The book known as theLibro de Buen Amorordel Arcipresteis one of the most diverse, unusual, and challenging texts any reader is likely to encounter. It has a loose, largely first-person, narrative thread which recounts the failed amorous adventures of the narrator who is apparently identified with the named author, Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita.¹ It is polymetric, withcuaderna vía(a monorhymed four-line alexandrine) narrative verse and lyric metres, and comprises a range of materials, representing the majority of medieval generic forms: a wide range of tales,exemplum(plural,exempla; see Taylor below) which demonstrate...

To pick up a printed copy ofLibro de Buen Amoris to encounter one of the most familiar objects in our world; but a modern book differs radically from a manuscript. For H. J. Chaytor the invention of printing ‘modified the psychological processes by which we use words for the communication of thought’ (1966: 1), while Hans Robert Jauss saw the milieu of script and orality as a feature of medieval otherness which no hermeneutic effort can now fully recapture (1977: 16). This chapter aims to unpack these statements and their bearing on our aesthetic appreciation of Juan Ruiz’s...

Although theLibro de Buen Amoris one of the most widely admired medieval works in verse, modern editors and critics find very little to praise in its versification. This is because they write after almost half a millennium in which the first test of metrical competence in Spanish has been whether lines have the notionally correct number of syllables. Not only do Juan Ruiz’s lines fail this test, they do so by a wider margin than those of most other medieval Spanish poets. Approximately four-fifths of theLibro’s lines are in strophes ofcuaderna vía, a form that traditional...

When Juan Ruiz wrote hisLibro, he drew on traditions of stories and sayings, Latin and vernacular, written and oral. Their presence throughout the book exemplifies its fusion of popular and learned. This survey of brief sayings and short narratives in theLibrois intended to define certain genres, to indicate the traditions underlying Ruiz’s use of them, and to point to the coexistence of high and low culture in his work.

Anexemplum(plural:exempla) is a short story with a message.¹ In the words of J.-Th. Welter:

Par le motexemplum, on entendait, au sens large du terme,...

TheLibro de Buen Amoris a patchwork of anomalies, ambiguities, inconsistencies, ironies, and pitfalls for its interpreters. To say that any episode of theLibrois anomalous may seem like tautology, but the linked episodes of the debate with Don Amor and the seduction of Doña Endrina, beginning at stanza 180 and continuing to stanza 909, are, even when judged by the high standards of oddity that Juan Ruiz sets himself, notably anomalous. One oddity is apparent at the outset: Don Amor’s large size.

Ca, segund vos he dicho, de tal ventura seo

que, si lo faz mi signo...

Keith Whinnom, in his University of Exeter inaugural lecture of 1967, ‘Spanish Literary Historiography: Three Forms of Distortion’ (publ. 1968), poured cold water on the notion that theLibro de Buen Amormight have had any influence onCelestina, as argued by, for example, F. Castro Guisasola (1924). The case for seeing such an influence has been argued again by Samuel G. Armistead (1973, 1976–77), which leads us to wonder if any of the situational and verbal coincidences could possibly indicate a link, other than their common source in thePamphilus.¹ One area of difference has seemed clear enough,...

If theory implies a stepping back in an act of observation, as its etymology suggests, encouraging us to reflect on our acts of interpretation, then surely the term is not out of place here; I submit that theory already has a large hold on the critical reception of theLibro, but that its role has not usually been made explicit.¹ I hope to show that theLibro– or the three or fourLibros, as the late Paul Zumthor would have said (1972), insisting on themouvanceof the text – invites us to be mindful of theory when we...

The beautiful swirling shape known as the Lorenz attractor is a visual image of a strange attractor, a term coined by twentieth-century chaos theorists to illustrate the stability and hidden structure in supposedly patternless systems. In this essay, I should like to suggest ways in which a modern interdisciplinary approach can enrich critical reading, by exploring the metaphorical and literal relevance of both the term ‘strange attractor’ and the concept of chaos to the study of a fourteenth-century Castilian poem.

Faced with the complexity and apparent disorder of Juan Ruiz’sLibro de buen amor, critics have tried hard to smooth...

TheLibro de Buen Amorbelongs to those perverse narratives of early vernacular literary production that satirize or mix generic conventions and thus do not fit conventional nineteenth-century generic designations to which surveys of literature still tend to adhere. In his 1992 edition of theLibroAlberto Blecua succinctly summarizes over a half a century of scholarly opinions regarding the structure and genre of this very complex work, on initial reading apparently a kind of miscellany of episodes, which has been dubbed everything from a moralizing narrative poem to acancioneroor a goliardesque compendium.¹ But Blecua, like his predecessors,...