, and a century later by the archivist Jaume Riera i Sans. Here, she re-examines the case to show how historiographical and social perspectives and scholarly methodologies have changed and how this has impacted the interpretation of the case over the last century and a half. This case demonstrates the importance of revisiting even well-known texts and how the way we interpret the past tells us as much about our world today as it does of the past.