Miles Christi : la construcción del Ethos en el “Fortalitium Fidei” de Alonso de Espina (Castilla, siglo XV)

Abstract

Castilian friar Alonso de Espina writes c. 1460 a voluminous work entitled Fortalitium Fidei, known for its harsh invectives against the “enemies of the faith”: Jews, judaizing heretics, Saracens and demons. However, the aim of this article is not to study how Espina’s discourse deals with the various enemies of the ecclesia Dei, but to analyze the place bestowed by the Castilian friar to the defender of the faith par excellence: namely, the preacher of the divine word. Using the polyphonic theory of enunciation and recent contributions to the notion of ethos, we will study in particular how Alonso de Espina assumes the investiture of evangelical preacher, soldier of Christ, to legitimize his own words and also the way in which such identification allows him to delineate, by contrast, the figure of the heretic, one of his main opponents.