"Meddling with Royal Hearts": Interiority and Privanza (1598-1643)

This paper studies how seventeenth-century writers in Spain elaborated different conceptions of interiority in connection with the intimacy they imagined between the king and his favorite or privado . Authors in the days of Lerma, Uceda and Olivares portrayed the relation between king and privado in terms that generally relied on inherited notions of ideal friendship, which nonetheless would clash with concerns about the ubiquity of deceit, simulation and dissimulation at the court. This seemed to set boundaries to the unlimited transparency and trust expected between friends. I will address three issues. First, the way writers imagine the favorite’s access to the king’s secrets, as well as the nature of these secrets. Second, the space of intimacy and shared loneliness in which they conceive the friendship of king and privado to materialize. Third, the transformations that take place in the favorite’s interiority as a result of his relation with the king and his position at the court.