Good love book

The Book of Good Love (1330 and 1343), also called the Book of the Archpriest or Book of Songs, since extant manuscripts do not provide a title, is a work of the 14th-century mester de clerecía. It is a composition of stanzas of varied character, whose common thread is constituted by the story of the author's fictional autobiography (Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita). It is considered one of the Spanish literary peaks of any time, and not only of the Middle Ages. The book contains a heterogeneous collection of various materials united around an alleged autobiographical narration of love affairs by the author himself, who is represented in part of the book by the episodic character of Don Melón de la Huerta. In it, all layers of Spanish late-medieval society are represented through his lovers.

In the course of the main plot, fables and apologists are interspersed, constituting a collection of exempla. You can also find allegories, moralities, sermons, and cantigas of the blind and schoolchildren of the Goliardesque type. Profane lyrical compositions (serranillas, often parodic, derived from pastorelas) are also collected alongside other religious ones, such as hymns and joys to the Virgin or Christ.

The narrative materials are based on the parody of pseudo-Ovidian medieval elegiac comedies in Latin for schools, such as De vetula and Pamphilus, in which the author is the protagonist of love affairs that alternate with poems related to them. Pamphilus is also cited in the Book of Good Love as the basis for the episode of Don Melón and Doña Endrina. In addition to materials derived from Ovid's Ars amandi, the liturgy of the canonical hours or the songs of deed are also parodied, such as the fight between don Carnal and dona Cuaresma. Other genres that can be found in the Book are plantos, such as the one made at the death of Trotaconventos, a character who constitutes the clearest precedent of La Celestina or satires, like those directed against female owners or the equalizing power of money; or fables, from the Aesopian medieval tradition, or pedagogical manuals, such as the Facetus, which considers loving education as part of human learning. Although Arabic sources have been proposed, current criticism favors considering that The Book of Good Love descends from clerical medieval Latin literature.

Manuscripts

There are three manuscripts of the Book of Good Love, none of which are complete, the divergences of which made Ramón Menéndez Pidal think that they could respond to two different redactions made by the author at different times in his life:

• Manuscript «S» by proceeding from Salamanca; specifically from the Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé. It was a time at the Royal Library of Madrid and is now preserved at the Library of the University of Salamanca (ms. 2663). By its letter, it is in the early 15th century and is the most complete, as it incorporates added that are not in the other two. The colophon is attributed to Alonso de Paradinas.
• Manuscript «G», so named for belonging in his time to Benito Martínez Gayoso. Today it is located in the Library of the Royal Spanish Academy. It is dated at the end of the centuryXV.
• Manuscript «T», so called for belonging to the Cathedral of Toledo. Today guarded at the National Library of Spain. It is considered to be written at the end of the centuryXIV.

Theme and structure

The title by which the work is known today was proposed by Menéndez Pidal in 1898, based on different passages from the book itself, especially that of frame 933b, whose first hemistich reads «'Good Love' I said to the book».

Regarding the date of writing, it varies depending on the manuscript: in one the author affirms that he finished it in 1330 and in another in 1343; this last date would be a revision of the 1330 version in which Juan Ruiz added new compositions.

The book is characterized by its variety of:

1. Content (examples, loving narratives, serranillas, didactic elements, lyric compositions, etc.)
2. Metric (in addition to the notebook, use strophs of sixteen verses, zejelescas verses, etc.)
3. Tone (serious, festive, religious, profane, etc.)

The main materials of this work are:

• La Introductionwhere the author explains the meaning and interpretation of the book. It consists of a prayer in a notebook to God and the Virgin in which he asks for his help, a prose ape that adopts the genus of worship sermon (or Intra divisive, but written in Spanish) that could be parodic and another prayer invoking again the divine favor to carry out the book, to end with two lyric joys to Saint Mary.
• One fictitious autobiography of the author, which constitutes the guiding thread of the whole work. In it they relate their love with different women, all of different origin and social condition: a nun, a mora, a owner who saw being praying, a baker, a woman of high position, several serrans, etcetera, helped by a third or peanut, Urraca, better known as the Trotaconventos.
• One collection within (apologists, fables and stories), which serve as moral teaching and closing episodes.
• La dispute between the author and Don Amor (an allegorical character), where the first accuses Love as responsible for the deadly sins and the second gives considerations of how to be the woman and the gallant.
• The narration of the love of Don Melón and Doña Endrina (adaption of medieval humanistic comedy Pamphilus).
• The Allegorical Story of the battle between Don Carnal and Doña Cuaresma, actually a parody of medieval gestation songs.
• A commentary Ars amandi of the Latin poet Ovid.
• Tone satires and goliardesco contentsuch as the parody of the canonical hours, the “Cantiga of the clerics of Talavera”, the praise of the girl owners, or the satire “Contra the property that the money has”.
• A series of religious lyric compositionsalmost always Marianas (Gozos de Santa María).
• A set of various profanous lyric compositions: the plan to the death of Trotaconventos, blindfolds and schoolchildren.

Interpretation of the work

The intention of the work is ambiguous due to its great heterogeneity. In some cases it has the meaning of devoted love, but in others it refers to the skill of carnal love.

Menéndez Pelayo was the first to point out the goliardesque character of the work, although he denied that there was any attack against dogmas or insurrection against authority, as others saw later, an attitude that is precisely a distinctive feature of goliardesque poetry.

The possible didactic nature of the Book of Good Love has also been much discussed among specialists. While authors such as José Amador de los Ríos, Leo Spitzer or María Rosa Lida de Malkiel defend didacticism as an inseparable part of the work, others such as Américo Castro or Sánchez Albornoz deny it, and consider that Juan Ruiz was more cynical than moralistic, more hypocritical. how pious Juan Luis Alborg, for his part, makes an analogy with the use that Cervantes made of chivalric novels to express his irony and his personal vision; he himself considers that & # 34; the Archpriest is installed within the medieval didactic forms & # 34;.

His work reflects the multiculturalism of the Toledo of his time. Among the various women he tries to woo (the only case in which he has carnal relations occurs when the mountain woman "La Chata" assaults him, although the wild mountain women were characters of a highly typified literary genre) there is a blackberry, and he boasts of his talent as a musician, who composes music for Andalusian and Jewish dance. Also during the battle between Don Carnal and Doña Cuaresma he travels to the aljama of Toledo, where the butchers and rabbis invite him to spend a "good day". María Rosa Lida de Malkiel wanted to see the influence of the rhymed prose narrative genre, the maqāmat, cultivated by several peninsular authors in Arabic and Hebrew during the 12th-14th centuries.

The book also contains a passage in which a goliardesque protest is presented against the position of Gil de Albornoz who tried to extend the papal doctrine of compulsory celibacy to his diocese. This clashed with the Hispanic tradition of the barraganía or contract of coexistence between a priest and a woman, a more established custom in a multicultural territory such as the diocese of Toledo, once the source of the heresy of Elipando's adoptionism, engendered by the coexistence between Jews, Muslims and Christians. This is expressed in the "Cántiga de los clerigos de Talavera" included in said book, where he angrily protested against the archbishop's provisions against laziness in the archdiocese. Such a protest was the one that could lead to the prison by the archbishop. This critical stance towards the high clergy, like the rest of the casual and critical content of his book, makes him akin to Goliardesque literature.

Daniel Eisenberg has argued that "good love" for Juan Ruiz it was the love of the owner, the available woman, neither virgin nor married. The "bad love" against which he breaks a spear was the love of the "garzones" or boys. Instead of the insufferable young man (Don Hurón), you can choose what the text below presents: the "dueña chica". Although the intention of the Book has traditionally been read as From philology and post-structuralism in terms of ars amoris, a doctrinal work, parody and ambiguity of the linguistic sign, Juan Escourido maintains that the intention, anthropology and legitimation of the poem are based on an aesthetic of joy.

Authorship and dating

The author himself reveals his name and his ecclesiastical position in different places in the work: «Joan Roíz, açipreste de Fita» (notebook 19b-c) and «Yo Johan Ruiz, the aforementioned acipreste of Hita” (c. 574a), but it was not until 1984 that Francisco J. Hernández found a mention of a “uenerabilibus Johanne Roderici archpriest of Fita”, definitive proof of the real existence of Juan Ruiz in combination with the ecclesiastical title and in total coincidence with the reference that he gives of himself in the places mentioned in the Book of Good Love. For the rest, nothing is known of the biography of Juan Ruiz, beyond this documentary testimony.

The date of composition of the work is also extracted from the information provided by the codices. The G manuscript conveys that the book was finished in 1330. However, in the S manuscript—which contains new material—it appears dated 1343. Critics mostly agree that Juan Ruiz used previously composed episodes to weave together his book, and that his The first version would be from 1330. Later the Archpriest would add more poems (especially lyrical) to configure the Book of Good Love as it is published today.

The researcher Mariano Calvo concludes that the Archpriest of Hita composed the final version of the Book of Good Love in the archiepiscopal jail of Toledo, located in the house in Callejón del Vicario labeled modernly with number 3.

Fonts

The main influence revealed by the Libro de buen amor is that of the ecclesiastical literary tradition of his time, since Juan Ruiz had a rhetorical training required by his religious position, probably acquired in some cathedral school from the region of the Henares basin, perhaps that of Alcalá. Most of his material relates to the structure of the popular sermon (or divisio extra ), in which a moral issue was expounded with the complement of exempla . In addition, a treatise on confession, catechisms, and devotional prayers and hymns appear in the book.

On the other hand, the fundamental theme of love is based on medieval pseudo-Ovidian literature that, in the form of elegiac comedies or treatises derived from the Ars amandi and the Remedia amoris, they circulated throughout Europe. There are also traces of the concepts of Provencal courtly love and goliardic literature.

Thus, the most important sources of the Book of Good Love belong to the field of Western European literature. Thus, although some exemplum come from Arabic short stories, they had been almost entirely translated into Latin or the peninsular Romance languages in the 13th century.

Américo Castro defended the link between the book and Arabic literature, seeing it as a Mudéjar fusion, due to the variety of metrics, the frequent alternation of fiction and reality and, above all, the presence of the common thread as a love autobiography, an aspect that this critic related to The Necklace of the Dove by Ibn Hazm. However, none of these features is absent from European literature, and autobiography of an erotic type is characteristic of medieval Ovidian subject matter. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that Juan Ruiz read classical Arabic, and, although Moorish lexical terms appear, they are due to the colloquial Arabic of the Mudejar communities, abundant in Hita and other places in its surroundings.

María Rosa Lida de Malkiel associates the autobiography with the Hebrew genre of maqāmat, more specifically with the Book of Delights by Yosef ben Meir ibn Sabarra (b. around 1140), but it can be adduce the same objections as for Arabic literature: the ignorance of Hebrew on the part of the archpriest and that the same feature can be explained from Christian works.

Gerald Burney Gybbon-Monypenny, in the introduction to his 1984 edition of the Book of Good Love, associates the fictional autobiography with French versified romance, especially with Guillaume de Machaut's Voir-Dit, with which he establishes a certain analogy: a narrative poem that includes lyrical songs. Already at the end of the XIII century, in the Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel, there is a protagonist poet in love who, on the occasion of his erotic adventures, includes lyrical poems from the songbooks. Other poets such as Nicole de Margival, in the Dit de la Panthère , dialogue with the gods of love and use poems of her own and those of Adam de la Halle to authorize her feelings. It is even worth mentioning a fictional love autobiography with Austrian lyric songs interspersed, Frauendienst (1255), by the minnesänger Ulrich von Liechtenstein.

Among the specific sources of independent episodes, it is worth mentioning —in addition to short stories of oriental origin, introduced by the Arabs in the Peninsula, in collections such as the Calila e Dimna or the Sendebar )—, to Pedro Alfonso, a Jewish convert from Huesca, and to Aesop, to whom some of the exempla of the Book refer, such as that of the «Dispute of the lawsuit that the The wolf and the fox had before Don Gimio [Ape], mayor of Buxía». On the other hand, quotes and echoes appear from the Psalms, the Canonical Hours, the Book of Job or the Apocalypse, in addition to Saint Gregory the Great, the Decrees of Clement V or the Decree of Graciano, probably from manuals of his clerical training.

Most of the critics agree that the Book of Good Love is a parody of the elegiac comedies De vetula and Pamphilus, in which the author is, in turn, the protagonist of a story in which love affairs alternate with the inclusion of poems related to the episodes that are represented. In addition, the Pamphilus is a recognized source in the text of the Libro de buen amor, whose author recognizes that the episode of Don Melón and Doña Endrina reworks this pseudo-Latin comedy. ovidian. Ovid himself was attributed the De vetula, and appears, therefore, as the protagonist of the erotic adventures of this work. It is worth pointing out that the priests of the Middle Ages preached their sermons in the first person, a technique with a great capacity to attract an audience that required indoctrination. The declared didactic intention of Juan Ruiz, despite the continuous ironies and ambiguities of interpretation, would be in correspondence with the popular medieval sermon in the first person.

Lyrical poetry

The book contains, in addition to the central narrative content written in monorhyme tetrastrophe (cuaderna vía), a considerable number of poems in minor art verses of traditional metric and lyrical content, which makes the Book of good love in the first written lyric repertoire in Spanish at a time (first half of the XIV century) in which Most of this poetic genre in Castile was written in Galician-Portuguese.

In the prose prose sermon with which the work begins, Juan Ruiz declares that one of his goals in writing this work was:

[...] give some leçion and sample to merge and rrimar and trobar.

Good love book, ed. de Gybbon-Monypenny, 1984, pp. 110-111.

Indeed, the Libro shows off the lyrical variety of genres and forms of the Castilian lyric of the time and includes everything from religious lyric —hymns, joys, prayers— to songs of a goliárdico zejelesque, in addition to the fact that in the serranas del arcipreste there are echoes of the Provencal pastorela.

The troba cazurra stands out for its jocular character —cazurros were minstrels of the most marginal social condition— that he inserts in the episode of the young Ferrand García, who is after a baker named Cruz. Written like a zéjel and with important Mudejar traces, the entire little poem is a game of misunderstandings where dysemia is established between the meanings of Catholic imagery and sexual misunderstandings:

Crusade Cross
I've taken for the dressing room.
I took a career path
Like Andalusian.

Watching that there would be,
tell Ferrand Garçía
to throb the pletesy
and it was pleités and duz.

Tell me that I'm talking about grade.
e fizo se de la cruz private;
I gave rumiar saved,
He ate the sweetest bread.

Book of good love, est. 116-118.

But most of the lyrical poems in the book are dedicated to religious devotion, mostly Marian-themed, although there are also others to the crucifixion of Christ. The presence of joys to the Virgin is significant, a genre that consisted of a set of reflections of a lyrical nature about the main events in the life of Mary, from the Annunciation to the Assumption. The joys initially recounted five episodes, which Franciscan Latin poetry later increased to seven. However, the number of passages increased and in the manuscript of the Omne's Book of Misery —a treatise that addresses the topic of De contemptu mundi— some joys of end of the XIV century of twelve steps, but, unlike those of the Arcipreste de Hita, they are written in a cuaderna vía stanza.

On the other hand, there is no example, except for the lyrics of Juan Ruiz, of religious poetry in Spanish written with a refrain structure up to the XV, and it is highly probable that he was the first to compose this type of meter in the vernacular. In this way, he would gain more meaning from the intention declared in his prose prologue to «give [...] leçion e sample de metrificar e rimar e de trobar».

Style

Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, considers himself the first poet to versify in all existing genres in Spanish. His book reflects a culture typical of the clergy, uses a rich, creative language, with varied registers (from the popular and colloquial to that of ecclesiastical oratory), with an extensive lexicon, which includes terms in Andalusian Arabic from his time.

Likes to accumulate partial synonyms and expand concepts, resources that relate to sermon techniques.

At the end of his book he declares that anyone can add or correct it, on the sole condition that they know how to do it well, an open attitude that goes against that of other contemporary writers who tried to establish their text, such as Don Juan Manuel.

On the other hand, his work demonstrates a deep knowledge of human passions and is characterized by a wonderful balance between delicacy and shamelessness, achieved through a very fine, ambiguous and ironic intelligence, despite which the work He has verve and audacity. On the other hand, it offers a very complete social overview of the early XIV century, reflecting the social tensions between the emerging bourgeoisie and the privileged estates (clergy and nobility) of society, as in the satire "Of the property that money has", where the role of money as a destroyer of the rigid class order is perceptible.

Rhetorical figures used:

1°Reduplication

2nd position

3°Repetitions

4th rhetorical questions

Language

The text presents the typical characteristics of late medieval Spanish. The text presents hesitations, for example, between the diminutive form -illo versus -iello; verbal alternations such as fazía~ fazie. Also the quantifiers muy~mucho alternate in front of the adjective (in contemporary Spanish muy usually appears before an adjective –very big, very bad– unless it is in a comparative degree –much greater, much worse–). We can also observe the incipient loss of the article in front of the possessive: although in the oldest medieval Spanish the common form was as in la mi muger 'my woman', in the Book of good love alternate the older form with the modern form la mi~mi or la su~ his.

There are also many words that show phonetic differences from modern Spanish:

• While the presence of /f-/initial appears a few ≤3000 (as in modern Spanish).
• There are certain differences in the first vowel of the simple preterite Feast, come close to modern forms fizo, wine 'Hizo, wine'.
• After the consonants /d, n, l, ll, r, z/ is frequent the /-e/ apocope as in pid, vien, val, quier, faz against modern forms Ask, come, okay, want, do (in modern Spanish a few apocops are preserved after coronal Good, great derivatives Well, big).

Some of the manuscripts show a good number of lionisms, although these could be the work of later copyists and not the author of the text. Among these are selmana instead of week, vilda instead of widow, -m final as in tam, arpom, guardam' or hesitations in the pretonic vowel liçion, loxuria, canistillo 'lesson, lust, basket'.

Influence

The existence of three manuscripts—none complete—is an indication that the work was known and read during the Middle Ages, at least until the invention of the printing press. There is even a very fragmentary version of the XIV century Portuguese. The Book of Good Love could have served as a repertoire of minstrel poems, judging by other fragments found at the end of a codex that contains a chronicle and ends with a set of miscellaneous materials. Passages of this work could, therefore, be transmitted orally.

The possible influence of Juan Ruiz's book on Chaucer's work has been pointed out; They also cite the book of the archpriest in the XV century the Archpriest of Talavera and the Marquis of Santillana. However, from the XVI century, the traces of the book in later literature are noticeably reduced. The reception of the Book of Good Love has been studied by Alan Deyermond in his article «The dissemination and reception of the Book of Good Love from Juan Ruiz to Tomás Antonio Sánchez: provisional chronology».