The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor [Core Textbook ed.] 9781400821075

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION: The Larger Gloss
PART I.
CHAPTER 1. “A Glorious Thyng, Certeyn”
CHAPTER 2. Adaptation and Application
CHAPTER 3. The Ethics of Reading the Book of the Archpriest of Hita
PART II.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 4. S/Ç: The Manuscripts of the Libro and Their Scribes
CHAPTER 5. At the Margins of the Libro
CHAPTER 6. Reading the Book of the Archpriest of Hita
CONCLUSION: Tolle Lege
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

THE ETHICS OF READING IN MANUSCRIPT CULTURE

THE ETHICS OF READING IN MANUSCRIPT CULTURE GLOSSING THE LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR

John Dagenais

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS P R I N C E T O N, N E W J E R S E Y

COPYRIGHT  1994 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA DAGENAIS, JOHN. THE ETHICS OF READING IN MANUSCRIPT CULTURE: GLOSSING THE LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR / BY JOHN DAGENAIS. P.

CM.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. eISBN 1-4008-0147-8 1. RUIZ, JUAN, FL. 1343. LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR. 2. TRANSMISSION OF TEXTS.

3. MANUSCRIPTS,

MEDIEVAL. I. TITLE. PQ6430.D34

1994

861′.1—dc20

93-23881

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN GALLIARD

FOR

Ralph Waldo and Julia Ann Casad Dagenais AND FOR

Gail, Nicolás, and Camille vna ave sola nin bien canta nin bien llora

Glosyng / is a glorious thyng certeyn For lettre sleeth / so as we clerkes seyn Chaucer, “Summoner’s Tale,” Hengwrt, 80v And he looked even further than I had read, and I knew not what followed. Augustine, Confessions bk. 8 But as this Work is chiefly recommended to those who know how to Read it, and how to make good Uses of it, which the Story all along recommends to them, so it is to be hop’d that such Readers will be much more pleas’d with the Moral than the Fable, with the Application than with the Relation, and with the End of the Writer than with the Life of the Person written of. Daniel Defoe, Preface to Moll Flanders To a textual critic, a manuscript is of interest only as a vehicle of readings. James Willis, Latin Textual Criticism

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS PREFACE

xi

xiii

INTRODUCTION

The Larger Gloss PART I

3

31

CHAPTER 1

“A Glorious Thyng, Certeyn”: At the Margins of the Medieval Text 33 CHAPTER 2

Adaptation and Application

56

CHAPTER 3

The Ethics of Reading the Book of the Archpriest of Hita PART II

80

109 111

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 4

S/Ç: The Manuscripts of the Libro and Their Scribes CHAPTER 5

At the Margins of the Libro

153

CHAPTER 6

Reading the Book of the Archpriest of Hita CONCLUSION

Tolle Lege NOTES

213 219

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

263

243

171

118

ABBREVIATIONS

AHN BdO Ble83 Ble92 BNM BNP BPP Cej

Chi C/N Cor CSIC Duc

Edad80 Edad84 Edad91

Esc G Gyb Jos74

Jos90

Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional. Osma, Catedral de Burgo de Osma. Alberto Blecua, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Barcelona: Planeta, 1983. Alberto Blecua, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Madrid: Cátedra, 1992. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale. Soria, Biblioteca Pública y Provincial. Julio Cejador y Frauca, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Clásicos Castellanos 14 and 17. 2 vols. Madrid: Espasa, 1951. Giorgio Chiarini, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1964. Manuel Criado de Val and Eric W. Naylor, eds. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. 2nd ed. Madrid: CSIC, 1972. Joan Corominas, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Madrid: Gredos, 1967. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Jean Ducamin, ed. Libro de buen amor; texte du XIVe siècle publié pour la première fois avec les leçons des trois manuscrits connus. By Juan Ruiz. Toulouse: Privat, 1901. Alan D. Deyermond. Edad media. Historia y crítica de la literatura española 1. Barcelona: Crítica, 1980. Alan D. Deyermond. La edad media. Historia de la literatura española. Barcelona: Ariel, 1984. Alan D. Deyermond. Edad media; primer suplemento. Historia y crítica de la literatura española [suplementos] 1. Barcelona: Crítica, 1991. El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Madrid, Real Academia Española. Ms. Archivo Est 2 Er. 5a (“Gayoso”). G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Madrid: Castalia, 1988. Jacques Joset, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Clásicos Castellanos 14 and 17. 2 vols. Madrid: Espasa, 1974. Jacques Joset, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Madrid: Taurus, 1990.

M/S

PL RAH S San

T Wil Zah

A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott (with David Wallace). Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100–c. 1375; The Commentary-Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Jacques-Paul Migne. Patrologiae cursus completus [series latina]. 221 vols. Paris: Migne, 1844–82. Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia. Salamanca, Biblioteca Universitaria. Ms. 2663 (“Salamanca”). Sánchez, Tomás Antonio, ed. Poesías del Arcipreste de Hita. Madrid, 1790. By Juan Ruiz. Vol. 4 of Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo XV. 4 vols. 1779–90. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional. Ms. Va 6-1 (“Toledo”). Raymond S. Willis, ed. Libro de buen amor. By Juan Ruiz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Anthony N. Zahareas, ed. Juan Ruiz, “Libro del Arcipreste” (también llamado ‘‘Libro de buen amor’’); Edición sinóptica. By Juan Ruiz. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1989.

PREFACE

F

EW BOOKS of the Middle Ages have proven to be as frustrating to modern scholars as Juan Ruiz’s Book of Good Love. The very title by which we know it, Libro de buen amor, was given to it only ninety years ago and has recently become a new topic of critical debate.1 The precise date of composition and the identity of the author remain in question despite new documentary evidence that identifies an Archpriest of Hita named Juan Ruiz in 1330 (Hernández, “Venerable” 10).2 Can we believe this documentary evidence, or does other evidence suggest that the book was written in the late fourteenth century, too late for this Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, to be the author of the book?3 If basic external facts such as the identity of the author and the date of the work’s composition are still unresolved, the text remains equally obscure. There remain many passages whose literal sense escapes us. What is the sense of “puntos” in the following lines: “dicha buena / o mala por puntos la Juzgat | las coplas conlos puntos / load / o denostat” (S:6v;69cd: “Judge what I say, good or bad, by ‘points,’ | Praise or blame the verses with the points”; for my transcription practices, see pp. xx–xxii). What does Juan Ruiz’s book mean by “instrumentos” when it says: “Detodos Instrumentos / yo libro so pariente” (S:6v;70a: “I, book, am the relative of all instruments”). Musical instruments? Legal documents? The instruments of an art, here specifically of the art of poetry? Instruments of navigation?4 And beyond the problem of what known words may mean in a given context, there are a number of words attested only in the Archpriest’s book whose most basic meaning still eludes us: “diçia” (G:6r;89a), “sentia” (S:9r;112c), “aJeuio” (S:83v;1387a), “fresuelos” (G:53v;1085c), “amarga lonJa” (S:87r;1443b). In addition to these difficulties with surviving portions of the Libro, we must confront the fact that the text is incomplete in all surviving manuscripts. There is a lacuna of thirty-two stanzas in the key final passage of the Doña Endrina episode. Numerous lyric pieces promised in the body of the text do not appear, not even in the collection of miscellaneous pieces found, with significant differences in content, at the end of the Salamanca and Gayoso manuscripts (but not in the Toledo manuscript). All these missing pieces—author, date, parts of the physical text, the literal sense of surviving portions—make even more difficult the larger task of illuminating the problematic sense of the Libro. Is the Libro a didactic book that uses humor to enhance its message? Or is whatever didactic intent we might perceive in the book undermined by its relentless exposure of religious and other hypocrisies, its apparent celebration of the

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delights of this world, and its ultimate failure, from the point of view of modern readers, to take a clear moral stand? Can we use genre or sources or parallels in other medieval European texts to aid us in interpreting the Libro? If so, to what genre does the Libro belong? How does Juan Ruiz use and abuse his sources? Are not the European parallels we find in increasing numbers for the Libro just as problematic as the Libro itself? These problems have been dealt with in a body of studies that, though not equal in amount to the scholarly ink spilled over Chaucer or Dante, is nevertheless immense.5 And inconclusive. The Libro is a book that, even as it protests its own openness, seems, through its language and structure and through various accidents of history, almost demonically to close the reader out. The Archpriest’s failed love adventures seem to mock our own pursuit of meaning in the text. If the Archpriest is looking for love in all the wrong places, then perhaps we too must reorient our quest for understanding that object of our desire, as elusive for us as the dueñas of medieval Castile were for the Archpriest of Hita. My own suggestions for how we might reorient this search are worked out in this study. The debate over the sense of the Libro has gone on largely untouched by the critical ferment felt in the past three decades in other literary disciplines as well as in medieval studies. This is due in part to the characteristic lack of dialogue between Peninsular studies and their Northern European counterparts. But it is due just as much to the unique interpretive problems posed by the Libro itself. Since Zahareas’s pioneering study in 1965, the interpretatio recepta of the Libro has been that the book is “ambiguous,” that the author deliberately intends to convey a double or, at times, multiple message (see the latest articulations of this approach in Gyb 60– 73 and in Joset, Nuevas 67–86). If we can chart any change in attitudes toward the Libro in recent years, it is a trend toward more nuanced views of the Libro’s didacticism, informed by a deeper understanding of the many ways in which medieval didactic ideas differed from modern ones. Thus we are moving from Empsonian ambiguity to a greater awareness that medieval didactic literature functioned in a region of unlikeness in which few signs had a single constant value, where contradiction and contrast dominated (see Burke, “New”; Brownlee, Status; Gerli, “Recta”; Nepaulsingh, “Rhetorical,” “Talavera’s” and Towards; Rico, “Clerecía” and “Sobre”). It was a world in which the sublimity of God was best conveyed through the most grotesque imagery (M/S 165–96), in which to dwell on the negative was to exalt the positive (Dagenais, “Further” 44–46). In such a world, the concept of ambiguity loses considerable force. Critics are moving beyond the simple Puritan dualities of the modern age toward the more complex dualities of the Middle Ages.6 While these debates have continued among students of the Libro, great

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changes have been taking place in the larger realm of medieval European literary studies.7 To generalize very broadly, it seems that these revisions have come from two directions and two disciplines. Scholars of medieval French literature have worked out from the critical/theoretical excitement of Paris in the 1960s to reexamine medieval texts in the light of the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Kristeva, to name the most important. I am thinking of the work of Leupin, Dragonetti, Cerquiglini, Méla, Poirion, Bloch, and Hult. On the other hand, students of medieval English have approached similar problems from the direction of hands-on work with manuscripts, often in the course of editing a medieval text. In their work one reads a growing awareness that many of their basic assumptions are not supported by the evidence before them (Machan, “Scribal” is an excellent example) and a new openness to reexamining these assumptions. As Knight (46) puts it, manuscripts contain “lots of odd things you don’t expect to find.” There are, of course, significant exceptions to these generalizations: Huot’s influential studies of Old French “lyrico-narrative” texts have brought manuscript work alive for a number of scholars with theoretical backgrounds; and Patterson, working on medieval English, has attempted to place the activity of critical editing in a broader theoretical framework (see also McGann). If anything has become the focus of our rapidly evolving views of medieval textuality, it is the manuscript itself. In many ways, the present study shares this focus. But it also grows out of a series of dissatisfactions with aspects of both the old and the new philology. These dissatisfactions arise, in turn, from my own struggles with Juan Ruiz’s difficult text. There are problems that neither the new nor the old philology has been willing to address.8 My dissatisfactions with New Philology arise when New Philology (and its congener, New Medievalism) begins to look like Old Theory—namely, the theory of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Too often, the new recognition of “la variante,” of the richness and variety of the medieval manuscript “matrix” (Nichols, “Introduction” 8) of our “texts,” has celebrated them merely as the opening of a new territory for verbal play, a new object/subject of jouissance. The New Philology continually reveals its own origins in approaches to literature that many in the literary establishment, and especially in medievalist circles, have felt to be self-indulgent or self-serving, pointless, plagued by fundamental misunderstandings or misreadings, or just plain dull. For all its awareness, indeed praise, of the manuscript object and its culture, in the end this approach swerves away from the newly colonized manuscripts and their variants to return to more comfortable views of texte. In many ways, I think it is possible to see in New Medievalism the last gasp of the verbaliconolatry that has charac-

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terized so much of twentieth-century thinking about literature. “Texts” appear to take on a life of their own, to acquire human volition, human values. On the other hand, traditional philology seems unwilling or unable to rise to the legitimate challenges to traditional ways of looking at texts raised by new approaches to medieval textuality. Too often the response has been shrill, or merely diversionary. The defense has rested on pronouncing the words “trendy” or “fashionable,” uttering “Derrida” in a hoarse whisper, and reaching for the nearest cruciform object. Although the practice of textual editing is clearly evolving, too much energy is still devoted to quibbling about the validity of conjectural emendation, editorial “objectivity,” Lachmannian versus Bédieriste approaches (and all the approaches in between and beyond), the layouts of text, variants, and plates, and so on. So far textual critics in general have not been willing to let go of the comfortable creative-author/literary-work paradigm long enough to examine the basic assumptions that go into the activity of producing a critical edition of a medieval text. Why should this activity be considered an obligatory precursor to talking about medieval literature? What is the intellectual value (and cultural significance) of taking a text that was written and read in a variety of forms in numerous medieval manuscripts and transforming it into a single printed book? The present study had its origins a decade ago in the recognizably old philological activity of trying to understand the literary ideas of the Libro through their sources in Latin culture as it was transmitted to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Castile. Because of a dearth of knowledge in this area, I was led to manuscript sources in a search for glosses, accessus, and more extended commentaries that might illuminate Juan Ruiz’s literary background. I did not find much of what I was looking for, but, in the process of looking, I did find manuscripts. And I found that the medieval literature I had been studying till then—the medieval literature based on “texts” and an established canon of authors—was not the same medieval literature I encountered in the manuscripts. The medieval literature I found was far more fluid and dynamic. It had rough edges, not the clean, carefully pruned lines of critical editions; and these edges were filled with dialogue about the text—glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations. I began to see that it is at the edges of manuscripts and in the various activities by which medieval people transformed one manuscript into another—commentary, translation, adaptation, reworking, and the “mechanical” act of copying—that the most important part of “medieval literature” happens. As I worked through these ideas and became familiar with work in other medieval literatures, I noted an increasing visibility of terms such as “re-creation,” “re-writing,” “re-authoring,” or “écriture-lecture” (“writ-

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ing-reading”; see the Introduction below). These terms suggest that the “author/work” paradigm is under considerable pressure, that activities assumed until now to be the focus of critical inquiry—creation, writing— no longer serve for understanding medieval literature in its medieval context. And it has seemed to me that the attempt to shore up this paradigm simply by using the iterative prefix “re-” will not serve either. What we need is not modification, or nuancing of the old terminology, but new ways of looking. These considerations have led me to propose a reorientation of the way we approach medieval literature, a shift from a view that privileges the author and/or his text (and carries with it both the implicit model of the printed book and all the baggage of the academic study of literary canons) to one that privileges the individual reader and the multitude of medieval literary activities, such as commentary and copying, that mirror reading. This point of view has the additional advantage of being based not on postmedieval models, but on the concrete documentary evidence of thousands of surviving medieval manuscripts. It is these individual, concrete manuscript codices which I would situate at the heart of the study of medieval letters. The title of this book also includes the word “ethics,” however, and I should explain that one of my conclusions about the nature of medieval reading is that it was above all an ethical activity. Where we tend to see our texts as webs of language, medieval readers saw a world of human action for good or ill co-extensive with their own. Texts were acts of demonstrative rhetoric that reached out and grabbed the reader, involved him or her in praise and blame, in judgments about effective and ineffective human behavior. They engaged the reader, not so much in the unravelling of meaning as in a series of ethical meditations and of personal ethical choices. They required the reader to take a stand about what he or she read. This aspect of medieval texts does an end run around most contemporary models of literature, grounded as they are on the idea that the purpose of texts is to signify, to say some thing, and that this thing is located (or worked out by the reading subject) in the words of the text. The ethical reading of the Middle Ages does not function this way. It often maintains only the most tenuous connection with the letter of the text. It treats as chaff the “literary work of art” that for us is the grain, as it repeatedly confronts basic questions about how one should behave with a view to greater happiness in this world and the next. It continually denies its readers the pose of scientific objectivity that academic literary studies in our century have sought so relentlessly to assume. And so I argue for a reversal of the old paradigm, a reversal in which the reader, not the author, occupies the central position. Most of my argu-

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ments for this reversal are laid out in the Introduction that follows. I take advantage of the utilitarian atmosphere of the Preface to advance a simple and practical argument. Quite simply, there is far more direct evidence of medieval reading than there is of medieval authoring. Tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts exist, not as “vehicles for readings” to be discarded in the process of edition-making, chopped up into lists of variants and leaves of plates, but as living witnesses to the dynamic, chaotic, errorfraught world of medieval literary life that we have preferred to view till now through the smoked glass of critical editions. We should begin our attempts to understand the phenomenon of “medieval literature” by examining this vast body of concrete material, not by treating it as the waste product of the process of producing our chimerical authorial texts. Medievalism, as it has been practiced over the past two centuries, is the only discipline I can think of that takes as its first move the suppression of its evidence. Manuscripts are not just “physical support” for texts, nor are they simply documents or artifacts for a cultural history of the Middle Ages. Rather they are the object of that discipline we call medievalism. Some might label this approach “beyond Bédier” or “beneath Bédier,” and I want to acknowledge at the outset that there are clear limitations to a view of medieval literary lifeways founded exclusively on physical manuscripts. Both Zumthor explicitly (“Intertextualité” 13) and Carruthers implicitly have suggested that we can no longer ignore oral and memorial culture in favor of written texts. I certainly agree, as the portion of my study that deals with ethical reading will show. I hasten to point out that manuscripts remain one of our few keys to the lost realms of medieval orality, memory (Carruthers, chap. 7), and ethics. But I also think that after 500 years of editing medieval manuscripts, we still have so much left to learn about how they functioned in their own world that we are far from being in danger of paying too much attention to them. Along with what my book is, I should clarify what it is not. First of all, it is not an argument for ceasing production of critical editions. It is, rather, an argument for rethinking the exaggerated role they have been given in our representations of the Middle Ages and its literature. This book, then, is not a critique of any particular theory of edition or of endless musings about conjectural emendation or editorial subjectivity. Instead it is a demand for a reexamination of the fundamental assumptions that have caused medievalists to devote so much time and effort to producing critical editions or publishing literary criticism based on them. It may be that these ideas constitute a “theory,” but if so, it is a theory still in its initial stages of elaboration. It is not a theory whose ontological validity I am trying to prove here. It is merely a different way of seeing. To the extent that it is a theory, I think it is a good one for the same reason

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that any theory is good: it embraces and explains more features of the object under study than do other theories, most notably the “creativeauthor” postulate. I also want to make clear that the present study of the Libro de buen amor makes no claim to being a full implementation or maximum exemplum of the approaches I advance here. In many ways (in its very title, for example), this book is still caught up in the author/text paradigm it hopes to overthrow. It is not, I fear, an ideologically pure endeavor. By the same token, this book does not and cannot claim to suggest the full range of critical activity that may be possible using its reader/manuscript-centered model. To readers nurtured on the rich feed of authorial creation, much of the material we find ourselves dealing with—fragments of glosses that lose themselves in the gutter or are trimmed at a crucial word, snippets of text rather than “works,” jumbles of apparently unrelated texts—seems inconsequential, or perhaps just boring. But we have had 200 years in which to apply the author/work approach to medieval letters. Who could have projected what forms author-centered criticism was to take when Sánchez published his Poesías del Arcipreste de Hita in 1790? To attempt to enumerate all the possibilities of the reader/manuscript model here would be at best short-sighted. I can point to some studies, such as those by Huot, that already work along the lines I suggest here. As for the present book, I see it as groping out from that authored Libro de buen amor toward the Libros read in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. I hope at least to have staked out the territory in this specific case.9 Let me clarify some of the “apparatus” of the present study. Concerning the work’s title, I have opted for the short form “Libro.” In the spirit of this study, I allow the reader to decide whether he or she wishes to expand this to Libro de buen amor, the title Juan Ruiz himself may have given to his book, or to Libro del arçipreste de Hita, a title popular in the Middle Ages as well as in recent years. I follow tradition in dating the Libro’s composition to the first half of the fourteenth century, perhaps in the years 1330–43. My reason for this choice (for it can be little more than that) is that the three most concrete documentary details—the dates in manuscripts S and T, and the copy of a document witnessed by Juan Ruiz—all point to this person and date. Nevertheless, as should be evident by now, the precise date of the Libro’s creation is not particularly important to my study. The Libro that concerns us dates from the 1370s to the 1560s. Indeed, it is the only Libro we have. As a largely arbitrary, but necessary, convention, I use the name “Juan Ruiz” to refer to the presumed human author of the Libro. “The Archpriest” or “Arçipreste de Hita” and the like will be used to refer to the fictional character whose love adventures are a frayed thread running through the Libro.

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Anyone who seeks to argue via the medium of printing that manuscripts, not modern printed editions, constitute the only valid object for an inquiry into the literary life of the Middle Ages faces a very real problem: how do I cite my text? So much is lost in the translation of manuscript text to printed edition. But forcing readers to wade through the manuscript text, even if it were possible to reproduce it integrally here, would be for many readers a distraction, even an irritation, which I, as author of this printed book, would in principle like to avoid. In the end, the pressing need for granting a larger voice to the manuscript witnesses in the course of routine scholarly activities, such as citing texts, took precedence over other considerations. The solutions I have decided upon constitute a series of working compromises. When I quote the Libro, I use the following format: S:26r;377a. “S” stands for the Salamanca manuscript, the number after the colon refers to manuscript folio and side, the number after the semicolon to the traditional numbering of stanzas, and the letters to lines in the stanza.10 In citing folio numbers, I use the following: for S, numbers at the lower right of the folio, probably written by Ducamin; for G, numbers in the upper right; for T, numbers in the lower right. I have based my transcriptions on microfilms and published facsimiles, consulting also the transcriptions by C/N and the electronic versions compiled by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies in Madison, Wisconsin. Such are the ironic realities I face in this study of manuscripts. In those cases where the reading of a specific manuscript is not in question, I have opted for a rotation among the readings of surviving manuscripts based on rough percentages of surviving lines. In this way I hope to give greater presence to the entire manuscript tradition than is possible when scholars cite from a single critical edition. S, although certainly the most important manuscript from a textual-critical point of view, has come to dominate our view of the entire tradition of the Libro, even though manuscripts like G and T may have been more common in the Middle Ages (Faulhaber, “Celestina” 11). Regarding the transcriptions of manuscript texts, I want to stress from the outset that they do not strive for diplomatic status. Their major function is to serve as a reminder that the material I cite is drawn from a medium radically different from the modern printed page on which we read it. In agreement with the themes of this book, the transcriptions represent the manuscript text as best I can capture it in two stages of existence. At the first level, the transcriptions seek to represent in the print medium certain features of the text on the manuscript page, stripped of modern accretions (capitalizations, punctuation, standard word division) and with portions of the medieval text preserved (most notably scribal “errors,” punctuation, and physical spacing). I have tried to reflect rudiments of

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scribal usus, so that readers may eventually be able to recognize the manuscript in question from the transcription. Thus, my transcription uses the tyronian sign, and, when appropriate, paragraphs (calderones) and marginal material. In certain instances, I use uppercase type to indicate manuscript letters whose size is visually striking but may have no literal or aural significance. Thus I routinely use J to represent the outsized jota of these manuscripts. Boldface type is used to represent rubrication. This transcription, then, is not intended to be a scientific representation of the physical manuscript page, but rather a designedly impressionistic one. The most general transcription practices are the following: I do not distinguish long i and short i. I do distinguish u and v. As a necessary compromise with the limitations of the printing press, I have not attempted to distinguish the various forms of s, except when I use the capital S as a reflection of the often disruptive size this letter assumed, especially in ligature, in late-medieval manuscripts. I have retained s for the looped, “sygmatic s” representing the sound [dz] or [ts] when I can find no distinction between this form and the form for [s] on the folio in question (Millares and Asencio 1:194–95, 227–28). I have mimicked as accurately as I can without resorting to a ruler manuscript word joining and separation. The common practice among Spanish scribes of attaching short prepositions to their object and detaching prepositional prefixes from their verbs may create some initial confusion. But these are easily sorted out with a bit of practice: amal = a mal, en mendar = enmendar. Conjunctions, especially o, can also be found connected to the following word or to the virgula that precedes them. I use the tyronian sign ¬ (usually pronounced [e] in these texts). I also use “&” to represent the variant form that resembles a large lowercase e. At a second level, I have sought to reflect in these transcriptions, however remotely, what might be termed the “corrected read version” of the text. This is the text as medieval readers might have pronounced it to themselves or read it to an audience once the corrector had passed through the text. Thus I expand abbreviations, not “silently,” but vocally. In these manuscripts, as in the vast majority of medieval manuscripts I have seen, abbreviations are so standardized that their use is as conventional as that of any other medieval alphabetical character.11 For similar reasons, I have transcribed manuscript punctuation (almost always the virgula suspensiva: /), but I have not attempted to distinguish those virgulae which may have been written by readers rather than by scribes. Again, in order to give maximum voice to the realities of manuscript culture, difficult places or scribal slips in cited texts are clarified in the translations that follow the text rather than in the text itself. I use* in the translations to mark simple confusions in spelling or number of nouns and verbs (often due to the omission of an abbreviation stroke) that I have

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emended in the translations without further note. More complex variations are explained in brackets in the translation. I have steered clear of the manuscript text itself as much as possible, except to indicate poetic or other line divisions with a “|” in running quotes. Thus, “/” represents medieval punctuation that actually appears in the manuscript; “|” is a mark I introduce into the text. Most other medieval texts cited in the book are quoted from editions unless otherwise indicated. In reproducing these passages I have changed or eliminated punctuation as I felt necessary without noting it. Any significant features of an individual manuscript transcription will be indicated in a note. I have provided English translations for all passages in premodern languages. These translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I have also translated all modern critical commentary into English; references are to the original texts. Some readers will no doubt find my transcription practices distracting. I hope my explanation makes clear that they are intended to be just that. If I have reached any conclusion at all, it is that since some manuscript features will have to be left out in any case, it is perhaps best to tailor the transcription to the specific purposes for which the transcription is being made. To make a virtue of necessity, I might claim that the failings of the system I have worked out dramatize the essential antagonism of the printing press to manuscript culture, that the press must inevitably mask or distort its predecessor. The day is not far off, however, when, through the increasing electronic sophistication of presses, it will be a much simpler proposition routinely to use at least stylized manuscript typefaces in scholarly studies. Optical scanning and increasing graphical power in desktop computers hold the promise that manuscript passages might be quoted in facsimile form. I am grateful to the following libraries for granting me permission to cite from manuscripts in their collection: Osma, Catedral de Burgo de Osma; El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial; Évora, Biblioteca Pública y Arquivo Distral; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional; Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale; Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina; Soria, Biblioteca Pública y Provincial. I wish to thank the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support of this research. I also wish to thank the Newberry Library, and especially Paul Gehl, for allowing me to work in residence with their rich collections. Charles Faulhaber, Eric Naylor, Brian Dutton, and Spurgeon Baldwin have provided vital help throughout this project from its inception. Joseph Snow, Steve Kirby, and Michael Gerli read an early draft of the opening chapters and

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made numerous invaluable comments. Alan Deyermond’s published comments on this same draft (“Salamanca” 4, Edad91 180) also helped me to refocus some of my arguments. John Nitti generously supplied me with electronic copies of the Hispanic Seminary’s transcriptions of S, G, and T; Ivy A. Corfis has also helped me in consulting the Seminary’s rich holdings. Participants in the online discussion group on medieval texts, MEDTEXTL, directed by James W. Marchand, have helped me with many aspects of the book, from its broadest conception to details of translations. William Paden, Sylvia Huot, and Jim Burke read the first full version of the text and offered many comments that have helped me to improve the final version in a variety of ways. Mark Williams reviewed the Latin translations and made a number of helpful suggestions. The errors that remain are my own, and my thanks to those who have helped me by no means signifies that they endorse all the ideas found here. Final thanks must go to Inman Fox, chair of my department, for his support; to interlibrary-loan librarians Marjorie Carpenter and Kathryn Deiss, without whose help this book could not have been written; and to Bob Brown, my editor at Princeton, for his patience. My largest debts and gratitudes are acknowledged in the dedication of the book.

THE ETHICS OF READING IN MANUSCRIPT CULTURE

INTRODUCTION THE LARGER GLOSS

G

ASPAR MELCHOR DE JOVELLANOS, a leading figure of the Spanish Enlightenment, sounds the opening salvos of the critical debate over the moral sense of the Libro de buen amor in his “Censura” to the first modern edition (1790) of the text. Jovellanos argues that, contrary to the wishes of the text’s editor, Tomás Antonio Sánchez, who would prefer to suppress certain scurrilous and blasphemous passages, the entire text should be published (San xxix–xxxii).1 Jovellanos’s reasons include the sensible observation that if one began suppressing all the stanzas that violate “those most rigid principles of modesty,” one would end up suppressing all or nearly all the passages that deal with love (surely an unfortunate fate for a book about love). Making another point, Jovellanos argues against fears that this book may “fall into the hands of youths, women, uneducated or incautious readers.” The book will represent no danger to these groups because the obscurity, simplicity, and carelessness of its style and its jokes, and the very way in which it paints and describes objects, no longer suits either our taste or the ideas of our time, so that we can be confident that there will be no one among the already-mentioned groups of persons who has the simple endurance to read this whole book, who will not, in fact, have the book fall from his hands before he reads eight or ten stanzas. (San xxxi)

It remains unclear exactly what force would cause the Libro to fall so readily from the hands of unfit readers. Jovellanos takes full advantage of the Castilian dative of interest here: “se le cayga de la mano.” It seems most likely, however, that Jovellanos expects the book to put its (young, female, dull-witted, or incautious) readers straightaway to sleep. Although one occasionally hears the theory voiced by students, the idea that the Libro is a safe and effective soporific is not generally found today in the spectrum of critical positions taken by scholars. Jovellanos’s censura of the first printed edition of the Libro offers, however, a useful and appropriately burlesque point of departure for the present study, which seeks to understand more fully that interaction of reader and manuscript text which I will here call “ethical.” We may pause to enjoy the fine irony that the censura in fact argues against censoring the book at all (and that the book was published in

4

INTRODUCTION

censored form anyway). But I cite Jovellanos because I believe he provides a useful model for the goals and limitations of the present study. Jovellanos suggests that the Libro possesses a special power, that it is somehow capable of censoring itself, of sensing the sort of reader in whose hands it lies and of reacting in a way that gives him or her a reading (in this case, it is actually to deny a reading) appropriate to his or her sex, age, or moral or intellectual status. The idea of an especially powerful and intimate relationship between the Libro and its readers is fostered already by its author. Juan Ruiz offers his book to “ome omger de buen entendimiento” (S:2r;prol.: “the man or woman* of good understanding”), as well as to those of “poco entendimiento” (S:2r;prol.: “little understanding”).2 Those who wish to sin “aqui fallaran algunas maneras para ello” (S:2r;prol.: “will find some ways to do it here”). He promises that everyone will find what he or she is looking for in the Libro, then, whether it be salvation or earthly love. The book has the “buena propiadad” (T:36v;1627a: “good property”) of making the reader suddenly wish to go to Mass, provided, that is, that his or her spouse is so ill-favored that other pastimes are undesirable. What I want to draw from Jovellanos’s scenario is the fact that there is a persuasive rhetoric that informs the act of reading the Libro. Somewhere outside the raging debates concerning the moral sense of the Libro sits an individual human reader who is addressed by the Libro and who becomes, in a sense, one of the circumstantiae—who, what, when, where, why—of a dynamic rhetoric. This reader interacts with the text based on his or her own predispositions and goals, whether or not those coincide with any goals the author may have for his text. The rhetorical content of the exchange is an occasional (that is, of a particular occasion) playing off of the res of the text and the particular circumstantiae of the reader.3 I choose Jovellanos’s scene to figure this rhetoric inversely, as an unrhetoric of sorts: his readers interact by not interacting, are persuaded to cease being persuaded, by a postprandial predisposition to somnolence and a curious combination of the perceived deficiencies of the text itself—obscurity, carelessness, archaic style—and their own inherent inadequacies to it. The ways in which such interactions occurred in the case of medieval readers and their Libro is an important focus of this study. Jovellanos’s scene of reading seconds the Libro’s own claim that it possesses certain “properties” that short-circuit the reading process, that return the reader to him- or herself in a realm outside the text, send him or her scurrying off to Mass. These properties decenter and ultimately render irrelevant the elucidation and paraphrasing of “meaning,” which for most professional readers is still, in one form or another, the central paradigm of reading. They also reveal the limitations of a poststructuralist reading,

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in which the reading subject is absorbed “like a spider” in “its own web” (Barthes, “Theory” 39) into the “free” play of the language of the text. The reader who lies asleep with the Libro in his or her young, female, dull-witted, or incautious lap is effectively safe from the book’s many contradictions. This reader has resolved in a realm beyond language both the dangers and the pleasures inherent in the letter of the text. Are there places other than the kingdom of Morpheus where such resolutions can take place? How do we as readers of the Libro locate them and speak about them? Or can we? Jovellanos’s scene also conveniently mimics the state of impasse that studies of the Libro have reached. Although there is a growing awareness of Juan Ruiz’s participation in and manipulation of the textual theories of his time, and a thorough knowledge of the sources and traditions he was drawing upon, this historical knowledge ultimately does not help us with the text. The text remains a texture of contradiction. What does “buen amor” really mean? Courtly love (1507)? Sexual love (1630d)? Christian caritas (prologue)? A bawd (933)? And which of these is the book named after (13, 933, 1630ab)? Does love ennoble (155–56) or degrade (157– 59)? Is the bawd a demonic figure (1453ff.), or worthy of a heavenly seat among the martyrs (1570)? Woven amongst these problems are deflating pokes at tradition: the promise that understanding the book will get you a pretty girl (64d), a refiguring of the canonical hours of the Church as erotic sojourn (372–87), a botched translatio studii from Greeks to Romans (44–70), the rhetorical ideal of brevitas incarnate in the superior sexual gratification afforded by small women (1606–17). For good measure, Juan Ruiz tosses in schoolboyish vulgarity: the story of Don Pitas Payas (474–85), the depiction of the serrana (1010–21). And covert obscenity (perhaps 985). In the midst of all this, the text offers lessons in canon law (321–71) and the jurisdictional rules for taking confession (1128–60), a mnemonic guide to Christian works, gifts of the Holy Spirit, Sacraments, and theological virtues (1579–1605), some silly ditties (115– 20, 987–92), and, of course, the author’s frequent avowals of didactic purpose (prologue, 11–19, 44–46, 64–70, 892–909, etc.). We might just choose to go for a ride on this textual rollercoaster, and enjoy the fun, but the author denies us this “open arabesque” (Castro, Structure 393) by insisting on the rewards of understanding and the dangers of misunderstanding his text. Our problem, then, is that if we take Juan Ruiz at his word, we cannot take him at his word. Recently, some of our best readers of the Libro have begun to view it as an exploration of the “fallen” state of language, of man’s “alienation” from and by language, of the ultimate inability of language to accomplish what it seems to promise to do: to communicate truth, knowledge, right

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INTRODUCTION

and wrong, emotion (Brownlee, Status; Read 22–48).4 This trend seems to mark these critics’ acceptance of defeat in their attempts to move beyond critical categories, such as “ambiguity,” that are no longer adequate. In reality this trend projects our own self-imposed dead ends back onto Juan Ruiz’s book. I agree with these scholars that Juan Ruiz was quite aware of the fallen state of language. Indeed, he inhabited a world convinced as perhaps no other human epoch has been of the fallen nature of all creation, not just language. It did not require modists or nominalists to make this evident (pace Read). Jerome and Augustine had wrestled with these issues a millennium before. This fallen world was man’s condition and his fault. But the fallen status of man, his world, and his language was not the endpoint of interpretation, any more than it was the limit of human existence or of human aspiration. The fallen state was, in fact, the happy beginning of salvation (just as the fall of Spain to the Moors was the beginning of the restoration of Christianity). For men and women who were neither mystics nor saints, that salvation had to be worked out through the fallen signs of God’s creation, and these included the imprecise, error-prone signs of human language. As Bruns (56), drawing on Gadamer, has pointed out, the very “indeterminate areas” in the text are invitations to “glossing” the text. I extend this observation to argue that, along with other paradoxes that lie at the very heart of the Libro, the larger or more numerous the places of indeterminacy and impasse, the larger the saving gloss. I would set this book up, then, very much in opposition to a tendency to view the Libro as an exemplar of failed language and faulty logic, as a region of unlikeness, insolvability, alienation, and impasse. Medieval people were well aware that there was a point at which human logic failed (and there can be little doubt that such failures are favorite targets of Juan Ruiz’s humor). But medieval people had at their disposal modes of inquiry that we have largely forgotten in our scientific age. They were able to distinguish the things that might be known precisely once and for all from those variable things, most notably human behavior, that had to be continually reinterpreted and renegotiated. They knew that some problems require knowledge (episteme) and others require practical wisdom (phronesis; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1139b15–20). It is precisely in the middle of this world of flux and foible that Juan Ruiz places his book.5 The “intellectum” (“understanding”) he promises (and demands of) his readers is not “scientific knowledge,” but deliberation, prudence, temperance, judgment. It is in the context of “practical wisdom,” the need for training human judgment, and the acquisition of prudence that we must see Juan Ruiz’s frequent “opening” of his book to his readers:

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en general atodos fabla la escriptura los cuerdos con buen seso entenderan la cordura los mançebos liuianos guarde se de locura EscoJan lo que es miJor el de buena ventura (G:4v;67) The writing speaks to everyone in general. With good sense, sensible people will understand the good sense. Let frivolous youths beware* of folly. Let the fortunate man choose* what is better.

There is also his image of the musical instrument: “detodos Instrumentos / yo libro so pariente | bien /omal qual puntares / tal te dira / çierta mente” (S:6v;70ab: “I, this book, am a relative of all instruments; it will speak to you exactly as you play it: well or badly”). Critics have yet to face squarely the full implications of such statements.6 We have failed to see that Juan Ruiz’s emphasis on the reader ultimately involves the critic in a revision not just of ways of looking at texts, but of our very concept of “text” as well. Nor have we openly examined phrases that invite the reader’s active participation in producing, performing, the book: “non a mala palabra si non es a mal tenida/” (G:4r;64b: “There are no bad words unless they are considered to be bad”); “veras que bien es dicha / si bien fuese entendida” (S:6r;64c: “You will see that [my word] is well said if it was well understood”). Such assertions represent for us a door through which we cannot or will not go. At best we can hope to close them off as topical, ironic, or simply insincere.7 Juan Ruiz has set up his book in places where we, as academic critics, are unaccustomed (or loath) to pursue it. In the good sense of sensible readers, for example. In the power of the reader to determine a word to mean one thing and not another. In the reader’s ability to control the flow of association, opposition, similarity, which can be played out endlessly at the level of the signifier. In the average reader’s right to return to the text and to understand it anew (this privilege we like to reserve for academic readers alone); and in his power, finally, to move beyond the text, to close the book and look at his or her own life anew. What role do such loci of textual meaning and function leave for the professional interpreter of texts? Because of the genuine methodological problems such statements present, we prefer to return to more comfortable pursuits, such as attempting to determine the sense (good or bad, ambiguous, contradictory) of the Libro from the words Juan Ruiz has written “on the page.” Like the man who has lost his key down the block, but prefers to look for it under the street lamp where the light is better, we persist in seeking the sense of the Libro in a place where Juan Ruiz has specifically told us it does not lie. The

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INTRODUCTION

apparent impasses in Juan Ruiz’s text are there because we choose to have them there, because we refuse to accept that our choice should make a difference—because, in short, we choose not to choose. This study asks the question, what happens when we open these closed places in the text of the Libro and try to peer beyond? Who is this reader who must “understand the good sense” of the book and protect himself from folly, for whom reading involves the reader in a series of choices—a choice, for example, between reading “bien o mal” (G:4v;70b: “well or ill”)—not just lectio but electio as well? How did he or she go about making these choices? I take “ethics” as an exemplum of the way in which, in the Middle Ages, a system of values broadly shared but constantly conditioned by an awareness of the imprecision and changeability of value systems allows reading first to dwell within, but finally to escape both the closed authorial work and the poststructuralist texte, that spider’s web of words. I might have chosen other systems—theological, political, social. Indeed, in many cases I use “ethics” to stand for the larger world of practical wisdom to which it belonged. Ethical reading is not the only form of medieval reading, but it is the most characteristic and the most common. I allow it to stand for medieval reading here. The idea of the “killing Letter,” which I work out in the next section, stands for two deadly models of reading against which I set this medieval ethical reading.8 The first is the “classical” model of creative author and literary work, the author’s literary property. The second is the newer model of texte as it has been worked out over the past three decades.

“For the Letter Killeth” The “classical” view of literary texts—indeed, until recently, the whole institutional apparatus that supports academic study of literature—begins with the idea that there is a human being who intends to produce a work of literature and who is solely responsible for its shape and meaning. His or her authority as creator of the text fully informs, is immanent in, every aspect of the text he creates. The creative genius of the human individual is the focus of literary-critical activity. This is our first deadly model. To date, most studies of medieval literature, and certainly most approaches to the Libro, have been based on this model. Juan Ruiz has created a masterpiece. It is the task of the critic to ferret out his meaning using clues contained in his work (as edited from manuscript for the printing press) and in the larger textual or cultural world to which he has made it refer. We strike the pose that only Juan Ruiz is authorized to tell us what his text means, to validate our interpretations. But behind this posturing we be-

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lieve that the critic’s ultimate success depends on his having mastered the text, unlocked its meaning, asserted his own authority over it. In the last two decades the word “text” has replaced “work” in much academic discourse about literature, even medieval literature. “Texte” is our second deadly model. We must be careful to distinguish two rather different uses of the term, however. One is what we might call the “vulgate” use of “text.” In this use, its essential meaning is “authorial work minus author.” It is used to refer to “texts” in the same way we might have used the term “work” twenty or thirty years ago, but stripped of various “fallacious” references centering on the author (intention, autobiography) that had informed previous study of “works.” This use of the term shades variously into a second: texte as it began to be understood following the heady days of ’68. This text is a productivity and a jouissance. It is an endless “space of the combinative play” with language (Barthes, “Theory” 37). In his classic exploration of texte, Barthes suggests that the term is most applicable to “the texts of modernity (from Lautréamont to Philippe Sollers),” but admits a potential applicability to “classical” works, such as those by Flaubert and Proust (41). In the years since Barthes promulgated these ideas, applications of texte have been pushed steadily backward in time and have even found their way into studies of medieval texts. There are indeed many ways in which the practice of texte resembles that dynamic productivity, that spreading web of words and parchment which is medieval manuscript textuality. This book illustrates in passing how rich and delightful that world of linguistic play was. And yet, for medieval readers texte was but one stage of the journey of reading. The goal was not a surrender “to an erotic practice of language,” but the conquest and surpassing of language. Medieval readers were ever mindful of that fragile, fallen, finite world in which a unique human individual had to win eternity. The spider’s web of language was beautiful texte, itinerarium, and trap. A point in Barthes’s exposition of texte at which he stumbles across a key concept of medieval reading—integumentum—allows us to pin down the crucial point at which both “work” and texte differ from the warp and woof of medieval letters. Whereas criticism . . . hitherto unanimously placed the emphasis on the finished “fabric” (the text being a “veil” behind which the truth, the real message, in a word the “meaning,” had to be sought), the current theory of the text turns away from the text as veil and tries to perceive the fabric in its texture, in the interlacing of codes, formulae and signifiers, in the midst of which the subject places himself and is undone, like a spider that comes to dissolve itself into its own web. (Barthes, “Theory” 39)

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INTRODUCTION

Barthes describes both the “classical” authorial work and the poststructuralist texte in terms of their relation to the “veil,” the fabric of the letter. If classical criticism sought to discover the “meaning” behind the veil, poststructuralist semanalysis takes as its field of play the veil itself. Beyond this, the “subject” (who may be a literary critic) places himself within the fabric and “dissolves” in it. Neither the “classical” model nor the texte model adequately represents the way in which the medieval veil functioned. Meaning, a “revelation” of sense, was not the final goal of the lifting of the integument that is the ethical reading we study here. Though integumental expositions might well have arrived at something we would recognize as “meaning,” that meaning is in general rather distant from the letter that bears it. This fact argues that what is being foregrounded in integumental readings is not the achieved meaning (and certainly not a final dissolving in its strands), but the system of values that allows the expositor to arrive at that meaning. For medieval Christian Europe this system was the relatively stable, but by no means static, set of moral, religious, and ethical norms inherited primarily from the Judeo-Christian tradition and classical antiquity. It is only a specific system of values, for instance, that allows Arnulf of Orleans to determine that Argus, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, represents the world: “Argus in pavonem. Pavo adeo superba avis est que etiam alas pandit si audiat se laudari. Argus igitur id est mundus” (203: “Argus is changed into a peacock. For in fact, the peacock is a proud bird which also spreads its wings if it hears itself praised. Therefore, Argus is the world”). But that same system of values could lead John of Garland to quite an opposite interpretation of Argus. For him, Argus represents the shrewd man who despises earthly riches (Integumenta 43 and n. 99–102). It is the active process of applying this system to the text, even more than the system itself, that must therefore be the crux of medieval reading. Neither the integumentum nor the letter, that veil of endless productivity, was the goal. The reading subject who dissolved in the fabric of the text was only suffering what St. Paul and others warned against: death by the Letter.9 In recent criticism on medieval letters, it is often possible to detect a moment when the critic approaches the veil of the Letter and seems about to move beyond, only to do an abrupt about-face. We can find this move, in different versions, in both the traditional philology and the New. A few exemplary cases may help to clarify what I mean by the “killing Letter” and the world of personal experience that lies beyond it. A recent article on the Libro by Orduna, one of Hispanism’s most thoughtful representatives of traditional philology, exemplifies the invisible wall we build around medieval texts when we found our view of them on the author/work paradigm. Orduna raises the very issue I discussed above: the significance of Juan Ruiz’s opening of his book to his readers (1626ff.).

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Juan Ruiz leaves his work open to emendation or continuation for those who judge themselves capable of doing so. In part it is a courtesy formula, and there are even critics who see in these words an application of the modesty topos. Personally, we feel that, moving beyond formulas and topics, the author recognizes a literary reality of his time: the tendency to gloss doctrinal texts, which, most definitely he himself applies in the elaboration of his book. (Orduna, “Libro . . . arcipreste” 2; my italics)

Here Orduna summarizes neatly a central idea of this chapter: that it is in those portions of the medieval text we tend to treat as dead letters—“formulas,” “topoi”—that we may sometimes catch a glimpse of a world beyond text. Orduna grants the author a solid familiarity with the literary facts of life in his culture, and even recognizes that Juan Ruiz inserts himself into an ongoing process of reading and glossing doctrinal texts. There is nothing in this with which I might quarrel. Despite these insights into the textus receptus (Orduna’s point, and again I agree, is that S has played too much of a role in our idea of the Libro de buen amor), Orduna suddenly swerves back into more familiar territory. He abruptly leaves the author’s understanding of a world of continuing gloss, of textual evolution, and seeks to carve out a chimerical Libro de buen amor in the midst of a manuscript tradition (is not this tradition the material reflection of the realities he states that the author recognizes?) that we may call, as fifteenth-century readers did (Orduna acknowledges), the Libro del arcipreste de Hita. Orduna wants an edition entitled, familiarly enough, “Libro de buen amor y otros poemas” (4: “Book of Good Love and other poems”). In the face of the author’s own recognition of the rough-and-ready textual reality in which he lived, Orduna wants to set up a neat collection of major and minor works on the model of some imagined fourteenth-century Pléiade. Critics should not treat the Libro de buen amor and the “otros poemas” (4, 6) as belonging to the same artistic register. The grand vision of the Libro de buen amor should not be tainted by mixing it with the minor poems (also attributable to Juan Ruiz) that have unfortunately become attached to it in the manuscript tradition and thus in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century “receptional form” of the Libro. Orduna’s specific arguments (2–4) for where we might establish the beginning (prose prologue) and end (the final two “gozos de Santa María” at 1635–49) of a Libro de buen amor have merit.10 But the establishment of a Libro delimited precisely enough to provide grist for authororiented criticism begs a whole series of interesting questions that Orduna touches on but does not pursue. How might Juan Ruiz himself have understood the term “libro” as a form of literary creation (he does use this term: 12–13, 16, 65, 70, 933, 986, 1626, and many others [see Deyermond, “Juan”])? Granting Juan Ruiz, for the sake of argument, a theory

12

INTRODUCTION

of “libro” identical to Orduna’s, why is it that the medieval “receptional form” of the Libro differs so radically from the Libro de buen amor Orduna would establish? Why do Juan Ruiz’s medieval readers miss the Libro de buen amor in the midst of the Libro del arcipreste de Hita? Why does the “receptional form,” in fact, resemble closely the textual realities of gloss and emendation that Orduna allows Juan Ruiz to use in the “elaboration” of his book, but banishes from the finished Libro de buen amor Orduna would make of it? As Walsh taught us, even those parts of the Libro which Orduna would isolate as his Libro de buen amor were composed in layers over time, stitched together, sometimes all too crudely. Can we really find the motivation in the text as we have received it to privilege one set of compilationes over another? Orduna beats a hasty retreat, then, from realities he quite clearly recognizes into a comfortable, neatly delineated authorial text, modeled on the printed book, printed editions, great works, and great authors, whose relevance to the Middle Ages has been assumed but nowhere, as far as I have been able to discover, proven. Juan Ruiz must adapt to our norms, not we to his. A more subtle veil appears in studies by medievalists working in Old French, some of them associated with the “New Philology” or “New Medievalism,” some, like Dragonetti or Cerquiglini, who appear to have served as springboards for the New-Philological program. I can certainly agree with Cerquiglini’s argument that “the variation of the medieval romance work is its prime characteristic, a concrete alterity which founds this object and which publication [of these works] should give priority to demonstrating”(62). Most of these scholars seem conscious of the pitfalls of what Cerquiglini calls “the notion of a fixed text” (texte sûr; 18). Yet I do not believe they have traveled as far from such notions as they might wish it to appear. The very idea of “joyous excess” (Cerquiglini 55ff.) preserves some quantifiable entity (the texte sûr?) that the varying nature of medieval manuscript textuality exceeds. Cerquiglini’s laudable “variante” simply comes up with a new, joyous, critical apparatus. And Cerquiglini’s own solution, l’édition écranique (112–16), what we may translate as “the CRTcal edition,” simply follows the logical trajectory of Gastonparisian philology’s flight from manuscript realities into ever more depurated and abstract forms of representation. Cerquiglini, whose suggestions have appeared so threatening to “old” philologists (Romance Philology 45 [1991–92]: 3, 18–20), is, in the end, simply traditional philology’s ideal reader, one of those rare scholars who actually does consult the list of variants.11 New Philology’s critique of traditional philology comes from another direction. I think there is much in the New Philology that represents a genuine renewal: the awareness of the “manuscript matrix” (Nichols, “In-

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troduction” 8), the questioning of the basic assumptions that underlie the process of critical editing (Hult, “Reading”), the recognition of the shifting nature of the Old French language itself (demonstrated more cogently in Fleischman, “Philology,” than in Bloch, “New”). But New Philology/ Medievalism is haunted by another notion of text that, in the end, is just as limiting as the belief in a texte sûr. What . . . is the risk in guarding the medieval text as if it were an alchemical secret, what is at stake in reading it like any other? What would happen if we were to take literally the possibility of reading à la lettre, or according to interpretative criteria suggested by the text itself? (Bloch, “Medieval” 101)

“Reading it like any other” means “reading it like any other Barthesian texte.” It is in the thoroughly anthropomorphic idea that texts “suggest” their own interpretive criteria that New Philology and related approaches get stuck in the web. Here Bloch turns away from the full implications of concepts such as manuscript matrix and the flux of the Old French language, simply using them as ways of extending, uncritically, the theory and practice of texte, of “reading à la lettre,” to the Middle Ages. Barthes himself, as I noted, did not foresee the application of texte to medieval literature. The move that Bloch suggests, that of reading the medieval text “like any other,” seems to solve this problem rather neatly. But I think it also avoids an important series of questions. Is such a transfer of texte really possible except by fiat? How do we reconcile this move with the insistence on the “alterity” of the medieval language and texts, which is also part of the inheritance of the New-Philological project? If the author/work paradigm does not work for medieval texts, why should we assume that the texte paradigm does? Is not texte in the end as rigid and mechanical an abstraction as is the most Lachmannly restored medieval “work”? And as rooted in the ideologies of a particular historical period (Gumbrecht, “Souffle”; Hult, “Reading” 117–18)? The New Philology repeats, then, in its own key, many of the moves it criticizes in the old. In the end, the application of texte to medieval literature preserves the same “scientific” distance vital to earlier critical movements: “the verbal icon,” “the text is its own referential system” (Riffaterre 34). As in these movements the myth of inherent textual value and values is created. The intentional capacity of human beings is transferred to the text, revealing that though we may banish authors, we have not yet found a way to banish certain “myths” of textual origin, value, and intent. The critic assumes the passive, often exasperatingly shamanistic, pose of privileged receiver of these “suggestions.” To “discover” one’s own values miraculously reflected in the letter or its veil is, of course, a quintessentially medieval move. Christian glossators’ discovery of Ovid’s or Virgil’s embodiment of Christian values in

14

INTRODUCTION

their texts is a familiar example. It may well be that many of the things medievalists find troubling in studies like those of Bloch are the same things they find upsetting in medieval reading practices: the blatant projection of one’s own values into the text in the guise of discovering those values there, the cavalier disregard for the author’s intention. If medieval readers find their authors praising and blaming again and again, if they discover the Holy Trinity figured throughout the Old Testament, is it so surprising that so many scholars these days find texts discussing their own “inscription”? Over and over, we find medieval texts talking about the very issues that might concern, say, a late-twentieth-century academic student of literature. It is what Jeay (291) calls the “retour sur soi de l’écriture” (“writing’s turning back upon itself”). This idea can stand for a whole school devoted to discovering and rediscovering that literature is chiefly preoccupied with dramatizing its own problematic creation.12 My quarrel, as I hope is apparent by now, is not with the act of projection itself, or even with the “bracketing” of the fact that it is taking place, but with the limited range we silently place upon that projection. I object to the refusal to allow these imposed and reflected values to spill beyond the safe borders of academic commentary into a realm of praxis (except, perhaps, the praxis of creating more commentary). The values discovered in the text are denied the full range of reverberation that similar medieval projections enjoyed. Perhaps I am simply using “New Medievalism” as a whipping boy for the academy in general. This desire to close literary study off from the real world, to pretend that whatever values we may find there cannot apply to us (and certainly do not originate with us), is typical not just of New Medievalists but of the twentieth-century academy in general. What medieval manuscript culture teaches us, and what we cannot avoid if we wish to understand it, is that texts refer constantly outside themselves to a system of values where they have both origin and impact. They refer, as well, to the human individual who must negotiate this system in terms of his or her own life experience. Works like Juan Ruiz’s Libro will forever (and inevitably) appear ambiguous, contradictory, fragmented, at impasse, as long as we ignore this dimension. If medieval readers were aware of no other thing, they were aware of the difference between themselves and the text. Yes, they were aware of the dangers of language, that words could mean more than one thing, and they were at the same time masters of language play. But they also saw themselves as the chosen audience of divinely ordained communication. Their texts addressed them rhetorically, grabbed them by the lapels, in a way that allowed no merging of self and text. The slippage that occurred, the space they had to negotiate through reading, was not so much between word and meaning as between the letter of the text and their own lives.

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Giles of Rome discusses these issues as he introduces his De regimine principum. Materia moralis . . . non patitur perscrutationem subtilem, sed est de negociis singularibus: quae . . . propter sui variabilitatem, magnam incertitudinem habent. Quia ergo sic est, ipsa acta singularia, quae sunt materia huius operis, ostendunt incedendum esse figuraliter & typo. (3) The subject of morals does not stand up to subtle scrutiny; rather, it deals with singular occurrences that, because of their variability, are quite uncertain. As it is so, the singular acts themselves, which are the subject of this work, show that it must be approached by figures and types.

Medieval people were well aware of the simple fact that no text could mirror their lives with complete identity, any more than any sign could fully possess a single stable meaning. Their texts could reflect their lives, but only “by figures and types.” And it was this point of difference, this space between the text and their own lives, which allowed them to escape that killing Letter and the miserable servitude to it that awaits those who seek its meaning, authorial or otherwise, or who surrender to the play of language alone. It is this evasion of the killing Letter which I call the “ethics of reading.” It depends ultimately upon a system of values that directs the flow of the letter’s play and ultimately closes it off at the point at which the letter meets the life experience of the individual reader. The “killing Letter” stands for the approach that would place all value in the play of language itself or in some achieved authorial sense (ambiguous or not) placed “intentionally” in it. The ethics of reading shows us a way out of the web of words. This is an escape that is possible and, indeed, routinely carried out by readers of any text at any period, not just by readers who live in periods during which systems of thought are relatively unified and universal.13 But there is another path, uniquely medieval, through which medieval textuality escapes the Letter and reveals the Letter’s dependence on time and place. Like the ethical world it mirrors, this pathway is intimately bound up in a world of error, indeterminacy, judgment, variability, and practical wisdom.

Per pargamenum et incaustum The Letter, both classical and poststructuralist, is an abstraction, a sequence reproduced endlessly, with only the slightest variation, by the printing press. This Letter can be analyzed and semanalyzed and taught to college students by “subjects” on opposite sides of the globe. The classical and poststructuralist Letter exists primarily in a world in which works and

16

INTRODUCTION

textes can be replicated ad infinitum. It is this very possibility which gives the Letter its autonomy and allows it to take on ever more virulent forms. Such replication was a technological impossibility throughout most of the Middle Ages. Each medieval “text” was as unique and concrete as the individual who copied it or who read it. This reality must alter, irremediably, our ideas about the relations among author, work, text, and reader in the Middle Ages. If the medieval text transcends the letter and escapes into a unique and personal ethical realm, it also eludes our standard paradigms to dwell within the equally unique and concrete world of the individual manuscript leaves that bore the letter. This is not a mere curiosity of the history of culture or technology. It is fundamental to our very notion of “medieval text.” In his Parisiana poetria, John of Garland suggests that students find ways of amplifying and varying their subject using the four principal causes: efficient, material, formal, and final. John’s suggestions about how they might do this are quite revealing. A book may be praised or blamed “per causam materialem, idest per pargamenum et incaustum; per causam formalem, ut per libri disposicionem et litterarum protractionem” (30: “through the material cause, that is, through its parchment and ink; through the formal cause, that is, through the layout of the book and the drawing out of its letters”). It would hardly occur to a modern teacher of literature to recommend to his students that they approach De la grammatologie through its paper and ink, or Castro’s Structure of Spanish History through typeface and layout. The four causes are offered as heuristic tools here, but that cannot totally eclipse the equivalencies between material cause and pen and ink, between formal cause and layout and scribal hand, that John of Garland announces. The ethical reading of the Middle Ages, focused as it is on the text as process of judgment and choice, demands that we reexamine the material and formal causes of that process. This examination reveals that many features we find in the ethical reading of medieval Europe are mirrored in the process by which reading was preserved and handed on: in the unique, individual, concrete nature of the manuscript text and of the circumstances of its production. Manuscript culture takes up its physical residence in that same world of variation, imprecision, and error. This residence necessarily implies the constant choosing between right and wrong meanings, senses and actions, in shifting and undefined contexts.14 The keystone of modern medievalism, the idea that we must have “coherent” texts before we can begin to talk about medieval literature, is absolutely at odds with the object medievalism pretends to treat. Incoherence is a powerful force in the medieval textual world, and a recognition (not suppression) of its power is fundamental to any understanding of that world. In order to understand ethical reading, then, it is imperative that we ex-

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plore the textual culture that supported it. It is the culture of the handwritten word: manuscript culture. Perhaps our suppression of the manuscript culture that lies hidden beneath critical editions begins with an uncritical focus on the manuscript book as product. Seen from this perspective, manuscript literacy resembles print literacy. A manuscript looks like a printed book: its use of the written word, the codex form, binding, durability, the possibility of buying and selling, of duplicating it with more or less precision, of placing it in libraries, of lending it (and losing it) to a friend. If we focus on the process, however, manuscript culture takes on features of orality. Each manuscript is unique (as is each oral performance). It is the work of one or more human individuals. Both processes respond to their environment, vary over time and according to circumstance (oral poetry can be rained out, a written line can detour around a hole in the parchment,15 a leaf or the writing on it can wear away). It is modified by its audience (as the oral performer tailors his performance to audience reaction, as members of the audience react to one another, as the manuscript text is mediated by generations of glosses). The handwritten text as product resembles the mechanically reproduced book; the process of its creation mimics the unique, occasional nature of oral tradition and oral performance. The rhetorical nature of orality, too, carries over into the realm of the manuscript text, always conditioned by and elaborated according to its circumstantiae. Behind the manuscript codex stands a whole culture of textual production: the student copying from a pecia lent him by the university stationer; a “workshop” of copyists (Tyssens); the personal miscellany drawn from several different manuscripts; the occasional author-supervised codex (S. Williams); manuscripts commissioned by a king, a noble, or a rich merchant; dictation in the monastic scriptorium or by an individual to his amanuensis. In contrast, the printed text, once fixed in form by the authorial/editorial process, may be reproduced almost endlessly without further human intervention at the textual level. The manuscript text is constituted by the individuals who created it: scribe, rubricator, corrector, illuminator. In the case of the scribe, these traces include individual hands (no matter how formalized), the variants caused by minor distractions whose causes are lost to us forever (a bird flying through a window), misreadings, misunderstandings, interference of dialects, poor eyesight, an aching back, and a host of other quirks that situate the product squarely in the process of its creation in a way that the printed book can never be.16 Accompanying these varying processes is a series of human emotions, attitudes, and states of mind or body that leave their mark on the text in ways unknown in the modern print medium: tedium, passion, religious fervor, the desire to produce an object of beauty, total disinterest, devotion to a patron or ruler, sloppiness, ineptitude, and even a sort of mind-

18

INTRODUCTION

less mechanical reproduction that comes to resemble, in its own way, the printing press itself. The production of the medieval text takes place, then, in that same ethical world to which it also points. These “ethical” modalities are certainly as significant in constituting “medieval literature” as are the processes of authorial creation or textual play that have been its major focuses till now. It is not so much the medium that is the message as it is the process of production. Or better, perhaps, the medium is that ethical world of praxis, error, and devotion. Until recently critics of medieval literature, coming from a textual world where such differences are rare or minimal, have viewed quirks of the manuscript text as obstacles to understanding, or as items of purely antiquarian interest. These errors and lacunae are what keep a manuscript from being a printed book. But I believe we must see them as constitutive rather than destructive of the object we study. The medieval textual edifice, built upon the backs of baby bovines, functions through, despite, and because of the fragile scribal process. Medieval readings of these texts were not deferred until modern critical texts could be established. This is not to say that medieval readers read uncritically, that they did not seek out good texts and attempt to correct bad ones; but the search itself went on in ways quite distinct from the modern textual-critical process. This search, too, is a constitutive part of medieval textuality. Our first question, then, must not be what the medieval text (that is, the reconstructed authorial work) signifies, but how that text came into being and moved physically through the world to which it belonged. Once we understand this, perhaps we can begin to perceive new ways in which signification occurred despite, through, and around the uncertain process by which medieval manuscript texts were created. I would take as a focal point for the study of medieval literature, then, the process by which an individual, concrete manuscript book came into being, grew through accretions of gloss, commentary, and irrelevant marginal jottings, moved through both space and time, and was, in many cases, transformed into another individual, concrete manuscript book. That manuscripts are different from modern printed editions is obvious enough. Yet only when we have spent some time among manuscripts do we begin to realize just how powerful this difference is. When we use the manuscript merely as a dark glass through which to seek the elusive authored text, ornate initials disappear, illuminations are reduced to a few plates; the personal stories that gave this manuscript life are reduced to a few pages of introduction. The quirks or ideological program or dialect of the scribe or manuscript sponsor are effaced out of respect for the original authored text. If the manuscript contains “minor” works or “unrelated” works or fragments, although these constitute a manuscript book compiled by medieval readers and handed on to other readers, the context of

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the minor works and fragments is reduced to a few notes in the manuscript description (except on those rare occasions when these works come together to comprise a single-author anthology). We forget or ignore this crux of medieval textual life: most manuscripts exist because a human individual had access to a manuscript previously copied by other human individuals at the same time he or she had access to the tools and materials with which to make another copy. To make medieval literature conform to the author-text model suggested by the printed book, we must subject it to considerable brutality.17 In the specific case of the Libro, in order to produce an authorial text that is “authentic,” we struggle to create a critical edition that, within certain limitations, will be the closest representation of Juan Ruiz’s “original.” The three surviving manuscripts and the few fragments must be reduced to one “book” that can then sit on our shelves alongside other canonical texts. Dialectal traits (for example, the Leonese pronunciations reflected in S and T) must be corrected to conform to the presumed dialect of the author: Castilian.18 Other variations are judged according to metrical rules or to usually unspecified or ad hoc standards of logical integrity. In the specific case of metrical standards, some editors, most notably in Cor, have resorted to superhuman effort in forcing their versions to conform to imposed systems of metrical regularity, again at the cost of great violence done to the manuscript texts. Marginalia—marks, jottings, doodles, notas—which are part of each of these manuscripts, are, in the case of paleographic editions, relegated to footnotes or endnotes, and in the case of critical editions, often ignored.19 Scribal textual division, layout, and annotation may also be ignored (in the cases of G, T, and the Portuguese fragment) or made canonical (in the case of the rubrics found in S). The composite nature of these manuscripts poses further problems for the reconstruction of authorial texts. In the case of Juan Ruiz, what parts of the text are truly his and which belong to later (or earlier) writers? Most problematical are the substantial differences found between G and T on the one hand and S on the other. The fact that S includes, among other things, a verse and prose prologue not found in G or T is especially troubling, leading many scholars to posit two authorial “editions.”20 And what of the miscellaneous material that comes at the end of all three manuscripts? Poems that appear in both S and G are presumed to be authentic, especially when they are also announced in the cuaderna vía text. The prose Visión de Filoberto, which is found in T only and is, like so much of the Libro, a translation from a medieval Latin school text, has never been considered authentic, perhaps because its first editor deemed it to be of the late fourteenth century, and thus too late to have been authored by Juan Ruiz. It has therefore been banished absolutely from discussions of the Libro, despite its physical proximity to the Libro (it was written by the

20

INTRODUCTION

same scribe and begins on the verso of the folio on which the Libro ends) and its clear thematic links to the subject of death, which scholars have seen, increasingly, to dominate the Libro.21 On the one hand, then, we have the considerable presence of the three manuscripts of the Libro (none of which is an autograph, or even an early copy); on the other we have a model that limits the unit of literary studies to the reductive paradigm of author-produced work or the texte. Does not the physical evidence of the manuscripts argue for a different model, one that might embrace the author-text model, but would not be limited by it or reduced to it? The surviving evidence for the literary life of the Middle Ages is fundamentally different from that of the era of the printed book. And I believe that the criticism that seeks to elucidate this literature must also be fundamentally different. In simplest terms, this criticism must grow out of the evidence itself. It must recognize that although medieval people certainly read “books” by “authors,” these deceptively familiar concepts were constantly conditioned by the processes through which, in the Middle Ages, “books” were produced and read—that is, by the physical manuscript codex.22 In the remainder of this study I use the term “scriptum” (pl. “scripta”), “a thing written,” to refer to medieval writings. I use this term in place of words such as “work” or “text” to remind us of the fundamental alterity of the medieval handmade book. I do not use the term “manuscriptum,” in part because of the confusion it might occasion, but chiefly because the clarifying manu would have been superfluous: through most of the Middle Ages there was no way to produce a scriptum except by hand. I use the term in place of cumbersome locutions such as “physical text” or “concrete text,” or the vaguer “manuscript matrix.” “Scriptum” signifies a concrete, unique, unduplicatable, physical manuscript together with the writing, both textual and trivial, it contains. It exists in opposition to the Letter, the infinitely replicable text that, freed from its physical support, serves as the basis of most forms of postmedieval discourse about both literature and scripta.23

Lecturature I have sketched two moves, one “beyond” the Letter into the ethical world of readers and one “beneath” it, into the physical scriptum that bears the letter: one movement of transcendence, the other of immanence. Despite the apparent contrast, there is a remarkable similarity in these moves. In his apotheosis of the Letter, Barthes (“Theory” 44) suggests that all reading should become writing. I begin by suggesting we

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link both moves to a similar rhetorical reversal that sees all forms of writing (from “creative” to scribal) as reading. To do this we will need to return to the question of ethics. “Ethical reading,” which links reading to the unique individual life of the reading subject via an interplay of systems of values between reader and text, is a perennial feature of the act of reading. It is a feature necessarily ignored by contemporary litteromanic criticism, which repeatedly commits in the most literal of ways the error Augustine so clearly warned against: that of taking signs for things (Augustine, On Christian 3.9). It is also a feature for which the Middle Ages already had ample theoretical materials. The ethical imperative of that body of writings we now refer to as “medieval literature” was studied by Allen (Ethical). Allen demonstrated that medieval commentators assigned most of the writings we now classify as “poetry” to the category “ethics.” Of special interest is the way in which Allen establishes the relation between a text (here, a poem) and its audience: “A poem, fully understood, is larger than its textuality, and includes, by assimilation, its audience and its commentary as well, by which and because of which it functions as part of the system of parallel systems of which the world is composed” (217). According to Allen, the medieval text must be viewed not as verbal icon, not as Letter alone, but as an “event” that actualizes the ethical behavior of a reader, absorbs the reader into its own ethical system, and stimulates, among other ethical acts, its own reenactment (and, I would add, its own retelling and recopying). When we turn to scholarship on the Libro we find that Spitzer has anticipated some of these ideas: “The human book, a copy of the divine, will be changeable in its interpretation: the reader’s gloss also belongs to the text of the poetic work. . . . The original text contains all the possible senses and subsequent interpretations” (Spitzer, “En torno” 123). Spitzer and Allen, then, work out a model of the functioning of medieval ethical texts by which the text somehow contains its readers and the act of reading. Allen’s analysis of the medieval ethical poetic remains bound to the idea that the basis of literary (or ethical) inquiry is the literary text, which, through Allen’s discovery of this poetic, is now opened to include the reader or his or her reenactment. For Allen, this inclusion of the reader should allow us now to elucidate more accurately the written object that, say, Chaucer set out to write. The important study by Gerli (“Recta”) allows us to add a crucial correction to these ideas. Gerli shows how ideas worked out in Augustine’s De magistro inform Juan Ruiz’s ethical stance. For Augustine, Gerli reminds us, the teacher cannot communicate truths directly to students through signs. The state of the student’s will, whether he chooses to love God or the things of this world, determines the sense he will perceive: “The result of perusing the Libro is at once esthetic and ethical—we are

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INTRODUCTION

obliged to enter into it not as mere spectators but as interpreters of art; and we are forcibly led to make value judgments about what we have experienced” (508).24 Gerli’s reading of “Augustine’s ethics” points the way to the Libro that I discuss in this study, a book that engages its reader in a dynamic process, a process that, because it involves choices and action, is necessarily ethical. Gerli’s observations allow us to move beyond Allen’s and Spitzer’s authorcentric idea that the literary text encloses or contains the reader. It allows us to reject our most basic of paradigms— author, work, texte, printed book—in favor of a paradigm that shifts the focus to the reader and to the act of reading in all its variety. The “ethics of reading” implies, and the fact of the medieval scriptum demands, a redefinition of the concept “literature” as it relates to the Middle Ages. We can do this only if we recognize that in the Middle Ages the primary “literary” activity was not writing, and certainly not “authoring” or “creating,” but reading. The broad lines of such a reversal are easily drawn. We have only to acknowledge that the vast bulk of medieval writing is biblical commentary (or commentary upon commentary). I would not be the first to suggest that there is just one text and one Author for the Middle Ages, to which the rest is gloss (for example, Cerquiglini 59; Jeay 286 [paraphrasing Dragonetti]). Add to this not only the commentaries on classical texts, but also a vast body of adaptation, translation, remaniement, continuation, prosification, versification, and various forms of compilatio, including florilegia. Nearly every sermon delivered in medieval Europe, whether in Latin or in the vernacular, was a reading and explication of a specific text. Standard texts—Ovid, Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica, Terence, legal texts, and of course the Bible—soon acquired standard readings in the form of glosses that often migrated over time to the body of the text, leaving room for further glosses. Nor should we forget that the reworking of fables and other canonical texts by students and the commentary upon them by masters was a part of education from late antiquity. Finally, we should remember that the very act of reproducing the physical manuscript text involved an intimate act of reading that has no precise parallel in the age of printing. As I suggested in the Preface, the author/work paradigm is presently under siege in its relation to medieval literary studies. The first blow was struck by Zumthor’s now-classic idea of mouvance: “Each version, each ‘state of the text’ should in principle be considered not so much the result of an emendation as of a re-using, a re-creation” (Essai 72). In the past decade scholars have been groping for terminology to express the evolving view of the nature of medieval literary culture: “re-creation” (Van Vleck); “récriture” (Cerquiglini 57); “ré-écriture” (Poirion; Jeay 283); “secondary creative acts” (Pickens, Songs 35); “re-author,” “re-writing”

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(Carruthers 168); “co-créateur” (Jeay 285); or Dragonetti’s revealing term, “lecture-écriture” (42). Like the concept of mouvance (and the idea of aesthetics of reception), these terms attempt to integrate the newly recognized importance of reading in medieval literary culture, while leaving the author or the text in their traditional central location. Minnis (Medieval) and Allen (Ethical) have, from quite different directions, caused us to reexamine the validity of our comfortable term “author” in the light of medieval realities. And still more recent scholarship has posed questions that render the application of traditional ideas of authorship to the medieval literary object still more problematic. Van Vleck is among the first scholars to attempt to view a set of medieval authors from their own perspective, rather than from ours. The troubadours she studies are aware of the limitations and strengths of the modes of transmission open to them. She also shows that what we view as limitations and strengths were not necessarily viewed in the same way by the troubadours. In particular, the author’s desire to control the fate of his text seems to have been only a minor preoccupation for the troubadours she studies. Carruthers has shown that much medieval composition went on in the memory before being dictated directly to scribes. This simple fact alone must alter radically the assumption that lurks behind most of our views of medieval textuality (and our attempts to reconstruct it): the idea that there was somewhere an “autograph” manuscript, a written authorial draft. Chartier (161) has attacked the question from a still broader perspective. He quotes Roger E. Stoddard: “Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines.” Chartier adds: This gap, which is the space in which meaning is constructed, has too often been overlooked, not only by the classical approaches, which consider the work itself as a pure text whose typographical forms do not matter, but also by reception theory . . . , which postulates a direct, immediate relationship between the “text” and the reader, between the “textual signals” used by the author and the “horizon of expectation” of those he addresses.

The solution Chartier proposes “requires consideration of the close-knit relationship among three poles: the text itself, the object that conveys the text, and the act that grasps it.” I believe we are best able to carry out such consideration from the viewpoint of reading rather than of authoring. But I would add that, along with trying to understand the “close-knit relationship” among text, scriptum, and reader, we must see that they function together, a synolon that puts the act of reading at the center of medieval “literary” activities.

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INTRODUCTION

I think that this shift from author-based to reader-based paradigm is essential to an understanding of the shape of medieval texts.25 Reading, not writing, was the dominant literary mode in the Middle Ages. This does not mean that I would banish the study of authors (even if I had the delusion that I could do so). Rather, it means that we can understand medieval authors best by seeing them as a special (and especially interesting) case of “reader.” How does our view of medieval literature change, what new things do we see, when we take as our premise the idea that the impetus for producing texts moves from reading and is conditioned by reading rather than from and by “creative” authors?26 To put it another way, I suggest that medievalists become not students of “literature,” but students of “lecturature.” This is something of a Saussurian move: placing the creation of literary sense, not in the fixed points of the authorial work or “text” (as edited for the printing press and modern readers), but in the fluid (but often quite concretely documented) interstices between them. It is here that the system of medieval “lecturature” functions. The following almost trivial example may help to clarify what I mean by “lecturature.” It is not intended, however, to exhaust the possibilities of the concept. We are accustomed to refer to the author’s invitation to “correct” or amplify his book as a topos of the exordium, or perhaps as an equally topical expression of (usually false) modesty.27 I have already cited some examples of this common topos in the Libro, but we can also find it in works as diverse as the prologues to the “Solsequium” of Hugo von Trimberg (ca. 1230–ca. 1313) and to the fourteenth-century Libro del Cauallero Zifar.28 The latter provides a particularly good illustration: esta obra es fecha so emienda de aquellos que la quesieren emendar. E çertas deuenlo fazer los que quisieren e la sopieren emendar sy quier; porque dize la escriptura: “[Qui] sotilmente la cosa fecha emienda, mas de loar es que el que primeramente la fallo.” E otrosy mucho deue plazer a quien la cosa comiença a fazer que la emienden todos quantos la quesieren emendar e sopieren; ca quanto mas es la cosa emendada, tanto mas es loada. (6) This work is written with the proviso that those who wish to do so may emend it. And certainly those who may wish to and who know how to emend it should do so, for the text says: “Whoever emends the written word with subtlety is more worthy of praise than he who first wrote it.” And also it should greatly please the person who began the work that all who wish to and know how to emend it do so, for the more a thing is emended the more it is praised.29

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A reading of this passage from the author-oriented point of view leads to a dead end. It is simply a topical and obligatory expression of authorial modesty. Because the ideas expressed in this passage carry the work of producing the text beyond our own boundaries, which are drawn at the point at which the author completes his work or in a field of purely textual play, they must necessarily remain empty of meaning for us. The passage can be of no direct relevance to our task of interpreting the authorial text that follows. We must simply acknowledge its topical nature, bracket it off from those parts of the text which we do consider subject to critical/ interpretive activities, and go on. Seen from within our own paradigms of literary production, all this passage offers the critic is a series of dead letters. But if we shift our view to the reader as central and to the implications that such statements may have for him or her, this “topical” passage comes alive. It opens the text to a new range of activities. Among these activities are “emendation” (which words? on what basis or authority?) and “knowing how to emend” (how does one gain this knowledge?; cf. Libro 1629ab). This passage also grants “greater praise” to the subtle corrector of the text than to the author himself. This is as clear a statement as we could wish for that the “work” of an “author,” which we still place at the summit of our own hierarchy of literary values, took second place to those written forms which we tend to devalue: commentary, continuation, remaniement. In fact, praise accrues to the author in direct proportion to the amount of emendation readers carry out upon his text. We tend to view such statements as a generous, even postmodern, opening of the text, a sharing of the authorial text with the reader. But medieval authors were well aware that their texts would be changed, whether or not they wanted them to be. Many complained venomously about this. A reader-oriented approach suggests that we should view such statements not as the author’s “opening” of his creative work, but as his attempt to claim for himself at least a piece of the action. I believe, then, that by taking seriously such “topical” invitations by the author to correct his text, we can open up a spectrum of interesting and important questions about medieval literature that we cannot otherwise ask. Of course, there is nothing to prevent us from continuing to place such statements in the comfortable realm of the topos; but if we do, we must also recognize that we are arbitrarily eliminating from consideration a frequent and significant part of the object we would study. We must also admit that we are choosing to ignore the concrete physical evidence of the thousands of medieval scripta that document emendation and amplification (“Glosynge,” in short) as ever-present and vital parts of the textual life of the Middle Ages.

26

INTRODUCTION

The frequent exhortations by Juan Ruiz and numerous other medieval writers to their readers to understand “something else,” the sententia, the “marrow” in their texts, provide a further example of the type of passage that takes on new interpretive life when seen from a perspective that gives primacy to reading rather than to authoring. The author-centered paradigm does not allow us to explore these exhortations, except on those rare occasions when the author himself spells out on the page just what this “otra cosa” is. A reader-centered paradigm invites us to explore, however tentatively, the larger world of medieval textuality, which embraces the medieval reader’s attempt to determine what that “otra cosa” might be. A tremendous strategic advantage of taking reading as the central paradigm of medieval literacy, then, is that it habilitates areas of medieval written texts that even those who have no essential quarrel with medieval literature have devalued. As we have seen, it allows us to situate “lesser” forms, such as translation, adaptation, remaniement, and continuation, as worthy (even privileged) objects of critical attention. They are no longer secondary, subordinate to “original” works by “creative” authors. More importantly, a focus on reading as the primary “literary” activity of the Middle Ages allows us to move out of the negative column many modern topoi about medieval letters. The popular assumptions about this literature that make medieval specialists most uncomfortable cluster about this very problem: that medieval authors are “unoriginal”; that they have no sense of authorship; that they are borrowers or plagiarists; that the literature they create is hackneyed, topical, unstructured, repetitive, digressive; that medievalists often work with texts that are not really “literature.” When we place the burden of medieval literariness on the reader and the individual act of reading, such features become important guides to the nature of the reading act. Can there be such a thing as digression, for example, when the reader is the point? Is a literary or ethical topos applied by a specific reader to a specific personal problem at a specific moment still topical? And of what use is a concept such as “original” when applied to individual acts of reading (or audition) by individual readers? The view of medieval literature that takes reading as its central paradigm allows us to recognize that all acts of reading are also acts of plagiarism.

Reading Medieval Reading If we may grant for a moment that reading is the dominant literary paradigm of the Middle Ages, our next problem is to determine what methods we might use to investigate medieval reading. How do we look for our key in the dark? We can easily see that the very variety of medieval modes of reading renders this a forbidding task. We can establish two main divisions

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of medieval reading: individual reading with manuscript book in hand either silently or aloud, and oral reading in the company of other people.30 Clearly the nature of oral reading is lost to us for all time, given the ephemeral contingency of time and place, the perishability of the oral medium, and the fact that a variety of readings are taking place at once and, perhaps, influencing one another.31 This suggests to me that an investigation of medieval reading cannot begin with oral readings. But it does raise a useful point to take with us in the course of this study: all reading is contingent on time, place, circumstance, moment. No two readings are alike, even two readings by the same individual. It seems, then, that we must limit our investigation to individual readings carried out with the physical text in hand. Here we also encounter a number of problems. How do we go about recovering the reading experience of the Middle Ages, the particular texture of reading, its starts and stops and bumps and skips, a texture that the interpretive problems we encounter in a book like the Libro suggest was far different from our own? Jovellanos would at least have had the option of rousing his readers from their slumber and asking them at precisely which point in the first eight or ten stanzas their eyelids began to feel heavy. We cannot rouse fourteenthand fifteenth-century readers of the Libro. And yet, in a text where the author so urgently requests the reader’s presence, it is important that we at least attempt to do so. The heft of a codex, the whispering in the monastic reading room, are past recovering. We cannot know them. But some tracings of medieval readings do remain to provide important clues. The medieval texts that have survived are surrounded in a very physical way by their readings, by the glosses, reclamos, nota benes, allegorizing or moralizing commentaries, pointing hands, accessus, synopses of ancient myths, and so on. These marginalia (and interlinealia) help us to measure the pace of medieval reading, the places where it starts and stops, refers, expands, takes note. The text is constantly mediated by glosses, and these glosses, in turn, refer not so much to the text as to the larger and invisible world that is medieval reading itself. Chapter 1 takes as its starting point the act of glossing, a key subset within the larger paradigm of reading. The subtitle of this Introduction, “The Larger Gloss,” comes in part from the obvious play on the Biblical glossa maior and on Juan Ruiz’s own “mas la glosa / non creo que es chica.”32 ¶

ffiz vos pequeno libro / de testo mas la glosa non creo que es chica / ante es byen grad prosa que sobre cada fabla / se entyende otra cosa syn la que se a lega / enla Rason fermosa (S:98v;1631)

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INTRODUCTION

I have made you a book that is small* in its text, but I believe that the gloss is not small; rather, it is quite a big* piece of writing; for in each tale something else is to be understood, beyond that which is said in the pretty text.

This is the clearest statement we could wish for that the letter of the text, “la Rason fermosa,” is not the only text of the Libro. In the following study I seek to begin to understand just what that mysterious “otra cosa” might be. But the subtitle derives as well from the idea that through “la glosa,” and through other comments by medieval writers on the act of reading, we can arrive at a clearer understanding of the special way in which the medieval reader moved through the text before him. This understanding may, in turn, give us insight into the many difficulties that beset the interpreter of the Libro. This book works at two levels, then. At one level, I seek to investigate how a specific set of medieval scripta functioned within the medieval textual/ethical system. I attempt to elucidate “ethical” reading of the Libro as a critical approach to this specific text (although I think this approach has validity for many medieval texts). But in the process of doing this, I have been forced to reexamine the very way in which we understand what medieval textuality, and by extension, medieval literature, is. Thus my study of the ethical reading of the Libro serves as a springboard for a general revision of our view of medieval textuality and the very substantial ways in which it differs from contemporary print textuality. In the end, the chasm that separates medieval scriptum and modern textuality is deep enough and broad enough to invalidate the application of much contemporary theory to medieval literature, based as this theory is on the author/ print paradigm and on the dogged taking of signs for things. We have yet to appreciate fully the extent to which contemporary literary theory is founded upon an archi-typographie. This revision hopes to open up, then, a new range of theoretical exploration based on a new paradigm of manuscript culture. At stake here are two very different ways in which medieval lecturature escapes our own much narrower Letter. The dual focuses of this book explain its peculiar rhythm: the shifting between narrow reading of the Libro and larger concerns about the nature of the medieval manuscript, gloss, and medieval reading itself. These two movements appear on the surface to be very much opposed. The one leads to such abstractions as ethics, the medieval reader, and the way that reader worked through the text before him. It leaves behind the safe world of the letter on the page for a sea of unknowns and unverifiables. In contrast, the other movement is too concrete. It attempts to examine the functioning of a world through its particulars, through unique, individual instances of scripta: parchment, letter, and gloss. I have struggled at times to separate these two goals, but

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in the end I have found it impossible to distinguish them fully. The true link between them is, I believe, their link to the world of human behavior. “Ethics” means simply “what people do.” This ethics applies in both cases: first, what people do as they read and with what they read; and second, the medieval scriptum as “what scribes, glossators, readers, and commentators did.” Both ethics exist in a fallen world of error, uncertainty, and flux, where both meaning and salvation have to be continually renegotiated. This most basic of ethics will have to bind the two together for now.

PART I

1 “A GLORIOUS THYNG, CERTEYN” AT THE MARGINS OF THE MEDIEVAL TEXT

R

EADING CAN serve as an illuminating master paradigm of the textual life of the Middle Ages. But we must understand that this paradigm operates at the same high level of generality as does the writer/text paradigm. It still requires considerable nuancing with regard to place, time, language, genre, the specific scripta under study, and above all the techniques we might employ in studying them. All those phenomena which we have customarily examined under the reigning “creative” paradigm need to be worked out anew under the paradigm of reading. As we work through the paradigm of reading using the evidence afforded by medieval scripta, many new phenomena will no doubt be observed. There will also be some instances, I am sure, when the reading paradigm suggests a model of authored texts quite similar to our traditional one. It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt more than an elementary application of the paradigm of reading to the Middle Ages in general. I will be working essentially in two directions. On the one hand, I will work out from a variety of specific fourteenth- through sixteenth-century scripta, which (as an ironic but, for me, still inescapable convenience) I refer to as the “Libro.” On the other hand, I will invoke a series of ever narrower focuses on reading itself. The dubious marvels of English orthography, and the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, provide me with a general term for the first and broadest focus: “Glosynge.” This type of reading was the chief “support” of ethical reading in the Middle Ages and was in turn a key force in shaping the scripta of Juan Ruiz’s Libro. I use the term “Glosynge” in full acceptance of the ironies present in the Summoner’s friar’s glorification of Glosynge as a form of mediation between a difficult audience and a resistant text. The friar is absolutely right that Glosynge is “Nat/ al after/ the text” (Ellesmere 82r; [D]1790–94; folio numbers, not visible in the facsimile, are supplied from the notes in Hengwrt).

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PART I

Juan Ruiz and the Medieval Ovid In the Middle Ages the text of Ovid was rather different from what modern students of the classics would identify as his text—different, too, from what the Roman poet wrote. “Ovid” for the Middle Ages was our Ovid, or the Roman Ovid, plus a battery of explanatory material ranging from interlinear glosses of difficult vocabulary or syntax to vast allegorizing commentaries on the text, such as those of Arnulf of Orleans, Pierre Bersuire, or the anonymous Ovide moralisé. Between these extremes we find a range of glossatory material that determined for the medieval reader how Ovid was to be understood—determined, in effect, what “Ovid” was. Such material included references to rhetorical figures used by the Roman poet (annotators were especially careful to point out irony), along with grammatical notes, explanations of metaphors (ignis glossed as amor), discussions of the genealogies of pagan gods and other characters in the work, and explanations of cultural references to Roman society that might need to be interpreted for the medieval reader. Argumenta in prose, or even verse, summarized the plot. Accessus showed the medieval student how he was to approach Ovid’s text (Coulson; Hexter; BPP 4-H [Metamorphoses]). As Rico has observed, there is a tendency in the Middle Ages for text and gloss to merge and for the former to come to dominate the latter (Alfonso 167–68). Text and gloss unite to form a new, integral text that we may identify as the “medieval Ovid.” This process went on, of course, not just with Ovid but with all the ancient authors whom medieval readers so avidly desired to know: Virgil, Lucan, Boethius, Terence, “Cato.”1 The twentieth-century reader who seeks to read the medieval Ovid—or the medieval Virgil, for that matter—finds he must perform demanding feats of mental gymnastics alien to his own mode of thought and especially to his well-developed ideas of how one explicates a text. The modern mind rebels when it is told, as in a twelfth-century accessus to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that “intentio istius est hortari nos ad contemptum secularium et ad appetitum celestium” (Young 9: “Ovid’s intention is to exhort us to condemn earthly things and to desire celestial things”).2 There is little in the text of our Ovid to support such a reading; and we are used to finding support for our readings in the text. Most contemporary approaches to literature share at least the idea that a text is somehow in dialogue with itself, that its parts correspond to one another in some way, even if only in contradicting or undermining one another. But the medieval Ovid does not work that way. Dido’s lament is not in the Heroides for its affective beauty but so that Ovid can complain about “the inconstancy of women” (Sedlmayer 96: “Hic inconstantes

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carpit Naso mulieres”)! In another letter, Ovid “criticizes Leander for undergoing so many dangers for the love of a woman” (100: “unde reprehenditur [Leander], quod pro muliebri amore tantum inibat periculum”). There is a gap, to us perhaps unbridgeable, between what Ovid seems to be about and what the gloss says he is about. We search in vain for the connecting link. Things that do not go together at all have been joined by brute force. This force is characteristic of the medieval program for reconciling pagan “authors” to the needs of a Christian society. Christian writers themselves recognized this violence in the metaphors they chose to use to describe this process. The pagan text, according to Jerome, was like the captiva gentilis of Deut. 21:10–13, who must be shorn of all her hair, have all her nails trimmed, and live apart for one month before she can be taken for a wife. Augustine (Letter 70) compared the process to the spoliatio Aegyptorum carried out by the Israelites on their former masters (Exod. 3:22, 11:2, 12:35). Pagan literature was “despoiled” of the riches it could yield for Christian society (Robertson 337–41; Lubac 1:290–304). These metaphors describe rather aptly what has happened to the medieval Ovid. He has been bathed and shorn and allowed to grow new hair; the parts of him deemed to be of value have been snatched up greedily (as the florilegia show); the rest have been left behind. In short, when we attempt to read the medieval Ovid, we are struck by a feeling that there is a tremendous gap between the interpretations of the text open to us and the sense we are told it contains. It is the giddy and disquieting feeling that disparate things are being held together rather precariously. It is, in fact, precisely the same feeling we get when we seek to apply our own exegetical techniques to the interpretation of the Libro. The vast and largely unexplored body of medieval literary theory found in accessus and gloss traditions teaches us that the “medieval Ovid” as text did not contain the sort of unity we expect to find—the kind that can be disassembled and put back together again. Text and gloss are at odds. Meaning has been imposed upon the text, and none of the strategies to which we instinctively resort—context, structure, allegory, symbolism, ambiguity, parody, irony—can help us to find a link between the text and the meaning the author of the gloss asserts it contains. The Libro, too, seems to invite modern critics to attack it with all of their favorite critical weapons, and at the same time to withdraw the possibility of using these weapons in any effective way to elucidate the text. We are graciously beckoned in one door and unceremoniously hustled out another. But we are not really reading what Juan Ruiz read when we sit down to do a source study of the Libro with a Teubner or Oxford or Loeb edition of, say, the Ars amatoria in hand. Nor are we reading what Juan Ruiz’s

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readers read when we sit down with a modern edition of his text, ignoring the vast body of commentary on Biblical or secular works that shaped the literary activities of both authors and readers. We will not be able to recover the reading act of the Middle Ages until we free ourselves from the powerful model of the printed book and its author. We will not understand “Juan Ruiz” until we realize that “Juan Ruiz” does not end where the edges of a critical text or list of variants meet the white marginal spaces of the printed page. The world of manuscripts, including the little world of the scripta of the Libro, is its own world, and our view of it will remain a distorted one if we insist on looking at it through the lens of the printed book. That manuscripts are different from modern printed editions is obvious enough, and yet when we have spent some time among manuscripts we begin to realize just how powerful this difference is. Manuscripts are, in fact, a vital culture. They have their own mores, customs, taboos, and, especially, sacred and profane places. Manuscripts have pages of text, and spaces between texts. They have margins and flyleaves. Flyleaves provide a good place to test a new quill or to practice forms of epistolary salutation. They are also good for copying, over and over, the grammar teacher’s latest pedantry and, curiously, were a favorite spot for writing down the verse epitaphs of major classical authors—especially Ovid, Terence, and Lucan—which circulated with little variation throughout medieval Europe. Margins are another world altogether. They are usually spared the mindless pen scratches and other jottings, for margins relate to centers, that is, to texts.3 Margins do things to texts. They call attention, through pointing fingers and flourishes, to important passages. They are a good place to write in corrections or alternate readings, or to point out the use of a specific rhetorical figure. Indeed, the term “margin” suggests to us a more precarious relation to the “text” than was, in fact, the case in medieval manuscripts. Often the space for marginalia was pricked and ruled as part of basic page design, whether or not this space was ever filled with marginal annotations. But the most important thing to remember about the ways in which what medieval readers read differs from what we read is this: margins were the place for dialogue with other readers of the text. Texts were shared, not private, affairs. In the margins readers corrected other readers, saw what other readers had marked as important, and added, perhaps, a few new pointing fingers or notas of their own. Margins were places where one might, in rare cases, copy one’s own opinion about a text. More often, one would copy a teacher’s comments or a commentary from another book, thus extending the dialogue across generations, miles, and centuries. This world still lives for those who care to look. And it is here that the

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reading of the Libro must begin. What is in the margins of medieval scripta is also central to our understanding of them. That invisible merging of text and gloss, which I have taken as a key to unlocking the medieval reading strategies hidden in the Libro, is taken up implicitly by Juan Ruiz in his “parable” for interpreting his book (Brownlee, Status 74ff.; compare Spitzer, “En torno” 124). ¶

Entiende bien mis dichos / ¬ piensa la sentencia non me contesca con tigo / commo al doctor de greçia con nel rribaldo Romano / ¬ con su poca sabiençia quando demando Roma / agreçia la çiençia (S:5r;46)

Understand my words well and weigh the sententia. Don’t let it happen to me with you as it did to the learned Greek with the Roman rogue and with his small wisdom when Rome asked for knowledge from Greece.

Juan Ruiz derives this first, most important exemplum, the story of the Greeks and the Romans, from a gloss by Accursius on the title De origine juris of the Digest.4 What was a marginal comment on law now becomes the law for reading the book. That which was marginal, supplemental, becomes a part of the very fabric of the text. The much-cited prologue to the Lais of Marie de France provides a useful starting point for an exploration of the precise nature of glosses and glossatory activity in the Middle Ages (Spitzer, “En torno” and “Prologue”): Custume fu as ancïens, ceo testimoine Precïens, es livres que jadis faiseient assez oscurement diseient pur cels ki a venir esteient e ki aprendre les deveient, que peüssent gloser la letre e de lur sen le surplus metre. (“En torno” 105–6) It was a custom among the ancients, Priscian is my witness, that in the books they made back then they spoke rather obscurely so that those who were to follow and who would learn them could gloss the letter and add the “surplus” from their own understanding.5

The passage reveals a belief in the ongoing nature of the interpretive process. The obscurity (that locus of indeterminacy) of ancient books is an open invitation to future generations to add the “surplus” by glossing the letter of the text.6 Although the letter of the text contains all possible

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interpretations, it can do this only because it contains none of them individually. The “surplus,” although present in potentia in the text, cannot be realized in actu until an individual reader adds it to the text as his own gloss, until he actualizes it through an individual act of reading. The function of Marie de France’s surplus is confirmed by its negative in a well-annotated copy of Luke found in BdO 92 (S. XIV). Here a gloss (of course) explains the types of gloss and the order in which they are to be read (85r): [G]losula alia est de continuatione sensus alia de continuatione littere. alia suppletionis si quid minus dictum est. alia explanationis ubi obscura [?] alia conditionis quando auctoritatibus quod dictum est confirmatur. Ordinem predictum obserua in legendo. Ordo multum operatur ad intelligentiam. One type of gloss concerns the meaning, another the grammatical explanation, another type fills in passages that have been left out, another gives explanations of obscure passages,* and another gives the background as when what the text says is confirmed using authorities. Observe the above order in reading. Order is a great aid to understanding.

Each type of gloss exists in the ever-deficient realm of aliquid minus: a meaning that remains to be worked out, an explanation needed to make the grammatical structure snap into focus (what Latin student has not experienced this aliquid minus ?), the physical absence caused by lost leaves or passages skipped in copying, a confirmation and authentication that assures meaning. Medieval scripta come into being negatively charged, wanting. In this one place the concept of “fallen” or “unfulfilled” texts can be useful. The surplus that is Glosynge is always working toward some plenitude of sense. But as soon as this surplus is added, as soon as the gloss becomes text, the text reverts to a negative charge. Glosynge must begin anew. We may situate the origin of ethical reading in this moment of fulfillment and depletion, for this moment leads to understanding and action in the unfinished realm of human endeavor. The author-oriented view of the Archpriest’s exhortations to his reader—“Entiende bien mis dichos / ¬ piensa la sentencia” (S:5r;46a) or “entiende bien mi libro” (G:4v;64d)—places the emphasis on the possessives and the nouns: “mis dichos.” The object to be understood is in the letter of the text, placed there by an author who, in doing so, also takes possession of it. Such a view of the interpretive process involves the modern (or postmodern) critic in a whole series of Letter-bound activities that keeps him or her revolving around the empty and infinite sense of “mis dichos.” The ethical reading of the Middle Ages puts the emphasis on the dynamic nature of the verbs, entender, pensar, and on the obvious, but nevertheless elusive, truth that it is the reader alone who produces and acts out meaning.7

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This is not to say, of course, that the letter of the text had no relation to the sense that the medieval reader produced in the act of reading. Part of the task of this book is to explore the nature of that relation, so different from our own view of the way in which texts “mean.” The model for such a view of the nature of texts is, as Spitzer points out, Scripture itself (see the Introduction above). The very idea that the coming of Christ “fulfills” the historical events recounted in the Old Testament founds the model of “surplus” or “gloss.” Christ is the gloss who acts out the events already contained, in potential, in the Old Testament. He adds the “surplus” to their aliquid minus. Without this surplus, in the view of Christian thinkers, this text is incomplete. Christian history is a vast gloss on Old Testament history, which nevertheless contains the central meaning of that history. Christ actualizes, acts out, meanings already figured there. Glosynge in the Middle Ages cannot be the static determination of textual meaning, the solution of authorial puzzles. Nor is it an endless play at the level of the Letter alone, though, as we shall see, Glosynge embodied value-driven play of remarkable variety and delight. In the end, the act of Glosynge is intimately bound up in the dynamic of time, change, conversion, if you will. It is both what comes after and what comes before the physical manuscript text, the scriptum, of Ovid or of Juan Ruiz. It is at the margins of scripta that ethical reading and Glosynge converge. The real world of human struggle and the vellum world of manuscript margins are spaces in which the text is glossed, augmented, enacted, changed. The culture at the margins of medieval manuscripts in Castile, and indeed in Europe at large, remains a terra incognita. Yet there is evidence that Glosynge was an essential part of literary reality (in both Latin and the vernacular) throughout medieval Europe. It is a reality we can no longer ignore as we seek to understand the forces that shaped the creation and reception of medieval scripta, and, specifically, of the scripta I refer to collectively here as the “Libro.” A few brief examples may help us to enter that world. In early fifteenth-century Castile, Pablo de Santa María announces in his Additiones that he will annotate Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla “cum paucis admodum additionibus in margine transcriptis” (“with a few additions written in the margins”) ut et ipsi novitii studentes facere solent, qui cum librum aliquem affectuose perlegunt, aliquibus glossulis saepe manu propria conscriptis margines occupant, ut firmius memoriae, quod legerint, tradant [sic]. (PL 113:37) as new students are accustomed to do, who, when they are moved by some book they read, fill the margins with a few glosses, often written in their own hand, so that they may commit to memory more firmly what they have read.

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Pablo considers the custom of glossing books an everyday part of the scholarly life. He inserts himself and his work in “glossatory position” vis-à-vis Nicholas of Lyra’s own “postilla” on the Bible. He posits memory as the endpoint of the process of glossing (cf. Carruthers, chs. 5 and 7). As Juan Ruiz preaches in his prologue (and as Carruthers has shown), it is, in turn, “memoria de bien” (S:2r;prol.) that makes possible the ethical reading of his text (see Chapter 2). But the world at the margins is not always so serious. We can find traces of the same sense of humor that allowed personages such as Juan Ruiz to flourish in medieval Castile. Among the texts found in BNM 10046 (SS. XIII and XIV) is a Latin version of the Chronica of St. Martin that belonged to the cathedral library in Toledo. The entry for the year 508 ab urbe condita (21v) describes the Gauls: “gali siquidem sunt animo feroces corpora fortiora aliis hominibus habentes” (“Indeed, the Gauls are ferocious in courage, having bodies stronger than other men”). In the margin some reader, in a variation on a pun that was already old then, has drawn a picture of a rather peaceable-looking chicken. More personal communication can go on, however, as we see in BNM 10073 (S. XIV), a Latin grammar text with examples in Castilian. A reader has written in the top margin, “yo amigo tengo te por fodido amen” (45v: “Friend, I think you are screwed, amen”). Was this aimed at whatever readers might come after or at a specific “amigo” whom the scribbler of the gloss knew would follow him in reading the manuscript? Or is it aimed at the book itself? “You, friend, are impossible to read, amen.” Another Castilian reader recounts a more public agony in RAH Aemilianensis 11 (SS. XIII/XIV), a copy of Comestor’s Historia scholastica originally from the monastery of San Millán, 283v: “tres bezes me han azotado por fray juan del canpo” (“They have whipped me three times on account of [by?] Fray Juan del Campo”). Three folios later, the reader returns: “quatro bezes por fray Juan del Canpo . . .” (286v: “Four times because of [by] Fray Juan del Campo . . .”).

Scripta and Gloss Such incidental material provides striking glimpses of the people who worked their way through manuscripts in medieval Castile, but the world at the margins of Latin manuscripts holds a larger significance for those who would study medieval vernacular scripta. At the origins of vernacular culture sits that founding aliquid minus which in Spain, as in other European regions, gives rise to vernacular letters: the difference between the “obscure” Latin text and the diaphanous vernacular one (Ong 112–16; Stock 19–30). The earliest examples of written “Spanish” are one-word

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glosses on unfamiliar lexical items in Latin religious texts. The first brief Spanish text, what Alonso (“Primer”) has called “el primer vagido de nuestra lengua” (“the first infant wail of our language”), appears in the margins of a tenth-century collection of Latin homilies (RAH 60, 72r).8 It is not by chance that this text is also the earliest Spanish model for the process of accretion of glosses and their subsequent absorption into texts. Following a practice found in thousands of medieval manuscripts, an eleventh-century reader adds brief glosses of a grammatical nature in the interlinear spaces (in italics): domino

Adiubante domino nostro Ihesu Xristo cui est qui

qui domino est

cum ke

honor et imperium cum Patre et Spiritu in ke

corum

Sancto in secula seculorum. amen.

In the margin beside the close of this homily, perhaps the same reader has written a “Spanish” translation. Cono aiutorio de nuestro dueno dueno Christo dueno salbatore qual dueno get ena honore e qual duenno tienet e la mandatione cono Patre cono Spiritu Sancto enos sieculos de losiecu los. Faca nos Deus omnipotes tal serbitio fere ke denante e la sua face gaudioso segamus. Amen. With the aid of our Lord Christ, Lord Savior, who is in honor and who holds command with the Father and the Holy Spirit now and forever. May omnipotent God make us perform such service that we may appear joyfully* before him. Amen. [Italicized portion is unique to the Spanish gloss.]

This layering of interlinear and marginal glosses reveals a series of attempts to remedy the aliquid minus of the Latin text, beginning at the level of continuatio litterae. The referent of the pronoun cui is supplied in the first such note. Both relative and noun are supplied above “imperium.” But the confused nature of the remainder of the Latin interlinealia reveals a sense not yet achieved. The vernacular gloss that sits beside the text adds its “surplus” to the sense previously shared between text and interlinear gloss. Interlinear

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notes (“domino,” “cui domino”) are incorporated into the vernacular marginal gloss, leading to the apparently excessive repetition of the word dueno (a surplus of surplus). But other material, whose origin seems to lie outside both text and interlinealia, creeps into the vernacular gloss as well: “dueno salbatore.” Finally, in a process we shall find repeatedly in the act of scribal Glosynge, prayer builds its own momentum and breaks the limits of the prayer contained in the pseudo-Augustinian “text.” It is most convenient for my purposes that this prayer asks God’s help in “performing service” of a specific type, that is, of a type that will gain salvation rather than of a type that will not. In this first snippet of Spanish vernacular, we see already the merging of physical margins and ethical choice for action that is at the heart of medieval ethical reading. RAH 60 demonstrates how rich an object of study the scriptum is—far richer than the object we analyze when we ignore the sermon text with its grammatical glosses in order to exalt the “first infant wail” of “Spanish.” Medievalists must attempt to recover the literature that now wanders in and out of successive modern editions, stripped of both the cultural and the physical surroundings that gave it being. In Spain, the need to create a Castilian national literature on a par with that recently established by Gaston Paris and others for medieval France strongly influenced the scholars who founded the discipline of Hispanomedievalism (Cerquiligni 73ff.; Gumbrecht, “Souffle”; Portolés; Blecua, “Textos”). But in making the Castilian literature of the Middle Ages, they unmade the literature of the Castilian Middle Ages. Castilian literature first appears at the margins of Latin religious texts. This is true both metaphorically and physically. Yet, some twenty-five years after Whinnom’s Spanish Literary Historiography, both the metaphorical truth and the physical realities are still ignored by most students of vernacular Castilian letters.9 A parallel situation occurred in other vernacular literatures, of course. The Serments de Strasbourg are simply a quote in Nithard’s Latin History (Cerquiligni 40). Kiernan (“Reading”) has recently reopened the question of Caedmon’s “Hymn.” He makes a strong case that the first “work” of England’s first known poet, which appears only as a later marginal gloss in two eighth-century manuscripts of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, is simply a vernacular translation cum amplification of the Latin paraphrase given by Bede. He also shows how a vernacular gloss becomes text (especially a modern schooltext) and the Latin text becomes footnote, a process that delightfully travesties the medieval interchanges between text and gloss I have been tracing here.10 Most, if not all, “Old Irish literature” and “Old Welsh literature” appears at the margins of Latin texts. This phenomenon does not end with the close of the High Middle Ages, but continues well into the fifteenth century, when, as Copeland’s study suggests, the relation Latin-text/vernac-

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ular-gloss is one of the major structures in play in vernacular works by Chaucer. The neat pages of our anthologies and editions of vernacular literature have hidden from generations of medievalists and their students the crabbed, precarious, and dependent realities of medieval vernacular culture.11

Working with Scripta Further examples drawn from early “Spanish literary works” demonstrate how powerful the marginal relation is and how rewarding the study of scripta rather than of texts can be. The vernacular Auto de los Reyes Magos appears in BNM Va 5–9, 67v–68r. This manuscript formerly belonged to the cathedral of Toledo. The text, whose title is a modern creation, is the earliest surviving theatrical piece written for performance in Castile (Toledo). Its author, who may have been Catalan, Gascon, or Riojan, attempts to write in Castilian, and so the Auto represents one of the earliest surviving “Spanish” verse texts (late twelfth century; Edad84 364–65, Edad91 359–60). The manuscript also contains glossed Latin versions of the Song of Songs (1r–27v) and the Lamentations of Jeremiah (31r–67v), together with several pages of miscellaneous Biblical commentary. The Auto proper, written as prose, begins mid-page, at the close of Lamentations. It continues onto the recto of the following folio, where it ends. It is written in a dark ink, in a larger, far less regular hand than those which wrote the rest of the manuscript. The complex page layout that went into producing the glossed biblical texts preceding the Auto is absent here. The lines do not even appear to have been ruled. An examination of the scriptum in its entirety reveals that, however much the Auto appears to belong to a different world than the formal biblical texts that precede it, there are important thematic connections. At the play’s close one of Herod’s rabbis refers to “las profecias las que nos dixo ieremias” (68r: “the prophecies, those which Jeremiah told us”). As Weiss (“Auto”) has pointed out, this line gains special significance when we remember that the manuscript that includes the Auto also contains the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Although the text of the Book of Jeremiah proper is not included in the manuscript, Weiss suggests that “las profecias” to which the rabbi of the Auto refers are probably those of Jer. 23:5–6 or 33:15–16, or of similar passages.12 This tentative evidence for a direct thematic link between the Latin manuscript and the vernacular play at its margins gains further weight when we examine the incidental Latin material in the manuscript. On 28r, the name of the play’s central figure, Herod, also appears, together with his exemplary significance for Christians:

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¶ Quinque sunt cause quare flagellamur a deo. uel ad augmentum meritorum

sicut tobias. ¬ iob. uel ad custodiam uirtutum ut apostolus. uel peccata preterita corrigantur ut paraliticus cui dictum est. ecce sanus es factus. uel ut duplici contriccione pereant ut anthiocus ¬ herodes. uel ut gloria dei manifestetur ut de ceco nato dictus est a domino. There are five reasons for which we are lashed by God. Either for the increase of merits, as with Tobias and Job. Or for the keeping of virtues, as in the case of the Apostle, or [so that] previous sins may be corrected, as with the paralytic to whom it was said: “Behold thou art made whole” [John 5:14]. Or else so that they may die with a double destruction, as Antiochus and Herod [cf. Jer. 17:18]. Or so that the glory of God may be manifested, as the Lord said of the man born blind [John 9:3].

An important context of the Auto, then, at least for those who may have performed it or seen it performed, was likely to have been the “double grieving” or “affliction” of Herod. The double affliction may be the deaths of his children: first, of his infant son in the very massacre he had unleashed; then, of two other sons whom he executed for their suspected treason against him. Or it may be these events taken together and Herod’s suffering from a grotesque illness at age 65 (cf. Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, chapter on the Holy Innocents). Proud King Herod does not know of these consequences at the time of the action of the play itself, but the audience and actors can “prophesy” what will befall him. Significantly, the fragmentary passage recounting God’s affliction of Herod invokes a passage from the book of Jeremiah itself (17:18): “Bring upon them the day of affliction and with a double destruction (duplici contritione) destroy them.”13 But we should realize that Herod is not the only stock character of medieval religious theater who appears here. Herod shared the medieval stage with the Apostles and the man blind from birth.14 In this hardly fortuitous coincidence between the Latin biblical commentaries of Va 5–9 and the Castilian text that hangs upon it, we have interesting evidence not just for the theme behind the Auto, but for part of the exemplary function of medieval theater in general. Editions of the Auto lift it out of its physical context. Verse lines are set separately. Indications of which character is speaking at a given time are added (though the Auto does bear a few signs to indicate changes of speaker). Medieval scriptum is transformed into modern play, complete with title, stage directions (Menéndez Pidal, Crestomatía 1:71–76), and even indications as to how the roles are to be interpreted (Lázaro 97–106). Something is gained in this, perhaps, but much is also lost. In the manuscript, the Auto is followed by another brief Latin text (68v), snatched from Isidore of Seville’s Liber sententiarum. This text has not previously been noted, as far as I know. Written in a neat hand

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in narrow, carefully ruled columns, the fragment links this simple vernacular play and the prophecies to which it refers to the lofty realms of biblical exegesis and, specifically, to the mystical interpretation of divine law. Lex diuina [in] tribus distinguitur partibus. [In] Istoria in preceptis. ¬ in prophetis [?]. In istoria est. is [= istoria in is] que gesta sunt. Precepta. [in] is que iussa sunt. Prophet[i]a [?] [in] is que fu[t]ur[a] pronunciata sunt. Lex diuina triplici *sciet sic modo: P[ri]mo ut istorice .ii.o ut tropologice .iii.o ut mistice i[n]telligatur. Istorice autem [?] iuxta l[i]tt[e]ram.** Trobol[og]ice iuxta moralem scientiam. Mistice iuxta spiritalem intelligentiam. Ergo si [for “sic”] istorice oportet fidem tenere. ut ea[m] ¬ moraliter debemus interpretare. ¬ spiritalem [for spiritaliter?] intelligere.15 Divine law is divided into three parts: into history, precepts, and prophets [prophecies?]. History is in those things which were done, precepts in those things which were commanded, and prophecies [?] in those which were foretold. Divine law is to be known in this triple way: it should be understood first historically, second tropologically, and third mystically. Historically with regard to the letter, tropologically with regard to moral science, and mystically with regard to spiritual understanding. Therefore, just as it is necessary to have faith to read historically, we must also interpret it [“the law,” “the letter,” “historical reading”?] morally and understand it spiritually.

At the close of the Auto (68r), Herod asks his rabbis to look in their books for an explanation of the miracle of the star. They are unable to find any reference to the birth of a king “que es senior de terra” (“who is lord of the earth”; Menéndez Pidal: “tirra”). In Menéndez Pidal’s version of the dialogue, one rabbi accuses another: “non entendes las profecias las que nos dixo ieremias” (“You do not understand the prophesies that Jeremiah told us”). Swearing “par mi lei” (“by my law”; compare “lex divina” above), he asks, “por que non dezimos uertad.˜” (“Why don’t we tell the truth?”). A moment later, he answers his own question: “porque no la auemos usada. ni en nostras uocas es falada.” (“Because it is not practiced among us and it is not found in our mouths”). Here the issue of the correct interpretation of prophecy, which is the final message of the Auto, is given fuller explanation in the text that follows it physically in the manuscript: it is the mystical interpretation of the Scriptures, and specifically the Christian history foretold in it, that the rabbis of Herod’s court cannot understand. A very similar passage in another of Isidore’s works, De fide Catholica contra Judaeos, makes even clearer the link between the Latin guide to interpreting divine law that follows the play and the controversy over rabbinical interpretations of the Old Testament that emerges in the Auto itself:

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Dupliciter enim sentitur lex, ut prius secundum historiam, deinde secundum sacramentorum intelligentiam sentiatur. Tripliciter autem scribitur, dum non solum historialiter, vel mystice, sed etiam moraliter, quid in unumquodque gerere debeat edocetur. . . . Hinc est quod Judaeis obtecta et clausa sunt omnia; qui nisi crediderint, ad eorum intelligentiam pervenire non possunt. (PL 83:528–29) The law is understood in a double way, first according to the historical sense and then according to the understanding of the sacraments. It is written in a triple way, since it teaches not only historically or mystically but also morally what should be done in every situation. . . . Here is what was entirely closed off and hidden from the Jews, who, unless they believe, cannot arrive at an understanding of them.

This passage is followed by chapters such as “Quod Judaei, nisi credant in Christum, non intelligent Scripturas” (PL 83:529: “That the Jews, unless they believe in Christ, do not understand the Scriptures”). This crude and early piece of vernacular theater acts out a major interpretive problem identified already by Isidore in seventh-century Spain. This problem was to have important repercussions for Spaniards of all religions in the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries: how do we validate interpretations, especially when understanding depends not on the text itself, but on the state of faith of the person reading the book? “Neque enim possunt [the Jews] legem et prophetas intelligere, nisi ante in Christum crediderint” (PL 83:529: “Nor can the Jews understand the law and the prophets unless they first believe in Christ”). It is no accident that it is this same issue—that a correct understanding of his book must come from a specific state of faith—which Juan Ruiz, writing 150 years later, places at the center of his Libro. To understand, we must convert, change our ways, remember, believe. “You do not understand the prophecies that Jeremiah told us” is a reference, then, to the specific context of the glossed text of Jeremiah’s Lamentations contained in Va 5–9 and to the larger world of medieval reading. The passage from Isidore that follows it in the manuscript answers the question raised at the end of the Auto (and one that applies quite nicely to students of the Libro): “por que non somos acordados.˜” (“Why can’t we agree?”). The prophecies of Jeremiah cannot be understood unless we read in a manner appropriate to prophecy, with the spiritual understanding that comes from faith alone. Va 5–9 allows us at least to perform our own analogical, if not mystical, reading of this passage. We may choose to see the relation between the Latin and vernacular texts as sequential, the Latin ars legendi following the Auto. But the scriptum suggests yet another analogy: a relation that is two-dimensional, like the manuscript leaf. The rules of historical, tropo-

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logical, and mystical interpretation hover invisibly on the verso of the leaf bearing the conclusion of the Auto. Despite their invisibility (until we turn over the leaf), these rules are physically a part of the Auto in precisely the same way that these interpretive modes lurk constantly, physically behind not just the Bible, but the vernacular texts of medieval Castile as well.16 The “Siesta de abril” (early thirteenth century), perhaps the most intriguing and difficult brief text of the Castilian Middle Ages, takes on still richer resonances when we view it as scriptum rather than text or texts. The scriptum that includes the “Siesta” reveals as well as we might wish the fundamental wrongness of the author/text paradigm for the Middle Ages. The title I have just used was given it by Menéndez Pidal, based on the curious time frame announced in the poem: “E nel mes dabril depues yantar” (BNP lat. 3576, 124r; l. 11: “April after lunch”).17 The title represents the Spanish scholar’s attempt to deal with the problematic dual nature of the text by giving it as uncontroversial a title as possible. But Menéndez Pidal is obliged immediately to reintroduce the duality of the poem by giving it a subtitle: “Razón de amor con los denuestos del agua y el vino” (“Love Talk Together with the Debate between Water and Wine”). From our traditional view of the nature of “works” and genres, there are many good reasons to separate the “Siesta” into two poems: (1) a lyric “razón de amor,” built of both popular and courtly elements, portraying a cleric’s erotic encounter with a beautiful lady in an allegorical garden (roughly ll. 1–161); and (2) a comico-religious “debate poem” heavily indebted to the Latin tradition (ll. 162–259).18 But scholars have also found rewarding arguments for the “unity” of the two pieces (for example, Spitzer, “Razón”; Impey), arguments that expose the elaborate mechanisms we must erect to safeguard the artistic integrity of our canonical works. Spitzer, for example, makes his arguments on behalf of the “consummate art” (153) of the poem and the “originality” (159) of its artist. He also invokes the manuscript context: “The unity of a medieval text that presents itself as ‘one’ in the manuscript tradition, should not be called into question without overriding reasons to the contrary” (164). But it is not quite that simple, even when we take the manuscript context into account. In fact, the manuscript layout seems to go out of its way to suggest a separation of the two parts. The “Denuestos” section begins with a highly literate and Latinate “Aquis copiença adenostar el uino . . .” (125r; ll. 162–63: “Here wine begins to insult . . .”). This line is separated from the preceding text by a blank line and begins with an initial A nearly twice as high as the Q that began the “Siesta” as a whole (124r), suggesting a possible argument for the priority of the “Denuestos” over the “Razón.” But such a neat, physical solution is also not to be. This section

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opens with wine’s complaint that it is weakened when water is mixed with it. This is precisely what has happened in the “Razón” immediately prior to the incipit I have just quoted: a bird has flown into the garden where the cleric lies and spilled a cup of water into a cup of wine (125r; ll. 147– 61). The presence of these two cups was announced already in lines 15 and 29 (124r), making it difficult, despite the separation suggested by manuscript layout, to effect a clear division of the text into two poems. All that is really clear here is that we can neither make this text into two poems nor feel completely satisfied in treating it as one. The very categories by which we would set up the limits of “consummate art” are denied us. This strongly suggests that we need other categories. As we examine this scriptum closely, however, we begin to find various intriguing echoes among its parts. The theme of debate between wine and water, certainly the least interesting to modern scholars from the artistic viewpoint, underlies the entire text. The cleric hesitates between drinking water or wine at ll. 23–33 (124r). He is afraid the water is enchanted. Even the explicit carries on the debate. Water has had the final triumphant (?) word at the debate’s close (ll. 252–59, 126r): after all, water is the instrument of Christian baptism. But as the scribe Lupus de Moros quills the conclusion, he invokes another genre, the scribal explicit, and asks to be given wine. It is as if he hasn’t been listening to the debate at all. The debate motif permeates other registers of the poem: the contrasts between oral and written openings and closures, between sensual imagery and Christian allegory, between earthly lover and the Virgin. The generic parataxis (love poem/debate poem), the focus of critical controversy regarding the poem, is merely an extension of this. Genre itself determines the “winner” of the debate at each stage. Yet the shifting values caused by the joining of genres (lyric, debate, explicit) is not limited to the three most obvious divisions. We could establish several other places in which the poem appears to shift genres. Scholars have noted the traditional materials (Van Antwerp), the hints of the Provencal vidas and razos (De Ley), and the suggestion of another debate topic: the relative merits of clerics and knights as lovers (Spitzer, “Razón” 159 n. 1). Most striking is the way in which the popular cantiga de amigo breaks into the courtly love poem/Christian allegory of the “Razón” (cf. Cárdenas). Twice the escolar’s lady bursts into song (ll. 78ff. and 130ff., 124v– 125r). The parallelistic cantiga de amigo, with its alternation of amigo/ amado in rhyme position, reappears from time to time (e.g., 124v; ll. 108– 9) and reaches its climax at ll. 130–33 (I cite Menéndez Pidal’s paleographic edition, without distinguishing forms of s or expanded abbreviations): “Dios senor, a ti loa[do] | quant conozco meu amado! | agora e tod bien [comigo] | quant conozco meo amigo!” (125r: “Praise be to thee, O

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Lord, when I know my beloved. Now all good is with me, when I know my lover”). The parallelistic structure of these lines suggests the germ of the leixa-pren (“leave-take”) form.19 Yet in the scriptum itself, the very elements that would authenticate this structure are missing: the do of “loado,” necessary to establish the rhyme with “amado,” the comigo, essential for setting up the shift to “amigo.” These have been supplied in their entirety by the editor.20 Menéndez Pidal’s reconstruction is no doubt correct. He sits in the same position occupied by medieval readers of this text who could easily have filled in the missing rhymes from their own knowledge of similar songs, who might already have been singing the song to themselves. This unrealized cantiga de amigo can, in fact, stand for the whole text, which “takes up” one generic/interpretive context as it “leaves behind” another. At the same time, it never fully achieves a single generic definition, nor does it let go of any one completely. Nothing I have said so far concerning the “Siesta” would escape us if we sat down with a good edition of the poem and took an occasional glance at the facsimile published by Menéndez Pidal. At most we might note the scribal invocation (“Sancti spiritus ad sid nobis gratia amen”; “May the grace of the Holy Spirit be with us, amen”). This is not the whole story of the “Siesta,” however. The “Siesta” occupies 124r–126r of an original gathering of eight folios. Two folios were cut out, apparently before the “Siesta” was copied there, leaving a cuaderno of six folios. This cuaderno, written in a Spanish hand, is bound between two large collections of homilies, perhaps written in southern France in the early thirteenth century (Franchini 78–80), which occupy folios 1–122 and 129–68 of the manuscript in its present form (BNP Catalogue 6:278–79). Since Morel-Fatio published the “Siesta” in 1887, we have known that it is accompanied by another Castilian text. This text is an abbreviated confessional manual that uses the Ten Commandments and the five senses as guides for confessors in eliciting descriptions of sins and prescribing appropriate penances (126v–128v). This text has played little or no part in the ongoing debate over the sense and unity of the “Siesta.” Nepaulsingh, as far as I know, is the only scholar to use the confessional manual as part of an interpretation of the “Razón” (Towards 59–61).21 Yet the links are clearly there: the prominence given to eliciting confession of the several sinful forms of sexual love, the critique of “cantares luxoriosos” (126v: “lascivious songs”), that is, of songs exactly like the one contained in the “Siesta.” Even the criticism of “los que façen encantaciones . o conjurios por mulleres” (126v: “those who recite spells or conjurations for women”), under the rubric of the first commandment, recalls the cleric’s

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fear of enchanted water in the “Razón” and reinforces the supernatural aura that surrounds the mysterious lady’s sudden appearance. Was she (is the poem?) a lascivious conjuration? In many ways the “Razón” seems to create the very state of sin that the prose text’s confession and penance seek to correct. The complex echoes within the “Siesta” itself merely reflect the larger resonances of the orphaned cuaderno as a whole. The “text that presents itself as ‘one’ in the manuscript” is a far more complex object than Spitzer suggests. Is the poem itself the record of a confession? An exemplum in malo? An encantación? Can we see the confessional section as a law that seeks to govern and control the reading of the “Siesta” in the same way that Isidore’s lex divina governs the reading of the Auto? Does it succeed in doing so? Can it? In the century since the publication of the “Siesta” together with the confessional text, these questions have not yet been addressed, let alone answered, largely because our view of texts or works forces us to place the “Siesta” in a different artistic plane from the Ten Commandments with which it shares the cuaderno. The “Siesta” is art, and the “separate” confessional text is merely a document of possible cultural or linguistic interest. But these are not the only texts in the gathering. The “Siesta” is preceded by a folio (123) containing various prayers and formulas of exorcism and conjurations against storms. It thus establishes at the beginning of the cuaderno the atmosphere of veiled danger picked up in the escolar’s fear of the enchanted water. These conjurations are written chiefly in Latin and, lacking artistic quality, are doubly distant from the cantar de fin amor that has been of primary interest to Hispanomedievalists. Among the interesting texts there, we find an exorcism that tells the devil “¬ uas signatum ¬ non designauis” (123r: compare Franz 2:609: “et uas signatum non designabis”; “You will not unseal the sealed vessel”) and a reference to “aqua piissima” (123v: “most holy water”). My argument is not that we must use the confessional text and the spells as tools to interpret the “Siesta.” Rather, we should see the entire cuaderno as a rich set of relationships, every bit as tantalizing as the “Siesta” alone. Debate, conflict, generic parataxis, and man’s suspension between the devil and the Decalogue are enacted physically as well as verbally in all parts of this scriptum. As in so much of medieval literature, where we seek linear development and a clear resolution, perhaps in favor of good over evil, this scriptum seems caught in an endless loop of temptation, confession, penance, and the return of temptation.22 In no place can we establish a clear beginning and a clear end. I offer the cuaderno containing the “Siesta” as an example not of answers to old problems surrounding our canonical “works,” but of new questions, new relations, that await us when we work at the level of the scriptum.23

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Master Text/Master Gloss The relations among a vernacular religious play, a biblical text, and a guide to biblical exegesis that we saw in Va 5–9 are not surprising. It is equally unsurprising that modes of biblical interpretation, together with the text of the Bible itself, should be applied to secular texts as well. The text of the Bible is ever-present in the mind of the medieval glossator. Metamorphoses 8.618–19 (“inmensa est finemque potentia caeli | non habet, et quicquid superi voluere, peractum est”; “The power of heaven is immeasurable and has no bounds, and whatever the gods want is done”) reminds a glossator of Ps. 113B:3: “iuxta illud de psalmista quecumque uoluit fecit” (BPP 4–H [late S. XIV/early S. XV], 102r: “Very like the psalmist: he hath done all things whatsoever he would”). Tacked onto the end of a collection of Christian exempla by Clemente Sánchez de Vercial, Libro de los ejemplos por A.B.C. (BNM 1182, early S. XV), is a garbled account from “Ovid” of the slaying of the Medusa by “Jason,” who uses an “escudo de cristal” (“glass shield”) to show the sinful woman her own visage and then beheads her with a double-edged sword. The story is explained thus: esta mujer qualquier anima pecadora que esta fea por el pecado jason significa nuestro Señor Jhesu que secubrio del escudo de cristal conuiene saber dela humanidad /¬ con el cuchilo conviene saber con la su palabra que era aguda de cada parte deguella a toda anima pecadora la qual viendo se ansi aflicta dize miserere mei domine fillii [sic] david. dixo: domine quantum ad dignitatem dixo filii [sic] dauit quantum ad humanitatem. // (160v; I transcribe using the plate in Darbord, following p. 54) This woman [signifies] any sinful soul that has become ugly because of sin, Jason signifies our Lord Jesus who covered himself with a shield of glass, that is, with humanity; and with the knife, that is, with his word, which was sharp on both sides, he beheads each sinful soul, which, seeing itself thus afflicted, says: “Miserere mei Domine fili David,” it said “Domine” with regard to his rank, it said “Son of David,” with regard to his humanity.

In the space of a few lines we see how much interpretive density “Ovid’s” tale could hold for medieval readers. Classical fable is glossed with Christian moralization, allegory, and typology. Each new layer creates the space for further Glosynge. The allegory of Medusa as a human soul defiled by sin becomes this soul caught in the act of pleading for God’s mercy. This plea, apparently drawn from Matt. 15:22 (and not from the liturgical Ps. 50:3), opens onto an almost knee-jerk bit of biblical Glosynge, which seems, in turn, to shut down, if not to fulfill, this particular chain reaction. It is only natural that the powerful techniques of biblical reading should

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be applied to secular Latin and vernacular texts. One does not cut down a tree with an axe if one has a chain saw. Much of the advice Juan Ruiz gives his readers amounts to the suggestion that we take the chain saw of biblical exegesis to his book. The relations among techniques of biblical exegesis and secular, vernacular letters are thus quite complex. A staple of biblical exegesis was the idea that the text of the Bible “adapts” itself to the person reading it, an idea present in the Libro as well. In the Diadema monachorum, Smaragdus outlines this principle, which depends not on the variables of time and place, but on the varying intellectual and spiritual states of the reader: “Scriptura sacra aliquo modo cum legentibus crescit, a rudibus lectoribus quasi recognoscitur [here, as in the Libro, unlettered readers must rely on memory], et tamen a doctis semper nova reperitur” (“Sacred scripture in some way grows with its readers, it is recollected, as it were, by unskilled readers, and yet it is always found new by learned readers”). Smaragdus goes on to quote Ezek. 3:1: “Son of man, eat all that thou shalt find.” He explains: “Quidquid enim in sacra Scriptura invenitur, edendum est: quia et eius parva simplicem componunt vitam, et eius magna subtilem aedificant intelligentiam” (PL 102:598: “Therefore, whatever is found in holy scripture is to be eaten: because both the little things in it construct the simple life and the great things in it edify the subtle understanding”). This proved to be a rather seductive idea: a single text multiplied into many by the shape of the audience itself. Although the works of secular poets were not always able to apply to a variety of readers at once, they were sometimes able to deal with them seriatim. According to the thirteenth-century General estoria, a world history compiled at the order of Alfonso el Sabio, individual works in Horace’s oeuvre are directed to readers of varying ages and intellectual capacities. este oraçio . . . cato las hedades delos omnes •/ Et vio commo el omne desque viene A hedat de entender bien ¬ mal ¬ esto es enel comienço de su mançebia ·/ Conpuso ally libro delas odas enque fablo delas cosas ¬ delas costunbres que conuienen a aquella hedat ·/ Et por que pertenesçen alegrias ¬ cosas alegres a esta hedat mas que a otra . . . puso le nonbre odas ·/ Et esta palabra odas quiere dezir tanto commo alegrias. (Esc R.I.10, 215v) This Horace . . . looked at the ages of men and saw how man, from the time he comes to the age to understand good and evil (and this is in the beginning of his youth), [and] composed a book of odes in which he spoke of the things and of the customs that belong to that age. And because delights and happy things belong to this age more than to any other . . . he called it “Odes,” and this word “odes” means “delights.”

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The Epistolae, on the other hand, were intended for readers “de mayores sesos que non los de la mançebia” (“of greater sense than that of youth”). The Sermones, like the sermons preached in church on Sunday, were for everybody together: “Et dio este nonbre sermones a este libro por que asy son los sus dichos comunales para todo omne que aprender quisiese commo el sermon que se faze enel pueblo comunal mente a todos los que y vienen ·/” (Esc R.I.10, 215v: “And he gave this name ‘sermons’ to this book because what he says is as general for any man who wants to learn as is the sermon that is given publicly in the village to all who come to hear it”). Juan Ruiz seems to have had a similar mix in mind when he wrote his Libro: ¶

En general atodos . ffabla la escriptura los cuerdos con buen sesso / entendran la cordura los mançebos liuianos / guardense de locura escoJa lo meJor el de buena ventura (S:6r;67)

The writing speaks in general to all: the sensible people with good sense will understand the wisdom; let frivolous youth take care not to commit folly; let the person of good fortune choose the better.

In fact, Juan Ruiz seems to be granting to his vernacular text a property held by Holy Writ: it speaks to all at the same time that it speaks to both mançebos and those of buen sesso individually.24 In a remarkable section of the General estoria, the idea of dividing the first two works of Horace into those written for “mançebos” and those written for men of “mayores sessos” is elaborated and turned back upon the Bible. The authors of the General estoria use the age and experience of potential audiences to rearrange the canonical order of the biblical books they include in part III. They acknowledge the Holy Fathers’ arrangement—Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom—but prefer their own: Et nos catando los tiempos ¬ las hedades segunt que salomon dixe las palabras destos libros. por que los dichos de cantica canticorum acuerdan con la hedat dela mancebia ¬ quando los omnes se trabaian en cantares ¬ de cosas de solazes ¶ Ordenamos en esta ystoria que fuesse primero cantica canticorum ¶ Et otrossi por que ha aun adelante hedat de mayor seso que todos los otros que son passados ¬ fablo salomon en el libro de sapiencia del saber delas cosas. nos ordenamos por ende este libro en el tercero logar empos estos otros dos. . . . otrossi los omnes que vienen ala uejez ¬ ueen que las cosas que han passadas que non son nada desprecian el mundo ¬ las sus cosas. Et por que fablo salomon deste despreciamiento del mundo en el libro ecclesiastes pusiemos le postremero destos quatro libros. (Évora CXXV.2.3, 119r)

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But we, looking at the times and the ages according to which Solomon spoke* the words of these books, because the words of the Song of Songs agree with the age of youth and the time when men devote themselves to songs and pleasures, we order in this History that the Song of Songs go first and, likewise, because later on they have an age of greater sense than of all the others that have come before and Solomon spoke in the book of Wisdom concerning the knowledge of things, we order, therefore, this book in the third place after these other two. . . . Likewise, men who reach old age and see that the things that have passed are nothing, despise the world and its things. And because Solomon spoke of this contempt of the world in Ecclesiastes, we put* it as the last of these four books.

If it appeared that in the exposition of Jason and the Medusa, the Bible occupied the role of master gloss to which all other glosses ultimately referred, we can see here that this is not always the case. The master gloss is, in fact, the audience, its age and moral state. The radical nature of this reordering on the basis of audience can quickly be appreciated through a gloss by an unidentified scribe/scholar who annotated Stephen Langton’s commentary on Ecclesiastes in BPP 9-H (S. XIII).25 The glossator, who signs his name .S., shows an awareness of the same continuities in Solomon’s works that the editors of the General estoria use in their reordering. His solution, however, is quite the opposite: verba ecclesiastes ¬ c˜. Notat quod salomon iuxta tria nomina / tres libros composuit. prouerbia / ad instructionem paruulorum. ecclesiasten / ad prouectiores. cantica / ad perfectos. (Eccl. 2r, bottom, foliation is by book in this manuscript) ¶

He notes that Solomon composed three books under three names: Proverbs for the instruction of children, Ecclesiastes for those more advanced, and the Songs for the fully trained.

The editors of the General estoria, basing themselves on poetic form and themes, assign the Song of Songs to the age of “mancebia”; Langton, presumably stressing the allegorical reading of this text, assigns it to “perfectos.” Ecclesiastes is mentioned by the editors of the General estoria as fit for those who have reached old age. Langton justifies the traditional arrangement by considering Ecclesiastes to be addressed to those who are “advanced,” but not yet “perfect.” Alfonso’s editors use the thematic content, form, and “intent” to establish a new order for Solomon’s books. In the gloss, based on Langton’s spiritual exposition, there is a progression from Proverbs, simple messages designed for youths, to the Song of Songs, the allegory of Christ and His Church. We have already seen that “order is a great aid to understanding.” Here we find “order,” in this case

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the ordering of the books of Solomon, subordinated to the larger demands of reading. Understanding, in fact, “works on” order. Reading, here the reading audience, comes to dominate the particular arrangement of Solomon’s books found in the General estoria’s vernacular translation of the Bible. The goal of this chapter has been twofold. At one level I have sought to demonstrate the power and interest that can be generated by a study of medieval letters that works at the level of the scriptum (the unique, concrete, individual written artifact) rather than at the level of the edition or “text.” Each scriptum is its own little world, and the true universe of medieval literate culture is the system constituted by these concrete worlds, not by a corpus of texts. At another level, I have continued my argument that this culture is based on a group of related activities (glossing, commenting, copying, rehandling) that may most profitably be viewed as forms of reading rather than of writing. The medieval scriptum is eternally deficient. The yearning for totality is always disappointed at the moment it is realized. The styles of Glosynge that I have analyzed thus far have in common the idea of a special relation between text and audience that privileges the reader. In the Auto it is the reader’s state of faith that allows the perception of the truths in the “Book.” The reader precedes the text, in a sense. The age and sense of the reader are invoked variously in the discussions of the order of the books of Horace and Solomon. For the editors of the General estoria, the Song of Songs is appropriate to youth and alegrías. For Langton and most other Biblical students, the same book is appropriate to “perfectos.” In the very discordia, we see again the power of readers to determine the nature of the text. Finally, we remember that in RAH 60 the series of grammatical and cross-linguistic fulfillments that ends in vernacular prayer points outward to a realm of action for good or ill on the part of the glossator/reader who amplified this written prayer with words from his own heart. It is this world which I wish to examine now.

2 ADAPTATION AND APPLICATION

T

HE PROCESS OF Glosynge, that ever-deficient surplus, allowed any given piece of text to take on tremendous density of interpretation. And yet most of the glosses we saw in the preceding chapter ultimately pointed not into the text, but outward toward a realm of human action. In the San Millán gloss, it is the glossator himself who amplifies a sermon benediction, asking for guidance in serving God. In the “Jason and Medusa” gloss, the sinful soul cries out for God’s mercy. The snippet of Isidore’s text that “glosses” the Auto answers the question, “Why are we confused?”: “Because we do not believe.” Implicit in this answer is the act of conversion itself. The medieval reader always occupied the same historical position vis-àvis the text as did Marie de France with regard to the “ancients.” The text was then; the gloss was now. But we have already seen enough evidence to suggest that “obscurity” was a function not of the text itself but of the glossator’s desire. As Diego García de Campos (d. 1218) put it, in reference to Holy Writ: “Neque enim ipsum nomen, nec sillabarum vel litterarum numerus. nec inflexiones casuum carent misterio sine causa” (355: “Not even a name itself, nor the number of syllables or letters, nor the case inflections lack mystery without cause”). A single letter could be made to yield the same tale of the ages of man that we have seen applied to the entire oeuvre of Horace and the corpus of Solomon’s books: Y litteram Pythagoras Samius ad exemplum vitae humanae primus formavit; cuius virgula subterior primam aetatem significat, incertam quippe et quae adhuc se nec vitiis nec virtutibus dedit. Bivium autem, quod superest, ab adolescentia incipit: cuius dextra pars ardua est, sed ad beatam vitam tendens: sinistra facilior, sed ad labem interitumque deducens. (Isidore of Seville, Etimologías 1.3.7; see also Harms) Pythagoras of Samos first formed the letter Y to exemplify human life. The lower stroke signifies the first age, uncertain, of course, and which has not yet given itself either to virtue or to vice. The fork that is above begins with adolescence. Its right part is arduous, but leads to the blessed life. The left is easier, but it leads to destruction and death.

Glosynge starts outside the text and works in. Perhaps it is better to speak not of “indeterminate areas” (Bruns 56) but of the text as one vast “region of indeterminacy” that medieval readers continually filled and re-

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filled. They had at their disposal a vast technology of reading evolved in monasteries, schools, and pulpits: the chaining and associative styles; the Trinity; Christ and the sinner; the human soul and the flesh (usually figured by a man and a woman respectively); the world, the flesh, and the devil; the seven you-name-its; the virtues and vices; praise and blame; topics such as old age or wine; even cupiditas and caritas. This is the point at which Robertsonian criticism falls short of the medieval literary object. In the first place, it is clear that no dictionary of “standard” or “commonplace” medieval symbology or allegory could ever hope to account for all the readings we observe (cf. Robertson 372). Though there were surely certain patterns, most of them strongly influenced by the practices of biblical exegesis and the mythographic tradition, which both writers and readers might invoke, the glossator’s goal in “Glosynge” his source (the description fits most, if not all, medieval “creative” activity) was not to plug in a specific symbolic code that readers could decipher using the same key. It is true that many medieval readers would have seen a potential for Christ or the devil behind a reference to “lion.” But what were the rules that permitted medieval readers to determine, at a given moment of reading, that “lion” meant “Christ” and not “the devil”? The key, then, lies not in a dictionary or code book or “massive index” (Kaske 28), however complete, but in a grammar of medieval reading. As Honorius of Autun put it in his commentary on the Psalms: “Carmen huius libri . . . est convertibile ad omnem sensum cuiuslibet intentionis” (PL 172:274: “The song of this book can be converted to any sense of any intention whatsoever”). This is the second point at which the Robertsonian view is too reductive. I do think that a “law of charity” or laws that functioned similarly (“praise and blame”) were often invoked to guide readings. Certainly Juan Ruiz, in setting up buen amor/loco amor as the hinge on which the Libro swings, is deliberately invoking this law. But such laws can be analyzed at levels both less specific and more complex than a simple “law of charity” alone. At the most abstract level, cupiditas/caritas is but one of many “binary” pairs evolved by medieval people to deal with the presence of evil as well as good in their world and in their texts. There were numerous ways, not just exegetical, but also social and official, by which the balance could be shifted to favor good and diminish evil’s power. Most medieval readers played with a stacked deck in this regard. But in doing so they were merely repeating one of the most common moves of Western metaphysics. As Nietzsche suggests and Derrida explains, the ostensible dichotomies by which we define our world—man/woman, soul/body, subject/object, good/evil—do not exist in simple opposition. Rather, they stand in a hierarchical relation in which the first term, as I have listed them, is viewed as “superior” to the second. And so it worked with medi-

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eval binary pairs such as “praise and blame” or “caritas and cupiditas.” The veiled difference in these pairs is a key force in generating the ethical nature of medieval reading. A value-laden choice, not just a choice between two alternatives, is implicit in the “laws” that direct reading. But such oppositions/hierarchies were only a rough guide in the reading process. Far more important was the structure that derived from the reader himself, from the things that struck him, made sense to him at a given moment. In the little ars legendi that comprises chapter 366 of his massive Libre de contemplació (c. 1272), Ramon Llull tells us that the reader already familiar with his book should go reading “a aventura d’un palàgrafi en altre e d’un capítol en altre triant aquelles raons qui a ell mills se covenran en aquell temps” (“at random from one paragraph to another and from one chapter to another, choosing those passages which will suit him best at that moment”). He explains: “Enaixí com les viandes se convenen mills ab lo cors en diverses temps les unes que les altres, així les raons les unes se convenen mills ab l’ànima en un temps que en altre” (Obres 2:1255: “Just as certain types of food are more suitable to the body at certain times, so certain passages fit better with the soul at one time than at another”; compare Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon 3.11, PL 176:772). Reading is contingent on time, place, person. This fact illustrates, again, the failure that awaits any attempt to uncover a unique phenomenon we might call “medieval reading” or to explain its functioning through a set of laws and indices alone. The book is reconstructed by the reader, based not only on the needs of his individual personality, but also on his needs at a particular moment. The text of the Libre de contemplació, apparently fixed on the manuscript page, is actually in constant flux, changing its shape, order, texture, to suit the needs of the reader, who also inhabits a soul, body, and world in constant flux. From this pragmatic, uniconic view of the nature of reading proceed those parts of medieval reading most alien to us, those parts which cannot easily be predicted or duplicated by our own reading habits: the taking of sententiae and exempla out of context, or the fanciful or strained moralizations that we label with words such as “comic misapplication” (MacDonald) or “misappropriation” (Walsh, “Juan” 73–74; Brownlee, Status 88–97). The most powerful of these strategies, however, is the chaining, associative type of reading, which moves by verbal and mental connections not always clear to us. These associations engage all of the strategies of medieval reading in a system of free play: literal, allegorical, anagogical, and tropological readings, readings in bono or in malo, reading through opposites, through alternate readings generally linked with vel or aliter, and through various established symbolic or allegorical meanings. Numbers, etymologies, the interpretation of individual syllables or letters could be invoked and could be made, as we have seen, to reflect even master

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patterns such as the ages of man or his fall and redemption. An excellent extended example of this type of reading may be found in Diego García de Campos’s Planeta (early S. XIII). García generates nearly 100 folios of association upon the familiar six-word phrase “Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.” But glimpses of this mode are visible in the Libro as well, most notably in the opening folio of the prologue. It is impossible for us to predict which strategies a given reader might invoke at a given time or in what order he might invoke them. We can only hope to demonstrate as concretely as we can what these strategies were and to acknowledge that the reader usually arrives, however roundabout his path, at social, moral, or theological truths known long before he set out on his journey. Medieval reading was, above all, the discovery of new and delightful roads home. The complexities of these strategies are in some ways the subject of the remainder of this book. I do not think we can work out a langue of medieval reading until we have collected a large number of paroles (but not mots). That is precisely what I believe a view of medieval literature that moves from reading rather than from creative writing will permit us to do. We will include in our collection most “works” by authors like Chrétien or Chaucer or Juan Ruiz that we have studied over the past two centuries. They can be, and indeed have begun to be, viewed as paroles that enunciate the larger langue or grammar that is medieval reading (Copeland). But there is also a vast amount of material—commentary, formal and informal marginal glosses, marginal diagrams—that constitutes an untapped resource for the understanding of the parole that was Glosynge. This is a resource that, until recently, medievalists have had little interest in pursuing. But whatever data we may collect, we will be bound to misinterpret them unless we allow into our grammars both the varying competencies of individuals and the real-world context that was its locus of function. In the past decade several medievalists have sought to grasp the peculiar relationship between text and the ethical world of “what people do.” Allen’s impressive attempt to understand the medieval “ethical poetic” is quite correct in recognizing the rhetorical nature of medieval poetry and the importance of the relationship between audience and text that he calls, after Aristotle-Averroes-Hermann the German, “likening” (assimilatio). But Allen concludes that “the audience of poetry was in a sense inside it, absorbed into it by virtue of that constant reciprocity acting between ordinary ethical life and its reflection in words” (Ethical 289; see also 224 and 292–93). For me, the rhetorical nature of this poetry is precisely what makes that “absorption” of the reader impossible. By its very nature, the rhetorical stance posits “unlikeness”; its whole purpose is “persuading” to likeness. The reader’s status as audience in need of persuasion establishes

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a relation of “unlikeness” that, for me, makes the idea of a merging of text, reader, and world untenable. This is where Allen misunderstood the concept of assimilatio. The prefix ad (ad-similatio) implies a moving toward but not an achievement of likeness (cf. Carruthers’s discussion of ad-aequatio, 24–25). It is precisely this distance which Giles of Rome and other medieval interpreters understood in Aristotle’s definition of demonstrative rhetoric and of ethics itself. Ethical inquiry proceeds “figuraliter & grosse” (“broadly and through figures”), without the benefit of “mathematical” truth (Giles, De regimine 4; cf. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 1140a1–1140b30). To us, living in a scientific age, this seems to limit unacceptably the possibilities for success in ethical inquiry; but Aristotle did not view the problem in this way, nor, we may guess, did medieval people (Nichomachean Ethics 1141a9–1142a30). The practical wisdom gained through experience was, especially in its ability to grasp particulars, superior to “theory.” And reading was experience. The process of “likening” itself was ethical. It involved the reader in recognizing and evaluating both the similarities and the differences between him- or herself and the models and guidelines, the storehouse of human experience presented in the text. Like Allen, Carruthers and Copeland have also found important connections among rhetoric, ethics, and reading in the Middle Ages. For Carruthers the key link is in the observation succinctly expressed by Thomas Aquinas that “memory is a part of prudence” (cited 67). Prudence, in turn, is a part of ethics. Carruthers notes that “Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas both make the conscious cultivation of memory and the practice of the memorial arts a moral obligation as well as a scholarly necessity” (70). “As a condition of prudence, possessing a well-trained memory was morally virtuous in itself” (71). In her important chapter, “Memory and the Ethics of Reading,” Carruthers shows how the terms of Allen’s “absorption” of the reader into the poem must be reversed. She cites in evidence no less an authority than Gregory the Great in his Moralia in Job (164): “In nobismetipsis namque debemus transformare quod legimus; ut cum per auditum se animus excitat, ad operandum quod audierit vita concurrat” (PL 75:542: “And so we ought to transform what we read into our very selves so that when our mind is aroused by listening, our life may move toward doing the things it has heard”).1 For Carruthers this transformation and internalization has a very physical location in “la çela dela memoria” (S:1v: “the cell of memory”), to quote Juan Ruiz’s prologue on the same topic. Hence the frequent metaphors of rumination (“eat this book”) that accompany scenes of medieval reading (a good example occurs in St. Martín of León; see Chapter 3). From this point, Carruthers argues that we should see medieval literature as governed by “ethical memories, ‘contained’ in texts” rather than by “ethical rules”

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(182). And she suggests a useful paradigm for understanding medieval narrative as containing “a recollecting subject, a remembered text, and a remembering audience.” I believe we might apply this paradigm to the Libro with great profit. Most recently Copeland has studied the merging of rhetoric and the enarratio typical of the part of the medieval grammatical studies that dealt with literary texts: The rules by which orators compose have here become the rules by which grammarian-exegetes read. . . . The rhetorical systems incorporated into exegetical structures do not lose their inventional and argumentative force when they are transplanted; rather, they exert a certain rhetorical power in their new exegetical environment, to transform commentary into a kind of praxis.” (64, 65)

Copeland’s arguments are more complex than this brief quote can convey. Although Copeland’s historical tracing of the merging of grammar and rhetoric is aimed specifically at an analysis of medieval translation, I think she does as fine a job as anyone has of explaining from the broadest perspective why medieval glossing and commentary behave the way they do (see also Bruns). Although my conclusions are quite similar, my approach is different from those of Carruthers and Copeland. They rely to a much larger extent than I do (for reasons quite pertinent to their particular arguments) on the study of what classical and medieval thinkers said in formal treatises and commentaries about memory and translatio respectively. In this study I have chosen to examine a body of textual and glossatory material, most of it traceable to Spain in the late twelfth through the fifteenth century. It has been my goal to arrive at some generalities about the way medieval ethical reading worked through the examination of a variety of individual cases. My focus will also be different from that of Carruthers and Copeland. I am chiefly interested in observing the way in which the nature of Glosynge and some specific instances of glossing in medieval manuscripts reveal a textual world that is not self-sufficient, not completed, not even intended to be complete, until an individual reader intervenes “ethically” in the text. This ethical intervention involves at the most basic level the stance that texts are “ethical” and rhetorical in nature, that they speak to an audience about behavior. When this stance is a given of reading, it is inevitable that the audience seek to engage a written text rhetorically. At the simplest level, the reader “distinguishes” simple ethical elements in the text or its gloss: proverbs, exempla. At a higher level, the reader begins to engage his own prudence or judgment in making ethical decisions about the material in the text, deciding, for example, whether a given behavior is being praised or blamed.

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It is at this level that a key process, which I call “adaptation,” occurs. Not all the textual material medieval readers possessed was immediately available for such ethical engagement. Ovid and Virgil are two obvious cases, but even the Bible could be subjected to such processing, as when pseudo-Bede transforms Uriah into a figure of the devil, Bathsheba into the Church, and David into Christ (Minnis, Medieval 105). The desire to find ethical models in texts, then, not the ethical sufficiencies or deficiencies of any given text, drove this system. Adaptation prepared texts to be consumed ethically. It also allowed works and readers to add to the ethical content of materials such as exempla, which were already ethically packaged, or to shift their ethical import in another direction. At a final level, but at this level only, I think, medieval readers may have dealt with the ethical res of authorial “texts” in our sense as signifying unities. Although such a view is fundamental to our approach to literature, it is very difficult to find medieval readers dealing with “works” as units, seeking a “global” interpretation. Most often such global interpretations involve extended adaptation, the rewriting (which we take here as a form of reading) and reworking of textual material wholesale, as Juan Ruiz does to Pamphilus. But the process does not end at the borders of text and gloss. Most of these activities make no sense unless there is a real world in which the ethical judgments “practiced” in the text can continue. Carruthers has amply demonstrated that they continue into memory. They arrive in memory, we should not forget, through practice and praxis, through habitus (64–69). The reader’s storehouse, memorial and textual, prepares him to face real-world ethical judgments. Juan Ruiz describes the process succinctly in announcing that his intention in undertaking his Libro was “por Reduçir atoda persona Amemoria buena de bien obrar ¬ dar ensienpro de buenas constunbres ¬ castigos de saluaçion” (S:2v;prol.: “to lead everyone back to the good memory of doing good and to give example of good habits and corrections for salvation”).2 This aspect of medieval reading is the most elusive for us. Although a greater familiarity with the material at the margins of medieval texts and with the process of ethical reading may sharpen our sense of the way in which medieval readers “applied” the fruit of their ethical readings, we are not likely to find substantial direct evidence of medieval readers applying a given ethical lesson gleaned from their readings to a specific life situation. It is crucial, however, that we acknowledge this to be a significant feature of the medieval reading process, the final, larger gloss on medieval texts. Much medieval literature will remain ambiguous, contradictory, insolvable, and unfinished for us until we recognize this dimension. There is, perhaps, no better example of this fact than the Libro and its modern critical reception.

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Fortunately for us, a great deal of late medieval literature chooses to dramatize, in bono and in malo, the process of application. Carruthers (180) has suggested that Dorigen’s recollection of noble wives and maidens who committed suicide rather than face violation of their bodies (Canterbury Tales, FranT [F] 1364–1456) reflects the real process by which medieval readers reached ethical decisions, invoking a storehouse of exemplary types more or less congruent with the ethical dilemma at issue. Juan Ruiz builds his book, in large part, precisely on such dramatizations. In his adaptation of Pamphilus, for example, Juan Ruiz adds proverbs and classical fables to provide ethical and unethical motivations for the actions already present in his source. In adding this ethical gloss, Juan Ruiz’s adaptation engages the reader in evaluating the ethical application itself. This compounding, or compacting, of ethical density is one of the characteristic features of Juan Ruiz’s text. Carruthers summarizes far better than I can the workings of medieval ethical reading and its close relation to rhetoric. She begins with a critique of the tendency of “exegetical critics” (it applies to other sorts as well) to see “the ethical use of texts in entirely normative and definitional terms.” Clearly, such a view of the function of ethical literature has given rise to most of the debates over the ethical status of the Libro itself (see my “Se usa”). But we are wrong to see the medieval text “as an instance of a universal and normative moral principle.” Rhetorically conceived, ethics is the application of a res or generalized content (most often expressed in a textual maxim) to a specific, present occasion which is public in nature, because it requires an audience. Rhetoric “makes” commonplaces by a process of adaptation. Normative or transcendental analysis, in contrast, “discovers” a universal, timeless principle amid the detritus of the event, and its moral truth is unconditioned by audience, occasion, speaker, or text. But rhetoric does not normalize an occasion, it occasionalizes a norm. (Carruthers 180–81; her italics)

Here, I think, is the key to the Libro. It is a series of specific occasions of ethical and unethical behavior. But these occasions acquire their final gloss of ethicality not from the text as a universal, unchanging “unity” (or creative work), but from the circumstances of the individual reader at the moment of reading. This brings about a rather uncomfortable dilemma for modern critics. We will never be able to recover the totality of even one “occasion” of medieval reading of the Libro. Even if we could do so, our own need for universal, normative, or even mathematical analysis would make this an unsatisfying accomplishment. Yet the inevitable alternative to recovering medieval readings is equally unpalatable to us. Our need to arrive at universals in our professional readings (and other needs as well, perhaps)

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closes off the possibility of making our critical readings “occasional,” of engaging our own circumstantiae explicitly in our public transformations of the text. Here, it seems to me, it is not just individual scholars who cannot or will not measure up to the uncomfortably personal challenge of our medieval texts. It is also an entire institutional apparatus of literary study that has come to privilege episteme over phronesis in more ways than we may care to count. But that is a topic for another occasion.3 In the remainder of this chapter I provide some minimal examples of the process of adaptation and application. Though I had used these terms before reading Carruthers’s book, the citation above employs both terms in ways similar to those I illustrate here. Her use of them can provide an additional gloss.

The Simple Forms We may take as a basic, exemplary unit of ethical reading the gloss found in a version of the Pharsalia contained in Esc R.I.10 (General estoria). This gloss shows in simple form how the text is made to project into a real world, not just of good and evil, faith and heresy, but also of prudence and imprudence, praise and blame: “E llorauan por cornelia las onrradas matronas ¬ las otras dueñas con tan grant amor” (111v: “And the honored matrons and other ladies wept for Cornelia with such great love”; cf. Pharsalia 9.166ff.) This refers to the citizens of Rome who accompanied Cornelia in her mourning over her murdered husband Pompey. A gloss in the left margin transforms Cornelia into an ethical type: “la perssona virtuosa ¬ humana ¬ amigable tanto es amada de los estraños commo delos ssuyos” (111v: “The virtuous, humane, and friendly person is loved as much by those she does not know as by her own family”). This gloss takes Cornelia as an exemplum of “virtuous,” “humane,” and “friendly” behavior and allows the text to dramatize the effects of this “type” of behavior. The gloss, a later “surplus” to the text, now adds a specific causality, both to the events narrated in the text and to the future behavior of readers who might choose to add this type to their personal repertoire. This dual, postfacto causality is but one example of how the past is constantly brought into the present rhetorical moment of reading through Glosynge. The events of the Old Testament possess a capacity for prefiguration that extends beyond the major events of Christian history. They can also prefigure events of local and secular history. A gloss on Petrus Comestor’s Historia scholastica (BNM 130, SS. XIII–XIV), referring to 2 Kings 27, rubric: “De ezechia” (see PL 198:1408), relates to events in fifteenth-century Spain Sennacherib’s bad faith in besieging

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Jerusalem again, after tributes agreed to by Hezekiah had been paid: “Nota contra regem qui non seruat pactum sicut Rex Johannis [secundus?] aragonensis non seruauit karolo filio et populo cathalanorum annis m cccclxj et lxii” (155v: “Note: against the king who does not keep his pact as King John II of Aragon did not keep his pact with his son Charles and the Catalan people in 1461 and 1462”).4 Kings will be kings. The account from the book of Kings of the Assyrian king’s perfidy toward Hezekiah is transformed first by the single word contra into a general ethical type: the king who does not keep his pacts. Sicut allows the glossator to read the biblical passage as an ethical criticism aimed directly and specifically at the activities of the fifteenth-century king John II of Aragon. But interestingly enough, the gloss sets up a two-way correspondence. King John II glosses Sennacherib as Sennacherib glosses John II. The gloss provides us with two separate types of the faithless king. Proverbs, essential building blocks of the Libro, are also one of the formes simples of ethical reading in medieval scripta. In general the exposition of proverbs involved a straightforward “chaining” of proverbs that cluster around a given theme. .S., the Spanish glossator of Langton’s biblical commentaries, amplifies the proverbs of Ecclesiasticus with Latin versions of vernacular proverbs. Vernacular culture and its own mores now serve as gloss on the timeless wisdom of the Scriptures. Ecclus. 7:22 deals with the treatment of servants: “Hurt not the servant that worketh faithfully, nor the hired man that giveth thee his life.” .S. glosses the passage by tacking on two proverbs of his own: “In prouerbio uulgari hyspano dicitur. domina culpata / male uerberat suam mallatam .i. seruientem suam [remainder trimmed] ¶ In lombardo dicitur. Domina casta / non timet camerariam gualardam.” (BPP 9-H, Ecclus. 11r: “In the vernacular Spanish proverb it is said: the lady who is criticized wrongly beats her maid, that is, her servant girl; in Lombard they say: the chaste lady does not fear a merry chambermaid”). Ecclus. 33:20 cautions against giving away one’s possessions before one’s death: “Give not to son or wife, brother or friend, power over thee while thou livest; and give not thy estate to another: lest thou repent.” .S. glosses with another proverb: “Nota Prouerbium est hyspanorum. Qvi sua dat aliis ante suam mortem./ cum malleo debet percuti . . . in fronte” (BPP 9-H, Ecclus. 65r: “Note: there is a proverb among the Spaniards: whoever gives his possessions to others before his death ought to be hit in the forehead with a hammer”).5 Here, the general admonition of Ecclesiasticus is answered with a rather direct vernacular remedy. .S. sets up a proverbial chain from Latin to Spanish to Lombard about the theme of masters and servants. The proverbs shift the theme to more specific relations among husbands, wives, and the latter’s servants. The final proverb in the chain shows that mistresses may, through their own

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moral steadfastness, resist the looser standards of serving people. The translation of “vulgar” proverbs into Latin provides an authentication of its own and allows the proverbs to coexist in the storehouse of ethical types with other material of classical or biblical origin. .S. is already operating in the world of popular proverbial wisdom that is to become a characteristic “mode” of writing in Castilian in the Middle Ages and after. We may trace the development of the proverbial impulse exemplified here through the Libro of Juan Ruiz in which the character of the go-between seems almost to have been chosen for the known penchant among such old crones for spouting proverbs (cf. 64a and 1273d). Trotaconventos’s character allows the author to lard his text with a maximum number of proverbial expressions. We can observe a process very similar to .S.’s chaining of Latin and vernacular proverbs in Juan Ruiz’s translation of Pamphilus. In effect, Juan Ruiz glosses two chained proverbs in Pamphilus with eight of his own: “Res tamen interdum grandia parua mouet: | Ex minima magnus scintilla nascitur ignis” (ll. 370–71: “Occasionally a small thing can set large things in motion. Great fire is born from a tiny spark”). a veses luenga fabla tiene chico prouecho/ quien mucho fabla yerra diselo el derecho/ a veses cosa chica fase grant despecho/ ¬ de comienço chico viene granado fecho/ a ueses chica fabla / ¬ bien chico Recabdo/ obran mucho enlos fechos a veses rrecabdan luego/ de chica çentella nasçe grant llama ¬ grant fuego/ ¬ viene grandes peligros a veses del chico juego/ (G:34v;733–34) Sometimes a long speech holds little profit. The person who talks too much errs, so says the law. Sometimes a small thing causes great rancor, and from a small beginning comes a great deed. Sometimes a little speech and a very short message achieve much in our affairs, sometimes they get results right away. From a little spark great flame and great fire are born, and great perils come* at times from a little game.

The go-between is suggesting here that her “small talk” with Endrina can lead to “great things” in marriage. But clearly such phrases as “from a little spark a great fire is born” have applications outside the specific context of the go-between’s attempted seduction. In fact, at the close of this episode a very similar set of proverbs pops up in quite a different context. Here “chica fabla,” rumor, is a bad thing that can lead to public knowledge of Endrina’s disgrace at the hands of Don Melón:

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De fabla chica dañosa / guardese muger falagoera que de vn grano de agraz / se faze mucha dentera de vna nuez chica nasçe grand arbor de grand noguera & muchas espigas nasçen de vn grano de çiuera (S:53v;907)

Let the attractive* woman beware of harmful small talk, for a single sour grape seed can cause a lot of chewing, from a tiny nut a big tree* of a big walnut tree is born, and many seed heads grow from a single grain of wheat.

The lists of proverbs are quite similar. We might switch their positions without great damage to the narrative sense in either place. Indeed, the scribe of S, whom I quote above, seems to associate this proverb with a more general one already known to him involving a nut that grows into a generic “big tree” rather than into a “big walnut tree,” causing him to write “grand arbor de grand noguera.” The “convertible” nature of proverbs makes them separable, selectable, collectable. The go-between’s copious command of proverbs is a model, though her specific application of them is usually exemplary only in malo. Juan Ruiz’s diptych on “small talk” foregrounds again the need for prudence in reading. In the late fifteenth-century Celestina, Fernando de Rojas takes proverb-dropping to almost Baroque excess. The topics discussed by each character, from lowly servant to noble paterfamilias, are laid out in a dizzying series of proverbs and sententiae drawn from a wide range of classical and medieval, learned and popular sources. The proverb chains that we see beginning in the thirteenth-century glosses of .S. have followed the standard migratory pattern of the gloss. By the turn of the sixteenth century, we find them woven into the very fiber of Rojas’s Celestina.

Adaptation Not all texts were as immediately applicable to the life situations of readers as were these simple moralizing glosses and proverbs. In the case of classical texts and medieval narrative or scientific texts, some degree of mediation was required to render the material suitable for ethical consumption. I call this process “adaptation,” that is, “making apt,” “making appropriate.” The process of adaptation is often quite simple, involving prepositions, such as de or contra that suggest a specific topical or rhetorical reading of the text. BNM 12739 contains the text of Bartholomew the Englishman’s De rerum proprietatibus. This scriptum includes hundreds of moralizing glosses on the characteristics of animals, vegetables, and

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minerals.6 In the text nearly every aspect of Bartholomew’s description is given a tropological significance, but these tropologies revolve around a rather limited range of moral and social situations, a range that centers on the religious life, but occasionally branches into related realms such as misogyny, or into more general analyses of human social behavior. The entire text and gloss make fascinating reading. I choose the explanations of the badger (taxus or melis) as representative, in part because alternate explanations of the name of Juan Ruiz’s “Don Melón” have been suggested based on the Latin word.7 The clerical context is established at the beginning of the text. The badger is an animal “cuius pellis ualde est hyspida et uillosa. et dicitur melota” (205r: “whose hair is bristly and shaggy and it is called ‘melota’ ”). Bartholomew links this to the description of the prophets of old in Heb. 11:37: “They wandered about in sheepskins (in melotis), in goatskins, being in want, distressed, afflicted.” The gloss to this line reads: “¶ De aspero habitu religioso qui dicitur melota” (205r: “On the harsh religious habit that is called the ‘melota’). The use of de suggests a topical relation between the text and the subject of the gloss. The gloss connects the deprivations of the clerical life with the sufferings of the prophets via the equivocal etymology melota (“clerical habit”)/melis (“badger”) suggested by the associations already in Bartholomew’s text. Yet we should remember that the true text being glossed here is the animal, the badger itself. The animal is transformed into the bearer of ethical senses suggested by the glosses that follow. The glossator reads the contemplative life in Bartholomew’s discussion of the hibernal habits of the badger: “latibulis sibi prouident in pastu contra hyemem. et si quando eis defecerit cibus. eis pro cibariis erit sompnus” (205r: “They provision their burrows with food against winter, and if ever they lack food, sleep will take the place of food for them”). This is glossed in the margin: “de contemplativis” (“on contemplatives”). The provisions may represent treasures laid up in heaven through the contemplative life against the winter of death. It seems also that the general lack of activity in winter, the calm and isolation, have something to do with the connection. Perhaps we can relate the substitution of sleep for food to the contempt for bodily comforts, or even physical necessities, that is an aspect of the contemplative life. In this case, though, it seems to me that we would have to make a further substitution. Sompnus must certainly stand not for the contemplative’s falling asleep but for contemplation itself. This has interesting implications for our own estimation of the medieval understanding, not just of contemplation, but of hibernation as well. The point here is not to discuss medieval “science,” nor to determine whether my ordering of these relations is the correct one. Rather, the point is that the simple juxtaposition of the badger’s winter rest and “de

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contemplativis” leads inevitably to a chain of loose and shifting associations. Food as material life, sleep as a substitute for food, spiritual contemplation as a substitute for material possessions, is certainly a possible chain. Once we take the gloss and its relation to Bartholomew’s text as a thing to be understood, we are immediately caught up in a process of “adapting,” “making apt,” the apparently simple, but ultimately rather problematic relation between the badger’s hibernation and the contemplative life. In a process that parallels Glosynge itself, adaptation, by implying the existence of ethical links between text and gloss without specifying them, creates a new ethical space in which to test the reader’s prudence and experience. Other glosses in this scriptum suggest more straightforward ethical or moral meanings. When the wolf invades the badger’s burrow and defiles it, causing the badger to move house, the gloss explains that “boni cedunt malis” (205r: “The good cede to the bad”). Is this good or bad? The reader must decide. In any case, the issue is topical. A gloss to Dares’ De excidio Troiae in BdO 126, 68v, tells us, Quod uix aut nunquam peruersos homines a suo prauo sensu quilibet possit auertere. palamedes monstrat in suo opere . . . eggregius agamemnon paucis demonstrat. Maluit siquidem aliene iracundie cedere. ¬ imperium relinquere. quam iracundie uirus euomere. Hardly ever or never can perverse men be turned from their evil designs, Palamedes shows in his deed. Illustrious Agamemnon represents the select few* [reading paucos]. He preferred to cede to alien wrath and to relinquish his power rather than to vomit the venom of wrath.

Are we to take this as a lesson in humility? This example illustrates, incidentally, that once we begin to move among medieval scripta and their margins rather than among editions of authorial texts, a new set of relations among our texts emerges. Bartholomew’s De rerum and the De excidio are not works that obviously relate to one another, but surely for medieval readers such “interglossatory” links were as significant as the “intertextual” links that fascinate us. The rhetorical nature of the glosses, which speak “about” or “against” certain topics is heightened in a set of glosses that speak against certain classes of people. When the wolf sees that he cannot hurt the badger because of its tough and shaggy skin, he runs off, pretending to be beaten. This behavior speaks, the gloss tells us, “contra simulatores et dolosos” (BNM 12739, 205r: “against fakers and tricksters”), for while the badger is out hunting, the wolf sneaks into his burrow and defiles it “urina et aliis imundiciis” (205r: “with urine and other filth”). This gloss speaks “contra defamatores bonorum” (205r: “against the defamers of

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the good”). Such comments seem straightforward. But implicit in the glosses is the idea that the natural behavior of wolves contains morally charged lessons for men. The many versions of the Trojan legend in medieval Spain demonstrate its popularity. In addition to the Historia troiana polimétrica (ca. 1300), we have the episodes told in the General estoria and the Estoria de España. In the fourteenth century we have the abbreviated version by the unidentified Leomarte, together with translations into both Castilian and Galician of the Roman de Troie (Leomarte [Intro] 21). The goals of reading the Trojan legend in the mid-fourteenth century are announced by Leomarte in his Sumas de Historia Troyana: the deeds of great men are written down so that men can remember them and take example from them (63). Leomarte provides his own exemplary reading of the legends in the form of proverbs and sententiae intercalated in his text. A squire attempts to cheer the pregnant Rhea, who has already lost three offspring to the cruelties of Saturn, by telling her, “ninguna cosa que los omnes por su voluntad toman non les deue ser graue de sofryr” (73: “Nothing that people take on voluntarily should be difficult to bear”). In BNM 9256, fv, someone has extracted this and other proverbs from the text under the rubric “Dichos del abtor Leomarte” (“Sayings of the Author Leomarte”): “Las cosas que por voluntad se toman non son graues de sofryr” (61: “The things that are taken on voluntarily are not hard to bear”). The transformation and generalization of proverbs, illustrated graphically here, must have been one of the most common moves of medieval reading. But the interpretive possibilities of the Trojan legend were not limited to proverbial wisdom and example. Medieval readers found deeper significance beneath the cloak of legend. BdO 126 (S. XIII) from the cathedral library of Burgo de Osma illustrates the power of medieval reading to delve beneath the surface of the text to find further ethical guidance. This scriptum contains, among other texts, the De excidio Troiae historia of Dares of Phrygia and the anonymous Excidium Troie.8 The annotations to these texts are about a dozen in number, written in a neat hand, perhaps by the same scribe who copied the text. They are not spontaneous annotations. Rather, they are designed to be a formal part of the manuscript and are perhaps copied from another source. The first of these annotations illustrates how the process of adaptation works to shift a pagan legend, in stages, into Christian and tropological realms. At the first mention of “Alexander” (62v), the glossator offers what must be a standard school explanation of Paris’s double name, mentioning that the city of Paris is named after him. In the first moralizing shift, we are given the apparently “historical” information that Paris was a “pas-

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tor in montibus” (“shepherd in the mountains”). To this, however, the annotator adds the further information that he was a guardian “uacarum taurorum .i. superborum non ouium et agnorum .i. humilium” (“of cows [and] bulls, that is of the proud, not of sheep and lambs, that is the humble”). That Paris is a “guardian of the proud” has little significance except in the light of his subsequent activities. But the introduction of the relation between cows and bulls (pride) and sheep and lambs (humility) moves Paris into the realm of “binary” ethical thinking, in which Paris’s prideful actions acquire ethical depth by serving as the definition of behavior that is not humble as well. The tale of Paris also shadows biblical history. When Priam prefers the advice of Paris to that of Hector, the glossator adds: “Hic si placet in medi[um] proferatur roboam sal[o]monis filius qui praeposuit iuuenes sen[ibus] stultos sapientibus” (63r; I supply bracketed portions, which were trimmed or worn off at the margin: “Here, I believe, may be mentioned in passing Roboam, the son of Solomon, who preferred youths to old men and fools to wise men”). Roboam is “figured” secularly by Paris. And vice versa. An extended reading of the story of Achilles and his heel provides an opportunity to view the adaptation process from a larger perspective. I note in passing that the glossator inserts his gloss into the ongoing debate about the use of “fabulae fictae” in moral fiction: “Achilles ut ait homerus fuit pelee regis ¬ tetis regine filius. de hoc idem ipse fingit fabulam. immo similitudinem congruam ad nostram exortationem satis aptam” (70r; ed. sec. 34: “Achilles, as Homer says, was the son of King Peleus and Queen Thetis. And he himself makes a fable about it, or rather a fitting similitude rather apt for our exhortation”). The glossator clearly belongs to those who believed that moral truths lurked behind the veil of poetic fiction (he is referring to Homer here, not Dares). His similitude is “rather apt” or “apt enough” for our instruction. He situates his work explicitly within the process of “ad-aptation.” The glossator recognizes that absolute precision falls outside the scope of ethical inquiry. But this does not prevent his gloss from functioning ethically. The glossator briefly tells the tale of Achilles’ dip in “aqua inferorum” (“Stygian water”) and of his betrayal and death at the hands of Hecuba, Polyxena, and Paris. Not surprisingly, Achilles’ heel forms the basis of the moral exposition that follows: In talo ut ait papa Gregorius finis est corporis. ¬ significat finem uite uel operis. In hoc ergo facto monemur presentis uite lasciuiam. carnis blandiciam. heue nequiciam. heccube fraudulenciam. polixenensis pulchritudinis immo putredinis industriam declinare. oculorum leuitatem mentis mobilitatem deuitare. in bonis operibus usque in finem perseuerare. Omnis si-

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quidem laus in fine canitur. ¬ corona non nisi perseuerantibus promittitur uel tribuitur. Alexander ¬ enim noster hostis antiquus cotidie satagit ¬ cogitat. qualiter in nobis finem uite uel talum operis transforare queat. O quales ¬ quantos non tamen rudes ¬ stultos. sed etiam sciencia uita ¬ moribus magnos. quia sustenencia cum eis non perseuerauit. in profunda baratri precipitauit. In the heel, as Pope Gregory says, is the end of the body, and it signifies the end of life or of work. In this fact we are warned to decline the lasciviousness of the present life, the blandishments, or rather evil, of the flesh, the fraudulence, that is, of Hecuba, the diligence of the beauty (nay, rather of the putridness) of Polyxena. We are warned to turn the lightness of our eyes and the fickleness of our mind toward good works and to persevere until the end. All praise, indeed, is sung at the end, and the crown is neither promised nor granted except to those who persevere. Alexander, and indeed our own ancient foe, each day shoots arrows* [sagitat?] and plots how he may pierce in us the end of our life or the heel of our work. O, what kinds of men and what multitudes, not just unlearned and foolish, but also those great in learning, life, and character, because patience did not persist with them, he has cast into the depths of hell.

This is a complex series of associations. The heel, according to Saint Gregory, can represent either the end of life (that is, death) or the goals of our actions. The double reading of “goal” and “death” is maintained throughout: we must keep our eyes on the goal until the end. Gregory’s explanation of the heel serves as an extended set of “adaptations” on Achilles’ own end. The love of Polyxena, which leads Achilles to his death, is lewdness in general. Hecuba’s scheming for revenge on Achilles represents fraud, deceit. Polyxena is the putridness that underlies all earthly beauty. Paris is the devil, who plots our downfall. The material of the Trojan legend may well have its own ethical implications: the prideful behavior of Paris, the lust and wrath of Achilles. But in this gloss such themes are formally adapted to a familiar set of Christian moral/ethical types: the lustful lover, the ephemeral nature of earthly beauties, the devil who hunts us down. There is also a minor lesson in perseverance and patience. Achilles’ downfall begins with his mother’s failure to persevere to the end (heel). Thetis lacks the patience to flip the infant hero over and dip the part she had missed. Readings that use absurdly mixed metaphors like “the heel of our work” are good examples of practices we find most alien and least interesting in medieval reading. Such glosses are the first things to be stripped in the process of creating critical editions. We have chosen not to examine the fascinating ways in which such glosses work to extend the text beyond the margins of the manuscript leaf.

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Application: “El dicho yo le apruevo, el propósito no entiendo” In the second auto of Celestina, Calisto, the lovesick youth, and Pármeno, his servant, are arguing about the wisdom of employing the old bawd to aid in the seduction of Melibea. Pármeno is against it. “Nunca yerro vino desacompañado, . . . un inconveniente es causa y puerta de muchos” (“No error ever came unaccompanied, one difficulty is the cause and doorway for many”). Calisto responds: “El dicho yo le apruevo; el propósito no entiendo” (Rojas 134: “I approve of your saying, but I do not understand its purpose” or “its application to present circumstances”). It is not enough to have timeless wisdom of the sort provided by proverbs and moralizations. Without a specific context, they are empty vessels. Ethical material must be related to the particular human situation in which it is invoked. This is the final referent, the final context that sustains the edifice of medieval reading. In this example, Calisto is incapable of seeing, as Pármeno does, that Calisto’s loss of his hawk, the event that leads him to encounter Melibea in her garden, is not the source of celestial joy he believes it to be. Rather, it is the first of a series of misfortunes that will eventually destroy him. Proverbs, exempla, and more complex moral adaptations are ethically true, but their ethical force depends entirely on the use made of them, and ultimately on the moral state of the person who would apply them. Morally blinded by love, Calisto has lost the ability to establish the ethical links between perennial wisdom and his present situation. Pármeno knows that the proverb applies all too well. The world of medieval reading does not end with the Letter on the page and the various strategies we might invoke for playing with it or elucidating its meaning. Beyond the Letter sits the “real reader,” who, unless he, too, is morally blind, invokes these strategies and is changed by the reading process. “Real reader” is a problematic enough concept when we investigate living readers of our own era.9 The real readings of men and women who lived in the Middle Ages would seem to represent an object whose secrets are impossible to unlock. But there is some evidence available for us to use, however tentatively. The glossatory material such as that studied in this chapter can provide some glimpses of this activity. The concept of scriptum allows us to see the complex relations among texts mediated by the physical parchment leaf, and we can catch further glimpses of medieval readers in the web of these relations. But these will be only partial glimpses. Our escape from the Letter of the text can be only a limited one: the recognition that this world of real readers did (and does) exist, and that the Letters of our text do refer to it and have an

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impact on it and in it. In a sense, then, Calisto figures modern readers who confront the medieval ethical text. We can approve of what we read, but much of it remains pointless, absurd, quaint, uninteresting, because we are blind to the fact that this literature cannot stand by itself. It cannot stand unless it leans on us, unless we actively apply it to ourselves, to our lives. This was its design, at least; and when we ignore this design, it is bound to appear pointless (because it then is) and absurd. The existence of adaptation is our strongest proof that the ethical application of medieval scripta to the true life situation of readers was a fundamental part of the medieval reading experience. Medieval moralizations and allegorical interpretations remain dead Letters, artificial and uninteresting devices, until we recognize that adaptation would not have existed without application. There is no motivation for making Achilles’ heel into the end of life and the end of our works unless this view of the heel has significance in the world beyond the text. Our choice, then, is whether to see a large part of the object that we study to be absurd (as so many medievalists have) or to acknowledge the inescapable presence of a world larger than the Letter. In this latter world it is not at all absurd to think about one’s life in terms of its end, the goals we set for ourselves in it, or the particular weaknesses and deceits that can destroy not only great men like Achilles, but us lesser men and women as well. Castilian writers of the later Middle Ages were keenly aware of the aliquid minus that was adaptation without application. Collections of exempla (some of them moralized) and proverbs abounded, many drawn from Arabic sources (Edad84 176–84). Their truths, drawn from Christian, classical, and oriental sources, were available for the preacher, monk, nobleman, or individual reader. Yet this truth, however laudable, was useless, remained inert, until it was activated, until it was applied to some specific case. We find an interesting development in early fourteenth-century Castile in works such as Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor and Juan Ruiz’s Libro. In these works a narrative frame grows up around exempla and proverbs. And this frame, too, is exemplary. Its function is to portray explicitly the application process, in bono or in malo. The frame provides a story that exemplifies possible applications of ethical material, and it dramatizes the consequences of right or wrong application. Our initial impulse is to view “narratives” such as the Conde Lucanor or the Libro as innovative because they use a rudimentary storyline (the love adventures of the Archpriest of Hita, for example), which they interlard with pithy sayings and mini-narrative units such as exempla. We read these narratives as (failed) early experiments in extended fictions, mere “frame tales” that do not realize the quasinovelistic status to which they aspire. Works like the Conde Lucanor and the Libro come into much clearer

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focus, however, when we view them as collections of previously authenticated proverbial and exemplary material to which is now added, in fictional form, the implicit but hitherto invisible application of this material to a “real-life” situation. Narrative fulfills, glosses, the application to the world of human values that is the justification for the existence of exempla and proverbs in the first place. We find striking evidence of this procedure in its simplest form in Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor. The work is divided into two major sections, a Libro de los enxiemplos (Obras 2:19–438) and a series of books containing proverbs and other didactic material (2:439–91). The primary didactic building blocks, proverbs and examples, jumbled together in the Libro, are kept separate in the Conde Lucanor. That medieval readers saw the enxiemplo as the central focus of the first part of the book is evidenced in ms. M (BNM 4236), where “exenplo” appears in red in the margin at the point at which Patronio’s exemplum proper begins (Gloeckner passim). Tables of contents and rubrics in ms. S (BNM 6376) also refer to the traditional exempla, not to the specific problem with which the fictional Conde presents his advisor (129v–130r, Obras 2:19–22). The Conde Lucanor, then, was presented to medieval readers in manuscripts into the late fifteenth century primarily as a collection of exempla, not as a narrative frame (the Conde’s conversations with Patronio) containing smaller narrative units (“stories”). To medieval readers the Conde Lucanor may have looked much like the exemplum collections that lacked such a narrative frame. What was the purpose of the addition of the dialogues between the Conde and Patronio and of Juan Manuel’s own presence in the book as author of mnemonic versets? The Conde and Patronio are there to add to the exemplum material a series of exemplary applications. In each enxienplo, Patronio shows the Conde how a particular tale can be adapted to a specific personal problem the Conde has encountered. These problems generally relate to the Conde’s status as a member of the high nobility. Patronio’s exemplum and adaptation will allow the Conde to solve his problem while maintaining his “onras . . . faziendas et . . . estados” (Obras 2:23: “honor, wealth, and position”). In a brief formula at the end of each enxienplo, Juan Manuel tells us most explicitly that the Conde Lucanor actively applies to his own life Patronio’s particular adaptation of the tale: “El conde touo esto por buen conseio, et fizo lo assi et fallose ende bien” (Obras 2:314: “The count considered this advice good, and he did it this way and found himself the better for it”). This formula, repeated with scant variation at the close of most of the exempla, has received little, if any, comment from scholars. But I think it provides a strikingly concrete glimpse into ethical reading and the ethical world that surrounded medieval literature. Juan Manuel

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seeks to dramatize, however crudely, the process by which ethical material is adapted to a particular case and is then applied in the real world of human interaction that so fascinated Juan Manuel. Each presentation ends with another formula in which Juan Manuel, the author, “understands” that the exemplum is good: “Et entendiendo don Iohan que estos exienplos eran muy buenos, fizo los escribir en este libro, et fizo estos viesos en que se pone la sentençia de.los exienplos” (Obras 2:37: “And since Don Juan understood that these exempla were very good, he had them written in this book and made these verses in which is contained the sententia of the exempla”). Juan Manuel’s understanding allows him to approve the exemplum for inclusion in his book. In addition, he writes a viesso (the moralizing versus of the Latin tradition) to make Patronio’s particular adaptation of the exemplum more memorable. An early manuscript or manuscripts may have included ystorias, pictures that provided a further memorial clue. But we should not conclude that Patronio’s particular adaptation of the exemplum to the Conde’s crisis of the moment, and the Conde’s subsequent application of it, close off the power of the exemplum to signify in other ways or to be applied to other situations. This would be to introduce our own Letter-bound view of these texts once again. Juan Manuel makes this quite clear in his general prologue: “seria marauilla si de qual quier cosa que acaezca a.qual quier omne, non fallare en este libro su semejança que acaesçio a otro” (Obras 2:23: “It would be a miracle if in anything that might befall anyone he would not find its resemblance in this book in something that happened to someone else”). Although the book itself is directed primarily to those of Juan Manuel’s estado, it remains open. It is an endless possibility of semejança to “anything that might befall anyone.” Juan Manuel offers his book, then, first as exemplary tales and exemplary applications to the noble life, and second as a set of potential “similitudes apt enough” for other readers to find the reflection of a given personal situation there.10 Juan Manuel’s exempla are all applied in bono by the Conde Lucanor; that is, they lead to a positive outcome in the fictional ethical world that the Conde inhabits. We would not expect Juan Ruiz to be content with such simplicities. Like the Conde Lucanor, much of the Libro can be understood as a dramatization of the process of applying exempla and proverbial material contained in it, but with one important difference: within the fictional frame itself, we have exempla applied both in bono and in malo. Juan Manuel guides us heavy-handedly through a specific, constructive use of the exempla he includes in his book. In the Libro, the same open-ended ethical choices that we must make throughout his book (and in the real world as well) are included in the fiction. A brief sample must suffice.

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One characteristic feature of the Libro is its “duelling fables.” The old bawd and her female victim argue about whether the younger woman should begin a relationship with the bawd’s employer. Exempla, usually based on Juan Ruiz’s translation from the Latin fables of Walter the Englishman (Lecoy 113–37), are cited by both the woman and the old bawd as types of behavior to be followed or avoided in the specific fictional occasion. This procedure is most fully developed in Juan Ruiz’s “seduction” of the nun Garoza. Garoza angrily rejects the initial suggestion of her former servant, Trotaconventos, that she get involved with the Archpriest. Trotaconventos’s first move is to pretend that Garoza is just upset because the go-between has brought her no presents, not because she has brought an illicit proposal. To characterize the nun’s behavior, Trotaconventos applies to Garoza and herself the exemplum of the old hound who is no longer fit to hunt and is neglected by his master: ¶

sseñora dixo la vieJa / por que so baldonada quando trayo presente / so mucho falagada vine manos vasyas / finco mal estultada conteçe me como al galgo / vieJo que non caça nada (S:81v;1356)

“Lady,” said the old woman, “why am I set at naught? When I bring a present, I am flattered. I came with my hands empty, I was badly criticized; it is happening to me as it happened to the old hound who cannot catch anything.”

Modern readers will enjoy the irony that Trotaconventos is very much an old dog on a hunt, but such ironies escape Garoza. Trotaconventos’s application of this exemplum to the specific case of her petition to Garoza softens the nun’s position. The bawd has managed to shift ethical grounds. When the duel began, Garoza had compared Trotaconventos in her attempt to seduce her to the snake who tries to kill a gardener who has saved its life. She had protected Trotaconventos, her servant; in return, the servant wants to harm her. Now, through the example of the ungrateful master, Trotaconventos has put Garoza on the defensive. The nun attempts to justify her “cruel and ungrateful” treatment of her former servant by invoking the type of the “country mouse”: “Mas temome & Reçelo / que mal engañada sea | non querria que me fuese / commo al mur del aldea | conel mur dela villa yendo afazer enplea” (S:82r;1369: “I fear and am leery that I may be badly deceived; I would not want it to happen to me as it did to the small-town mouse with the city mouse when he went to market”). She prefers the simple safe countryside of the convent to the city of human sexual love.

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mas vale en convento las sardinas saladas fasyendo adios seruiçio con las dueñas onrradas que perder la mi alma con perdises asadas /¬ fincar escarnida commo otras deserradas (T:19v;1385)

It is better [to eat] salted sardines in the convent performing service to God with honored nuns, than to destroy my soul with roasted partridges and to end up shamed like other women who have gone astray.

The debate proceeds in this fashion, with each party offering a series of fable types, usually as a critique of the other’s behavior. The duel culminates with Garoza’s application of the tale of the thief who sold his soul to the devil. Trotaconventos, out-fabled for the moment, can only remark, “muchas fablas sabedes” (T:26v;1480a: “You know a lot of stories”). Garoza’s store of ethical exempla has proven even more “copious” than the bawd’s. For the moment she seems safe from Trotaconventos’s wiles. But the go-between soon recovers from this setback and plunges in again. It soon emerges that Garoza’s resistance has only been a means of testing the go-between’s fidelity (1483a–c); her application of the fables has been as manipulative as the bawd’s. Nothing in the specific application in bono or in malo of these fables to the situation of Juan Ruiz’s fictional characters closes off the possibility of their being applied by readers to other situations, however. Indeed, as we shall see, medieval readers found the exempla and proverbs applied in malo by Trotaconventos just as useful as those supposedly applied in bono by Garoza. Juan Ruiz’s own adjustment of his fables to the specific fictional context in several cases seems crude, at best (Michael 215–16). What Juan Ruiz gives us is an opportunity to evaluate application itself in a way that collections of exempla or unidirectional applications like those found in the Conde Lucanor cannot. Juan Ruiz compounds the ethical density of his book when he not only portrays human behavior that we must judge as ethical or unethical, but also provides examples of such judgments, some effective, some not. Application was an essential, though often invisible, part of the medieval ethics of reading. We must not let our fascination with the evolving skill and complexity in storytelling we witness through the Middle Ages cause us to forget the essentially rhetorical nature of these texts. They were there to teach a lesson to specific human individuals facing concrete problems. The rest was adornment, the coating on the pill to make it go down more smoothly, as medieval writers so often tell us (for example, in the Conde Lucanor, Obras 2:28). In some, if not all, cases, application had to be preceded by adaptation. Exempla and proverbs functioned “figuraliter et grosse,” in an imprecise, representative way. The precise balance of

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likeness and unlikeness is best captured in the image of the human face with which Juan Manuel opens his collection of exempla in the Conde Lucanor. Among the many marvels that God has created, one of the most marvelous is the human face: de quantos omnes en.el mundo son, non a vno que semeje a otro en.la cara; ca commo quier que todos los omnes an essas mismas cosas en.la cara . . . las caras en.si mismas non semejan las vnas a.las otras. Et pues en.las caras, que son tan pequennas cosas, ha en.ellas tan grant departimiento, menor marabilla es que aya departimiento en.las voluntades et en.las entenciones de.los omnes. Et assi falleredes que ningun omne non se semeja del todo en.la voluntad nin en.la entençion con otro. (Obras 2:27) Of all the men in the world, there is not one who looks just like another in the face; for although all men have the same things on their face, the faces themselves do not resemble one another. And since, among faces, which are such small things, there is such great difference, it is no wonder that there is a difference in the will and intentions among men. And so you will find that no man totally resembles another in will and intention.

It was this recognition of the very similar but inescapably different faces, wills, and intentions of men that the ethical reading of the Middle Ages sought to negotiate. But there were other features of medieval texts, such as the technology of reading, that maintained the openness of the text to Glosynge while channeling that Glosynge in particular “safe” directions. Juan Ruiz’s book is an encyclopedia of such technologies. I examine these in the next chapter.

3 THE ETHICS OF READING THE BOOK OF THE ARCHPRIEST OF HITA

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HUS FAR, we have studied an “indeterminacy” that was part of the very nature of the medieval scriptum, that gave to the text an aliquid minus, a negative charge that allowed a gloss to spring up at any point. The reader determined the nature of this fulfillment according to his or her occasional circumstances: educational background, cultural or social milieu, moral status, and ethical concerns of the moment. I have sought to illustrate this feature of medieval literary life through concrete examples drawn from medieval scripta. The reasons for which this indeterminacy came into being, its origins and history, are a complex set of problems that lie outside the scope of this book. Whatever the origins may have been, it is clear that the Middle Ages evolved numerous formal and semiformal systems that sought to codify the processes of fulfilling the text and to direct their flow. Among the passages of the Libro that have attracted the most attention from modern readers (though not medieval readers, as we shall see) are the many places in which Juan Ruiz suggests certain standard techniques for reading his book. Most notable are the prologue (found in S alone), the plea for divine aid in composing the book (11–19), the episode of the Greeks and Romans (44–70), and the envoi and explicit (1626–34). Beyond these instructions, which were placed in anticipated locations at the beginning and end, there are scattered references to how one should read the Libro throughout the cuaderna vía text (for example, 986, 1390). Twentieth-century readers have found these instructions problematic in the same way that the rest of Juan Ruiz’s book is problematic. What, for example, does it mean that “buen amor,” the key concept of the book, lies beneath the “cloak” of Juan Ruiz’s text just as a drunk lies in a stupor beneath his cape (18cd)? How do we read a book under the rule of the liar’s paradox: “do cuydares que miente dise mayor verdat” (G:4v;69a: “Wherever you think it is lying, it is telling a greater truth”)? The portions of the Libro that are supposed to help us participate fully and frustratingly in the same contradictions and impasses we read in the remainder of the text. Passages we hope will clarify the book, in fact, compound its mysteries. This very blending of text and “critical” gloss illustrates again the

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impasse we encounter if we take such glosses to refer to the authorial text rather than to readers. It is through this series of instructions on how to read or “understand” his book that Juan Ruiz opens his Libro most explicitly into the ethical world that surrounds it. In this chapter I survey a few of the specific reading strategies Juan Ruiz recommends to his readers and examine the traditions he invokes in recommending them. Here Juan Ruiz makes his point that not only our interpretations but also our choice of interpretive strategies require prudence. They are ethical choices. I give special attention to two significant reading traditions largely neglected by students of the Libro. The first concerns the tiniest, most basic building block of medieval ethical reading: the concept of praise and blame, together with the various “binary” pairs that derive from or are related to it. The second concerns a rather different aspect of medieval readings of the Libro: the fact that the religious lyrics of the book—gozos (“Joys”), pasiones—belonged to a tradition of personal devout meditation. Although this second type of reading may lie outside the boundaries of that reading we call “ethical,” it is important for placing ethical reading in the larger context of medieval reading, in which wideranging personal and occasional “meditation” upon texts rather than the slavish following of a path laid out by an author was both the obligation and the delight of readers. Elsewhere (“Se usa”), I have suggested that we can best understand many of the ethical ideas found in the Libro in the context of the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Castilian reception of “Aristotelian ethics.” I am thinking of works like the Castigos e documentos of Sancho IV, the Libro del cauallero Zifar, and Don Juan Manuel’s Libro de los estados, as well as of translations and adaptations from other languages: the De regimine principum, translated and glossed by Fray Juan García de Castrojeriz for the young prince Pedro, and the Libro del tesoro of Brunetto Latini, a translation probably commissioned by Sancho.1 We could learn a good deal about this period and these works by seeing them, together with the Libro, as part of a generalized intellectual movement in Castile (see Kinkade, “Sancho”). For the purposes of this study, however, I take a broader perspective, examining the Libro in the light of longstanding European traditions. Academic commentary on both the genuine and the spurious works of Ovid provides especially interesting insights into the categories in which Juan Ruiz and his readers may have placed his Libro. The “warning function” that Juan Ruiz ascribes to his book in the prologue—“descobrimiento publicado de sus muchas engañosas maneras que vsan para pecar E engañar las mugeres” (S:2r;prol.: “exposure made public of the many deceitful ways they use to sin and to deceive women”)—is very much in the vein of an accessus to the pseudo-Ovidian De sompno:

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Intentio sua est . . . reprehendere viciosos mores lenarum que per fallacias suas castissimarum etiam incestant animos feminarum. Utilitas est delectatio, vel operis lenarum et morum cognitio. (Ghisalberti 48; cf. Rico, “Sobre” 304) Ovid’s intention is to censure the wicked ways of procuresses who, through their deceits, corrupt the minds of even the most chaste women. The utility is delight, or knowing about the deeds of procuresses and their ways.2

Traditions of reading simpler genres such as fables and proverbs also appear in Juan Ruiz’s book. We have known since Lecoy’s Recherches that Juan Ruiz translated most of the Aesopic fables that comprise a substantial portion of his book from the Latin verse of Walter the Englishman. So far as I know, however, it has not been remarked that Juan Ruiz’s references to the “vile” integument of his book (16–18) are strongly reminiscent of the prologue to Walter’s collection. Vt messis pretium de uili surgat agello, Verbula sicca, Deus, complue rore tuo. Verborum leuitas morum fert pondus honestum, Vt nucleum celat arida testa bonum As the wealth of the harvest arises from a vile little field, rain upon these dry little words with your dew, O God. The lightness of the words bears an honorable weight of morals as the dry shell conceals a good seed.

“Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis” (Hervieux 2:316: “People laugh more sweetly at serious things ornamented with jests”) is suggested in Juan Ruiz’s “e por que de buen seso non puede omne rreyr | avre algunas burlas aqui aenxerir” (G:2v;45ab: “And since one cannot laugh at good sense, I will graft in a few jokes here”; cf. 15), as well as his “coplas pintadas” (G:4v;69b: “ornamented verses”). The common idea that fables formally figured the human world (cf. Henryson’s “be figure of ane uther thing”; 41, l. 7) may account for some of the passages in which Juan Ruiz seems to suggest an allegorical sense for his book: “¶ ca sobre toda fabla se entyende otra cosa | sy lo quise alega en la rrason fermosa” (T:37r;1631cd: “For in each fable you must understand another thing besides* that which* is* stated* [cf. S:98v;1631d: “syn la que se a lega”] in the pretty text”). Proverbs, which make up such an important part of Juan Ruiz’s book, were also portrayed as having “another sense” in some prologues to the proverbial books of the Bible: etiam prouerbia plerumque tam obscura sunt vt parabole bene dicantur. . . . Prouerbiorum liber non vt simplices arbitrantur patentia habet [p?]recepta sed quasi in terra aurum in nuce nucleus in hirsutis castanearum operculis

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absconditus fructus inquiritur ita in eis diuinus sensus altius est inquirendus. (Biblia cum glossa 3:b1v) Many proverbs, too, are so obscure that they might well be called parables. . . . The book of Proverbs does not, as the simple-minded believe, have obvious precepts, but as gold in the earth, the kernel inside the nut, the hidden fruit inside the hairy covering of chestnuts are sought, so in proverbs the profound divine sense should be sought.

That biblical proverbs and classical fables were described in such similar language simply shows again that it is in reading strategies rather than in texts or genres that we must seek the medieval sense of medieval scripta.3 In a similar vein are statements that recall, in burlesque key, the world of biblical exegesis. A teacher’s preface to Peter Riga’s Aurora cautions readers: “Legat itaque antequam contempnat, et intelligat priusquam dampnet” (1:5, ll. 16–17: “And so, let him read before disparaging and understand before damning”). Juan Ruiz opens his “burla” on the serrana “fasta que el libro entiendas del bien non digas maL” (G:47v;986c: “Do not speak ill of the good until you understand the book”).4 The following line evokes the language of figural biblical interpretation: “ca tu entenderas vno ¬ el libro dira aL/” (G: 47v;986d: “For you will understand one thing and the book will say another”). Compare the General estoria’s analysis of Old Testament sacrifice: “non se oluide . . . que todos los sacrifficios que enel uieio testamiento se fazien mostrauan uno e dauan al a entender, et todos eran fechos en semeiança, e en figura e encubierta mientre” (1:501a: “Do not forget that all the sacrifices performed in the Old Testament displayed one thing but meant another thing to be understood, and all were done in similitude and in figure and in a hidden way”). The line I have chosen to represent the goals of this study, “fiz vos pequeño lybro de teste mas de glosa | non creo que es pequeño ante es muy gran plosa” (T:36v;1631: “I made you a little book with regard to its text,* but I do not think the gloss is small; rather it is a very large piece of writing”) echoes the Glossa ordinaria’s explanation of the modus agendi of Ecclesiasticus and Ecclesiastes: “Paucus est in sermone et planus, sed multus in sententia et obscurus in mysteriis” (Biblia cum Postillis 3:a2r and k6v: “It is small and plain in words, but large in sense and obscure in its mysteries”; compare the introduction to the third part of the Conde Lucanor, Obras 2:453). Many reading practices advocated by Juan Ruiz had found their way into the language of vernacular poetry long before him. In announcing his intention in the work, the author of the twelfth-century vernacular version of the story of Joseph says: “Sachiez que de folie | N’est faite ne d’envie”

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(L’Estoire Joseph ll. 15–16: “Know that it is not written out of folly or envy”). Compare Juan Ruiz’s “atrobar con locura non creas que me mueuo” (G:4v;66c: “Do not think that I am moved to write verse out of folly”). Bernart de Ventadorn had already told his audience, “lo vers es fins e naturaus | e bons a cel qui ben l’enten” (Jos90 23: “The poem is subtle and natural and good to the person who understands it well”) more than a century before Juan Ruiz told his readers concerning his book, “veras que bien es dicha / si bien fuese entendida” (S:6r;64c: “You will see that it is well said if it was well understood”). Dante’s “O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani, | mirate la dottrina che s’asconde | sotto ’l velame de li versi strani” (Dante, “Inferno” 9.61–63: “O you who have sound understanding, mark the doctrine that is hidden under the veil of the strange verses!”; trans. Singleton) echoes the common plea of medieval writers to their readers to “intelligere sane” (“understand healthily” or “sensibly”; cf. Jos90 27). Compare Juan Ruiz’s “anssy entendet sano / los proverbios antiguos” (S:12v;165c: “And so understand healthily the ancient proverbs”).5

The Art of Love No doubt the most difficult tradition into which Juan Ruiz inserts his book is that of the art of love. He calls attention to the presence of the art of love in a way that casts doubt on all the pious warnings he has given: “en pero por que es vmanal cosa el pecar si algunos lo que non los consseJo quisieren vsar del loco amor aqui fallaran algunas maneras para ello” (S:2r; prol.: “However, since to sin is human, if some readers—this is not my advice—should want to use mad love, here they will find some ways for it”). It is difficult to see this as an innocent statement. Juan Ruiz’s use of the verb usar suggests, however, that he may have been recalling remotely the medieval distinction between “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” arts, between the knowledge of the rules of an art and its practice (Minnis, Medieval 30–33). The thin line that Juan Ruiz walks so gingerly here is one already trod, in all apparent seriousness, a century and a half earlier by Petrus Cantor: “ipsa ars est bona tamen eius vsus est malus” (“The art itself is good, but its use is evil”). The art of love, like poison, comes from God, Petrus explains. Thus, in itself, the art cannot be evil. Only its use is evil. ergo ille qui docet artem amatoriam non ne utitur ea et peccant moraliter [?] dicimus quod non utitur ea sed tradi eam ille autem qui per eam corrumpit mulieres utitur ea. doctor uero tradit eam non ad usum sed ad cautelam. (Munich Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 5426, 163r)

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Therefore, the person who teaches the art of love not so that they [?] use it and sin morally [?], we say that he does not use it, but hands it on. The person, however, who corrupts women with it uses it. Truly, the learned man teaches it not for use but as a warning. [Text and translation are rough, but I hope to have captured the general sense.]

It is very difficult for us not to find Petrus a bit hypocritical here. It is almost impossible for us not to feel that Juan Ruiz is mocking such hypocrisies when he claims that his book is “descobrimiento publicado de sus muchas engañosas maneras que vsan para pecar E engañar las mugeres” (S:2r;prol.: “exposure made public of the many deceitful ways they use to sin and to deceive women”).6 We are skeptical of his assertion that he hands on this material in his book “por que sean todos aperçebidos ¬ se puedan meJor guardar de tantas maestrias como algunos vsan por el loco amor” (S:2v;prol.: “so that everyone can be advised and can protect themselves better from all the tricks that some use for mad love”). At the very least it is clear that Juan Ruiz is invoking, whether with serious or ironic intent, oppositions such as those set up by Petrus Cantor: the knowledge of the art of love is valuable as protection against those who put it into use; teaching it is not wrong, but using it is.7 Christian thinkers had already dealt with most of these issues in their struggle with the overt sensualities of the Song of Songs. Gregory had explained that this book refers to “oscula,” “ubera,” “genae,”and “femora” (“kisses,” “breasts,” “cheeks,” and “thighs”) so that men may be “aroused” (“recalescat,” “excitatur”) to a higher love: “ut cor nostrum ad instigationem sacri amoris accenderet, usque ad turpis amoris nostri se verba distendit” (Expositio; PL 79:473: “So that our hearts may be inflamed to the incitement of sacred love, he extends himself to the words of our wicked love”; see Robertson’s useful discussion of this and related texts, 24–31). Honorius of Autun viewed the Song of Songs as the final step in a biblical art of divine love using terms as graphic as those used in the Hebrew wedding songs themselves: Praeterea notandum quod Cantica in quinto loco agiographiae calculum ponunt, quia nimirum quinque gradus amoris sunt, videlicet visus et alloquium, contactus et oscula, factum. In primis namque puella placita visu eligitur, deinde electam amans alloquitur, tertio blando contactu amplectitur, quarto osculatur, quinto res facto peragitur. (Expositio; PL 172:351) Furthermore, it should be noted that the Songs are counted in the fifth place among the hagiographa because, of course, there are five steps to love, that is, sight and conversing, touch and kisses, the deed. In the first, indeed, a girl pleasing to the sight is chosen, then, once chosen, she is spoken to

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lovingly, third, she is embraced with gentle touch, fourth, she is kissed, fifth, the thing is carried through to the deed.

Here, unmistakably, Honorius identifies the spiritual allegory of the Song of Songs with the “act” of sexual intercourse. As Roy has shown (54–59), more than half the Latin manuscripts of Andreas Capellanus’s De arte honesti amandi are linked to a religious context, often because the text was copied together with religious or moral works. All of this suggests that manuals for sexual seduction fell into rather different generic categories in the Middle Ages than they do in the twentieth century. By the later Middle Ages the languages of human sexual love and spiritual love had become, in effect, a single discourse. It would be very much up to the reader to select among a variety of ethical and spiritual values assigned to anatomical parts, to erotic acts, to lover, lady, and go-between, and to all the arts of seduction. Surely there were many medieval readers who did not sufficiently distinguish between an art and its use or who did not fully accomplish the move from earthly love to celestial. In the medieval arts of sexual love and in the text of the Song of Songs we have two of our clearest illustrations of the way in which reading continually involved the reader in ethical, moral, and spiritual choices. Reading praxis was indistinguishable from “real world” ethical praxis.

Memory, Understanding, and Will In the prologue Juan Ruiz provides his most extended guide to reading his book.8 The prologue has been studied from a variety of angles: as “parodic sermon” (Lecoy 361; Deyermond, “Some” 56–57), “sermon joyeux” (Green 1:46–47: “burlesque sermon”), “learned sermon” (Chapman), “meditative sermon” (Burke, “Libro”), from the perspective of Augustinian voluntarism (Ullman), and in the light of patristic and medieval theological, psychological, and legal doctrines (Jenaro, “Presupuestos”). Significantly, Jenaro’s discussion of the “intellectual presuppositions” of the prologue devotes considerable space to Gregory’s Moralia and to the Nicomachean Ethics. The special medieval understandings of Augustine’s “memory,” “understanding,” and “will,” which Juan Ruiz places at the center of his prologue (and, thus, of the reading of his book), served to enhance rather than to close off the reader’s responsibility in working out the ethical significance of his or her Libro. Intellectus (“understanding”) is the first word of the prologue: “¶Intellectum tibi dabo et Instruam te In via hac qua gradieris firmabo super te occulos meos” (S:1r;prol.: “I will give thee understanding and I will instruct thee in this way, in which thou shalt go: I will fix my eyes upon

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thee”; Ps. 31:8). A few lines later, Juan Ruiz introduces the active role the verb entender (“to understand”) is to play throughout the Libro in determining an occasional and personal truth rather than in receiving a transcendent, static meaning: “/enel qual verso entiendo yo tres cosas . . . entendimiento. voluntad. E memoria” (S:1r;prol.: “In which verse I understand three things . . . understanding, will, and memory”). The emphatic use of the pronoun yo merely adds extra weight to the active and personal sense already contained in entender. Juan Ruiz actively chooses on this occasion to read three particular things—understanding, will, and memory—in this verse. To understand is to seize the text and the moment and to declare their signification. In promising to give us understanding, Juan Ruiz is not offering to convey a specific truth to us so that we may understand it; rather, he is offering his readers the capacity for active, “good” understanding. This understanding will allow them to make similar good choices about the signification of what they read in his book. How does this understanding function? As we have just seen, Juan Ruiz’s goal is not “true” understanding but “good” understanding, an understanding that functions well: “por el buen entendimiento entiende onbre el bien E sabe dello el mal” (S:1v;prol.: “Through good understanding man understands the good and knows from it what is evil”). Understanding, then, is an act of separating, distinguishing good from evil. In his study of the meaning of this verb in various Old Provencal and Old French texts, Schutz suggests that the verb may mean “to ‘conceive,’—to ‘comprehend’ as it were, purposefully, from the artistic standpoint, with the idea of artistic structure in mind” (135; his italics). Schutz’s adverb “purposefully” captures the sense of entender in Juan Ruiz’s prologue. Like all medieval understanding, it was carried out with the goal already in mind. It was a negotiation between the text and predetermined modes of reading and categories of sense. It simultaneously allowed the reader to define these modes and categories more clearly and enabled him to use them to determine the sense of the text for him. This circular process created a “good understanding” that “understood well.” The aestheticist preoccupations of the thirties, however, cause Schutz to limit too narrowly this process of negotiation to that of “artistic structure.” Kendrick makes a partial escape from this too-narrow view in distinguishing Schutz’s idea of entendre as “part of the original composition process” from what she sees as “part of the re-creative process” (Game 63). As should be obvious by now, I would substitute “reading” for the term “re-creative.” I would also see the process described in the troubadours’ trobar e entendre as merely a reflection of the broader process of understanding carried out by all medieval readers whenever and whatever they read. They, too, were “purposefully” engaged in determining “structure” (ethical as well as topical or aesthetic) in what they read.

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The medieval understanding of “understanding” allowed for the personal, occasional nature of medieval reading. “Understanding” came from sources outside the text, sources that could include grace and election, as well as the trained, good understanding of the reader. Diego García de Campos recalls an event of “elect” understanding in his Planeta. placet michi mea electio. per quam inter alios intellectus specialiter intellexi de beata virgine locum illum. in omnibus requiem quesivi. et in hereditate domini morabor [Ecclus. 24:11]. (344) My election pleases me by which I understood, among other understandings, this passage to refer especially to the Blessed Virgin: “In all these I sought rest, and I shall abide in the inheritance of the Lord.”

The “special” understanding granted to García coexists with other understandings. In his moment of grace he has perceived a new “structure” in the well-known text: it refers to the Virgin. García works out this understanding in the remainder of his fourth book, which is dedicated to the Virgin. It is with this understanding of “understanding” that we should approach the many other key uses of this verb in Juan Ruiz’s book. Few words return with such insistence in the Libro. In none of these cases does Juan Ruiz intend the comprehension of a specific meaning that he has placed in his book. Rather he puts the burden on the reader to “entender bien” or “entender sano” (165c). The reader must figure out the way, not to understand well what Juan Ruiz has written, but to understand as “good,” in a “sensible way,” what he or she reads: “Entiende bien mis dichos / ¬ piensa la sentencia” (S:5r;46a: “Understand what I say well and think about [weigh] the sententia”); “non a mala palabra si non es a mal tenida / | Veras que bien es dicha si bien es entendida /” (G:4rv;64bc: “There is no evil word unless it is taken evilly | You will see that it is spoken well if it is understood well”). Like the prologue, these passages stress the active role of understanding in determining the sense of the book. There are many places in the Libro where the reader’s ability to “entender sano” is seriously challenged, and this is precisely the point. The reader who opens the Libro and seeks to understand the text before him as preaching proper ethical behavior may have to use most of the arrows in the quiver of medieval reading strategies: moralizations, allegory, irony, praise and blame, the law of charity, reading by contraries. But he will use them in his own way, and, clearly, his degree of knowledge of these techniques will help to determine his success. Part of the process of understanding the Libro “sensibly” is a honing of these very tools. Juan Ruiz presents challenging materials. The reader who arrives at the end

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with his “good” understanding intact will in fact have been given understanding. The medieval understanding of “memory” functioned in a similarly active way, as Carruthers has shown. Like “understanding,” it is directly linked to prudence, to the capacity to “choose” good. A “trained memory” (is this what Juan Ruiz means by “memoria buena”?) “perfects, indeed makes possible the virtue of prudence or moral judgment . . . memory is the faculty that presents (or re-presents) experience, the basis upon which moral judgments must be made” (67–68). For Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas, trained memory was, in fact, a part of prudence (69–70). Carruthers (68) traces this idea to Aristotle’s Ethics (1103a17), where the Philosopher states that “moral excellence comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name [xthikx] is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word habit [xthos]” (cf. Jenaro, “Presupuestos” 180–86). Habit, of course, is the result of experience, and, according to Carruthers, “experience—memories generalized and judged—gives rise to . . . ethical judgment, for ethical judgment, since it is based upon habit and training and applies derived principles to particular situations, is an art, and part of the ‘practical intellect,’ that is, directed to the world of process and change rather than of essence and unchanging Being” (68–69). A “habit” of virtuous behavior leads to a virtuous character. Juan Ruiz clearly had such ideas of the nature of memory in mind. His book was a source of experience, among other things, of the experience of using good understanding to choose good and distinguish it from evil. The book can help to create the “habitus” of choosing good, which can then be applied in the real world of flux. The memory to which he refers is not just the one that passively stores things but also the one that actively recalls things apposite to the present occasion. This memory allows prudence to put experience into appropriate action. This is why Juan Ruiz makes memory a key link in the chain that leads to good works: “deuemos tener sin dubda que obras sienpre estan enla buena memoria que con buen entendimiento E buena voluntad escoJe el alma E ama el Amor de dios por se saluar por ellas” (S:1v;prol.: “We should believe without doubt that works are always in good memory that, with good understanding and good will, the soul chooses and loves the love of God in order to save itself through them [works]”).9 We can see the link between memory and behavior in a negative key as well: “/ Como quier que alas vegadas [el alma] se acuerde pecado & lo quiera ¬ lo obre” (S:1v;prol.: “Although sometimes the soul may remember sin and desire it and do it”). This sequence—memory, will, act—is the basic pattern through which memory shapes human behavior, both good and bad. The will to sin comes from natural human weakness and from man’s natural inclination

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toward evil. It also comes from “la pobledad dela memoria que non esta Instructa del buen entendimiento ansi que non puede amar el bien nin acordarse dello para lo obrar” (S:1v;prol.: “the poverty of memory that is not trained by good understanding, so that it cannot love good or remember it in order to do it”).10 For these reasons, Juan Ruiz continues, man makes “libros dela ley E del derecho ¬ de castigos E constunbres E de otras çiençias” (S:1v–2r;prol.: “books of law and jurisprudence and moral instruction and ethics and other sciences”). Juan Ruiz’s main point is that the “poverty” of memory renders man unable to retain the experiences that would allow him to function ethically. It is a poverty of function. But I think “poverty” also refers to an “impoverished” state of the memorial storehouse. Books and other forms of art (Juan Ruiz mentions painting and “images”) furnish the memory with a greater treasure of memorial experience on which to base ethical judgments. At the very least, books allow man to add to his own store of memories past events that he has been unable to witness in person (see Libro . . . Zifar 6). “Good” memory is what founds Juan Ruiz’s book: “fiz esta chica escriptura en memoria de bien” (S:2r;prol.: “I made this little writing in memory of good”; see Burke, “Libro” 123–24). Memory is also what will allow one part of his anticipated audience—“los de poco entendimiento” (“those of scant understanding”)—to profit from his book: “/ca leyendo E coydando el mal que fazen otienen enla voluntad de fazer . . . acordaran la memoria E non despreçiaran su fama” (S:2r;prol.: “For by reading and thinking about the evil [others] do or have the desire to do . . . they will remember their memory [‘tune their memory to the example’?] and will not despise their reputation”). When they see their own actions (or actions they wish to do) exposed here in Juan Ruiz’s book, they will wish to avoid for themselves the consequences of such exposure for their public reputations. The judgments they make about the behaviors portrayed in the Libro will be the same judgments made by others about their behavior in the real world. Understanding and memory are the first and last of the three powers that Juan Ruiz understands in his quotation from Psalms. The central one, in this list and in Juan Ruiz’s book, is voluntad (“will”). For speakers of Spanish, then as now, the noun and the verb “will” and “to will” were inextricably linked to another set of ideas, “love” and “to love” (cf. querer, “to want,” “to love” in modern Spanish). The connection was made explicit by Augustine: “recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor” (De civitate, PL 41:410: “Right will is good love and perverse will is bad love”; see Gerli, “Recta”). Once man has been trained in good understanding, “ama & desea omne el buen amor de dios & sus mandamientos” (S:1v;prol.: “he loves and desires the good love of God and his commandments”).

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This is what Juan Ruiz’s book is all about: a honing, a training of the will. Whether or not “buen amor” is the name of the book, it is a concept that returns insistently, now in a “good” key, now in a “bad.” Does “buen amor” represent “divine love,” “charity,” as it does in the passage just quoted and elsewhere in the prologue? Or does it represent sexual or worldly love, as it seems to in 1452b? What is required to make this decision is precisely “buen amor.” But which kind of “buen amor” will enable us to make the correct choice? “Buen amor” of course. And so on in abismum. Juan Ruiz’s brilliant play on “buen amor” compounds the ethical density of his book. We cannot have good understanding until we have attained good understanding; we cannot have good memory until we have acquired good memory. We cannot just have “buen amor”; we must constantly reevaluate its significance for us. We cannot just have it, we must use it. Like “good understanding” and “good memory,” “buen amor” is a process that continually redefines itself and its action in the fictional world of Juan Ruiz’s “chica escriptura” and in the realworld experience of readers. It is the will, the power of choice, love, that make dynamic understanding possible, and it is the nature of the individual will that is in turn modified by the process of choice. The final transformation of the will is one from choosing to simply loving, and for the “ideal reader” Juan Ruiz describes in his prologue, this love is “el buen Amor que es el dedios” (S:1v;prol.: “the good love, which is the love of God”).

Praise and blame que saber bien ¬ mal // dezir encobierto ¬ doñeguil tu non fallaras vno / de trobadores mill (S:6r;65cd) saber el mal desir bien encobierto doñigil tu non fallaras vno de trobadores mill que todos non lo fasen con arte muy sotil (G:4v;65cde; translations follow)

These lines from Juan Ruiz’s extensive section on how to read his book (64–70) are among those which have given the Libro’s editors the most problems. Concerns with the proper placing of commas, the spacing of words, and the punctuation of these lines force the textual critic to commit himself or herself to one of several possible readings. Jos74 (1: n. 65c) edits S: “saber bien e mal, dezir encobierto e doñeguil,” interpreting, “There is not one poet in a thousand who knows how to say in a covert and elegant way the good as well as the bad.” Jos90 omits the comma after

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“mal,” an omission more in line with his interpretation. Ble83 and Ble92 retain the comma. In a note, Jos74 punctuates the reading of G similarly: “saber el mal, dezir bien encobierto, doñigil” (“To know evil, to speak subtle good, in courtly fashion”?). Here the poet “knows what is bad,” but says the good (well?) subtly and elegantly. Cej chooses the version in G, also placing a comma between “mal” and “dezir”: “Saber el mal, desir bien, encobierto, doñeguil” (he interprets in note 65: “To know how to speak well the ugly and the bad, subtly and elegantly”). Rearranging these lines for maximum color, Cor reads “¿saber mal, dezir bien, cobierto e doñegil?: | ¡tú non fallarás uno de trobadores mil!” (“To know evil, to speak good, subtly, in courtly fashion? | You will not find one in a thousand troubadours [who can]!”). Thus, Cor follows G in reducing Juan Ruiz’s knowledge to that of evil alone while maintaining his ability to speak (poetize) well. Chi and Gyb follow S most closely: “saber bien e mal dezir encobierto e doñeguil” (Gyb includes the opening que). Chi (n. 280) explains: “This is understood ‘there is not one poet in a thousand who knows how to speak with amiable dissimulation about both the good and the bad.’ ” Morreale (“Más . . . Chiarini” 219) interprets Chi ’s version differently: “To know good (that is, to be sensible, to know the means by which one saves one’s soul), and to say the bad (or the ugly), but in a subtle and elegant way [is a skill that few, or almost none, possess].” But Morreale also makes the point, important for my argument here, that in other instances in which they appear together in the Libro, the adverb mal and the verb dezir are joined in Chi’s edition to form the verb maldezir. This verb has a variety of meanings in the Libro. According to Morreale (220), it can simply mean “to speak ill” of someone: “amuerta non maldiga” (T:34r;1578d: “Do not speak ill of a dead woman”). In other places, it appears to mean “to talk dirty” or “to talk about unmentionable things”: “tres cosas non te oso agora descobryr | son tachas encobiertas de mucho mal desir” (G:16v;447ab: “There are three things I dare not disclose to you now, they are hidden stains, very improper to mention”) or “¶ E dios sabe que la mi Intençion non fue delo fazer por dar manera de pecar ni por mal dezer [?]” (S:2r-v;prol.: “And God knows that my intention was not to do it in order to teach ways for sinning or to say* dirty things”). These meanings of maldezir and the context of 65cd suggest that we should understand these lines to read “saber bien[dezir] e maldezir, encobierto, doñeguil.” I would interpret the version found in S, then, “You will not find one in a thousand troubadours who knows how to speak both well and ill in a subtle, elegant manner.”11 Such a reading is supported by Wil, who, significantly, follows S rather than his base manuscript G in this instance: “saber bien- e maldezir, encobierto, doñeguil.” Wil paraphrases: “An art [knowledge] of praising and vilifying, cryptic

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and graceful.” I read two verbs here, then: bendezir (to speak well of, to praise) and maldezir (to speak ill of, to condemn, to blame). This reading allows us to link directly both the bendezir and the maldezir in Juan Ruiz’s reading program to the most central view of the function of literary activity from Aristotle well into the Renaissance (and beyond): the idea that poets (and other authors) write in order to praise or to blame specific types of human behavior. Juan Ruiz writes his book in the epideictic mode. It is a work of demonstrative rhetoric. The implicit corollary of this for readers, and the main engine that drives medieval ethical reading, is that the primary task of readers is to recognize what is being praised and what is being blamed in any given passage of text. In 65cd, Juan Ruiz is not boasting separately of his own moral knowledge and verbal skill. Rather, he is alerting the reader that, like all “troubadours,” he knows how to praise and blame. His special skill lies in doing it in a subtle, hidden manner. The way in which he praises or blames, or the precise objects of praising and blaming, may be hidden, but the fact that this is what he is doing is not. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this simple binary pair, praise and blame, in the literary attitudes of the Middle Ages. Aristotle had made praising and blaming the basic function not just of poetic speech, but of all human speech: Whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals . . . , the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust. (Politics 1253a10–17)

In the Poetics, according to Hermann the German (see below), the Philosopher says, “Every poem, and all poetic utterance, is either praise or blame” (M/S 289). I survey now a few of the many places in which this pair makes its appearance and present some of its variants and developments. In the accessus we find praising and blaming established as essential activities of the school authors by the late eleventh century. This system finds its fullest development in accessus to Ovid’s Heroides: “intentio huius libri est commendare castum amorem sub specie quarundam heroydum . . . vel vituperare incestum amorem sub specie incestarum matronarum” (Huygens 32: “The intention of this book is to commend chaste love in the guise of certain heroic ladies . . . or to criticize unchaste love in the guise of unchaste matrons”). Obviously, what underlies this binary pair, praise and blame, is yet another pair: virtue and vice.12 Authors praise virtue and condemn vice, and from this activity follows a binary set of responses by readers: they flee vice and cling to virtue.

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finalis causa est ut per commendationem caste amantium ad castos amores nos invitet vel ut visa utilitate quae ex legitimo amore procedit visisque infortuniis vel incommoditatibus quae ex illicito et stulto amore proveniunt, et stultum et illicitum repellamus et fugiamus et legitimo adhereamus. (Huygens 32) The final cause is so that through the commendation of those loving chastely he may attract us to chaste loves or so that, having seen the utility that proceeds from legitimate love and the misfortunes and disadvantages that come from illicit and foolish love, we may reject and flee from foolish and illicit love and cling to legitimate love.

This is from the same accessus to the Heroides. Ovid’s praise of chaste women and condemnation of those who engage in illicit love, together with his full portrayal of the consequences of both types of behavior, serve as exempla that guide the reader to flee evil behavior and pursue good. A fifteenth-century accessus to the Facta et dicta of Valerius Maximus illustrates the persistence of this tradition throughout the Middle Ages and in works other than those of Ovid: “Causa finalis est ad virtutes inducere et a viciis removere” (Allen, Ethical 55 n. 19; citing Yale University, Beinecke Library, Marston 37, 5r: “The final cause is to lead us to virtues and away from vices”). A twelfth-century accessus to Prudentius already employed similar vocabulary: “Intentio sua est nos hortari ad appetitum virtutum et contemptum viciorum” (Huygens 20: “His intention is to urge us to the desire for virtues and the contempt of vices”). It was not always easy to tell precisely how Ovid was praising and blaming, but medieval commentators remained certain that the pagan poet’s goals had been in line with those of Christian commentators: Intentio istius [of Ovid] est hortari nos ad contemptum secularium et ad appetitum celestium, quod ipse tamen minime uidetur facere. Sed hoc inde potest percipi, quia ostendit nobis ista secularia esse transitoria, quia commutantur de sattu in sattum. (Young 9) Ovid’s intention is to urge us toward the contempt of worldly things and toward the desire for celestial ones, which, nevertheless, he does not seem to do. But this may be grasped in this way, because he showed us these worldly things to be transitory because they are changed from one breed to another.

Here it is up to the readers to understand, in the “purposeful” sense, the binary message that lies at the heart of Ovid’s text. In academic commentary on works with multiple parts, like the fables of Avianus, a large vocabulary of verbs portraying authorial praising and blaming, persuading and dissuading, developed: “Hic hortatur nos,” “hic monet,” “hic suadet,” “corrigit superbos,” “hic reprehendit,” “ad-

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monet,” “hic invehitur,” “docet” (Huygens 22–25: “Here he encourages us,” “here he warns,” “here he persuades,” “he corrects the proud,” “here he censures,” “he admonishes,” “here he attacks,” “he teaches”). A similar vocabulary was used with Ovid’s Heroides: “Naso laudat,” “vult carpere Naso,” “damnat Naso,” “approbat hic castas multum Naso mulieres” (Sedlmayer 96–99: “Ovid praises,” “Ovid wants to revile,” “Ovid condemns,” “Ovid greatly approves chaste women here”). Such verbs, and similar marginal notes that appear in many manuscripts, reveal, again, the rhetorical role that auctores and text played in the minds of medieval readers. At each place in the text, the auctor’s role is to praise, blame, approve, dissuade in relation to the materia of the text before an audience of readers. Thus an important part of medieval reading may have been the assigning of verbs describing authorial praise, blame, approval, and censure to passages as one read. It is a revealing experience to go through the Libro with such a set of categories in mind. What or whom is the auctor praising (and/or damning) in the Archpriest’s attempted seduction of the Mooress? What is he admonishing in Trotaconventos’s epitaph? What, if anything, is he approving and what is he censuring in the episode of the Greeks and Romans or in the tale of Don Pitas Payas? As we attempt to negotiate between the text and a relatively limited and standardized set of authorial positions (and the values they imply), the ethical import of many passages in the text becomes clearer. These verbs are tools for focusing, for shaping, in an ethical way, the materia of a given text. In most cases where such elaborate vocabularies of authorial rhetoric are involved, the terms can easily be reduced to the simple pair praise and blame. But the operation of even this limited pair was not as simple as we might first believe. The pair operated under a rule of contraries that created, in effect, a double text. As the author praised a given behavior, he was also implicitly blaming its contrary. This reading by contraries is described in general terms in an accessus to Horace’s Sermones: “Item nota quod hac de causa reprehendit vitia, ut dehortetur a vitiis et hortetur ad contraria, virtutes scilicet” (Huygens 51: “Item: note that he criticizes vices for this reason: that he may discourage vices and encourage the opposite, that is, virtues”). Although the main focus of Horace’s work is “reprehension” of vices, the dissuasion from vice implicitly contains its binary “contrary,” the encouragement of virtue. We must keep this strategy in mind when reading quasisatirical works like the Libro, works that seem to contain more blame than praise. For each behavior that is blamed (fornication, attempting to seduce infidel women, drinking too much), the reader must identify in his or her understanding the contrary behavior that the author is implicitly praising. An active ethical exploration is involved, not just a passive listening as the author tells us what we should and should not do.

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The accessus to the Heroides again provide a model quite appropriate to reading the love adventures of the Archpriest of Hita. Intentio sua [Ovid’s] est legitimum commendare conubium vel amorem, et secundum hoc triplici modo tractat de ipso amore, scilicet de legitimo, de illicito et stulto. . . . Sed has duas partes, scilicet stulti et illiciti, non causa ipsarum, verum gratia illius tercii commendandi interserit, et sic commendando legitimum, stultum et illicitum reprehendit. (Huygens 30) Ovid’s intention is to commend legitimate marriage or love, and so he deals with love itself in a triple way, that is legitimate, illicit, and foolish. . . . But these two latter types, that is, foolish and illicit love, are included not for their own sakes, but rather for the purpose of commending the third type, and thus by commending legitimate love, he condemns foolish and illicit love.

The faithful Penelope is commended by Ovid, “et econtra idem non agentes reprehenduntur” (Huygens 33: “And, on the contrary, those who do not behave as she are criticized”). The cure “by contraries” is basic to medieval medical and ethical thought. Gregory the Great lays out the relation in his Homiliae: “sicut arte medicinae calida frigidis, frigida calidis curantur, ita Dominus noster contraria opposuit praedicamenta peccatis” (PL 76:1232–33: “Just as by the art of medicine hot things are cured by cold and cold things by hot, so our Lord opposes contrary preaching to sins”). Aristotle had already used such thinking in discussing virtue and vice in his Ethics (1104b17–18): “It is the nature of cures to be effected by contraries.” After discussing how one makes speeches of praise, Aristotle finds no need to go into speeches of “censure”: “Knowing the above facts, we know their contraries; and it is out of these that speeches of censure are made” (Rhetoric 1368a37–38). This type of thinking was part of the larger medieval worldview. One did not have to have a “Dionysian imagination” (cf. M/S 165–73) to see the world as a “pulcherrimum carmen ex quibusdam quasi antithetis” (Augustine, De civitate, PL 41:332: “A beautiful poem made up, as it were, of certain antitheses”).13 I believe the use of the term “binary” is especially appropriate here. The two poles, praise and blame, persuasion and dissuasion, set up a tiny system. Praise defines blame, virtue defines vice. There are no other terms in the relation. The movement between the poles (medieval commentary assumes that the movement is always in the direction of virtue) defines the movement of the reader’s heart or will as he or she encounters the text. The binary system established itself permanently in medieval school readings of the Latin and Christian classics. But twelfth- and thirteenthcentury thinkers also extended it to study of the Bible. Abelard begins his commentary on Romans with an invocation of praise and blame. Here

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we see that the author’s praise and blame carries with it familiar responses by readers: they pursue that which is praised and flee from that which is blamed: The intention of all Holy Scripture is to teach or move men in the same way as speech does in the sphere of rhetoric. It teaches when it advises what we should do or avoid. It moves us when, by dissuading us with divine admonitions, it makes our will draw back from evil; and by persuasion it brings us to the good, with the result that we want to do what we have learnt we ought to do, or avoid whatever is opposed to that. (M/S 100)

In his Expositio in Cantica, Honorius of Autun makes a knowledge of what the book is recommending or advising against a feature of the inquiry into intentio: In principiis librorum tria requiruntur, scilicet, auctor, materia, intentio. . . . Materia, ut scias utrum de bellis an de nuptiis vel de quibus rebus tractat. Intentio, ut cognoscas utrum rem de qua tractat suadeat vel dissuadeat. (PL 172:347) In the beginnings of books, three things are required: author, subject matter, and intention. . . . The subject matter, so that you may know whether it deals with war or weddings or whatever. The intention, so that you may know whether it argues for or against the thing it treats.

There are two stages to reading here: first, to know what the res of the book is, and second, to know whether the author is encouraging or discouraging that res. The Song of Songs is a particularly appropriate example for us. Readers of the Libro may have approached it in similar fashion, attempting to decide whether Juan Ruiz is arguing for or against the materia of human love his book treats. On Spanish soil, the early twelfthcentury St. Martín of Léon, whom an angel compels to devour, physically, the books of Isidore of Seville, regurgitates the words of his master concerning the goals of reading scripture:14 “Studium ergo sacrae lectioni sine intermissione impendite, ut in ea quid cavere, quidve oporteat vos agere, possitis agnoscere” (Sermonum liber; PL 208:30 [based on Isidore’s Liber sententiarum, cap. 8]: “Therefore, devote your study to the Holy Scripture without ceasing, so that there you can learn what to fear and what you ought to do”). In the following century, in Toledo, the translation into Latin of Averroes’s “Middle Commentary” on Aristotle’s Poetics by Hermann the German, as we have seen, quotes the Philosopher, who places praise and blame at the very heart of all artistic activity:15 “Aristotle says: Every poem, and all poetic utterance (oratio poetica), is either praise (vituperatio) [sic] or blame (laudatio) [sic]” (M/S 289). The act of praising or blaming

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comes about through the poet’s goal of moving the will of man away from vice and toward virtue: “Aristotle says: Since those who make representations and likenesses have as their purpose, by this activity, to urge men on to certain actions which are voluntary, and to dissuade them from others, it will of necessity be virtues or vices which they urge by their acts of representation” (M/S 291). Certain representatores are better at portraying virtues and others are more skilled in portraying vice, that is, “Some poets are successful in praising, but not in bestowing blame. Conversely, others are successful in bestowing blame rather than praise. So, in every ‘likening’ these two different ingredients should be found, that is, praise of what is good and condemnation of what is evil” (M/S 292). Juan Ruiz’s boast in the lines cited at the beginning of this section takes on a new significance in the light of this passage: unlike many poets, he is skilled in both praising and blaming. The idea that poets praise and blame, and that from this readers learn what to cling to and what to shun, is basic to medieval attitudes toward the Latin classics and the Bible. But to what extent did the idea that praise and blame are at the heart of the poetic activity carry over into the realm of vernacular poetry? After all, Juan Ruiz is speaking as a one-in-a-thousand troubadours in asserting his skill in praising and blaming. As it happens, there is clear evidence in various poetic manuals written to describe the verse of the Provencal troubadours that praise and blame were also viewed as basic to vernacular poetic activity (cf. Méjean 19–21). In these manuals, we return to the basic binary pair, bendezir and maldezir, invoked by Juan Ruiz in describing his own work as “troubadour.” These treatises on Provencal poetics, several of them written by Catalans, were composed after the fact, as an effort to interpret and categorize the forms of Provencal verse for a foreign audience. For this reason, they are of great value for their ability to show the strategies for reading vernacular verse that might be invoked by readers in the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. The Razos de trobar by the Catalan Raimon Vidal was probably written between 1190 and 1213. It survives in two fourteenth-century manuscripts (Marshall lxx and ix–xii). The purpose of the treatise is to teach “aqelz qe.l volran aprenre, con devon segre la dreicha maniera de trobar” (Marshall 2: “those who wish to learn it how they should follow the correct way of writing verse”). Vidal describes the achievement of the Provencal troubadours in terms quite similar to those in which Juan Ruiz describes his own work: E tuyt li mal e li be del mon son en menbrança e en memoria mes per trobar que per als. E ia no trobaretz pretz, be dich ne mal dich, pus que trobayre l’aya dit ne mes solamen en rima, que tots temps no sia en remenbransa. (Marshall 3)

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And all the evil and all the good of the world are put in remembrance and in memory more through writing songs than through anything else. And you will not find value, well said or poorly said, once a troubadour has said it or just put it into rhyme, which is not in memory always.

Vidal goes on to explain that “una de las maiors valors del mont es qui sap lauzar so qe fa a lauzar et blasmar so qe fai a blasmar” (Marshall 4: “one of the greatest values in the world is his, who knows how to praise what should be praised and blame what should be blamed”). The work of speaking ill and well, of blaming and praising, is fundamental to the art of the troubadours as Vidal sees it, and it seems clear that Juan Ruiz is explicitly inserting himself into this tradition when he describes his own work as troubadour in saying good and bad in a skillful, artful manner. The Regles de trobar, written by another Catalan, Jofre de Foixà, between 1286 and 1291, and the Doctrina de compondre dictats, perhaps also written by Jofre, show that the general task of praising and blaming that Vidal assigns to the troubadours had come, by the late thirteenth century, to be an integral part of the description of certain troubadour genres (Marshall lxxii–lxxviii). In describing the satirical sirventés, Jofre takes praise and blame as fundamental to the genre: “Car si tu comences a far un sirventesch de fayt de guerra o de reprendimen o de lausors, no.s conve que.y mescles raho d’amor” (Marshall 57: “For if you begin to write a sirventés on deeds of war or blame or praise, it is not proper for you to mix in speech about love”). The sirventés works by praising or blaming specific contemporary persons. It is part of a system of eulogy and invective. There is a fuller explanation in the Doctrina: Si vols far sirventez, deus parlar de fayt d’armes, e senyalladament o de lausor de senyor o de maldit o de qualsque feyts qui novellament se tracten. . . . E per proverbis e per exemples poretz hi portar les naturaleses que fan, o ço de que fan a rependre o a lausar aquells dels qual ton serventez començaras. (Marshall 95) If you want to write a sirventés, you should speak of deeds of arms, and especially either of praise or blame of a lord, or about whatever events are newly reported. . . . And through proverbs and exempla you can bring out the nature of what they do, or what those about whom you make your sirventés deserve to be blamed or praised for.

This little treatise extends the activity of praising and blaming beyond the satirical genre of the sirventés in which we naturally expect to find it, however. The courtly canso, the love song, is also portrayed as having praise and blame as its central purpose. But here the object, the materia, of praise or blame is love alone: “E primerament deus saber que canço deu parlar d’amor plazenment, . . . e ses mal dir e ses lauzor de re sino d’amor”

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(Marshall 95: “And first of all, you should know that the canso should speak about love pleasingly, . . . and without blame or praise of anything except love”).16 The assumption here is that the normal activity of writing, even in the vernacular love lyric, is praising and blaming. The author sees this binary pair as so fundamental to poetic activity that he works out a fascinating schema of troubadour poetic genres based to a considerable extent on the presence of praise or blame or both, together with their object in each genre (compare Honorius above). This simple system— praise, blame, materia—is articulated into a full set of criteria that defines such genres as the alba, the estampida, and the vers, and serves to distinguish one genre from another (Marshall 95–97; see my “Genre” for a fuller discussion). These treatises were composed in eastern Iberia. But praise and blame appear again closer to Juan Ruiz’s cultural milieu, in the fourteenth-century Galician-Portuguese arte de trovar, which describes the characteristics of both cantigas d’escarnho and cantigas de maldizer. Cantigas d’escarneo son aquelas que os trobadores fazen, querendo dizer mal dalguen, en dizer-lho per palavras encubertas que ajan dous entendimentos, pera lhe-lo non entenderen ligeiramente. . . . Cantigas de mal dizer son aquelas que fazen os trobadores descubertamente. (Rodrigues Lapa ix) Cantigas d’escarnho are those which the troubadours write wishing to speak ill of someone, saying it in hidden words that have two interpretations so that it is not understood easily. . . . Cantigas de maldizer are those which the troubadours write openly.

Juan Ruiz may be telling readers that his book resembles the genre of cantigas de escarnho more than that of cantigas de maldizer in that it “speaks ill (or well)” of someone in a hidden, indirect manner. Juan Ruiz’s art is that of the subtly twisted knife. In Juan Ruiz’s Castile, praise and blame had entered the vocabulary of vernacular poetics. The Libro de los cien capítulos, written around the year 1300, makes praising and blaming the primary functions of the poet. El buen versificador es el que dize bien e ayna e sabe contar las maneras de quien quisier e sabe [denostar] vilmente e loar altamente, e sabe fablar de guisa que ayan sabor de oyr lo que dize. (30) The good versifier is the one who praises and quickly and who knows how to represent the behavior of whomever it may be and knows how [to blame (supplied by Rey from manuscript other than base manuscript)] vilely and praise loftily, and knows how to speak in such a way that they have pleasure in hearing what he says.

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Juan Ruiz sets himself up as the perfect versificador in his introductory stanzas. His book will provide praise and blame as well as solaz (entertainment, pleasure). The preceding discussion has sought to demonstrate how deeply the concept of praise and blame (and related binary pairs) penetrated the literary consciousness of the Middle Ages. They constituted a simple, yet remarkably powerful, tool for reading a variety of texts, from the Bible to the Latin classics to vernacular poetry. The very knowledge that authors engage in praise and blame involved the reader immediately in the rhetorical and ethical process of being dissuaded from vice and urged toward virtue. There was no room for waffling. It is important to point out, whether we like this style of reading or not, that certain “ambiguities” of the Libro become much clearer when we are put in the position of having to determine what Juan Ruiz is praising and what he is blaming. It is not at all far-fetched to suggest that many readers would have understood that Don Melón, Trotaconventos, and the Archpriest himself are blamed in the book. At the same time, the actions of those ladies who resist the Archpriest might be judged as worthy of praise. The first dueña, “la dueña cuerda” (G:5v;81a: “the wise lady”), who sends the Archpriest packing, however brief her appearance in the Libro, no doubt serves as a praiseworthy opening example, probably on the model of Ovid’s Penelope (see my “Further” 45 n. 44). The other ladies who reject the Archpriest, such as the Mooress, may also serve as virtuous examples. The behaviors of Doña Endrina and Garoza may have been seen as praiseworthy as long as they resist the go-between’s advances. But their behavior becomes increasingly blameworthy as they succumb to her wiles. This type of reading allows for dimensions of the text not accessible when we are content to let the narrator tell us what is to be praised and what blamed (an especially problematic proposition in an “unreliable” narrator such as the Archpriest of Hita). Pitas Payas is blamed for his neglect of his wife and his foolishness. This is clear from the text itself. But some readers may also have judged that the auctor blames his wife for her fornication and her deceit, however entertaining the results of both sins may be for those same readers. It is likely that the Archpriest himself was a major source of blame. In his Libre de contemplació, Llull explains the exemplary function of the “author”: “en molts de locs en esta obra nos gabam d’ésser vertuós e d’ésser viciós, e açò fem per tal que l’obra ne sia mills afigurada” (Obres 2:1257: “In many passages in this work we pretend to be virtuous and to be full of vice, and we do this so that the work can be better ‘figured’ ”). Juan Ruiz, in the guise of the Archpriest, gleefully takes full personal credit for the vices portrayed in his work, but Llull’s explanation suggests that the portrayal of self in medieval literature, whether virtuous or sinful,

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had clear didactic and aesthetic goals. The author’s feigning of virtue and vice allows the work to be “better figured.” The precise sense of the term afigurada is difficult to pin down. I believe Llull is using it in the same way that Giles of Rome, in his De regimine (2), says that moral instruction proceeds by “figures” or “types.” Llull is portraying himself as an exemplum of virtue and vice in order to illustrate more vividly these qualities. Llull’s feigned virtues and real vices (as he clarifies a bit further on) add authenticity to his moral work as the poet’s feigned love adds authenticity to his love songs. In the case of the Archpriest, problematic behaviors such as his apotheosis of his loyal go-between Urraca to a seat in heaven among the martyrs (1570), beyond their obvious comic function, may “figure” a character so removed from virtue that he no longer understands what sorts of behavior are likely to attain grace and what are not. If the Libro devotes more space to blamable behavior than we find credible for a moral book, we should remember, first of all, that the emphasis on blame is a prime characteristic of satire (Miller). But more important, we should remember from the accessus to the Heroides that the members of the binary pair mirror one another at all times. The blame of one type of behavior implies and therefore calls to mind its laudable contrary. The medieval text was a double one, but the task of filling in the missing member of the pair was often left to the reader alone. Paradoxically, the more the text presented blameworthy behavior, the more it lauded praiseworthy behavior. I have used the term “binary” to this point to describe the interaction of praise and blame in medieval reading practice. This term serves quite well to illuminate certain aspects of their function: their status as master categories to which all individual cases must be reduced and assigned, their mutual exclusivity, their resulting ability to contain and reflect one another. But it is also clear that although the two categories function as a pair, medieval readers played this game with loaded dice. The oppositions—praise/blame, virtue/vice—also functioned hierarchically (cf. Robertson’s “hierarchical solution,” 22–25). In orthodox readings at least, praise and blame both worked to promote praiseworthy behavior. Medieval ethical reading involves the reader in identifying at each step what behavior is praiseworthy and what is blameworthy. But this can only be done as one works out which “type” of behavior is praise- or blameworthy. It is a hall of mirrors precisely like that we have seen in the case of “understanding” or “buen amor.” The only possible escape from this system is blameworthy behavior itself: a full reversal of the hierarchy. One praises what is blameworthy and blames what is praiseworthy (as the Archpriest does in sending Urraca to heaven). Medieval moralists were certainly aware that such behavior existed. They found it blameworthy. It is a type of behavior that was espe-

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cially common in the courts. In his “Book of Beasts,” a treatise on kingship (book 7 of the Libre de meravelles), Llull makes knowing the proper objects of praise and blame vital to the proper conduct of secular rulership. He proposes a sort of Minister of Praise and Blame “qui reprena ço que fa a rependre, [e] qui lou ço que fo [sic] a loar” (“who would blame what should be blamed and praise what should be praised”). A squire begs the king for this job, but the king refuses, “car havia paor que l’escuder no.l blasmàs dels falliments que havia acostumats de fer, en los quals s’adelitava” (Obres 1:381: “for he was afraid that the squire would blame him for the errors he was in the habit of committing and in which he took delight”). This king will no doubt prefer the lauzengiers (“flatterers”) who specialize in praising his blameworthy behavior. I think there were few medieval readers of Juan Ruiz’s book who would not have played this game in some way. The hunt for praise and blame was a basic reflex of medieval reading and medieval ethical thought. An awareness of this activity adds a rich new level of interpretation to Juan Ruiz’s book, a level that modern scholars have not yet begun to explore. This is unfortunate, for much of what delights us in Juan Ruiz’s book is his program of setting traps in which readers may catch themselves praising what is blameworthy and blaming what is praiseworthy.17 Much of his book remains “ambiguous” only because we lack the will, the moral confidence, or the clear values required to play the game of praise and blame.

Religious Lyric I turn from these considerations to a rather different topic: the religious lyrics that comprise about 6 percent of the surviving stanzas of the Libro.18 These lyrics have received relatively little comment from scholars, even in the course of the debate over the religious or nonreligious intentions of the book’s author.19 The six-stanza zéjel dedicated to Cruz the bakergirl has received far more attention than all the religious lyrics combined. We are fortunate now to have a series of detailed studies on most of these lyrics by Morreale (“Gozos I,” “Gozos II,” “Glosa,” “Lectura”), studies that establish a critical text and do much to demonstrate the artistry employed by Juan Ruiz in his manipulation of traditional material. The poems in question include Juan Ruiz’s prayer on beginning his book, present only in S (1–7; and a fragment of a separate prayer in gozo form, 8–10); two gozos (“Joys”) of the Virgin, which open his book (20– 43); two poems on Christ’s Passion, found near the middle of the book (1046–66); and two more gozos, which appear at the close of the main cuaderna vía sections (1635–49). In addition, the miscellaneous materials at the end include a glosa on the Ave María prayer (1661–67)

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and four hymns in praise of the Virgin (1668–84), the last of them incomplete. These are among the earliest religious lyrics known in Castilian.20 Morreale has done much to situate them in their broader European context, as no Castilian context exists. Nevertheless, more needs to be said about this European context from a reader-centered, rather than a generic/authorial, approach. By including these lyrics in his book, Juan Ruiz is not only demonstrating his expertise in writing in traditional religious lyric genres, he is also extending the space for reader participation in his book by including types of lyric whose recognized purpose was to serve as the basis for meditation on the great events of Christian religious history and upon the state of the reader’s soul.21 Although this type of reading is not “ethical” in the sense in which I have been using the term, I discuss it here as exemplary of another way in which medieval text and gloss engaged readers rhetorically, made demands upon them, and abetted their escape from servitude to the Letter. Little has been written about the meditative tradition in Castile, or in Spain in general, as far as I know.22 We must turn to other literatures to explore this type of lyric. Woolf’s fundamental study, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, provides numerous interesting points of comparison with the religious lyrics by Juan Ruiz. Woolf refers to these lyrics as “short, religious, meditative poems” (1) and suggests that classifying them with the anachronistic term “lyrics” can lead us to misunderstand their devout and serious nature. In manuscripts they are called “meditations, treatises, or prayers” (compare the Archpriest of Talavera’s reference to the Libro as a “tractado”; see Chapter 6). What is a medieval “meditative” or “affective” (Gray, Themes 18) poem?23 Its qualities are best understood in contrast with the later English meditative tradition: “Whereas the seventeenth-century poets show the poet meditating, the medieval writers provide versified meditations which others may use: in the one the meditator is the poet; in the other the meditator is the reader” (Woolf 6). These poems, then, were designed to provide texts on which readers might work out their personal meditations on key themes and situations of Christian history. The major themes of medieval English religious lyric of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries correspond precisely to those genres included by Juan Ruiz in his Libro: lyrics on the Passion and the Virgin, especially on her “Joys.” For reasons of space, I discuss only the former here. The “Passions” provided the reader with a text for recalling and meditating on Christ’s great suffering and sacrifice for mankind. One of Juan Ruiz’s pasiones, written in zéjel form, outlines this purpose in the estribillo (refrain): “Los quela ley de christus avemos de guardar | de su muerte deuemos doler nos ¬ acordar” (S:62v;1059; “|” represents the physical

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line break on the page, which does not correspond here to the metrical line break: “We whose duty it is to keep the laws of Christ should be pained by his death and remember it”). Juan Ruiz, author, includes himself among his readers as a meditator on Christ’s suffering and death. The zéjel form adds to the poem’s meditative density. The words I have just cited, requiring compassion and remembrance from the reader, would have been repeated at the close of each of the seven stanzas of the poem (eight times in total), linking the meditative process to the individual events of Christ’s birth, Passion, and death, which are recounted in the body of the poem. Juan Ruiz’s poems are typical of this genre in focusing on the torments Christ suffered: the flagellation, the crown of thorns, the nails of the cross, the wound in the side. Such gruesome details are there to provide striking, “memorable” images for meditation. The first of the poems on the Passion links events in Christ’s betrayal, judgment, and death to the hours of the day and of the Church (“ora de maytines,” “ala bisperada” [G:51r;1051a: “at matins”; 51v;1057a: “at vespers”]), providing a temporal framework for the meditation (cf. Morreale, “Lectura” 359–60; for the traditional nature of this association, see Woolf 235). The reader is invited to associate the passage of time each day with the central event of Christian history. Even songs that at first seem to fall outside the scope of traditional meditative forms contain elements of this reading. Thus, the second students’ song includes two stanzas on Christ’s Passion. el señor de parayso achristianos tanto quiso } /mataron lo que por nos la muerte priso ——————— los judios / murio nuestro señor por ser nuestro saluador } sy el salue ato dat nos / por el su amor ——————————— dos uos /

A third stanza invokes the meditative process: acordat uos de su estoria /  dat por dios en su memoria /  dat nos limosna por dios / sy el uos de la su gloria /  (G:85r;1657–59)24 The Lord of Paradise loved Christians so much that he died for our sake. The Jews killed him. Our Lord died to be our Savior. Give to us in love for him. May he save you all. Remember his story. Give for God in his memory. May he give you his Glory. Give us alms, for God’s sake.

Here the audience’s remembrance through meditation has the additional benefit of providing alms for poor students.

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Another major theme of meditative lyric, as studied by Woolf, is death. Although there are no lyrics on death in the Libro, the cuaderna vía “mal dezir” (cf. S:91v; rubric) against death (1520–75) clearly belongs to the same tradition as lyric meditations on this theme. It is likely that the section on the “arms of the Christian Knight” (1579–1605) served similar goals. Each piece of body armor or weapon gives the reader a mnemonic key to the virtues, gifts, works, sacraments, and deadly sins. The reader meditatively “arms” his own body and in the process remembers (stores and recalls) the major tenets of the Christian faith. This section has been the least favorite among twentieth-century Libro scholars. Lawrance claims: “This is as near as Juan Ruiz ever comes to writing rubbish” (224). Yet a fifteenth-century (or later?) reader of S has written in the margin at the beginning of this section: “[N]otalo todo fasta la fin” (S:95v: “Note all of this to the end”; first letter trimmed). There is no more striking evidence of the difference in late-medieval and twentieth-century literary tastes. In its present form, T contains none of the meditative material I have been discussing here. But interestingly enough, it contains another piece, which scholars have not considered a part of the Libro, that has clear links to the pan-European phenomenon of meditative verse. I am referring to the Visión de Filoberto, a prose translation into Castilian of a Latin verse text that survives in dozens of manuscripts in both Latin and vernacular languages. Woolf notes three aspects of this traditional debate between the body and the soul: (1) it demonstrates “that all pride and prosperity must end in the grave, in which the body will rot, whilst the soul is tormented in hell”; (2) it shows “in fictional form the philosophical relationship between body and soul”; (3) it portrays “vividly and allegorically the conflict during life between the senses and the reason” (89). Only the first of these, according to Woolf, is properly meditative. The Castilian version clearly partakes of these meditative features of the Filoberto. Its presence in T suggests that whoever chose to place this text after the text of the Libro saw it as a natural continuation of or response to his own reading of the Libro. I discuss this text in more detail in the following chapter. Meditative lyric provided a structure for remembrance, invocation, praise, petition (cf. Wenzel 34)—in short, for private or public prayer. Juan Ruiz gives these poems special prominence by placing them at the beginning, middle, and end of his book. Though the physical space occupied by these lyrics is relatively small, their temporal space in the reading process must have been considerably greater as readers dwelt upon Christ’s suffering or Mary’s Joys or the inevitability of their own deaths.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have discussed two ways in which the indeterminacy of the Letter of the Libro was supercharged with a reading potential (I did not say “meaning”) not immediately apparent to the modern critic using twentieth-century critical tools. The medieval reader’s knowledge that praise and blame appeared in one way or another in his texts sets up two categories that he must read both directly and through contraries into the words before him. The meditative tradition implies still more personal involvement at the level of memory, in associations of thought that carry the reader far beyond the time and space of the page. Juan Ruiz’s book is more than a problematic compilatio of genres: fabliaux, fables, parodies, a sermon, a popular Latin school comedy, discourses on virtues and vices and Christian arms, trobas cazurras (“naughty ditties”), and religious verse. It is also a problematic compilatio of reading techniques. What happens when the veiled allegorical truths of poetry are brought hard up against a (probably) pornographic encounter with a mountain lass (985–86)? How should we understand such encounters when they are followed by two extended meditations on Christ’s Passion (1049–66)? What happens when the various genres Juan Ruiz compiles come into contact? And what happens when the various reading techniques that govern these genres enter into conflict? The art (and fun) of Juan Ruiz resides above all in juxtaposition. It will be up to the reader to work these difficulties out for himself or herself. And in doing so, as the first three chapters here have shown, he or she can draw on rich and dynamic traditions of active, personal Glosynge, traditions largely occulted from the view of modern medievalism by its fixation on the authorial text.

Caveat lector As is so often the case in Libro studies, however, we must return to one final and deflating bit of remembrance. As we saw in the case of “saber bien e mal dezir,” the scripta (here, manuscripts S and G) ultimately cheat us of any certainty that medieval readers would have understood a specific reference to praise and blame. The scribe of G, it is clear, did not understand his text in precisely this way when he wrote “saber mal dezir bien.” At best, he was only aware of the mal dezir. He may have been thinking of the Libro as primarily a satiric work. In S the scribe leaves a blank space between “dezir” and “mal” to represent the caesura in 65c. Not one, but two virgulae are used, separating the hemistiches still more emphatically.

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Does this suggest that medieval readers would never have put the reading of S together, as I have done here, into “maldezir”? I have been arguing out of both sides of my mouth, then, in this chapter. Among other things, in defiance of my own announced position, I have been using convenient but fallacious formulas such as “Juan Ruiz says” or “Juan Ruiz tells us” to introduce the ideas I find in the scripta of the Libro. There is probably a good chance that Juan Ruiz “said” on some occasion one or the other (or all) of the readings of 65c we find in S or G, or in the various editorial rearrangements of this line made in Juan Ruiz’s name. But the relation of that saying to the scripta S and G, not to mention their modern editions, is at best remote. This most common of codes for talking about literary texts does not really fit the medieval object. There are more significant problems with my techniques of argumentation here, however. On the one hand, I have attempted to use the textual tradition of the Libro to demonstrate the presence of familiar ethical categories with which readers may have approached (implicitly at Juan Ruiz’s invitation) the book before them. But the textual tradition itself does not permit me to affirm with conviction that medieval readers who saw one or another of the manuscripts of the Libro would have found the same categories. If the scribes missed them, could or would readers have found them again? This is a most troubling problem, especially to the extent that my argument depends on medieval readers’ ready recognition of, to them, universally familiar categories. It is in places like this that the realities of medieval scripta will rob us of our most cherished and well-documented arguments. And it is to these scripta, specifically to the various scripta we group together under another convenient rubric, “Libro,” that we must now turn.

PART II

INTRODUCTION

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HE PRECEDING chapters have shown how fundamental the indeterminacy of text and gloss was to the medieval reading experience. It was as much a part of this experience as concepts like “coherence,” “unity,” “author,” or “text” are for us. The reader’s life situation, memory (including memory of past readings), and ethical, intellectual, or educational status gave occasional determinacy to the letter of the text. But this did not rule out other determinacies discovered by the same reader on other occasions. When we turn to examine medieval scripta we find that the indeterminacy that was a part of the reader’s rhetorical relation to his text is mirrored in the physical object from which they read. Due to the technology of manuscript production in the Middle Ages, the scripta on which the medieval reader based all his readings were themselves mine fields of indeterminacy: grammatical errors, missing words, phrases, passages, chapters, or books, orthographical errors, fragments (identified or not) from other scripta, correcting glosses full of errors of their own, pieces of text in marginal spaces that may or may not have had some relation to the text in the center, missing leaves or gatherings (or just a gathering by itself), and on and on. The very act of reading a scriptum involved constant choices, decisions about the text on the page. These choices are as much a part of the scriptum as are the markings on the manuscript leaf. When people from print culture look at a medieval manuscript, we cannot help seeing a fallen text. It is almost an instinctual reaction. From the beginning academic medievalism has taken as its mission the restoration of coherence, sense, to these texts, which appear to us to lie just beyond the horizon of modern European linguistic and cultural understanding. Our heart goes out to these injured children of another, less sophisticated age, so damaged through the hazards of scribal transmission and the inexorable workings of time. It is a noble mission. But it is a misguided one. Medieval textuality functioned, one way or another, in this fallen state. When we choose “coherence” or “intelligibility” as the sine qua non for undertaking work on medieval texts, pretending that these were qualities they once possessed but have now lost, we are simply choosing not to look at medieval texts. Traditional philology has generally seen the scribe as an obstacle between us and the understanding of medieval texts. But in fact, the critical edition is the more dangerous obstacle. The critical edition substitutes one of the modern processes of textual edition and the idea of the “coher-

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ent” text for a host of readerly activities (some of which no doubt resembled certain procedures of critical editing, most of which did not) with which medieval readers engaged their fallen scripta, produced their readings, and went on with their lives. They could not afford the luxury of waiting around for an “intelligible” text. Let me make clear that my quarrel with the critical edition, that romance of medievalry, has nothing to do with the endless problems editors go on about: Lachmannian versus Bédiériste editions, “conjectural” or “silent” emendation, where to place variants, where to place musical scores or illustrations from the manuscript in relation to the edited “text.” (I would just point out again that these things will always be found in precisely the correct place in the manuscripts themselves.) Nor is my quarrel with the basic concepts and techniques of traditional philology. On the contrary, I believe these techniques can be tremendously powerful in illuminating the true nature of medieval textuality, when applied to proper ends. My first quarrel is, in fact, with the goal of textual-critical processes: the reduction of the fallen world of medieval manuscript textuality to a single (or set of) “intelligible,” “coherent” text(s), and with the corollary that the edition stands in some sort of relation we consider “true” to the manuscript textuality or to the author it claims to represent. My second quarrel is with the product or byproduct of these processes: the fact that published critical editions (neat and intelligible) have become for scholars and teachers of medieval literature, including me, the seldom-questioned basic tool of our work. I object, then, not so much to the existence of the critical edition as to the disproportionate space it occupies in academic discussions of medieval textual life, both as the object on which most studies of “medieval literature” are based and as a subject of endless theoretical quibbling in its own right. How does one reduce a family of manuscripts to an archetype or to a set of “intelligible” related texts? How does one select a “best” manuscript? These are fascinating abstract problems, I suppose, but they have little or nothing to do with medieval literature as it was produced and received by medieval people. The edition may be useful for presenting certain aspects of medieval “works” to certain groups: students, scholars unfamiliar with a given text or its language. As I hope I have made clear, I think the process by which critical editions are produced can be extremely useful in coming to understand many aspects of medieval textuality. But the end product, the critical edition, as it is currently constituted and used in scholarly work on medieval texts, is of absolutely no evidentiary value. It would be foolish to suggest, of course, that unmediated contact with manuscript textuality is possible or even desirable. The odd jumble of symbols I have used in striving to represent the scripta of the Libro should

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bring that point home. Even if we could hold a pristine medieval manuscript (how long did it stay that way?) in our hands each time we wished to comment on a medieval “text,” we could not escape this problem. Even in the most ideal situations today we have to look at the manuscript mediated by centuries of human history and by time pure and simple. The issue, then, is not mediation, but the kind and degree thereof. The critical edition makes two moves that, together, render its mediation of the medieval text undesirable. First, it ruthlessly suppresses its potential competitor, the manuscript text. As Willis (5) puts it, “To the textual critic, a manuscript is of interest only as a vehicle of readings.” Willis is talking about classical textual criticism, but this attitude is certainly one that has been, and still is, shared by many editors of medieval texts. It is evident in the vast body of literary criticism written on these texts. Alternatively, the editor may select a single manuscript and allow it to stand, with space for a few variant or conjectural readings, for all the others in its tradition. In a second move, the critical edition reduces mediation to a limited range of models, clustered about the idea of the coherent (originary or authorial) “text.” Historically (and this cannot be blamed directly on the critical edition), this model has excluded consideration of other models. This is not to say that critical editors are not striving to find alternate models. Pickens’s edition of Jaufré Rudel is the most visible of these attempts. Speer notes many more in her recent survey (“Editing” 25–43). But all of these work out from the model of the edition rather than from the model of the scriptum.1 Once we turn our eyes from the bright light of the critical edition, we grow accustomed to seeing in a darker world of flux, incoherence, and fascinating detail. At the very center of the issues I raise in this book sits the medieval scribe. The scribe is the hinge on which the rest of the system of medieval literature swings. The conventional wisdom I learned in classical textual criticism class was, “Thank God for the medieval scribes who made so many mistakes they gave us our jobs.” This is about as positive an estimation of the medieval scribes as we can find. More often they are viewed as inept defilers of the sacred authorial text, as obstacles to its reconstruction. Corominas’s indictment of the scribes and anthologizers of the Libro may be allowed to stand for an entire tradition. He refers to Juan Ruiz’s invitation to his reader to emend or amplify his text “sy bien trobar sopiere” (T:36v;1629a: “if he should know how to write verse well”). [Juan Ruiz] got what he asked for! The problem is that his only condition was not met: “He who knows how to write verse well.” A barbarous clan such as the low-life Andalusian minstrel [Cazurro] . . . and other low-lifes, among them the Leonese scribe of T, took it upon themselves not to emend

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but to mutilate and degrade his work. [They were] not just disrespectful with the letter of his works, but also deprived of the slightest literary sensibility and metric or poetic perception. And beyond these, only copyists not much more respectful than they, like those of S and G, took the trouble to transmit his work. Juan Ruiz would have been horrified, had he been able to read their handiwork. (Cor 22–23)

Holmes’s famous question about negative attitudes toward medieval scribes comes up, of all places, in the course of a critique of Bédiériste editors: “Why was every scribe except the first a careless ignoramus, and every author a flawless wielder of Old French metrics and case endings?” (469).2 Given the strong cultural and linguistic ties between the medieval scribe and the texts he or she copied, does the view of the scribe as obstacle really apply? Yes, to the extent that we seek the “classical” authorial text or the “coherent” text. But this search has itself become an obstacle to understanding the scribes’ pivotal role in the making of medieval textuality. The scribes were the source of all medieval written texts, whether of classical, biblical, or medieval origin.3 What medieval scribes wrote was what medieval readers got. The medieval reader who came across a puzzling passage either made his or her own sense of it or skipped on. Medieval reading did not break down at this point, did not cease. It seems to me that understanding how medieval readers dealt with the texts they did have is a far more vital (and interesting) problem for modern medievalists than is the reconstruction of authorial or “intelligible” texts in forms that never existed in the medieval world. I think, then, that we must refocus medieval literary scholarship on what scribes did and on the specific manuscripts they produced in doing it. We will also want to understand how what scribes did produced or destroyed meaning, how it engaged medieval readers. First, however, we must simply try to come to grips with how medieval textuality and “scriptuality” functioned in itself, in its time, and to begin to explore the ways in which this understanding might change how we wish to talk about “medieval literature.” Medieval readers had no other Libro than the fallen, fragmentary one they held in their hands. We must see errors, variants, omissions, and scribal “editing” as the true cruces of medieval textual life. Clearly many medieval authors sent their works off to copyists with considerable trepidation. Chaucer’s inept Adam Scriveyn is the most infamous of medieval scribes, lacking even the “specious lustre” accorded by Reid to Chrétien’s Guiot (17). Don Juan Manuel prefaces his Conde Lucanor with an important notice for his readers: he has prepared an authoritative version of his works, to be deposited in the Dominican monastery of Peñafiel. Readers should consult this man-

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uscript before praising or blaming his work (Obras 2:23). Scribes make errors, but these errors should not be attributed to the author without examination of the authorially approved text. In the general prologue to these works, he gives one medieval author’s view of the process that his work will undergo: recelando yo, don Iohan, que por razon que non se podra escusar, que.los libros que yo he fechos non se ayan de trasladar muchas vezes; et por que yo he visto que en.el transladar acaeçe muchas vezes, lo vno por desentendimiento del scriuano, o.por que las letras semejan vnas a otras, que en transladando el libro porna vna razon por otra, en guisa que muda toda la entençion et toda la sentençia et sera traydo el que.la fizo non aviendo y culpa; et por guardar esto quanto yo pudiere, fizi fazer este uolumen en que estan scriptos todos los libros que yo fasta aqui he fechos, et son doze. (1:32) I, Don Juan Manuel, fearing that, for unavoidable reasons, the books I have made will be recopied many times, and because I have seen that in recopying it often happens, sometimes due to a scribe’s misunderstanding, or because the letters resemble one another, that in copying the book he will put one word for another so that he changes the whole intention and the whole meaning, and the person who wrote the book will be criticized although he is not to blame. And to protect myself from this as much as I can, I had this volume put together in which are written all the books that I have made until now, and there are twelve.

Modern readers are struck initially by how “modern” Don Juan’s idea of authorship seems, by his sense of ownership of his text.4 The textual-critical process can charge in and rescue Don Juan from his scribes, can restore his text to him. But in his very concern for what the process of scribal transmission would inevitably do to his “libros,” Don Juan, with characteristic pragmatism, recognizes that such a goal cannot be realized. His purpose in making these copies is not to protect his works, but to protect himself. He has no illusions that he can transform the copying process. I am not trying to argue that medieval writers were never concerned about the integrity of their texts. My point is that, even in those cases in which textual integrity was the author’s ideal, it was an ideal seldom achieved (all of Don Juan’s authorized copies are lost). That this ideal is congenial to us does not mean that it should become the ideal to which we make all medieval texts or works conform, or the one on which we base the bulk of our interpretive activity. We need to explore the broad range of medieval attitudes toward authorship and the specific ways in which they shape various textual traditions. We cannot do this if we begin with edited texts that privilege a single model that was rarely, if ever, achieved in the Middle Ages.

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The world of medieval scribes is an area of inquiry that has fallen victim to modern scholars’ need to suppress the scribes’ handiwork in the production of critical editions of “authorial” texts. Much has been written, it is true, about the “psychology” of scribal error (Andrieu, for example), but little has been written about the psychology of being a scribe or of the global experience of copying manuscripts, as far as I know. The modern scholar who has transcribed even a page or two of a medieval manuscript has had a taste of it, though the tools and environmental conditions (ballpoint pens, heat or air conditioning, electric lighting) facilitate the task in ways a medieval scribe could only have dreamed of. The act of copying is a constant struggle between mechanical repetition and ever-changing detail, absolute concentration and absolute boredom. The same twenty-odd letters must be written over and over again; but the order in which these letters are produced is at every instant significant. The very flexibility of the alphabetic system is the source of many of the difficulties in its accurate reproduction.5 The collection of colophons compiled by the Benedictines of Bouveret, Switzerland reveals in fascinating detail a life experience shared by thousands of men and women across the European Middle Ages. The scribal world is one of contradiction, caught between gap (exaggerated boasts) and humility, between physical suffering and oblivion, between rigid attention to detail and total “carnivalesque” release, between authors and readers, between boredom (or madness) and salvation.6 This is a realm of human experience about which we have been rather incurious in our pursuit of the author and his text. Yet it is in this psychological and experiential space, and not in the elusive authorial autograph, that our medieval literature was produced. As I noted in the Preface (n. 7), recent years have seen a revision of medievalists’ views of scribes. This reexamination seeks to situate scribal activity in a more positive light and to study the scribal process itself, freed from slavery, if not to the authorial text, at least to the textual critic’s stemmata. We now have several studies on “the scribe as x.” The value of x may sometimes represent a recognized medieval activity: “the scribe as commentator,” “the scribe as continuator.” In some cases, however, the exploration of scribal activity may be enlisted in the task of proving the superiority of the authorial text (Windeatt). In other cases, x stands for a postmedieval literary activity peripheral to the creative process: “the scribe as editor,” “the scribe as critic,” “the scribe as reader.” For all the interest of these individual studies, one cannot help observing that in them, the scribe becomes important only to the extent that we can see him or her as something other than a scribe. The work of Machan is especially insightful in its recognition of the necessity to consider in a balanced way the roles of author, scribe, and

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physical text (“Scribal,” especially 160). Yet Machan still clings to the idea that scribes are useful only to the extent that they take on a role miming that of authors: “[The] procedure [of the scribes of Chaucer’s Boece] suggests that they appropriated for themselves the power to give a shape to what they were transmitting—to act, in effect, as authors” (156). Pearsall, in his excellent analysis of the problematics of editing medieval texts, expresses a similar attitude: “Manuscripts dismissed as worthless by editors of critical texts are often the very ones where scribal editors have participated most fully in the activity of a poem, often at a high level of intellectual and even creative engagement” (“Editing” 103). Much as I am in obvious agreement with the ideas expressed in the work of both scholars, much as I appreciate the attempt to save scribes through meaning, through “creativity,” I do not think we can afford such a one-sided salvation. We cannot restore the proper balance among scribe, author, and manuscript unless we permit the “uncreative,” “unauthorial” aspects of scribal activity to be a part of the equation as well, the times when they made nonsense as well as the times when they made sense. We cannot just take what we would like the scribes to be; we must recognize that they were, yes, sometimes clever readers and rehandlers, but that they were also often sloppy, inept, ignorant, and unimaginative. The “negative” aspects of scribal activity are as significant in creating the medieval scriptum as are the positive. We should see scribal activity (including those features traditionally considered “errors”) as integral features of the same textual world inhabited by the texts we seek to study. No medieval reader ever read the Libro in a manuscript free from “error” (the autograph, if it existed, no doubt contained some, if not many). How do we finally begin to appreciate the scribe as scribe? I hope to begin to provide some answers in Chapter 4.

4 S/Ç: THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LIBRO AND THEIR SCRIBES

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BEGIN BY characterizing briefly the three scripta that constitute our Libro.1 G (Gayoso) is now housed in the library of the Real Academia Española. It bears a colophon that gives the date 1389 (86v). Scholars generally accept this date as an accurate statement of the year in which the manuscript was completed (but see Kelly, Canon 28–35). It survives in eighty-seven rough paper folios measuring 220 mm by 150 mm, rebound in modern times. G is incomplete in the form it has come down to us; in addition, numerous folios have been bound out of order. More than one hand may have participated in the copying of G (Cor 30). The separation of four-line cuaderna vía stanzas found in other manuscripts of the Libro is not followed here. All the lines are run together, although occasional spaces are left for large initials. With one exception, these were not filled in.2 G is the only one of the surviving manuscripts written in the presumed dialect of Juan Ruiz himself: Castilian. This fact has led one twentieth-century editor (Wil) to base his edition on G, despite its incompleteness. T (Toledo), proceeding from the cathedral library in Toledo and now housed in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (Va 6–1), is the most fragmentary of the three major manuscripts. Only forty-eight folios survive. It is written on thick, dark paper measuring 250 x 155 mm. The manuscript was rebound in 1899. On paleographic grounds, scholars date it to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century (Blecua, “Textos” 79). It is probably somewhat later than G, then. The surviving portions were written by a single scribe. Spaces separate the cuaderna vía stanzas, and each stanza is marked with a calderón (paragraph) in black ink. According to Cor, the scribe of T was from the “city or province of León” (26 n. 16). His text bears many Leonisms, the most common of which is the exchange of l and r (see the discussion of S below). According to most critical editors, G and T constitute a family of manuscripts distinct from S. Editors disagree, however, as to the reasons for this difference. The traditional explanation (see the review by Gybbon-Monypenny, “Two”) is that GT represents an earlier redaction of the Libro, completed in 1330, the date given in the final stanza (1634) of the poem in T (this stanza is lacking in G). For other scholars, such as Joset (Nuevas 38) and Gyb (75), the evidence is inconclu-

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sive. In general, the “two-version theory” has been greeted with increasing skepticism by scholars, and Ble92 (LXXXI–LXXXVI) offers strong arguments for rejecting it entirely. S, given this designation because it was originally housed in the Colegio de San Bartolomé in Salamanca, is the most recent and the most lengthy of the three major manuscripts, although it, too, has pieces missing. It entered the library in 1440 and may have belonged to the founder of the Colegio, Diego de Anaya (d. 1437; Cátedra 25, 44–45). In its present form it has 105 folios measuring 278 x 205 mm. The manuscript is written on higher-quality paper than the other two manuscripts. This manuscript was rebound in the modern era. A name is associated with this manuscript, that of Alffonsus Paratinensis, or Alfonso de Paradinas, whom most scholars believe to have been the principal scribe of the manuscript. If this is true, the manuscript may have been copied around 1415–17, when Paradinas’s presence in the Colegio de San Bartolomé is documented. Paradinas gives his name in a rubricated colophon on folio 104r. ¶

este es el libro del arçipreste de hita el qual conpuso seyendo preso por mandado del cardenal don gil arçobispo de toledo & laus tibi xpriste quem [?] liber Explicit iste. Alffonsus paratinensis

This is the Book of the Archpriest of Hita, which he composed while imprisoned by order of the Cardenal Don Gil, Archbishop of Toledo. Praise to you, Christ, as* this book ends. Alfonsus Paratinensis. [I expand Paradinas’s name after Menéndez Pidal, “Copista” 146.]

Cor (29) maintains that only one scribe copied the manuscript. This may be true, but there are clear changes in style, if not in scribe, at 70r–v (cf. Blecua, “Problemas” 39). Stanzas are separated by a space and a red calderón marks each stanza. There is also an extensive system of rubrics, absent from the other manuscripts, that divides the text into sections. Because guide words in black ink can be seen beneath them, these rubrics appear to have been copied from another source, either an earlier manuscript that bore them or a new outline drawn up by someone at the time S was being prepared (Cor 136 n. 276a). S also contains numerous “Leonisms,”such as “plado” (prado; cf. S:45r;768a; “meadow”) and “prazer” (placer; cf. S:102r;1687f; “pleasure”). Those scholars who subscribe to the two-version theory believe that S represents the text of an authorial revision of the Libro completed in 1343, the date given in the colophon at S:99r;1634. Blecua (“Textos” 81 and Ble92 LXXXI–LXXXVI) categorically denies the existence of two “editions” of the Libro. In addition to the Spanish manuscripts, there is a fragment of an early

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Portuguese translation of the Libro. Most scholars believe this translation belongs to the GT group. The fragment consists of two parchment folios, which had been used as flyleaves for another manuscript. Despite this destruction, the manuscript seems to have been prepared with greater care than the other manuscripts of this family and is perhaps the manuscript mentioned in the catalogue of the royal library of Don Duarte de Portugal (1438; see Chapter 6).3 One physical line in the manuscript represents each Spanish hemistich, resulting in eight-line stanzas. A large initial begins each stanza, and rubricated capitals appear at stanzas 60, 124, and 129. The manuscript has traditionally been dated to the final third of the fourteenth century, thus making it potentially earlier than any of the surviving Spanish manuscripts. Faulhaber has suggested a later date for this manuscript (“Celestina” 9). Except in the case of Alfonso de Paradinas, we know little about the scribes of the manuscripts of the Libro. What impressions we may gather come from the manuscripts themselves, their physical make-up and layout, and a few patterns of variants, which we may use cautiously to attempt to establish some ideological traits of the scribes or their tradition. Menéndez Pidal sketched the outlines of Paradinas’s distinguished career several decades ago (“Copista”; see also García Blanco). He was born in Paradinas (or Paladinas) in the diocese of Salamanca about the year 1395. He was a resident of the Colegio de San Bartolomé in Salamanca around the year 1417, as I have noted. Menéndez Pidal believes that Paradinas, then in his early twenties, copied the manuscript of the Libro at this time. After holding a teaching post in Salamanca, he went to Rome, where he exercised the profession of lawyer. On Paradinas’s return from Italy, Enrique IV offered him the bishopric of Ciudad Rodrigo, which he held until 1463. Returning to Rome, he built the church and hospital of Santiago. He died on October 19, 1485, and was buried in the church he had built. Kelly (Canon 29) has recently expressed skepticism about the identification of the Paradinas of the manuscript with the distinguished churchman. Cátedra (44 and n. 63) has met Kelly’s objections, in part. There is much in the Libro itself that coincides with the picture we may draw of the inexperienced law student and churchman, however. Morreale characterizes the scribe of S as “given to false erudition” (“Más . . . Chiarini” 218). She refers to his “caprice of replacing an everyday term with a more affected one” and his “cultist ambition” (231). Other characteristics of S that may be attributable to the scribe of the surviving manuscript are the tendency toward “syntactic additions” (265) and a bent for the “prosaic” (280). Cor (136 n. 276a) notes that the rubrics of S tend to use linguistic forms that are more archaic or more correct, as well as spellings that are more learned and more etymologically grounded than those of the text itself. On the basis of this observation, Cor posits the existence of a “pro-

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fessor” who would have added the rubrics to the exemplar from which Paradinas copied the text of the manuscript. Out of respect for his professor (beatus ille), the young Paradinas would have scrupulously copied the more learned and archaic spellings of his teacher, while showing far less respect for the text of the Archpriest himself. Although it may seem that Cor has traveled far on rather thin evidence, there are other instances of variation in the cultural level of linguistic forms that suggest a learned intervention in the tradition at some point and for motives by no means clear. I explore some of these below. Cor ventures the further opinion that the scribe of S, as a university student, was “possessed of a certain superiority complex with regard to a popular, oral poet (poeta de aire ajuglarado)” like Juan Ruiz, and was “very young and surely quite presumptuous” (29). This assertion is based on the observation that the number of conjectural emendations is greater in S than in the “average medieval manuscript” or than in G. Though Cor offers no statistical data in support of this point, I think the accumulated evidence suggests that although Cor’s portrait of the arrogant and presumptuous college student may be exaggerated, it is essentially correct. All we know about the scribes of G and T is what we can glean from the manuscripts they produced. Corominas ascribes G to “Castilian monks of the fourteenth century” (Cor 29). He also suggests the possibility that the manuscript was copied by various scribes working in an officina or scriptorium who followed the linguistic and dialectal features of their model fairly scrupulously (30). For reasons I discuss below, T also seems to have been produced in a religious milieu, perhaps in or around the cathedral of Toledo itself. Most of what we think about these scribes, then, is based on speculation alone. Even the identification of “Alffonsus Paratinensis” with the famous churchman of the same name has been called into question, and the appearance of Paradinas’s name in a rubricated colophon without the normal scribal identification, such as scripsit (“wrote”), may suggest that Alfonso de Paradinas is the name of the manuscript’s owner, patron, or commissioner, not its scribe. We will have to get to know these scribes, then, through their handiwork.

Divisio Textus I begin with a look at the grossest features of scribal activity in the manuscript of the Libro: the layout of the text on the manuscript page and the division of the texts into topical, narrative, or lyric units. Division was as basic and interconvertible a tool of knowledge in the medieval period as the scientific method is in ours. Divisio textus was the final part of traditional academic exposition. Readers of the General estoria know that

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departir (“to divide into parts”) is synonymous with literary interpretation and often with speech itself: “departe el frayre” (1:92: “The friar explains”); “Agora uos departiremos desto que dizen dend los esponedores” (1:607: “Now we will tell you what the expositors say about this”). Juan Ruiz himself introduces this mode, as it entered sermon practice, in the opening lines of his prologue when he divides the verse “Intellectum tibi dabo” (S:1r;prol.; see Chapter 3) into three parts representing understanding, memory, and will.4 Beginning in the early thirteenth century when Stephen Langton set up his division of the Bible into chapter and verse, divisio became increasingly prevalent (Smalley 222–24; Rouse and Rouse, “Statim” 221; see also Saenger 374–76 for early divisions of patristic texts, and Parkes, “Influence”). Ramon Llull used various schemata to organize his texts: the seven planets in the Libre de l’orde de cavalleria (Obres 1:527), the 365 days of the year in the Libre de contemplació (2:1255). Fourteenth-century writers moved steadily toward more organized, more easily divisible, didactic texts. Even the most famous vernacular texts of the century are hyperorganized: Dante’s Commedia; Boccaccio’s ten tales on each of ten days; Chaucer’s pilgrims, each allowed two stories on the way out and two on the way back in the announced plan. In a work attributed in the manuscript to San Pedro Pascual, who lived at the end of the thirteenth century, we find a clear statement of these values:5 En los libros los titulos, e las rubricas alumbran los coraçones de los que leen, e oyen leer los libros para entender, para fallar de ligero lo que escrito es en ellos; e los parágrafos, e las letras capitales e los puntos interrogantes, e los otros, aguzan e abivan los leedores para entender e leer de entendimiento. . . . Muchos leen . . . enbueltamente, e apriesa, e enbargadamente, no distingendo, ni departiendo, ni declarando como deven, ni posando como deven, así que ellos no lo entienden, ni a los que oyen [ms. leen; emend. Valenzuela] dan a entender lo que que [sic] leen. (Obras 4:1–2) In books, titles and rubrics illuminate the hearts of those who read and hear books read so that they can understand and locate easily what is written in them; and paragraphs and capital letters and question points and the others, sharpen and stimulate readers to read with understanding. . . . Many read . . . obscurely and quickly and haltingly, not distinguishing or dividing or making things clear as they should, nor pausing as they should so that neither do they understand, nor do they make those who listen understand what they are reading.

In many ways the Libro is an unusual fourteenth-century text. At a time when writers were increasingly concerned with systematization, reduction, “concordance,” and literary unity, the structure of the Libro seems

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remarkably loose. There is no divisio textus, no elaborate dividing of the text into books, days, pilgrims. The references from one part of the text to other parts are few and often confusing. In what may be the most striking lack of division in the book, the personality of the Archpriest of Hita merges seamlessly with that of Don Melón in the course of the adaptation of the Pamphilus. Though the book has a clear beginning (invocation, prologue) that tells us how to take what follows, it lacks the tabulae that accompanied so many religious works. The single great division of the book is that which separates the main cuaderna vía sections from the collection of lyric, cuaderna vía, or prose pieces that follow at the end. But both the rubrics of S and the spaces left for initials in G show evidence of efforts to divide the body of the text. The divisions in S and G suggest the ways in which readers may have been guided in their approach to the text before them. In those places where both S and G divide the text, we can make a few observations on the differences in the two scripta. I take the spaces left for initials in G (generally three lines high) as an indication of a point at which the scribe felt a division should occur or at which one appeared in his exemplar. We can say that G tends to divide the text at the beginning of an exemplum proper, whereas S, especially at the beginning, shows a division perhaps more akin to modern sensibilities, beginning each section with a new part of the “story” of the Archpriest of Hita. For example, S places a rubric (“¶ aqui fabla de como todo omne entrelos sus cuidados se deue alegrar”; 4v: “Here It Speaks of How Everyone Ought to Have Happiness Amongst His Cares”) before stanza 44 (“Palabras son de sabio”; “They are words of a wise man”), which begins the introduction to the story of the Greeks and the Romans. G leaves a space two lines high for a drop capital A three stanzas later at 47a, where the story proper begins: “ a sy fue que rromanos” (3r: “so it was that the Romans”).6 A similar example occurs in the fable of the frog and the mole. S’s rubric at 407 (“Enssienplo del mur topo ¬ dela Rana”; 28r: “Exemplum of the Mole and the Frog”) includes the Archpriest’s introduction to the tale (“Contesçe cada dia”; “it happens every day”), whereas G ’s division at 408 begins a section with the fable proper: “ t enia el mur topo”; (14r: “the mole had”). The most striking example of scribal awareness of these divisions occurs in stanza 474, the beginning of the tale of Don Pitas Payas. S places a rubric before the entire stanza: “del que olvydo la muger te dire la fazaña” (31r: “Concerning someone who neglected his wife I’ll tell you the tale”). G takes the unusual step of dividing the stanza in half, placing the space for the capital E at 474c: “ e ras don pitas payas vn pintor de bretana /” (13r: “Once upon a time Don Pitas Payas, painter from Brittany”).7 This division, however, is entirely consistent with G ’s practice of beginning with the fable proper rather than with the Archpriest’s lead-in.8 Similar

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patterns of division occur at S:52v;892 versus G:43v;893 and at S:56v;950 versus G:45r;951. In the rest of the cases in which divisions are present in both manuscripts, S and G coincide.9 Stanza 11 is the first stanza in G and the stanza immediately following the prose prologue in S. Stanzas 959, 987, and 1022 begin lyric sections (serranillas). The remaining cases in which S and G coincide in their division occur at the beginning of exempla. In these places, S, too, divides at the beginning of the narration itself (“Era vn ortolano”, S:81r;1348: “There was a gardener”; or (“ e L buen galgo lebrero”, G:74v;1357: “the good rabbit hound”). In each of these cases, the rubric in S specifically announces that an exemplum will follow: “Enxienplo del ortolano ¬ dela culuebra” (“Exemplum of the Gardener and the Serpent”), “Enxienplo del galgo E del señor” (S:81v: “Exemplum of the Hound and Its Master”). At 74r;1348, 74v;1357, 75v;1370, 76v;1387, 77v;1401, and 78v;1412, G also bears a marginal notation (see Chapter 5) announcing the beginning of an “insienplo.” Thus we must recognize the divisions in the two manuscripts to be fundamentally the same, but with a tendency in S, especially at the beginning of the manuscript, to shift the emphasis from the exemplum as a self-contained moral unit to the fictional events of the Archpriest’s life that introduce the exempla. This is consistent with the general tendency we find in the rubrics of S to transform the Archpriest into an exemplary figure in his own right (Walsh, “Outer” 8–9).10 Both manuscripts, then, show by their division an interest in the “insienplos” translated/adapted by Juan Ruiz from Walter the Englishman and other sources. The marginal notations or divisions suggest a reading similar to that we will see in the Archpriest of Talavera and other readers of the Libro (Chapter 6), an interest in the book as a repository of traditional material that may serve readers in contexts quite divorced from that of the narrative immediately surrounding it. Especially in G, but, to a greater extent than has been acknowledged, in S as well, the story of the Archpriest’s love adventures, which has been the focus of most postmedieval critical attention, is reduced to a mere medium for bearing the “meollo” of the book: the exempla. The marginalia and divisions, then, are a means of aiding the reader in winnowing the grain from the chaff. Another aspect of “division” in the manuscripts of the Libro remains: the separation of the Libro into two parts. The first and larger part consists chiefly of cuaderna vía passages. The second, briefer part follows the epilogue at 1634 and consists largely of lyric or prose passages. That this is a clear and fundamental division is indicated in manuscripts S and T: both manuscripts bear a cuaderna vía “explicit” at stanza 1634 (G lacks the stanza in question but bears a prose explicit after the lyrics

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[after 1728]). The relation of what follows this explicit to what has gone before is especially problematic. Most scholars agree that the lyric pieces common to both S and G (gozos, student songs) are a legitimate part of the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita.” This opinion is reinforced by the fact that Juan Ruiz announces that he has written such songs in 1514. The same is true of the two “Cantares de ciegos” (“Blind Men’s Songs”), which appear in G alone but which follow without page break the student song common to both S and G: they are also announced in 1514. For similar reasons, the lyric pieces not found in G but present in S are also usually considered to form a part of the Archpriest’s book. The cuaderna vía section found in S alone, the “Cantica de los clerigos de talauera” (102v: “Song of the Clerics of Talavera”) is more problematic. Opinions differ as to whether this ought to be considered the work of Juan Ruiz (see Walsh, “Outer” 14–15). This is not an important question for our present purposes. The scribe of S places a second explicit at the close of this episode (104r;1709) that specifically includes this passage in the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita” (cited above).

Visión de Filoberto Still more problematic than the “Cántica” is the prose piece that follows the cuaderna vía section in T. This manuscript does not contain any of the lyric poems found in manuscripts S and G. If the episode of the “clérigos de Talavera” has caused much comment, the Visión de Filoberto in T has been totally ignored, perhaps because its first editor, Octavio de Toledo, deemed it to be a late fourteenth-century work and therefore not by the Archpriest of Hita.11 The author/work paradigm, which has been the basis of nearly all research on the Libro, had necessarily to ignore this work. One will search the thousands of pages written on the Libro in vain for any substantive mention of this work, which occupies one-fourth of the surviving forty-eight folios of one of the three chief scripta of the Libro. It has not been published in any edition of the Libro, and was not reproduced in the facsimile edition of T by Criado and Naylor. A reader-oriented approach demands that we examine the Visión at least briefly, for, written in the same hand that copied the text of the Libro and beginning on the verso of the folio on which the “explicit” to the Libro occurs (37r), it is clearly as much a part of this scriptum of the Libro as the lyric poems and the “Cantica de los clerigos de talauera” are a part of S. It is irrelevant for present purposes to attempt to determine whether the Visión is by Juan Ruiz. Rather, I am concerned to explore the motives that led some medieval person to place this text immediately after stanza 1634, and what these motives may tell us about the function of this late

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fourteenth-century scriptum of the Libro. It may have been Juan Ruiz, or a later rehandler, or, in fact, a scribe who was responsible for the presence of the Visión in this manuscript or an earlier manuscript in this tradition. I will simply refer to the responsible party as the “medieval person.” The Visión de Filoberto is a Castilian prose translation/adaptation of a Latin Dialogus inter corpus et animam (Wright 95–106; du Méril 217– 30). It is the familiar tale of a hermit who, having fallen asleep at his vigil, has a vision in which he witnesses an exchange of recriminations between a corpse and the soul, which has just left it, bound for eternal torment. Their debate is finally interrupted by a pair of demons who have come to collect the soul and carry it off to hell. The hermit awakens terrified and, repenting his many sins, prays to God to pardon him. What is the significance of the medieval person’s inclusion of the Visión at the close of the Libro? Thematically, the Visión’s inclusion supports the arguments of several scholars, most notably Walker, who find an increasing preoccupation with death to be the organizing structure of Juan Ruiz’s book.12 I am in substantial agreement with this assessment and have suggested that the topic “death lies hidden in sweet love (buen amor)” is the organizing motif of the Libro (“Mulberries” 400 and 402–3 n. 9). It seems likely that the medieval person felt the Libro and the Visión to be of a piece. Even if we deny thematic links or argue that the combination of the Libro and the Visión is merely casual, in the end there is one unity we cannot escape: the medieval individual who had in his possession at approximately the same time copies of both texts. The relations are particularly strong, of course, between the Visión and that portion of the “Libro” dedicated to the Archpriest’s “imprecation” against death (1520–75). To list these similarities will be merely to pass in review most of the favorite medieval topoi on the theme of death. The dead or dying man is forgotten by wife and family (39r–v, 47r; cf. 1525– 27, 1536–43); the obligatory ubi sunt (38–39; cf. 1568–69). Man’s only hope is to carry out “buenas obras” while he is alive (37v–38v; cf. 1532– 33). At times the topical nature of the theme leads to striking verbal similarities between the two texts. The Visión explains that once a person is dead, family and friends “arriedran se del ansy como de cosa que fiede muy mal” (47r: “Draw back from him as from a thing that stinks very badly”). This recalls stanza 1525: “por bien que lo quieren al omne enla vida | en punto que tu [la muerte] vienes con la tu mala venida | todos fuyen del luego commo de rres podrida” (T:30r: “However much they may love a man in life, when you come, death, with your evil arrival, all flee from him as from a rotting carcass”). Equally striking is the contrast in scope offered by the two texts. In the part of this scriptum also witnessed in S and G, the part normally attributed to Juan Ruiz, the emphasis is on the failure of the body at death, its

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loss of power and control over wealth and people. We find few of the common topoi on the foulness of the body in the tomb, and no description of the punishments that await sinners. Death is a closed door that only Christ has penetrated. Trotaconventos’s fate after death can only be a matter of speculation: “dote me an leuado non se cosa çertera | nunca torno con nueuas quien anda esta carrera” (T:33r;1569cd: “Where have they taken you from me? I know nothing definite: no one who goes that route ever came back with news”). The Visión, of course, takes as its primary and graphic focus these very matters: the corpse rotting in the grave (39r) and the soul’s initial torments in hell (44v–46r). The Visión, then, is a continuation beyond the moment of death, a supplement to the Libro, and a response—a gloss, in short. After reading the resounding condemnation of the vanity of earthly delights—food (38v–39r, 41v, 42r–v), women (41v)—it may be more difficult to assent to the fleshly delights supposedly celebrated in the Libro. Reading back to the Libro after reading the Visión, one sees more clearly the choices one must make and where a body and a soul can go wrong. Filoberto’s vision serves as a corrective, then, to one possible set of readings of the Libro. The debate between body and soul becomes a part of a larger debate between the two works. The final vision of the monk exposes the fleshly desires of the Archpriest and lovers like him for the vain “falagos” (“allurements”) that they are. In the three manuscripts of the Libro, we have three distinct medieval books. Each glosses the Libro in a slightly different way through rubrics, textual divisions, marginal notations, and included works. G and, to a lesser extent, S treat the Libro as a collection of exempla. This is especially true in the final third of the texts. G ’s signaling in the margins of the beginning of the fables themselves, distinct from S ’s linking of the exempla to the debate between Juan Ruiz and Don Amor, stresses their independence, their potential use to readers as free-standing exempla. S bears strong traces of the exemplum-book approach, but it also shows the beginnings of a different development. The rubrics stress the presence of the Archpriest himself in the book, of the things that happen to him (“Delo que contesçio al arçipreste conla sserrana”; S:57v; before 972: “About What Happened to the Archpriest with the Mountain Girl”). But he is also a voice of authority. He offers an opening prayer, he speaks to the reader concerning the way in which his book must be understood. And in the final rubric by Paradinas, the (pseudo?)-biographical elements of the Archpriest’s life become the circumstances of the book’s creation: Don Gil’s imprisonment of the Archpriest of Hita. T is an extended meditation on death. The juxtaposition of the “Libro de buen amor” and the Visión moves this scriptum closer to the realm of

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personal meditation and reflection. T invites us to reconsider the celebration of rich food in Don Carnal’s triumphal procession in the light of the hard questions asked in the Visión. “What happened to those rich foods you used to eat?” “What are they good for now?” The gloss of the Filoberto takes us beyond the fleshly world that seems to be the sole preoccupation of the “Libro de buen amor.” It adds a commentary on and corrective to a specific way of reading the book. We do a great disservice, then, to the richness of the medieval reading experience (and to our own understanding of it) when we try to reduce the Libro to a single critical text, when we attempt, through modern textual-critical methods, to construct and then privilege as genuine our own hypothetical “authorial” text. In the three chief scripta of the Libro we have at least three distinct Libros. No list of variants, however complete, could alone convey these significant differences. In the various fragments we have several more Libros (see Chapter 6). The Libro is not constituted by the authorial text to which it may theoretically (and only theoretically) be reduced. Nor is it the sum of readings that we have thus far elucidated. Rather, it is a dynamic process of change of emphasis, of new or old ways of reading, a continuing, evolving gloss.

Déluge de la variante When we attempt to examine the activities of scribes in relation to the letter of the text itself, the relatively neat patterns we have traced in the divisio of the manuscript text disappear. We are left with a veritable deluge of variants whose value for understanding the authorial text may be transcendental or nonexistent. And it is not at all easy to determine to which category a given variant may belong. Lachmannian textual criticism begins to solve the problem in its first move, by setting up as the unique standard an originary (hypothetical) authorial text that will eventually allow the elimination of a vast majority of these variants. It is a circular process, however. It is the variants themselves that allow the establishment of this authorial text. And so several sets of procedures are put in place that allow for reduction of variants. Some procedures or principles allow for wholesale annihilation of variants: eliminatio codicum descriptorum, recentiores deteriores.13 Other procedures work across manuscript families to reduce variants to groups that can be used in the production of an authorial text: “disjunctive errors.” Other procedures work to eliminate single readings, or individual readings within a tradition: lectio facilior, dialectal traits, the varieties of saut du même au même. Variants or errors are at once the veil that hides the authorial text and the magic keys that unlock it. For this process of eliminatio I would substitute a process of amplexus, an embracing of the

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entire textual tradition. Eliminatio is reductive and leads eventually to simplification, to the obliteration of problems; amplexus leads to an ever more complex set of puzzlements. The first problem with which amplexus presents us is how to organize the study of manuscript tradition and the scribal process in the absence of the unifying goal of the production of an archetype. What is the precise nature of “the scribe function” in medieval scripta? The following pages offer some ways in which we might begin to answer this question. The categories and procedures I suggest, and even the approach itself, are not intended to be final or exhaustive. They are simply the ones that have occurred to me as I have examined the manuscript tradition of the Libro. One convention: I use the terms ScribeG, ScribeS, and ScribeT to refer (1) to all the scribes who may have participated in the production of the manuscript indicated, and (2) to the scribes in the manuscript tradition who may have been responsible for the introduction of a given variant (rather than the actual copyists of G, S, or T ).The purpose of these terms is economy of expression, to save me from having to write “the second hand that worked on G ” or “the scribe of T or some scribe who preceded him in the tradition,” when these distinctions are not of immediate importance. This is not to say that they are always unimportant. In an earlier study (“That Bothersome”), I proposed two means of focusing on the unique presence that is the individual, concrete manuscript text, the “scriptum.” The first is one I have been arguing implicitly throughout this study: we must free the manuscript from the idea that it is a sign for something else, that it “represents” the authorial literary text that is the Libro de buen amor. At this level, however, the manuscript still participates with other scripta of the “same” text in a system of differences, variants, if you will. At the second level, we try to move beyond the relations both of origin and of difference to appreciate the peculiar plenitude of presence that is the individual manuscript codex, the scriptum. In Chapter 1 and, to a certain extent, in the preceding discussions of S, T, and G as separate medieval books, I have worked on this approach. Obviously, the first position postpones the thorny question of how one decides which manuscripts pertain to the “same” text, and thus admits through the back door the very concept of “originary text” it seeks to supplant. I frankly do not know how the concept of “same” text will work itself out in a study of medieval literature based on scripta rather than texts. The issues are considerably muddied when we deal with objects of study containing a Bible book and its gloss, a vernacular play, a single brief section from yet another text (Isidore’s Liber sententiarum), and other unidentified fragments, as we saw in BNM Va 5–9. Despite these problems, the place at which we may begin to view a given scriptum as the “same” as portions of another scriptum is a useful place to begin to work

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out the particular problems posed by the nature of handwritten textuality. From this point, in contrast to an approach that looks back toward a single, cold, originary text, we look out on a world of increasing variety and variance. It is a very human world of error, delight, and mutability. In working from this position, I employ a term that allows me to talk about the system of differences constituted by the three chief manuscripts and the few fragments of the Libro: “variance.” In an important study, Knight has used this word in a sense similar to, though not quite as specific as, the usage I suggest here. Cerquiglini (62) also uses the term, as we have seen, but in a far more ample, and vaguer, sense: “variance” is the “primary” and “founding” characteristic of medieval romance literature. My use of this term obviously takes advantage of the most popular nominal suffix for critical terminology over the past thirty years or so. But it also pays homage to the most influential concept in medieval literary theory in recent years: Zumthor’s mouvance. “Variance” may be seen as a variant— or even as a subset—of mouvance: the peculiar way in which handwritten texts “move” about each other and about a presumed originary center.14 I also use the term to refer to particular instances of variance. Thus 831b, which reads “loçana mente amada” (“loved lustily”) in S (49r) and “loca mente amada” (“loved madly”) in G (39v), represents a variance. We note the two readings’ variance without attempting to assign any hierarchical or textual-critical preeminence to one or the other. Variance contrasts, then, with a view that sees “loçana mente amada” as a rejected variant of (as most editors would have it) “loca mente amada.” The term “variance” allows us to talk about a system of differences without the obligation of assigning these differences to a hierarchy of value. “Variance x” is simply that. We do not have to decide if it is “more authentic,” “more logical,” lectio difficilior or facilior, in order to appreciate its condition of variance. It may, from time to time, be useful to view one term of a variance as proceeding from another. The reading “almas” (“souls”) in T:8v;1221d is usefully viewed as deriving from a reading “alanas” (“mastiffs”) represented in S and G. But this derivation should not be seen as situating “alanas” in a superior position to “almas.” Obviously, the state of being “different” is as problematic as the one of being “same.” It is another problem we must postpone. With the term “variance,” I want to create a value-free space in which to talk about those features of a set of scripta which, for whatever reasons, most readers may identify as “same” enough to be “different.” When we examine the three scripta of the Libro, we are struck first by the distances critical editors have traversed in creating the Libro de buen amor of Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita. The critical text, although not without its difficult places, on the whole makes sense grammatically and intellectu-

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ally. The individual lines of most quatrains rhyme (within Juan Ruiz’s own looser concept of rhyme; Lecoy 50–62). Each editor has, according to his or her own standards, attempted to make the text conform to metrical regularities. Certain aesthetic tasks have been completed: words repeated in the same line or stanza without obvious artistic justification have been replaced with synonyms drawn from other scripta of the Libro or from the editor’s knowledge of Old Spanish; five-line stanzas have been reduced to regular four-line stanzas. The scripta S, G, and T offer a radically different picture of Juan Ruiz’s Libro. Genders or numbers of nouns and modifying adjectives are confused in many lines.15 Subjects and verbs do not agree in person or number.16 Masculine pronouns appear in reference to feminine persons or things and vice versa, or the gender chosen goes against the sense of the passage, or the number or case is wrong, or there is no clear referent.17 Many lines do not rhyme, even remotely, though often there is a perfectly obvious, appropriately rhyming synonym for the rhyme word in question. In other cases, a minor change in word order would restore the rhyme.18 As a result of these and other problems, many lines of the three manuscripts simply make no sense.19 This is the text that confronted readers of the Libro in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the major question we must ask is how medieval readers dealt with the simple fact that their texts did not make sense grammatically or at the level of narrative coherence and continually disappointed certain aesthetic or generic expectations. Lacking most of the concepts in Lachmann’s toolkit, generally denied access to more than one or two manuscript versions of the same text, what sorts of readings did medieval readers produce? How did they fill in missing meaning? Or did they? These seem to me to be vital questions as we seek to understand how medieval literature functioned. Yet, as far as I know, medievalists have not raised them in any systematic way before. The scribes themselves, of course, were the medieval readers most familiar with the “difficult” world of medieval textuality. That they did not work harder at restoring sense to nonsense texts may give us our first clue to the system of values in which they functioned. Given their intimate contact with the manuscript tradition, it seems logical to assume that medieval thinkers would have devised and disseminated, mutatis mutandis, a system similar to Lachmann’s had their system of textual values coincided with ours. That they did not makes it all the more important to attempt to discover the system of values that “scribes as scribes” brought to the texts they copied. I begin with a few general observations about how manuscript tradition functions. Taking as our momentary point of view the “archetype,” we can say that a general process of differentiation occurs. That is, each suc-

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cessive copy in the tradition is increasingly distinct from the archetype. At the same time, members of different branches become increasingly different from one another as well, unless cross-copying (“contaminatio”) among the branches occurs. This cross-copying is no check on the process of differentiation, however. In fact it may enhance differentiation, as it is rarely, if ever, carried out with the intent of restoring the full authorial text. The scribal tradition is an evolutionary process in which isolated families become increasingly differentiated species, and cross-breeding can only augment evolutionary change, not restore the parent species. At the same time, another process is going on at the moment of transferring the text from one manuscript to another, that is, at the moment of scribal copying. This is the tendency for each copied manuscript to become more like itself. Borrowing a term from linguistics, we may call this phenomenon “leveling.” Leveling occurs chiefly with lexical items. In 1072d, S reads: “creo que se me non detenga enlas carneçerias” (63v: “I think he will not wait for me in the slaughterhouses” [?]), whereas G levels to “tengo que non senos tenga enlas carniçerias” (52v: “I hold that he cannot resist us in the slaughterhouses [?]”). (Blecua, in Ble83 and Ble92, is the only editor to view tengo/detenga as a figura etymologica by Juan Ruiz.) Leveling may occur with synonyms as well: “aves E animalias por el su grand amor | vinieron muy omildes pero con grand temor” (S:65r;1094cd: “Birds and animals out of great love for him came very humble but with great fear”) versus “aues ¬ animalias / por el su grant pavor” (G:54v;1094c: “fear of him”), which anticipates the animals’ fear (temor) of their señor, Don Amor, and effaces their natural love for him. Repetitio, pure and simple, is no doubt the most common of the processes of leveling: a word from one section of the text reappears in another, usually in the same line or in a similar position in a nearby stanza or line of verse. Thus, 512b: “acoyta E agrand priessa el mucho dar acorre” (S:33v: “Much giving helps out in worry and distress”); “acorre agrant priesa / el mucho dinero acorre/” (G:20v; nonsense repetition). See also 731c: “el coraçon del ome por el coraçon se prueua” (S:43r: “Man’s heart is proven by his heart”); “El coraçon del omne por la obra [“deed”] se prueva/” (G:34v). Or a word may simply be repeated in the same line: “ferio muy gruesa [S:65v: ReSia] mente ala grueSa gallina” (G:55r; 1103b: “She struck the fat hen very fatly [heavily?] [S: strongly]”). Sometimes a morphological element replicates itself, as a diminutive ending does in 434b: “eguales ¬ bien blancos vn poco apartadillos” (S:29v: “[teeth] even and quite white, a little separated”); “eguales ¬ blanquillos / poquillo apartadillos” (G:15v). A sequence of letters, having no semantic content, may come into play. In S, 1085c reads “quesuelos friscos” (64v: “fresh little cheeses”), but in G we find “fresuelos fritos” (53v: possibly “fried blood sausages”).20

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Rhyme can create special repetitive effects. In S:82v;1370, the rhyme in -ava is established in the final three lines of the stanza (the first line has -ara). This sequence is so powerful that it causes the scribe to add what is in effect an extra -ava to the final word of the stanza, yielding favaua for fava. But the effect does not stop there; it carries over to the first word of the following stanza: “Estaua en mesa pobre buen gesto E buena cara” (S:82v;1371a: “There was on a poor table a good cheer and friendly face”). The imperfect tense creates a narrative that varies from the more sententious present found in GT: “esta [T:18v: Estan] en mesa pobre / buen gesto ¬ buena cara /” (G:75v;1371a: “On a poor table there are . . .”). Where there is only one witness, editors have substituted the rhetorical figura etymologica for the scribal figure of repetitio. Since San (p. 122), editors have emended “por tu culpa byviras culpa penada” (S:46r;786d: “For your fault you will live a tormented fault”) to “por tu culpa bivirás vida [life] penada” (Gyb). Repetitio, that most common figure of the handmade text, is the one editors set out most relentlessly to eliminate. Though most editors use S as their base text, they accept the reading of GT for 1227b: “de diuersas naturas /¬ de fermosas colores” (I use T:8v: “of diverse kinds and of beautiful colors”). Only Gyb, in his “bedierista” edition of S, chooses “de diuerssas maneras / de diuerssas collores” (S:73v: “of diverse kinds, of diverse colors”). In the following example, all three manuscripts repeat tenemos in rhyme position in two lines of a single stanza (1447b,d): “miedo vano tenemos,” “vano miedo tenemos” (S:87r); “miedo vano tenemos,” “vano temor tenemos” (T:23v = G:68v; variations on “we are afraid for nothing”). Cor emends “tenemos” (“we have”) in 1447b to “auemos” (same meaning) on metrical grounds; Chi feels that an etymological figure on temor in GT justifies emending the second “tenemos” to “tememos” (“we fear vain fear”). In this case, the aesthetically justified figura etymologica allows the editor to substitute one repetitio for another. Leveling moves sporadically through the manuscript text as it is copied and, of course, is itself an important cause of variance. Without the intervention of other, opposing forces, we could imagine the Borgesian eventuality of a text in which every word was the same word. This does not happen, of course, but it is a force that had tremendous impact on the medieval reading experience. The critical text, equating, in general, lexical variety with authorial creativity, rigorously excludes the results of the leveling process. In this view, leveling deaestheticizes the text. The fact remains, however, that the aesthetic object “received” by medieval readers in manuscript form was, in general, far less lexically rich than the critical texts we reconstruct or the best manuscripts we patch with variants from other traditions in order to compensate for the leveling process. The scribes’ “attraction” to, and occasional avoidance of, repetition estab-

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lishes an essential rhythm of the medieval text, a degree of frequency of repeated sounds, which is lost to us forever in the critically edited text. These two phenomena, evolutionary change across generations or families of manuscripts and the leveling, especially at the lexical level, that is introduced by the act of copying one manuscript to another, are chosen not because they are of the same order, but because they illustrate two opposing forces at work in the process of scribal productivity. Leveling, as I have already suggested, is in fact one of the mechanisms of differentiation. The process of differentiation, under the rubric of “scribal error” or “scribal variants,” is the one which has most preoccupied editors of medieval texts. In place of the traditional classifications of scribal error, I would like to begin to work out a set of categories of variance that would allow us to examine the processes by which one medieval manuscript became another. The aim is to find a way of talking about scribal activity without recourse to negative or trivializing terminology, and free from the idea that we identify these categories solely in the service of another goal: unveiling the authorial text. We must seek to understand the scribal process in itself and to see it as productive of what medieval scripta were, not as evidence of what authorial texts were not. The reader will readily observe that in this discussion I reinvoke traditional philological thinking. Generally this involves comparing the readings of two or three scripta and viewing one reading as proceeding from another. T’s reading “condes” probably proceeds at some point in the tradition from the reading “couardes” represented in S (see below). But the value I assign to this precedence is merely illustrative, not hierarchical or paternal. As I have said, much of the technology of producing critical editions can be of great heuristic value in teaching us about the interactions of medieval scripta. If any of the surviving scripta of the Libro were direct copies of another surviving copy, we could make our discussion even more concrete. In traditions in which such direct copies do survive, we will be able to study scribal productivity in greater and clearer detail. I would place the codex descriptus in a pivotal rather than a peripheral position, then. I propose that we view the scribal process as a set of intersecting registers. These registers represent various possibilities, openings, opportunities for change in the act of copying one scriptum from another. I use the term “register” in part in homage to Zumthor, but chiefly because I see these processes not as systems that we can define, but as places in which we can glimpse and start to talk about scribal productivity. They are places in which a complex and apparently random interaction occasionally “registers,” leaves a trace we can try to articulate. I suggest, as a starting point, five basic registers of scribal activity. Two relate to the mechanics of the scribal process: the “navigational” register

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and the “orthographic” register. Two others relate to the system conveyed by the written medium: human language. These are the “linguistic” register and the register of “discourse.” Central to this second group is the intervention of a human individual in the copying process, an individual whose own linguistic traits become caught up in the scribal process at the moment it becomes language. A fifth register involves this human individual as he reacts with the other registers at an “ideological” level, at the level of the “understood things” that he brings to the copying process. The Navigational Register In discussing the first register, “navigational errors,” I accept the term “error” in its etymological sense. The scribe loses his way in the ocular, oral, memorial, physical task of transferring text from one leaf to another. This register involves the scribe in finding his way physically from the written text of his exemplar to the unwritten area of the manuscript he is creating, and back to the place where he left off (see Vinaver). These are the familiar processes of homoeoteleuton (and its relatives), recopying lines occupying the same position in the wrong stanza (ScribeT:29r;1516 and 1517), skipping stanzas. In S:87r;1446a, for example, the scribe recopies the first word of the preceding stanza (1445): andauan. G and T read catan (G:68r;T23v). The change in S sets off a chain reaction obliging ScribeS to modify the verbs in the next line from present to imperfect tense in order to preserve the sequence of tenses. These phenomena remain the most discussed in studies of the scribal process and I will say no more about them here. The Orthographic Register The second register, the “orthographic register,” involves the writing system itself, based, in medieval Europe, on the Roman alphabet. The structure of the alphabetical system is a breeding ground for variance: a limited number of individual symbols, a larger set of basic combinations (consonant-vowel; consonant-vowel-consonant; verb, noun or adjective endings; grammatical suffixes and prefixes), an overlay of not-quite standardized abbreviations representing all these combinations, and finally a vast number of possible combinations involving all three sets (individual symbols, their common combinations, abbreviations). This writing system is the source of many navigational errors, of course, but it can be the source of other changes as well. Letters, and therefore words, look alike, either in their general outlines (high-low-high) or in their particulars (homographous or near-homographous words). In addition, the scribe has in mind his own ready set of words to invest in any given alphabetic

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sequence, as we see below. Within the alphabetic system particular hands may lend themselves to specific types of variance. The minims of the Gothic hand are notorious. The minims of the writing system come into play in the following example: “deSiendo sus bramuras /& muchas amenasas” (S:64v;1091b); “deSiendo sus brauuras / con muchas amenaSas /” (G:54r: “saying its boasts and many threats”; both cases). A similar number of minims and the overall similarity of the words combine to produce the variance bramuras/brauuras. As it happens, both words have essentially the same meaning. The similarity of c and t gives rise to a phrase in T that may have some affective sense, but has little grammatical sense. S:1375c reads “buen talente” (82v: “good will”; ≅G). T:19r reads “buen calente.” Although “calente” is possibly a variant of “caliente” (“warm”; Corominas and Pascual, s.v. “caliente”), it is not a noun. Because it suggests warmth, it may have been drawn into the circle of meaning around food and warm hospitality found in these stanzas portraying the rich table set by the city mouse. These two examples show, incidentally, how variance often hovers around sense, not the crisp sense we demand of a verbal icon, but a looser, affective sense in which buen calente can serve in place of buen talente or in which either bramuras or bravuras will do. The Linguistic Register Language is carried by the written sign, but the system of language is distinct from the system of writing. The complexity of language makes it difficult to separate the various ways in which it may affect the copying of the handwritten text. I set up two broad registers, subject to further refinement. The first is the more difficult to nail down. I call it the “linguistic,” or simply “verbal,” register. At one level we might see this simply as the interaction of the “deep structures” of the languages involved in the copying process: text language/scribe’s language (or, for vernacular texts, text dialect/scribe’s dialect). Like the deep structures analyzed by linguists, the effects of change at this register rarely continue beyond a sentence or two, or a poetic stanza. That is, they occur at the level of linguistic rules, not at the level of discourse or narration. Verbal variance occurs without reference to the narrative or other discourse it embodies, as seen in S:27r;393c: “al que quieres matar” versus G:11v: “ala que matar quieres” (“the man/woman you wish to kill”). I would situate in this register certain changes due to dialect, reflecting the pronunciation of certain words or grammatical endings. Line 1362b reads “defienden la flaquesa” (“protect, justify the weakness”) in G:75r, “de fiende la franquesa” (“freedom”) in T:17v. S (82r) helps to explain the variance as caused by Leonese dialectal pronunciations: “defienden la

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fraqueSa” (“weakness”). Perhaps the manuscript from which ScribeT was copying already had the Leonese form, to which he simply added an n (which he does not abbreviate). The practice of writing que as q with a horizontal abbreviation stroke above it, even in the interior of words, may also be at work here. ScribeT may have taken a single long stroke to govern both the a and the q, producing the reading “franquesa.”21 The Register of Discourse The fourth category, the register of discourse, involves those changes which come about through the intersection of the discourse of the text of the exemplar and other discourses the scribe may bring to bear upon it or perceive within it. A simple example is that of proverbs. In this example, the scribe’s own knowledge of a proverb contained in the text takes over from the discourse of the text, and he inserts a nonrhyming synonym (the way the scribe learned it?) in rhyme position. S:67r;1126d conforms to the rhyme of the stanza in -aya: “quien tal fizo tal aya” (“Who did such a thing should receive the same punishment”). In G:57r, the scribe’s prior knowledge of a distinct version of the proverb takes over: “quien tal fiso tal pada” (“Who did such a thing should suffer the same”). The register of discourse is an extremely productive, powerful, and interesting one. I explore now a case in which not just language but the states of mind invoked by that language have striking effects on the scribe’s production of a scriptum. “DEVOUT ERRORS”

In Chapter 3, I examined the meditative function of portions of the Libro, arguing that readers would have viewed these sections as opportunities for meditation upon traditional themes: Christ’s Passion, the glories of the Virgin, death. Striking evidence of the meditative function of the religious lyrics found in the Libro comes from the scribes who copied these verses. Their work seems frequently to have been affected by their own active involvement in the recitation of the prayers/lyrics they were copying. This phenomenon most often takes the form of adding extra elements to the name of the saint or the divinity invoked (usually the Virgin) in these poems. It is as if the scribe is momentarily lifted out of the act of copying by his own involvement in the act of prayer implicit in the text. To put it another way, he or she is “attracted” from copying to prayer.22 In editing an anonymous fourteenth-century gozo of Mary, Artigas (371) notes that several of the stanzas fall into standard cuaderna vía forms if we omit certain invocations. He suggests emending “El tu primero gozo, señora, fue de muy gran alegria” (“Your first joy, Lady,

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was of great happiness”) to read “El tu primero gozo fue de muy gran alegria.” Confirmation of Artigas’s hunch comes from a previously unnoticed copy of a fragment of this gozo in a Paris manuscript (BNP n. acq. lat. 1300, 9v). Here the invocatory epithets are in fact absent: “El tu primero goco [sic] fue de grant alegria.” A similar unmetrical insertion appears in stanza 16 of the gozo published by Artigas: “por este gozo te ruego, señora, ¬ por el tu gran poder” (“For this joy I pray to you, Lady, and for your great power”). The Paris manuscript bears the same line, without the direct invocation of the Virgin: “ruego te por este goco [sic] e por el tu grant poder.” This evidence strongly suggests that the scribe copying Artigas’s gozo (or one of this scribe’s predecessors) was sidetracked into prayer itself as he was copying, and that the personal, devotional aspect of the text took precedence in the moment of copying over metrical and generic considerations, as well as over the mechanical act of copying. Morreale notes a variety of similar substitutions or additions in the manuscripts of the Libro, calling them “devout errors.” She attributes these errors to the fact that the scribes “are carried away by a generic familiarity with religious language” (“GozosI” 230). But we should ask why this particular language behaves so much more consistently in its effect on the text than do other discourses: legal or liturgical, for example. There is more than a “generic familiarity” at work here. The language is, in fact, an ingrained reflex of a personal and public discourse by which one connects with superior powers. The fact that it is “generic” in no way detracts from its personal, intimate powers. A few examples will illustrate the high degree of variation that occurs around the mention of the names of Jesus, Mary, or God, changes whose effect is to emphasize, generally by lengthening beyond metrical limits, the name of the person invoked. The first gozo begins “OSanta maria” (S:3r;20a), or simply “maria” (G:1v). Editors emend to “O María.” It seems likely that the amplification “OSanta maria” is evidence of ScribeS’s involvement at a personal level in the discourse of prayer. At 38d, ScribeG writes the proper name “jesu cristo” (2v) where ScribeS maintains “el tu fijo” (4r: “your son”). At 1649e, a stanza apparently detached from its original context, ScribeG again invokes “jesu cristo” (85r) at a point where ScribeS (99v) allows the third-person verb form to convey its subject. At 33cde, ScribeS invokes the Virgin again via epithet: “quieras me oyr muy digna | que de tus gozos ayna | escriua yo prosa digna” (4r: “Please hear me, Worthy One, that I may write worthy verse about your joys quickly”). Compare the rather different (and garbled) text at G:2r;33bc: “querer me he de tus gosos ayna | escriua yo prosa dina por te seruir.” The scribes’ involvement at a personal, devout level with the prayers they copied must have been a common component of the medi-

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eval handmade text. The first example of written Spanish, as we saw in Chapter 1, shows a glossator involved in a similar process. We completely miss this common, human way of experiencing our medieval texts if our sole pursuit is the authorial text, and if we give unquestioned priority to metrical or other formal criteria in emending our texts. LATIN IN THE LIBRO

The chief vehicle of religious discourse in the Middle Ages was, of course, Latin. The intersection of Latin discourse with that of the vernacular allows us to make some interesting observations about how not only medieval scribes, but also modern editors, have dealt with this intersection. Latin appears in the Libro in four places: (1) in the sermon prologue; (2) in the so-called “parody of the canonical hours” (374–87); (3) in the hymns sung to Don Amor by his clerkly followers (1236–41); and (4) in the lyric glosa on the Ave Maria prayer (1661–67). The first and fourth instances appear in S alone, the second is complete in S and G and fragmentary in T, and the third is found in all three manuscripts. The practice of nearly all editors in presenting the Latin citations within the Libro has been to introduce yet another discourse into the text: that of standardized, or at least sanitized (and even classicized), Latin versions of the biblical verses, hymns, and liturgical elements quoted. Jos74 (and Jos90) adds an a to form the classical diphthong ae in “tu[a]e” (384d) and “L[a]etatus” (385b), despite the fact that the a was rarely written in medieval Latin texts, and was certainly never written by scribes of the Libro. Cor and Ble83 follow the same procedure; Chi, Gyb, and Ble92 do not.23 But this is just the tip of the iceberg. At some level all editors exempt Latin discourse from whatever textual-critical process they apply to the restoration of the vernacular portions of Juan Ruiz’s Libro. This exemption causes us to miss several significant features of Latin discourse as applied by scribes (and possibly by Juan Ruiz). Critics have had great fun devising obscene innuendos behind the Latin phrases quoted in Juan Ruiz’s famous parody of the canonical hours (Green 1:53–60; Zahareas, Art 93–99). Whatever we may decide Juan Ruiz’s intentions were, it is obvious, when we turn from the standardized Latin versions found in the editions to the manuscripts themselves, that the readers of these manuscripts, granting for the moment that they understood Latin, would have had some difficulty understanding the Latin as written by the scribes. And if they could not understand the Latin, how profound could their understanding of the innuendo have been? The scribes, most of them surely familiar with at least some of these phrases from the canonical hours at some level, do not seem to have understood the Latin they copied very well. The simple phrase “ecce

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quam bonum” (374c: “Behold how good”; Ps. 132:1) is rendered differently in the manuscripts: S:26r: “ecce qu a n bonum”; G:10r: “eçe quam bono”; T:1v: “eçe quod [?] bonum” (in this section, italics represent expanded abbreviations).24 G gives us the greatest doubts about the impact of this parody on scribes and readers: G:11r;385c: “ylit enit acenderun” (cf. S:26v: “illyc enim asçenderunt”; “for thither did the tribes go up”; Ps. 121:4). At times, ScribeG seems to be employing an oral memory of the Latin texts in their Iberian pronunciation rather than following a written text: “cum mis quiuderun paçen” (G:10r;374b). Compare S: “cum his qu i oderunt paçem” (26r: “with them that hated peace”; Ps. 119:7). Or compare G: “in verbun tuvn” (10v:381c) with S:26v: “In verbum tuum” (“In thy word”; Ps. 118:81).25 ScribeT is more involved with the Latin text at the written level. He gives us several examples of common Iberian spellings of Latin: “hoderunt” (T:lv;374b) for “oderunt” (“[they] hated”; Ps. 119:7); “ud avdiad” (T:lv;375d) for “ut audiat” (“that he may hear”; traced by editors to Gregory’s hymn “Primo dierum omnium”). But S, surprisingly, contains the biggest blooper. The celebrated line from our editions (381d), “Factus sum sicut uter” (“I am become like a bottle [wineskin]”; Ps. 118:83), has suggested to scholars various forms of tumescence or repletion on the Archpriest’s part (for example, Green 1:58). ScribeS actually writes “feo sant sant vter” (26v: possibly “an ugly saint Saint Uter”?).26 Here the reading is so preposterous (especially if we believe that the manuscript was copied by the young churchman Paradinas) that we must wonder if this might be an attempt to clean up the obscene implications of the line by rendering it unintelligible. Or might “Saint Uter” have additional erotic implications? Was it an in-joke among the residents of San Bartolomé? In general the differences I have observed hold in the other Latin passage (1236–41) for which we have multiple witnesses. G and T present slightly more corrupt texts, though S is not without an occasional stumble: “magne nobiscum” (74r;1241d; G:66r: “mane nobiscun”; “stay with us”). Here we glimpse the would-be-learned hypercorrection common in S: the Spanish tendency to collapse gn to n (see dina for digna above) is “corrected” inappropriately. It is clear that if we wished to apply the Lachmann method to reconstructing the Latin texts imbedded in these portions of the Libro, we would be in trouble. Similarly, we would have great difficulty in determining the “best manuscript.” Many factors apply to these passages that cause them to behave in a way distinct from vernacular passages: in G, oral memory of the oft-recited canonical hours (here coupled, it seems, with a profound ignorance of their meaning); in T, a greater familiarity with Latin as

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it was commonly written in medieval Iberia; in S, a more formal knowledge of pan-European spelling standards, but the sort of knowledge that can become dangerous, leading to senseless hypercorrections. The various scribal discourses of Latin frustrate attempts to reduce the Latin passages to a single reading. The solution generally applied thus far, that of standardizing, for the most part silently, the Latin of the manuscripts, using sources or orthographical rules exterior to them, simply obliterates these differences. In the process it disguises the fact that, however modern scholars may understand this parody, many medieval scribes and readers may not have understood major portions of it at all. The practice of standardizing Latin passages even prevents us from asking important questions about the authorial text. Is it possible that Juan Ruiz was using these levels of Latinity (rote, oral mimicry versus literate) as part of his parody? Is the small Latin of the amorous cleric, in fact, one of the things he is spoofing? These intriguing questions about Juan Ruiz and his text have not been asked before, because scholars have depended for their interpretations on the sanitized Latin texts found in editions. It is worthwhile to explore further the different levels of Latin discourse that appear in the text. The sermon prologue is found only in S. It is clear that the quality of Latin in the prologue is distinct from that found in the parody of the canonical hours or the hymns to Don Amor, even in S. That is, although the Latin in the verse parts of S is already more “literate” than that found in GT, the Latin of the prologue is a cut above that found in the rest of S. The majority of the quotations in the prologue are much longer than those found in the verse sections of the Libro; yet we can understand all of them readily. Nowhere is the sense of a citation completely botched. But more than this, the orthography is closer to “standard” medieval Latin spelling than that found in the rest of S. Certain double consonants that are often reduced to one in Iberian texts are maintained in the prologue: “Intellectum” (passim). The sequence ct is also preserved in intellectum, although both it and the double l are lost in the canonical hours passage; compare “In notibus estolite” (S:26r;374b: “in noctibus extollite”, “in the nights lift up”; Ps. 133:2). To be sure, Iberian spellings do appear in the prologue (1v): “equs” (“horse”), “Iusta” (for juxta, “according to”), “Instruan” (“I instruct”). But these are far fewer here than in the other sections of the text where Latin appears. If I am correct about the differences in levels of Latin, what are the implications for our understanding of the way the Libro was produced? If we ascribe these differences to the author himself, we have evidence that, although he wished to preserve the good Latinity of the prologue, in which the authorial voice speaks, he may well have wished to satirize the Latin of amorous clerics and nuns. The differences would become a part of the signifying goals of the author. If, however, we see them as the

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intersection of various levels of Latin discourse in the copying process, we may have to posit that ScribeS copied the prologue from a source different from that from which he copied the rest of the manuscript. This source might be a different copy of the Libro, or another text entirely (perhaps written by someone other than Juan Ruiz), which ScribeS incorporated into the Libro. With this second possibility we come rather close to the scenario suggested by Cor : a “professor” at Salamanca (Diego de Anaya?) was responsible for the rubrics unique to S. According to Cor these rubrics employ more learned forms of Castilian than those found in the rest of the text (see above). Corominas suggests that the scribe Paradinas copied his teacher’s rubrics more meticulously than he did the rest of the text. He attributes these differences, then, to a varying attitude on the part of the scribe toward the texts he was copying. Although this remains possible, it is a difficult case to make. Whether or not this last part of Cor’s scenario is correct, the more learned Latin writing of the prologue and the more learned Castilian of the rubrics suggest that the prologue and the rubrics may have been added at the same time (and perhaps by the same author). If they were added at the same time, we have the kernel of an argument that the prologue was not by Juan Ruiz. NARRATION

In narrative texts, such as most of the cuaderna vía passages of the Libro, the narrative itself is one of the discourses involved in the copying process. The narrative register is obviously an extremely complex one. In the specific case of the Libro, most of the examples involving narrative discourse are negative ones: the scribes’ activity disrupts the narrative, renders it less coherent. Indeed, it seems that the scribes’ awareness of narrative discourse beyond the range of a few lines at most would be exceptional. They were too focused on the mechanical act of writing itself. This is yet another way in which scribal productivity of the medieval scriptum works in opposition to the practice of critical editing, which always seeks to restore narrative coherence. What we lose in this is the not-insignificant fact that for medieval readers “reading for plot” must have been a far more interactive proposition than we can imagine. They were constantly and directly involved, to the extent that they, too, wanted a coherent narrative, in producing the narrative as they read. Other narrations, other texts, were involved in the Libro as well, of course. The Libro is a vast intertextual web, as Lecoy and others have shown, incorporating Castilian translations of the Latin Pamphilus, of Aesopic fable (chiefly in the version of Walter the Englishman), of learned exempla and fabliaux, of some version of the Ovidian art of love, together

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with popular proverbs, a vision of the soul and body at death, and many other traditions. Gyb (50–51) is no doubt correct in his belief that many readers of the Libro would have recognized sources such as the Pamphilus and appreciated the author’s reworking of them. It is more difficult to determine whether such sources had impact on the scribes as they copied. There are clear cases of such impact, as we see in Chapter 6, in the reception of the Libro itself. As part of the tradition of the Conde Lucanor, two scribes have amplified two of Don Juan Manuel’s exempla with description and dialogue from the same stories as told in the Libro. The Ideological Register The final principle register is at once the most interesting for modern scholars and the most elusive: the ideological register. By this I mean not just a formal political, philosophical, or religious ideology that a scribe may impose upon the text wherever he believes the text strays from it or might be brought into closer conformity with it, but also vaguer systems of personal values held by the scribe. ScribeS, perhaps Paradinas himself, seems to hold “erudition” as a value, and this value causes him to overuse learned or pseudo-learned words and to hypercorrect. Certainly I would include “aesthetics” as one of the ideologies brought to bear by scribes as they copy texts. They may attempt to improve upon the texts they receive, choosing lexical items, syntaxes, rhythmic or metric patterns that conform to their own aesthetic standards or that, perhaps (as happens with modern editors), conform to what the scribe thought the author’s aesthetic standards had been. But in most cases it is far more difficult to pick out scribal ideologies. In the case of ScribeG we may feel that a certain mild prudery is being exercised wherever the text becomes too hot for a “Castilian monk of the fourteenth century” to handle. In 432d, S describes the ideal woman as “ancheta de caderas” (29v: “full in the hips”), whereas G has “angosta de cabellos” (15v: “narrow [tight?] in the hair”?), probably a nonsense orthographical variance, which may or may not disguise some prudery on ScribeG’s part (but see Ble92 432d and corresponding notes). In 528cd, S reads: “el vino fizo alot con sus fijas boluer | en verguença del mundo” (34v: “Wine made Lot and his daughters fall into shame before the world”). In G:22r;528cd, Lot’s incest with his daughters is changed to a more general shame that causes Lot and his descendants to fall into shame: “el vino fizo alot ¬ asus fiios boluer | en verguença del mundo” (“Wine made Lot and his sons [descendants?]”). We may wonder if this represents some attempt to cover up some of the more unseemly behavior of Old Testament figures, or if it is simply evidence of ScribeG’s lack of attention to (ignorance of?) this particular Bible tale.27

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Overall, however, the case for viewing ScribeG as a prude is rather weak. What seems to be a clear case of the scribe’s imposing his own standards on the text may, in fact, be the result of navigational errors or orthographical variance. A slightly clearer ideological pattern emerges in ScribeT. Probably also a religious, ScribeT appears to have some bee in his bonnet about the nobility. As the cat chases the city mouse and his guest, the country mouse, the latter is described in S:82v;1377d: “estouo alo escuro / ala pared arrimado” (“He was in the dark up against the wall”; ≅ G). T:19r reads: “estodo [?] el escudero ala pared ala pared arrymado” (“The squire was up against the wall against the wall*”). This reading makes no sense unless the country mouse has suddenly become a country squire. Obviously the orthographic register is at the heart of this variance, but what is interesting is the particular path this change takes. Its effect, if not its origin, is found in the ideological register. In another case, a reference to the nobility is clearly out of place. At 1294a (S:77v/G:71r) we have “tres labradores” (“three laborers”), but ScribeT (13r) writes “tres caualleros” (“three knights”). Finally, at 1450c, S:87v reads: “los couardes fuyendo / mueren deSiendo foyd” (“The cowards fleeing die crying ‘run’ ”; ≅G). T:24r reads: “los condes fuyendo mueren E diSen foyd” (“The counts fleeing die and say ‘run’ ”). This is as clear an example as I think we can find of how scribal ideologies shape texts at the most subtle level. The scribe may have a mindset that causes him to perceive the word condes for couardes (or to make an association that is orthographical/phonological/ideological in nature, deriving perhaps from a scriptum in which ar was abbreviated: cou˜des). There is no systematic program involved. It is simply one path along which variance may travel when, as it seems they are in the case of ScribeT, conditions are propitious.

Other Registers These are the five most active registers in which variance takes place during scribal copying. But the registers that can affect the final product of the scribe’s effort are far more numerous. In poetic texts, rhyme and metrics are another register in which variance can occur. We might call this the “generic” or “formal” register. The strength of its effects will vary according to the rigidity of generic strictures in play and the degree of the scribe’s awareness of them at a given moment of copying. Scribal puzzlement at the generic level may be glimpsed in the varying ways in which the lyric pieces of the Libro are laid out on the manuscript page by ScribeS and ScribeG. This engages yet another register, what we might call the “production” or “design” register, the factors that come into play in placing the text physically on the manuscript page: the layout of lyrics, the

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separation of stanzas (and all the problems that the lack of this causes in G), the leaving of space for initials and their rubrication, the scribe’s attempt to conform to a particular style sheet, signs used to guide binders, and running titles. Closely linked to the production register are two others. The first is the causa finalis of the manuscript’s production. Is it to be a presentation copy for a noble patron? A student’s copy for private use? Part of a monastery library? The second register linked to production is the scribe’s own causa suscepta operis. Are his motives for writing professional or pecuniary? Or is divine forgiveness, as the scribes often assert in their explicits, also a motivating factor? Related to the second register is one that involves the scribe’s level of respect for the exemplar from which he is copying. If it is high, he or she may deviate little from the copy text; if it is low, all the other registers may come increasingly into play. Finally, there is the physical register. This register includes all those factors of the specific physical media on which and with which the scribe is copying which may have an effect on the shape of the text: the tears or thin places around which he detours, the ease and speed of writing on paper versus parchment, whether the scribe is writing on the skin side or the hair side, the size of the page, the type of quill and its condition. We might include here problems caused when scribes try to transfer text from a small-format exemplar to a larger copy or vice versa, and the related problems of making text fill out a line or a given number of folios of a given size. Simply as a means of mentioning them in this context, I would also create an “accidental” physical register involving factors outside the scribe’s control that eventually come to shape the text he has copied. I am referring to accidents of time such as missing folios, especially at the beginnings and ends of texts or gatherings, which occur through normal usage. Deliberate mutilation may also occur. Such mutilation may have happened in the early history of the text of the Libro when the lines recounting Endrina’s “date-rape” by Melón appear to have been lost (torn?) from a manuscript. As happened with the Libro, the effects of such external physical causes are soon incorporated, often seamlessly, into the scribal text. I have left to the end a final register whose effect on the shape of the handmade text is as profound as it is elusive: the oral/memorial register. By this register I understand those features of spoken language and human memory which have an effect on the copying process. We can divide this register into two subregisters. I call the first the “oral/memorial substratum.” This involves the scribe’s own orality and memory as he copies the text. The scribe reads, perhaps out loud, the words from his exemplar. He remembers them as speech, not as a string of written signs.

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He may say them to himself as he writes the words on the page. This much-discussed feature of the scribal process has its effect at nearly every level, but is obviously most felt in the linguistic register. The scribe may read one thing out loud, but remember another thing when he copies, depending on his own dialect or level of attention or the other discourses going on in his head. At the most basic level, the oral substratum simply results in the familiar pronunciation spellings. The second subregister is the “oral/memorial overlay.” This overlay is especially important in the transmission of medieval lyric. This register comes into play when the scribe possesses, in addition to (or in place of) the written text of the exemplar, a personal knowledge, a memory, of the specific text he is copying. The mouvance of the oral text may dominate the variance of the written text and cause the scribe to substitute his remembered version for the written one. This may also occur when the scribe remembers the sense of a passage, but not the specific words. This may be what happens in 507c. ScribeG remembers the general sense of the passage he is copying from a prior reading or audition, but he ignores the written text of the exemplar, producing a passage that has the sense but not the text or rhyme of the exemplar (-uero): “quando le desuellan el cuero” (S:33r: “when they flay his hide”); “quando le tiran el pelleJo”(G:20v: “when they pull off his skin”). Though the sense is similar, G ’s version reduces the consonantal rhyme of the stanza in -uero to the assonance e-o. It is difficult to see how this variance might have occurred without the scribe having some prior knowledge of what was coming next, his temporary involvement in the sense of the passage, not in the written text. We cannot rule out, however, that this example of oral/ memorial overlay is, in fact, oral substratum. That is, the scribe’s “prior knowledge” of the passage may be only milliseconds old, dating from his reading of the passage before he copies it.28 Although we may distinguish these two subsets of the oral/memorial register in theory, it is difficult to separate them in practice.

The Play of the Registers It should be obvious by now that it is nearly impossible to find a “pure” example of any of the registers, a case in which one and only one of them is in play at a given time. The workings are complex, and the importance of each register involved in a given variance and the sequence of its involvement is by no means a simple matter to sort out. We may see some of the complexities in 605c, where Don Melón begs Doña Venus to heal his love wound. S:37v reads, “conortad me esta llaga / con juegos ¬ folgura” (“Soothe this wound with games and pleasure”); G:27v reads:

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“E conortat la llaga con vngente sy folgura” (“And soothe the wound with unguents and pleasure”). Is it the orthographical register or the oral substratum that comes into play here, given the similarities in “juegos” and “ung[u]entes”? Perhaps there is a metathesis g/ue for ue/g at the heart of this change (Ble92 concocts “juguetes”). But then the level of discourse enters in, specifically the narrational. Perhaps “conortat la llaga con” removes the scribe temporarily from the metaphorical realm of love madness to the more prosaic realm of physical wounds. Unguentes seems to him at this moment the proper choice (considering the phonetic or orthographic substance of the text) to continue this microsection of medical discourse. A similar but more significant case appears in T. The narration is that of the triumphal procession of Don Carnal (Lord Carnival) and Don Amor (Lord Love) as they enter the city following Lent. Among their accoutrements are the following: “ssogas para las vacas / muchos pessos & pessas | taJones & garavatos / grandes tablas & mesas | para las triperas / gamellas & artesas | las alanas paridas / enlas cadenas presas” (S:73r;1221: “Ropes for cows, many scales and weights, cutting boards and hooks, big tables and carving blocks; for his tripe sellers tubs and troughs; in chains the mastiffs who had already given birth”). At 1221d, “las alanas paridas” is the version of S and G. In T:8v, however, we find “las almas perdidas enlas cadenas presas” (“the lost souls held in chains”). At the origin of this variance is the orthographical register: the written similarities of alanas paridas and almas perdidas. The result of this variance at the orthographical register, however, is a change in the register of discourse, or even ideology. The integumental veil is suddenly rent. We perceive beneath the soulless beasts caught in the chains of the flesh and of love, the lost human souls whose bestiality they represent.29 This is the same scribe who is preparing to copy the Visión de Filoberto in a few folios. It is difficult not to see the ideological register at work here, even at an unconscious level. For the scribe and his readers, the allegorical reading of this passage may have been present in a way modern readers can begin to appreciate only when slips of this nature occur. Would medieval readers have been brought up short by this sudden shift in the level of discourse? Or would it have simply been a confirmation of the reading they had engaged in all along? Would they have sensed a variant—no, an error—at this point and sought to restore a more literal reading? If so, how many medieval readers, without the aid of other manuscript versions, came up with alanas paridas as a logical emendation? We should be aware, then, of two distinct sets of registers in our analysis of how the scribal process produced medieval texts. The first is the register or registers in which scribal variance is generated. The second is the register in which variance comes to rest, its effect on the text as handed

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down to subsequent readers. Obviously, the general flow moves from the navigational, verbal, and orthographical registers to the discursional and ideological registers. To put it in totally unsurprising terms, “errors,” and orthographical and verbal variance cause changes in the sense of the text. This fact has traditionally been used to account for damage done to the reconstructed “authorial” text. What medieval scripta offer us instead is the fascinating ebb and flow of sense and nonsense created by scribal activity, the manifold ways in which new meaning can be generated by something as simple as mistaking alanas for almas. This, not the archetypal “text,” is the crucible in which all textual meaning available to medieval readers was generated. It is in the process of sorting out these registers that medieval readers (including medieval authors) must have spent much of their time. These registers are interesting as individual sources of variance in manuscripts. But I believe we should see them in larger perspective, as processes by which the nature of meaning itself is worked out in manuscript culture. These registers are the pathways through which meaning is created and destroyed. It often happens that what appears to be a scribal investment of sense in a passage at the ideological level on scrutiny turns out to be the result of a purely narrational or orthographical change (escudero/escuro). But does this take away the ideological value of the variant for the medieval person who read it? These levels constantly masquerade as one another, and it is the waxing and waning of meaning as they do that is the very heart of the production of the medieval scriptum. It is natural for us to wish to focus on the instances in which meaning waxes. “Las almas perdidas” is an excrescence of sense upon the text. It holds our attention. It is a variance that may have enhanced medieval readers’ experience of the manuscript text before them. It can certainly enhance our own if we are open to it. But this should not obscure the fact that the instances in which meaning wanes rather than waxes are an equally valid, and no doubt more prevalent, part of the medieval reading experience. These instances enhance our understanding of the authorial text only to the extent that attempting to solve them for meaning causes us to focus in several profitable ways on the language of the time, metrical and prosodic rules, the author’s style and his intention. But the question of what medieval readers did in the face of absent meaning is an important one (if only because some medieval readers were also medieval authors). It is abundantly clear that surprisingly large portions of the individual scripta of the Libro are simply nonsense. The text is full of grammatical errors, gender confusions, words that make no sense in context, affirmative sentences that should be negated. In this connection we may note one final register of scribal activity: the cultural register. This register includes those cultural facts which it seems impossible that a scribe of that time and place would not know. In 1149b, ScribeG and ScribeT are shaky in their

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knowledge of the badges of office of archbishops: “de palio & de blago /& de mitra” (S:68v: “pallium, crosier, and mitre”); “de palyo E de blito E de mitra” (T:4v); “de palo ¬ de blito [blao Cor] ¬ de mintra” (G:58v). The cultural register can cause problems for editors, as in 1215d: “non lo conplaria dario / con todos sus thesoros” (S:72v: “Darius could not buy it with all his wealth”); “non los conprarie darco . . .” (T:8r: “ ‘darco’ could not buy them”); “non los conprarie duero . . .” (G:64r: “Duero [the river?] could not buy them . . .”). Jos90 (n. 1215d) comments: “A hyperbole probably inspired by the reading of the Book of Alexander, unless the wealth of Darius had already become proverbial.” We may accept the possibility that the scribes of GT had not read, or could not remember, one of the most popular schoolbooks of the Middle Ages, but we must seriously doubt the “proverbial nature” of Darius’s wealth if two medieval scribes did not understand the reference. Modern concepts of both learned and popular culture are defeated by the realities of the medieval manuscript text. Basic biblical knowledge seems to be absent from the scribes’ minds as they copy, as we saw in the case of Lot and his “sons.” In 1541d, a central component of the medieval worldview is lost on ScribeT. The dead man’s family gathers round him at his death: “ellos lieuan el algo / el alma lyeua satan” (S:93r: “They take his wealth, Satan takes his soul”). ScribeT, who is about to copy the Visión de Filoberto, in which these matters are presented in great detail, has the family carry off both the dead man’s possessions and his soul: “ellos lyeuan el algo / E alma santa” (T:31r: “They carry off his wealth and blessed soul”). These sorts of variance, although they originate for the most part in the orthographical register, suggest that the act of copying interferes with cultural understanding and knowledge. Our expectation is that scribes would have been able to apply this knowledge as they copied, to correct in the act itself readings that defied this knowledge (as a reader of T corrects the line just cited to “E alma el satan”). The alternative is to postulate a vast gap between the cultural knowledge of the author and that of his scribes. Such a gap no doubt existed at times, but it is difficult to believe that it was as wide as these variances suggest.

Conclusion S/Ç This, and not the perfect letter of the critical edition, was the text produced by medieval scribes and read by medieval readers. It was a patchwork of sense, near-sense, and outright nonsense. Orthographic, grammatical, metrical, and cultural expectations were constantly disappointed: five-line stanzas appear, pellejo rhymes with cuero, senbrado modifies simiente (f.) (S:44r;747d). Words, morphemes, sequences of sounds repeat

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themselves more frequently than in everyday spoken language or in our critical editions, giving the manuscript text, for us, a distinctly “flat” tone. Cultural, religious, ethical, even biological givens are no longer givens in the handwritten text. Meaning is up for grabs in a way that readers of modern printed texts and of medieval texts dressed up as modern printed texts will have a hard time tolerating. Modern readers have found ways of dealing with these problems in the various methods used to produce editions. When we pick up a critical edition of a medieval text, we enter a world in which the language is relatively clear, though many of its referents are unfamiliar to us. The medieval critical text is a tool through which we can catch a glimpse of an alien world in the hope of understanding it better. For the medieval reader of medieval texts, the experience was no doubt the opposite. The familiar everyday world and its language were rendered strange, in many cases unrecognizable. How did medieval readers deal with the texts they had? This is, of course, a complex question. Medieval readers’ corrections, like medieval text criticism, is a completely unexplored field of investigation. An in-depth study of the medieval reader’s corrections in T, for example, could tell us a great deal about the choices medieval readers may have made as they worked through this scriptum of the Libro. A quick examination suggests to me that this reader made choices rather different from the ones modern philologists have made.30 We can at least make two broad generalizations about how medieval readers must have confronted their texts. The first can be dealt with fairly easily: there must have been many instances in which the medieval reader found his text to be incomprehensible and skipped on. Because the text is largely incoherent, none of the readers of S or T:1607 on the “dueñas chicas” would have understood the full joke (see Gyb’s reconstruction and explanation in n. 1607cd). They probably would have recognized that a joke was being made, and its general topic: the relative merits of large and small women. But it seems likely that few of them would have traveled beyond this. Of necessity, medieval reading must have been a bumpier, more fragmentary experience than our critical editions can convey. The discontinuous ethical reading, the reading for exempla, proverbs, and quotable quotes (Badel 141–42, 499–501), merely echoes what must have been a discontinuous reading at the level of the letter on the manuscript leaf. There must have been many places in the Libro that readers skipped over, left out. Given the texts at their disposal, there seems to be little possibility that they interpreted Juan Ruiz’s text as a “unity,” at least as we understand the term. The internal references, symbol systems, intertextualities, motifs, thematic echoes and inversions, the moves we almost instinctively resort to as we try to understand an authorially pro-

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duced literary text, are continually corrupted by the means of production of the medieval text. Even such basic necessities as knowing which character is speaking at a given moment or which noun is the object and which the subject of a verb cannot be taken for granted. The meaning of the medieval letter is often underdetermined, and at many turns completely undetermined. Medieval readers could not have read “the whole book” even if they had wished to do so. This simple fact of medieval literary life deprives most modern theoretical approaches of their leverage on medieval scripta. One cannot even find aporia without positing a text in dialogue with itself in an intentional way. Contradiction, subversion, can occur only where there is an authoritative structure to undermine. The facts of medieval scripta and the scribal process itself permit us to see how much the modern and postmodern literary-theoretical apparatus is based on the assumption that all words in the text are somehow “intended” to be there, that texts (even the “text” of Plato!) are free from capricious or random error, that they are somehow “authentic.” The medieval scriptum is constructed by forces that we can name but whose sources and results we cannot predict. The second generalization we can make is that, because of this essential indeterminacy, the medieval reader had to rely heavily on systems outside the letter of the text as a way of investing it with meaning. Most of these systems coincide with the scribal registers themselves. That is, the reader’s own knowledge of a grammatical system would allow him to determine meaning or several possible meanings in those cases in which scribal activity had created a nonsense variance in this register. Reference to the grammatical and orthographical system, the knowledge that scribes often forget the abbreviation stroke that pluralizes verbs, for example, would allow one to solve certain puzzles. We cannot know, however, how often medieval readers mentally corrected their texts as they read, in what places they chose to do so, in what places not.31 The millions of written corrections made by medieval correctors and readers may give us some clues. The narrower survey of readers’ marks should be part of a broader survey of medieval correction by readers, scribes, and official correctors. Once we carry out such work, we will be in a far better position to understand the peculiar texture of sense and error that greeted medieval readers as they worked through their scripta. It does seem clear to me, however, that one system constantly invoked by readers of the medieval text must have been the ethical system. That is, in many passages, a choice of what is right and wrong (not just grammatically, but ethically), of which activities are socially acceptable or advisable, of what works in the real world and what does not, of what is to be praised or blamed, can guide the reader in evoking sense in a given passage. The ethical system, then, is part and parcel of the act of reading the handwrit-

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ten text. It is a part of the constant series of choices, grammatical, orthographical, cultural, narrational, that the medieval reader had to make as he confronted the medieval text. S/Ç stands, then, for the nature of the medieval text in opposition to the modern and postmodern text. If for Barthes the Z expected by French readers for the second S in Sarrasine reflects the name of the castrato Zambinella and is, thus, a hidden “initial of castration” suggesting Sarrasine’s own “wound of deficiency” (S/Z 106–7), then for us S/Ç represents the far greater deficiencies of the hand-produced sign, its status as a broad field of indeterminacy. The idea of “system,” which is fundamental to Barthes’s concept of the text (11, 132, and passim), is constantly cheated by the handmade scriptum, which cannot even support the basic orthographical and grammatical systems that are the unquestioned foundation of the Barthesian text. Although Barthes’s text allows for, indeed embraces, “noise” in the text’s and reader’s communication, Barthes must preserve a certain order within this noise: “This noise is not confused, massive, unnameable; it is a clear noise made up of connections, not superpositions” (132). The noise of the medieval scriptum, in contrast, is quite often confused, massive, and unnameable. In medieval Castilian manuscripts, s [s], ç [ts], and z [dz] were all at times indicated graphically, with little sense of system, by the sigma (Menéndez Pidal, “Título” 141 n. 1; Millares and Asencio 1:194–95 and 227–28; Mackenzie and Burrus 9 and examples listed there). Ç, in turn, can occasionally represent [s] in addition to [ts] (see T:37r;1634d). We take this as a sign for the massive confusion of the medieval scriptum. It was the task of the reader to produce not just the sense of the text, but also its letter. Scribality creates a vacuum of sense in which the reader must choose meaning by creating it himself or herself in ways Barthes’s joyous readers would find imposing, and, probably, joyless. We have begun, then, to deal with the question of how medieval readers coped with the textual world handed them by medieval scribes. In the remaining chapters I trace readings of the Libro in search of concrete answers to this question. I look first at the marginal spaces in SGT in an effort to understand how the text of the Libro was framed by scribes, readers, and correctors through marginal annotations, interlinear corrections, readers’ notas, and other marks.

5 AT THE MARGINS OF THE LIBRO

S

CRIBES ARE OUR first readers of the Libro. It is their extremely complex psychological and mechanical act of transforming one scriptum into another that sets the stage for future readings of the Libro. The act of copying a text inevitably transforms it, but just as importantly, it creates marginal space. These spaces quickly begin to fill with new material that joins the game of determinacy and indeterminacy, surplus and aliquid minus, that drives medieval manuscript culture. Some marginalia we find in SGT are probably the work of correctors or the scribes themselves: folio numbers or letters (though often these are later additions), catchwords or other guides to copyists, binders, and rubricators (for example, the small letters written in the margin next to spaces left for the rubricator in G), corrections to the text, or marks indicating where corrections should be made. Other marginalia are the work of readers: pointing hands, notas, the n with a flourish above it used to signify nota, together with various verbal annotations signaling the subject content of passages, and occasional doodlings (in S only). There are other marks used to single out a particular line or stanza for special note, whose origin (readers or correctors?) and purpose are not entirely clear. The most common are /. and perhaps . or /./ in G, and the circular or nearly circular o [ jo ] (literally, “eye”: “look,” “pay attention”) of T. Many, but not all, of the marks in the margins of the three chief scripta of the Libro have been duly noted by the editors of paleographic editions of the text, Duc and C/N. C/N seem to follow Duc rather closely, whereas Cor adds a few items missed by other editors.1 These marginalia are relatively few when we compare them to the teeming margins of Latin manuscripts (or even to those of English or French vernacular texts).2 There was certainly no glossa ordinaria on the Libro as there was for the Metamorphoses (Coulson). Nor do we find a formal marginal gloss of authorial origin, as we do in the case of Gower’s Confessio amantis.3 With few exceptions, the annotations of SGT are informal, made by readers as they read rather than part of a formal apparatus. For this very reason, they can provide important clues as we work toward a recovery of the reading process employed by early readers of the Libro.

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Marginalia in T T, the most fragmentary of the surviving manuscripts, contains one of our most significant medieval readings. A reader intervenes in the text with corrections more than 100 times. He also gives us the date of his reading: 1463 (37).4 This reader, who uses a darker ink than that found in the text, appears for the first time at 15r;1313, where he changes “dixo me con cuydado yo non alegraria” (“[Love] said to me anxiously, ‘I would not be happy’ ”) to “E con [written over ‘yo non’] poca [above line] alegraria” (“and with little would be happy”). The reader fails, however, to change “dixo” (“he said”) to “dexo” (“he left”) or to delete ar from the verb “alegraria,” though such changes are clearly at the heart of his correction: “dexo me con cuydado e con poca alegria” (“he left me with care and with little happiness”).5 Perhaps we are looking here at another gap between letter and sense in medieval reading. Perhaps this reader deemed the changes he had made to be sufficient for clarifying the sense of the line. The further emendation of dixo to dexo or of alegraria to alegria would have been supplied in the natural reading process. Perhaps he expected his corrections to be enough to enable future readers to understand the line. Most of this corrector’s emendations are of this quality. They seek to clarify passages that are also difficult for us, but offer few solutions that would satisfy editors familiar with the entire manuscript tradition. It seems possible in some instances that this reader had before him a text like S on which he based his corrections, but the fact that he does not coincide with S more frequently suggests he may have made these emendations independently. The same reader may be the one who has placed a circular or semicircular mark that Duc interprets as an ojo beside many stanzas of the text.6 In the fables “The Little Lap Dog” (21r–v;1401–11) and “The Mouse from Guadalajara” (18v–19v;1383–85), he has put a mark beside those stanzas which correspond to the moral of the tale (1407–8, 1383–85). He has also marked several sententious passages in the “imprecación” against death (29v–33v;1520–75). Except for 15r;1316, none of the passages he marks has anything to do with the “story” of the Archpriest of Hita and his loves. Even in this case the reader may have been most interested in the sententious “ca el omne que es solo tyene muchos cuydados” (1316d: “For the man who is alone has many cares”).7 Curiously, the corrector’s work begins only at 15r;1316, the close of the episode recounting Don Amor’s triumphal return along with Don Carnal. According to the old numbering, this is folio 102. The work of this corrector continues to the end of the text of the Libro and through

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the text of the Visión de Filoberto, which follows. When we examine the preserved portions of the text, we find that there are no marks in the first 14 of 48 folios. In contrast, there are an astonishing 34 corrections in the final 29 stanzas (35r–37r) alone. And the general progression is toward an increasingly heavier level of annotation as we near the end of the part of T generally attributed to Juan Ruiz. Because of the fragmentary nature of T, especially at the beginning, we cannot rule out categorically the existence of readers’ marks before this part; but the total absence of such marks in any of the surviving prior folios strongly suggests that marginalia cluster in the final third of Juan Ruiz’s text. This squares with evidence in S and G as well, suggesting that for medieval readers the final 600 stanzas of the Libro (from the episode on Doña Quaresma and Don Carnal on) aroused the greatest interest. It also squares with evidence, strongly suggested by G (see below), that the manuscripts of the Libro may have circulated in unbound cuadernos. In the case of T, we know that the manuscript was unbound at the time of its modern rediscovery in 1727 (Vàrvaro, “Nuovi” 137). T contains two other bits of marginalia. One was written, according to Duc, by the reader of the year 1463. This occurs at 36r;1620, where the reader has added up the “fourteen things” that prevent Don Furón from taking the prize as “best go-between.” iiijo ¶ era mintroso beodo ladron E mesturero iiijo tahur pelador goloso /¬ rrefertero iiijo rreñidor adeuino susio E agurero ij neçio /¬ peresoso tal es mi escudero He was a liar, a drunk, a thief, a gossiper, a cardsharp, a brawler, a glutton, and argumentative, a quarreler, a diviner, filthy, a fortune-teller, stupid and lazy; thus is my squire.

The reader may have made these annotations as a way of checking up on Juan Ruiz’s numerical accuracy, playing the game Juan Ruiz invites all his readers to play. Or perhaps they were made preparatory to the reader’s correction of the last line of the preceding stanza. The stanza read: “Sy non por que torse cosas nunca vy miJor quel.” This is legible if we join “que” and “torse” to make “quetorse”: “If not for fourteen things, I never saw a better [go-between] than him.” The reader has crossed out “torse” and written above the line “xiiijo,” producing a line that reads: “Sy non por que xiiijo cosas” (“If not because fourteen things”). Hardly a stroke of metric or syntactic genius. As I suggested in the preceding chapter, emendations made by readers in the text of a scriptum, especially in rare cases like the present one in which the reading is dated, can be of great

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use in helping us understand medieval textual criticism. For reasons of space, unfortunately, I must postpone full discussion of this reader’s emendations. A final marginal note, the only word written in the margins of T, is hard to date. It may belong to the time of the production of the manuscript rather than of the reader we have been discussing. It says simply, at 24r;1453, “El ladron” (“The thief ”). This occurs at the point where Doña Garoça introduces the exemplum of the thief who pledges his soul to the Devil. “El ladron,” then, is a sort of rubric, marking the beginning and the subject matter of the tale that follows. This is the only such annotation in T; but G and S contain far more fully developed systems of rubrication.

Marginalia in G The margins and interlinear spaces of T are relatively clean. Only one or two readers have left the marks of their passage through the text. By contrast, the margins of G are alive with numerous marks of various periods. Those which concern us at the moment signal specific passages in the text. In the case of G, it is especially difficult to determine whether the marginal annotations belong to readers or to the scribe(s) of the manuscript. Duc, who saw the manuscript (as I have not), attributes some corrections beginning on 73v to “an ancient hand” writing with a blacker ink than that of the copyist (xxvi). Among the marginal annotations (as opposed to textual corrections) that he mentions as written in “a darker ink” are the two mentions of “trotaconventus” (240 n. 1317.1 and 244 n. 1343.1). He also mentions that “la bejez” (“old age”) on 75r is written “with a slightly different ink” (148 n. 1363.3) It is unclear whether he is attributing these to the same “corrector” who writes in a blacker ink. Given the extremely restricted handwriting samples we have of this glossator and the fact that there is considerable scholarly disagreement concerning the number of scribes who participated in the copying of whole sections of the manuscript (Cor 29–30), it would be pointless to attempt either to determine whether these comments belong to a reader or to a scribe of the manuscript, or to distinguish the hands that wrote them. It seems likely that many of these annotations were written by scribes and were thus part of the design of the manuscript. Curiously, the most formal annotations do not begin until 46r;959. The majority are concentrated between 69r and 78v. In Vàrvaro’s reconstruction of the original format of G (“Stato” 550–51), these annotations all appear in fascicles VI, VII, and VIII (cf. Catalán and Petersen 58–59, cuadernos G, H, and I). This concentration of marginalia in three fascicles

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out of eleven suggests that the Libro may have been produced and/or circulated in separate cuadernos. In this scenario a given scribe or reader would have seen and marked the folios in these fascicles, but may never have had the other fascicles in his possession. If this is correct, it has important implications for the history of the text of the Libro and our understanding of the present lacunous state of the three main manuscripts. It seems unlikely that scribes and/or readers found passages worthy of annotation only in these fascicles. With either scenario, we must face the strong possibility that at least one medieval reader saw the text of the Libro, physically or mentally, in “fragmentary” form. I look first at a pair of annotations that announces the topical subject content of a given passage. On 73r, a marginal note signals “vino.” This refers to G:1339b: “do an vino de toro non beuen de valladolid” (“Where they have wine from Toro, they do not drink wine from Valladolid”). In a knee-jerk reaction, the reader has annotated this passage as if it were a topical critique of overindulgence in wine. In fact, in this passage Trotaconventos is extolling to the Archpriest the fine wines enjoyed by nuns in their convents. It is unlikely that the reader who wrote “wine” in the margin was seeking advice on how to stock his wine cellar. It may be that the reader, reading by contraries, understood and marked this passage as a critique of the use of wine, perhaps especially by nuns. Or he may have been recording publicly his indignation at the text’s casual treatment of this problem. The gloss, seemingly so inappropriate to the passage, is striking evidence of the process of ethical reading, which can transform what appears to be only remotely “ethical” material into ethical teaching. To understand the context of this observation, we have only to look at the way in which someone has annotated Langton’s discussion of Ecclesiastes 2:3 (“I thought in my heart to withdraw my flesh from wine”) in BPP 9-H, Eccl. 8v. In the left margin we find “de uino ¬ ebrietate” (“on wine and drunkenness”). A similar annotation can be found in BNM 507, a manuscript of a commentary on the Apocalypse and Ecclesiastes. On 31r, we read “vino” (“wine”). RAH 99, a copy of Terence (fourteenth or fifteenth century), has similar annotations: “Nota de ebrietate” (33v: “Note, on drunkenness”; see also 68v). The glossator of the Egerton manuscript’s version of the Wife of Bath’s “Prologue” comes up with a series of quotes against wine and drunkenness from Isaiah and Ecclesiasticus at the point where Alisoun recounts her gay youth (Schibanoff 79). The same mentality has quoted, badly, Juan Ruiz’s warnings about wine (stanza 547) in the salto miscellany (see Chapter 6). Putting a mark in the margin beside texts that can be brought under the ethical rubric “against wine and drunkenness” seems to have been an almost instinctual move among medieval readers.8 Another topical rubric is found on 75r. Here a reader has written “la bejez” (“old age”) beside

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1363, a stanza in which the aging hound laments his mistreatment by his master now that he can no longer hunt. Here we can see more clearly this late fourteenth- or fifteenth-century reader treating the Libro as a repository of the same topics he might expect to find in other tratados. The rubrics on “wine” and “old age” provide categories under which to arrange memorially or to locate physically the ethical commonplaces of the Libro. Another set of marginal annotations shows an interest in the characters in Juan Ruiz’s tale. On two occasions the reader has signaled the appearance of Trotaconventos by writing her name in the margin. The first is on 72v;1317a: “fis llamar trota conventus la mi vieJa sabida/” (“I had Trotaconventos called in, my wise old crone”). The second occurs at 73v;1343a: “yo le dixe trota conventus escucha me vn poquillo/” (“I told her, ‘Trotaconventos, listen to me a bit’ ”). At 73v;1346a, Doña Garçota (as she is called here) is mentioned for the first time, and her name is given in the margin by the reader. This coincides with direct speech by Garçota: “dixo doña garçota enbio te el ami/” (“Doña Garçota said, ‘Did he send you to me?’ ”). The most we can conclude from these annotations is that they appear near the mention of the proper name in the text. Except in the last case, they do not introduce speakers in a dialogue, as one might sometimes see in a manuscript of a play, or even announce the entrance of the character “on stage.” The annotations giving the name of Trotaconventos or of Garçota do not reappear when the dialogue resumes or when the name of “doña garoça” (as it is written this time) is mentioned in 77v;1395. A related group of annotations appears in the Doña Quaresma/Don Carnal section. The arrival of Lent is announced at 52v;1067: “Açercando se viene vn tienpo de dios santo/” (“A holy time of God is drawing near”). This stanza is signaled in the margin, in a hand very similar to that of the main scribe of G, with the word “quaresma/” (“Lent”). Twelve folios later, the triumphal entrance of Don Amor at Easter is announced with the word “pascua” (“Easter”) in the margin (64v;1225): “dia era muy santo dela pascua mayor” (“It was the very holy day of Easter”). The purpose of these annotations is unclear. They may simply show a liturgical interest in temporal divisions or church holidays. The interest in seasons is borne out in other glosses in G, as we will see. We should note that “quaresma” and “pascua” appear at precisely the same point that S inserts a rubric. Before 63r;1067, where G bears the marginal note “quaresma,” S has the following rubric: “Dela pelea que ouo don carnal con la quaresma” (“About the Fight Don Carnival Had with Lent”). Before 73r;1225, where G has the reference to “pascua,” we find in S: “De como clerigos ¬ legos ¬ flayres ¬ moJas ¬ dueñas ¬ Joglares salieron aRecebir adon amor” (“On How the Clerks and Laymen and Friars and

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Nuns* and Ladies and Minstrels Come Out to Receive Lord Love”). Could both the single-word annotations of G and the extensive rubrics of S reflect physical textual divisions and, possibly, rubrics in the early manuscripts of the Libro? On G:66r, a final marginalium of the first group appears. It, too, is in an ink and a hand very similar to those of the text. This marginal note corresponds to a space left by the scribe of G for a rubricated initial (the space was never filled in). Here (at 1242) the word “amor/” in the margin probably announces the arrival of the Archpriest’s señor, although, in contrast to what we have seen in the cases of Trotaconventos and Doña Garoça above, Don Amor is not mentioned by name until 66r;1246. The word amor (not “Don Amor”) in the margins reminds one of the annotations that signal topical subjects: “vino,” “la vejez,” “amor.” These annotations suggest that medieval readers may have read personifications differently than we do, that the distance between “love” and “Lord Love,” “Lent” and “Lady Lent,” was much shorter for them than it is for us. Above, on 46r, an annotation very similar in style to these announces the first of the serranilla lyrics (959): “/cantica/.” In the preceding verse, the narrative cuaderna vía section refers to the verses that follow as “coplas” (958d). Could a scribe have been copying this generic designation from another source? Or does it reflect an early system of marginalia? Again I note that S bears the rubric “cantica de sserrana” (57r: “song of the mountain lass”) in the same position. The annotations discussed thus far have all involved a word or two used to refer to material in the text itself. Another group of marginalia found in G is more extensive and ornate. In this group, marginal notes are surrounded by lines or boxes, which on occasion show a “long s”-shaped flourish on the right-hand upright. This type of annotation is found in two places. The first consists of a series of notes that, in effect, gives away in advance the riddle of the significance of the paintings in Don Amor’s tent (1266–1301). Thus, to the left of G:69r;1271a, “Tres comen todos avn tablero” (“All three eat at one board”), the annotator has written “inuerno” (“Winter”; I follow the transcription of Duc and C/N.). Beside G:69r;1272a, 1274a, and 69v;1275d, he has written “/Noviembre/,” “desiembre,” and “/enero/” (“January”) respectively. All twelve months are signaled similarly, and “/verano/” (“Spring”) is also identified (G:69v;1278a). These annotations spoil the fun of the riddle that Don Amor unravels later in a single stanza (1300). It is possible that these marginal annotations were written by the scribe, or one of the scribes, of the manuscript.9 Their ornate framing suggests a purely decorative role. It is also possible that a reader wrote them while attempting to verify Don Amor’s explication of the riddle, checking to see if all twelve months were there (simi-

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lar to the way in which the reader of T checks to see if all fourteen of Don Furón’s failings are accounted for). Perhaps the most we can observe with confidence about this set of annotations is that they are in keeping with the overall seasonal and cyclical themes of the Doña Quaresma/Don Carnal passage and with the marginalia that signal the arrival of quaresma and pascua.10 They also reflect the medieval fondness for divisio. Perhaps, in the same way that we may underline (in a xerox copy, of course) an author’s thesis statement, a medieval reader has felt it important to signal the divisions of the year, if only because they readily invite division. The second set of annotations in this more ornamented style begins at G:74r;1348a. Here the annotator has written “ensienplo” (“exemplum”) in a box at the beginning of the story of the gardener and the serpent: “/ e ra vn ortelano” (“Once there was a gardener”).11 The word insienplo also appears at G:74v;1357a (“/ e l buen galgo lebrero”; “The Good Rabbit Hound”), G:75v;1370 (“/ m ur de guadalhaJara”; “The Mouse from Guadalajara”), G:76v;1387 (“/ e n vn muralda andaua”; “In a Dungheap Went”), G:77v;1401 (“/ vn[?] n perro planchete”; “A Lap Dog”), and G:78v;1412 (“/ c onteçio en vna aldea”; “It Happened in a Village”). In these cases the marginal note signaling the presence of an exemplum serves the same purpose it does in hundreds of medieval manuscripts: it directs future readers to material that is of potential use in preaching or writing, and also of benefit for personal moral instruction and entertainment. Here, too, as in the annotations of the names of months and seasons, a form of divisio is taking place. The annotations signal the beginning of a new type of material, distinct and separable from the surrounding narrative material (here, the debate between Trotaconventos and Garoça). The readerly/scribal practice of signaling insienplo in the margins of a manuscript is not unique to G, of course. As I noted in Chapter 2, ms. M of the Conde Lucanor does so regularly and in a manner quite similar to what we have found in G. An annotator writes “insienplo” at the point where Patronio’s tale proper begins, not at the point where the Count presents his initial problem to his advisor. Similar markings of “Exemplum” appear in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, to cite just one of many other possible examples. The marginal annotations in G correspond to spaces left for initials in the text of G itself and to rubrics mentioning the word enxienplo in S, suggesting that the division of the text into a series of exempla may have been fundamental to medieval readings of the text, and perhaps to the early physical layout of the Libro. In addition to the various types of verbal annotation that appear in G, there are a number of markings that appear to indicate a scribe’s or reader’s interest in a particular line of text. By far the most common of

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these markings generally takes the form of a virgule followed by a period (/.), although there are several variations. There are well over 100 of these. There are also several crosses, usually in the form of a “+” or an “x,” but sometimes with a long descender trailing down and then to the left (6r [?], 10v, 11r, 17v, 18r, 33v, 35v, 36r). It is difficult to generalize about these marks. Unlike the ojo s in T, they do not seem to signal sententious phrases. They may mark corrections to the text or places where a scribe, corrector, or reader felt correction, metrical or otherwise, was necessary. We are on surer ground with the few n[ota]s found in the manuscript. All of them appear to signal sententious statements or neat colloquial turns of phrase; for example, “sey commo la paloma / linpio ¬ mesurado/” (G:24v;563a: “Be like the dove, clean and calm”); “Como el diablo a rrico omne asi me anda seguiendo/” (G:39v;826b: “Like the devil pursues the rich man, he is pursuing me”); “verdat es los plaseres / conortan alas de veses” (G:42r;861a: “It is true, at times pleasures give comfort”).12 The marginalia in G show considerable variety. In general, they reflect more standardized and formal approaches to the text, whereas T and S show more personal and casual interventions. Some of these marginalia may have been part of the original design of G itself. But we should remember that, as in T, the most important of these marginalia are concentrated in but a small portion of the manuscript. If they were part of a formal plan for annotating the Libro, this plan either did not include the first 950 stanzas or was simply not carried out in this part of the text. Before moving on to S, I note some evidence that at least one reader in the tradition of G engaged in the common practice of noting in the margins the sources of an author’s text, either by quoting the source or by giving reference to the original text. In a note above I gave an example from manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales in which Chaucer’s biblical source is quoted. Marginal source quotes are entirely absent from the manuscripts of the Libro, although Juan Ruiz quotes a variety of biblical and ancient authors. After 2v:44a, ScribeG includes the Latin version of the famous maxim from Cato that Juan Ruiz translates in the rest of the stanza (c–e): “interpone tuys Interdam gaudia caris” (“Interpone tuis interdum gaudia curis”: “Mix in some joys amongst your cares”). Except for the aberrant “interdam” and “caris,” the quality of the Latin is good compared to that found elsewhere in G. ScribeG seems incapable of recognizing even the name of Cato some 500 stanzas later (24v;568c), where he writes “tanto / sabie rromano/” (compare S:36r;568c: “caton sabyo Romano”; “Cato, the Roman sage”). These considerations, together with the telltale fact that the Latin citation makes up a five-line stanza, are clear

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evidence that at some point in the tradition a previous reader had written the original Latin text in the margin or interlinear space as a source quote. At a later point in the tradition, this annotation was copied into the text.

Marginalia in S We find a great variety of marginalia throughout S: pictures, hands, notas, and other flourishes. They appear to have been made by a number of readers of different periods, though my impression is that most marks are of medieval origin. It is likely, given what we know about the history of S, that these marks were made by residents of the Colegio de San Bartolomé, perhaps by successive generations of residents. Many of these marks seem to be the only mark made by a given reader. In other cases we can find several hands or notas in the same style, and in a few of these cases it is possible to glimpse the thematic concerns of the reader who made the marks. Readers most often seem concerned with a particular sententious remark by the “Archpriest” in his role as auctor. On one occasion, a reader focuses on sententious phrases relating to the part of Juan Ruiz’s book that is an art of love. An interest in this aspect of the Libro has not been apparent in G or T. Perhaps we can attribute this difference to the fact that the readers of S were probably college-age men and not “Castilian monks.” This reader apparently belonged to the group for which Juan Ruiz already provides in his prologue: “si algunos lo que non los consseJo quisieren vsar del loco amor aqui fallaran algunas maneras para ello” (S:2r;prol.: “If some—I do not advise this—wish to use mad love, they will find some ways to do it here”). I look first at those readers’ marks in S which seem to belong to individual readers who mark texts of interest to them at several different places. Sketches Perhaps the most interesting marginalia in S are the sketches, half a dozen in number, that appear at various points in the manuscript. Among these, three seem to have been made by the same hand, a hand skillful at drawing. Despite this skill, it is difficult to determine precisely what the sketches represent and their relation to the text they accompany. The picture of a hook-beaked bird, probably a bird of prey, appears in the margin beside 42v;721–22. These stanzas argue for careful consideration of when to speak and when not to: think about what you are going to say or keep quiet. Is the connection with some bird that talks a lot? Or with the fable of the “Great Bustard and the Swallow,” which follows twenty stanzas

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later at 44r? Is it some sort of memory key (see Carruthers 246–47, who notes the popularity of bird images in the mnemonics of book decoration)? Or is there no connection at all? Is this just a doodle, made casually in this place? The line drawn from the sketch to 722 suggests that the link was more than just casual. If there is thematic significance to singling out this stanza, it must be the same impulse as that which caused the Archpriest of Talavera to cite the “Archpriest” as an authority on keeping one’s counsel and which led the annotator of the Aragonese anthology to quote the “Archpriest” (stanza 553) on the value of using measure in one’s choice of words (see Chapter 6). The bird’s appearance here may already be a part of a tradition that makes Juan Ruiz’s Archpriest into an auctor, an authority on that favorite topic of medieval ethical discourse, prudent speech (however imprudent his own). Other sketches, probably made by the same hand, are equally puzzling. At 51v;870, there is a picture of a mammal of some sort with his or her tongue sticking out, a mouse or a rat, I think, though it might be a bear. The immediate context is Trotaconventos’s final exhortation to Don Melón to strike while the iron is hot now that she has convinced Doña Endrina to visit her home unchaperoned. The only animal mentioned is a kid, but the sketch is certainly not of a kid. There are no obvious references to rats, badgers, or any other mammal until 51v;874a, where Trotaconventos says that Don Melón possesses an “oJo de bezerro” (“calf’s eye”), and the following line, where she says that Don Melón “barrunta nos commo perro” (“sniffs us out like a dog”). But I do not believe the drawing is of either a calf or a dog. The modern English metaphorization of “rat” would certainly apply to Trotaconventos’s or the Archpriest’s treacherous behavior here. Or is Endrina a mouse who had taken the bait and is about to be caught in a trap? I suspect that the relation of picture to text is more complex than this. The next sketch appears at 98r;1623–24. Here the picture may show a snub-nosed and highly anthropomorphized monkey, though there are other possibilities: a dog or a demon. The figure stands erect. The context, the Archpriest’s conversation with and description of Don Furón, suggests several possibilities. Perhaps the sketch depicts the “mal perro” of 1623d, or perhaps it is a picture of a ferret, a reference to the name of the Archpriest’s new go-between. In any case, with its demon/animal body and humanlike face, this sketch suggests rather vividly the personality of Don Furón as it is portrayed in the Archpriest’s poem. If it is a demon, the sketch may suggest a more strongly negative view of Don Furón than Juan Ruiz’s burlesque “fourteen faults” conveys to modern readers. The interpretation of the sketch as a demon gains some support from Doña Fulana’s (Lady So-and-so’s) reply to Furón’s singing telegram: “tyra te alla pecado” (98v;1625c: “Get away, devil”). I am no ex-

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pert in the interpretation of such sketches, either at the “literal” level (just what animal is this?) or at the allegorical or tropological. By collecting and analyzing such sketches in manuscripts across the European Middle Ages, we may gain considerable insight into both levels of interpreting the medieval language of marginal doodles and sketches. More in the line of a doodle is a style of flourish found in many medieval manuscripts: a human face looking away from the stanza. Did these faces looking out from stanzas or passages represent the memory process? The face with text behind it suggests graphically that the text is already stored in “la çela dela memoria” (S:1v;prol.: “the chamber of memory”; see Carruthers 248 for comments on the related use of human heads in sketches). In any case, the interests of the reader of S who uses such flourishes are rather clear: the seduction of women. Don Amor’s advice to the Archpriest that women engaged to be married are poor prospects (34v;527) and his warning not to let the woman know that you are also involved with another woman (36r;564) are signaled with a face/flourish. A flourish, apparently in the same ink, appears beside 38v;622, a stanza in which Doña Venus summarizes some of her previous advice and goes on to suggest that the lover frequent those places where his “amiga” is most wont to go. Notas Notas, usually written as a stylized letter n with a squiggle or large loop above, are the most common marginal marking in S. One clearly identifiable group appears on those folios containing the story of “la Chata,” the mountain lass. These notas, which bear an exaggerated loop above, reveal a special interest in the pithy saying and the simple life. They appear in a section that is also heavily marked with pointing hands (see below), and it may be that the same hand has made both, alternating notas with hands. In both cases, the marks seem to refer to specific lines in the stanzas rather than to whole stanzas. Thus, notas on 56v signal a series of sayings of the type “quien . . .” (“he/she who,” “whoever”) that come up during the Archpriest’s conversation with the mountain lass: “Ca segund es la fabla quien pregunta non yerra” (955c: “As the saying goes: he who asks a question does not err”); “Respondiome la chata quien pide non escoge” (956a: “Snubnose answered: ‘He who begs does not get to choose’ ”); “comadre quien mas non puede / amidos moryr se dexa” (957b: “Mother, the person who can do no more, lets himself die, like it or not”). Other marks by this reader do not fit this pattern, but seem also to pick out passages for their sententious value: “mi casilla & mi fogar çient sueldos val” (57v;973d: “My little house and hearth are worth a hundred

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sueldos”); “escarua la gallyna E falla su pepita” (58r;977b: “The chicken scratches and finds her pip”). Another group of similar notas, probably by the same hand, continues the reader’s interest in the well-turned sententious phrase. Although these notas may refer to entire stanzas containing narrative elements, they are most likely meant to mark proverbial expressions such as 58v;983b: “pan E vino Juega / que non camisa nueva” (“Bread and wine are what counts, not a new shirt”) or 984b: “ca mala es de amatar el estopa de que arde” (“It is hard to extinguish the tinder with which she burns”). Stanzas 59r;995, 60v;1020d, and 83r;1380[?] and 1383, which bear a very similar style of nota, have more clearly sententious goals. Another reader of S uses a smaller, less ornate form of nota: an n topped by a tildelike squiggle with a small loop at the right end. This reader apparently has a quite specific topic in mind: how does one get the things one wants in this world? Through fate, through inheritance, or through personal effort? This theme is clearly introduced by Juan Ruiz, though not so clearly resolved, in the tales of King Alcaraz and of the Archpriest’s astrologically determined weakness for women (123–65). The reader finds a common solution to the question in two stanzas separated by seventy intervening stanzas: “effort” (“trabajo”) can overcome both unlucky inheritance and pure bad luck. Inheritance is dealt with in 38v;622: ¶

Non pueden dar los parientes al pariente por herençia el mester ¬ el oficio el arte ¬ la sabiençia nin pueden dar ala dueña / el amor ¬ la querençia todo esto da el trabaJo el vso ¬ la femençia

Parents cannot pass on to their family through inheritance craft and skills and art and wisdom; nor can they give the lady love and desire. It is work and practice and steadfastness that give this.

Both the overwhelming power of fortune and the possibility of conquering it with God’s aid and with one’s personal effort are treated in 41r;692: ¶

muchas vezes la ventura con ssu fuerça ¬ poder amuchos omnes non dexa su proposito fazer por esto anda el mundo en leuantar ¬ encaer dios ¬ el trabaJo grande / pueden los fados vençer

Often fortune, with her force and power, does not allow many men to accomplish what they wish; and so the world goes, rising and falling; God and hard work can conquer fate.

The first of these stanzas appears as part of Doña Venus’s lessons to the Archpriest/Don Melón. The second represents Don Melón’s own reflec-

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tions following his unsuccessful first interview with Doña Endrina, reflections that eventually lead him to undertake the “effort” of obtaining a go-between. Other lines signaled by this reader (9r;109a and 112d, 40r;644d) do not fall into any readily apparent pattern. Hands I have already mentioned one style of hand that coincides in several places with a particularly common style of nota. It is impossible to determine if this was annotatory overkill by a single reader or the case of a second reader assenting to the importance of passages marked by a previous reader. In any case, the hands continue an interest already noted in phrases of the model “Quien. . . .” Thus one hand points to 56v;951d: “quien busco lo que non pierde lo que tiene deue perder” (“He who looks* for what he has not lost should lose what he already has”). Above, a hand that is probably by the same reader has marked 15r;206a: “quien tiene lo quel cunple // conello sea pagado” (“He who has what he ought to have should be satisfied with that”). Both contain, then, the same conservative message. Other lines marked with hands in the same style show an interest in the related theme of being content with what one possesses, poor as it may be, particularly as the issue is expressed through food imagery. It is in the episode of the Mouse from Guadalajara, of course, that these themes find their maximum expression. The reader has placed hands pointing to 82v;1371c (“alos pobres manJares el plazer los rrepara”; “Pleasure compensates for meager food”) and 1375d (“solaz con yantar buena / todos omes ablanda”; “Good company and good food mellows all men”). On the following folio the reader has marked 83r;1379c (“el que teme la muerte el panal le sabe fiel”; “For* the man who fears death, the honeycomb tastes like gall”), 1381c (“las viandas preçiadas // con miedo son agraz”; “Precious foods taste like sour grapes when accompanied by fear”), and 1384d (“la pobredat alegre / es Segura noblesa”; “Happy poverty is secure nobility”). But an interest in “proverbs containing references to comestibles” is not limited to this section. The same reader also annotates 6r;66a: “Fallaras muchas garças / non fallaras vn veuo” (“You will find many herons, but you won’t find a single heron’s egg”). And it is probably the same reader who marks 27r;392d: “mas traes neçios locos que ay pyñones en piñas” (“[Love], you drag along more crazy fools than there are pine nuts in a pinecone”). This reader’s interest contrasts strikingly with that of the one we saw a moment ago who was attracted to the idea that “effort conquers all.” This reader finds appealing the rather more timid message that one should take no risks and be content with what one has.13 These contrasting readings

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give us an opportunity to view what may have been the medieval “ambiguity” of Juan Ruiz’s book: the fact that it was a storehouse rich enough to contain potentially contradictory ethical material that could be put to use by different readers on different occasions for varying, even opposing, purposes. The remaining readers’ marks in the manuscript cannot be readily assigned to a specific group. They seem to continue the various themes and interests evidenced by other readers and, in most cases, announced by Juan Ruiz himself: art of love, fate, death, trabajo, as well as more general interest in proverbial expressions. In addition to notas and hands, there are a few more doodlings. At 9r;108, a woman’s profile looks away from the stanza. Perhaps it is the “muger noble” mentioned in 108b. At 38v;622 (a stanza signaled by another reader, as we have seen), there is another feminine profile, this one with a big nose, bracketing Doña Venus’s exhortation that the seduction of a woman requires “el trabaJo el vso ¬ la femençia.” Finally, there is another picture of a woman (?) at 42r;713. Unlike the two just mentioned, this one is free-standing and has one raised hand. Is this picture used to illustrate the narration? In the stanza in question, Trotaconventos is exhorting Don Melón to work quickly, for a rival is also interested in marrying Doña Endrina. “[N]otalo todo fasta la fin” Finally, I must mention again the one example of verbal annotation in the margin of S. This precedes a section that has been among the least favorite of twentieth-century critics of the Libro: the section on the arms of the Christian knight (1579–1602; see Chapter 3). We have an excellent illustration of how much modern and medieval reading tastes differ in that a reader has written “[N]otalo todo fasta la fin” (“Note everything from here to the end”) at the beginning of this section.14 The mnemonic features of this passage (each piece of armor the reader dons is a mnemonic key to Christian works, virtues, etc.) suggest that we should understand all the notas in the manuscripts of the Libro in this light: as phrases or exempla selected for one’s memorial storehouse (or personal miscellany) as a means of increasing one’s copious store of ethical wisdom.

Conclusion The traces left by the early readers of the Libro suggest a reading quite different from that most common among modern readers. We focus on the autobiography of an inept lover, the Archpriest of Hita, and on the parodic, irreverent, scurrilous aspects of the book. We try to understand

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the Libro as an integral work (despite its fragmentary textual tradition), as possessing a unifying theme, approach, or, at least, authorial worldview. The medieval readers who marked the margins of SGT, in contrast, viewed the Libro primarily as a repository of sententious wisdom and religious learning, as a minor guide to the art of love, and as a source of good exempla. Their marks show their readings of the Libro to have been fragmented. They do not seem to have been seeking a global meaning. In their relentless search for serviceable proverbs and other ethical material, they do not seem to have been sidetracked at all by what we see as Juan Ruiz’s parodic deflation of ethical discourse (see Walsh, “Juan” 73–74). The ethically dubious uses to which Trotaconventos turns her exempla do not invalidate the exempla themselves as narratives with ethical force. These medieval readers read out of context; indeed, they seem to have had little interest in context. Few comments of any kind reveal an interest in passages longer than one or two stanzas. One exception occurs in G, where the allegory of Don Amor’s tent is rather heavily annotated with notes that explain the allegory. References to “Trotaconventos” and “Garçota” may reflect a special interest in the extended tale of the nun’s seduction (modern readers have shown greater interest in the tale of Melón and Endrina). In another exception, the reader of S has written “[N]otalo todo fasta la fin” at the beginning of the section on the arms of the Christian knight. But even here, the reasons for the reader’s interest are clearly different from those which might lead a modern reader or scholar to study this passage. Medieval readings were fragmented physically as well. The marks left by the “corrector” of T appear only in the last few folios of the manuscript, and the ojo s left by this or another reader display a similar pattern. In G, the marginalia signaling the appearance of insienplos or of characters such as Trotaconventos or Don Amor also appear only near the end of the manuscript, although similar series of exempla appear from the earliest stanzas of the Libro. To what extent is this fragmented approach to reading the Libro “typical” of medieval readers? It seems terribly reductive to us. We do not want medieval readers to have read their treasures in this way. But we need to recognize, first of all, that in many cases the texts available to medieval readers were fragmented in ways that the mania for editions of “works” over the past 200 years has almost totally obscured. Much of the material medieval readers read was composed of marginal snippets, short sections of text (identified or not, as with Isidore’s Liber sententiarum), or only one or two books from a larger text (Book 3 of Capellanus’s De arte acquired its own separate circulation [Roy 50–52], as did some of Chaucer’s individual pilgrim tales [Strohm, “Chaucer’s” 24–28]). And these are only the cases in which textual fragmentation was in some sense

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deliberate. It does not count the leaves so readily lost or appropriated for other purposes. One can only speculate about fragmentation as a part of the reading process (see Badel’s “discontinuous reading” 141–42, 499–501; Huot, “Medieval” 400–402). My impression is that this was a far more prevalent way of reading than we are comfortable recognizing. The marginalia in thousands of medieval manuscripts prove this. The act of marking a passage in a manuscript with a nota, hand, or other device was as natural as turning a leaf. The physical act of writing a hand or a nota may have been one of the gestures in a ritual of ethical reading that involved florilecture (reading for anthologizable quotes), memory storage, and the physical act of marking the page. Readers may have “noted” other features of the text as they read, but they reserved their written notas and hands for proverbial and other ethical material. At some level they may well have appreciated and been entertained by the parodies, “misappropriations,” and deflations as they read.15 So often modern readers, remembering our stern Puritan ancestors perhaps, think that humor inevitably subverts didactic or ethical goals. One is not supposed to laugh in church. We view Juan Ruiz’s humor as evidence of his insincerity. For many modern readers of the Libro, humor and didacticism are mutually exclusive categories. But medieval writers tell us again and again that this is not the case. Humor is the chaff we blow away to reveal the kernel of didactic sense. It is the honey that makes the medicine go down more smoothly. Humor in medieval didactic works can be an integral part of the didacticism, not its subversion. But it would also be a mistake to assume that these marks represent the totality of medieval readings of our texts. Our very dissatisfaction with “florilecture” should be a spur to discovering equally concrete evidence of other sorts of reading. I can give only one tenuous and brief example. Cátedra has suggested (41–46) that Alfonso de Madrigal, el Tostado, the prolific fifteenth-century Castilian scholar, who began his academic career in Salamanca, had read stanzas 71–76 of the Libro in S and that this reading is reflected in his Breviloquio de amor y amiçiçia (Little Treatise on Love and Friendship). The arguments are strong (see Deyermond, “Salamanca” 4). Granting their validity for the moment, we turn to these stanzas in S:6v–7r and find that there are no marks of any kind beside any of these stanzas. Clearly, El Tostado’s practice of reading S was distinct from that of the residents of the Colegio de San Bartolomé who marked the manuscript’s margins. We can safely assume, I think, that other medieval readers engaged in more complex readings. The advantage of studying the hundreds of thousands of marginalia in medieval manuscripts lies in their concreteness and their status as untapped resource in understanding medieval approaches to texts. El Tostado’s use of S:6v–7r suggests another

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largely unexplored pathway through which we look for medieval readings more congenial to us: a writer’s use, not of a text, but of a specific scriptum, in his or her extended reading of a text or textual passage. I have saved till last a discussion of the extensive rubrics found in S alone. If we seek a unified, integral approach to the Libro among medieval readers, we can find it here. Indeed, these rubrics, reproduced (with the exception of the explicit by Paradinas) in all editions of the Libro, are the basis of modern “unified” readings of the Libro as a work revolving around the fictional life of the Archpriest of Hita. These rubrics add a fictional ecclesiastical imprisonment to the events of the Archpriest’s life told in the text (104r). They transform the Archpriest (and not Don Melón) into Doña Endrina’s lover (40v, 51v). They add a certain quaint/ flip tone to the didactic materials in the book, a tone we identify with the Archpriest/Juan Ruiz himself: “De commo el amor castiga al arçipreste que aya ensy buenas constumbres ¬ ssobre todo que se guarde de beuer mucho vino blanco ¬ tynto” (34v: “How Love Instructs the Archpriest to Have Good Habits and, Above All, to Refrain from Drinking Too Much Wine, White or Red”). These rubrics also participate in a key transformation the Archpriest undergoes: he becomes an auctor, a source of authoritative moral and ethical advice. This is probably the key unity of the Libro for late-medieval readers, a unity based not on the relations of the parts of the Libro to one another, its style or themes, but on the auctoritas of the Archpriest himself, which informs all parts of “his” text. This unity forms, in large part, the subject of the following chapter.16

6 READING THE BOOK OF THE ARCHPRIEST OF HITA

T

HE MEDIEVAL SCRIPTUM grows through a process of accretion, beginning with the pivotal act of scribal copying, continuing through the work of rubricators and illuminators, and on to individual readers who begin to intervene in the scriptum, adding their own annotations and jottings in the margins. But medieval reading does not end at the physical margins of the scriptum. The process of reading leads to the production of new scripta. Often it is simply that the scribal process begins again, as a new copy is made from an old one. But other processes begin as readers respond in a variety of ways to the texts before them. For some, it is the simple act of copying a sententious phrase—out of context—into a personal miscellany. Other readers may construct whole new texts out of such phrases. I am thinking not just of florilegia but also of works like Gil de Zamora’s Prosodion or St. Martín of León’s biblical commentaries (a regurgitation of Isidore), or of works like Tirant lo Blanc, in which chunks of other texts are imported wholesale—medieval “plagiarism” at its finest. But more complex dialogues occur, dialogues of greater interest to us. Readers transform their scripta through translation, amplification, prosification, rehandling, and rethinking, into “new” texts. Copeland has shown how profound the idea of “translation” in its broader medieval sense can be when used to look at the “creative” activity of a Chaucer or a Gower (179–220). Juan Ruiz himself is a master translator, of Walter’s Fables, of Pamphilus. Yet scholars have neglected the specific features of his art of translation in their hunt for his artistic intentions. Machan (“Editorial” and “Scribal”) has made some valuable observations concerning the use of the manuscript context of “the medieval Boethius” to understand holistically the processes of translation/creation that went on in the creation of Chaucer’s Boece. A recent article by Jenaro points to the direction we must follow (“Sobre”). Jenaro seeks the specific textual traditions of Pamphilus that Juan Ruiz knew in preparing his translation. In the final line of his study, Jenaro goes one step further, proposing a search for the specific scripta Juan Ruiz may have used for his translations. In a pair of articles (“Avrás,” “Se usa”), I have suggested that an accessus and an explicit found in specific scripta of Pamphilus found their way, indirectly, into the body of Juan Ruiz’s Libro. An awareness of such

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relations may in turn help us to identify the specific scripta other medieval authors used in their translations and adaptations. We must start to view these processes as we view the scribal process, not as a transformation of one text into another, but as a transformation of one specific manuscript, one scriptum, into another. Juan Ruiz announces several categories of readers for his book: those who will grasp immediately its moral message; those of lesser understanding whom this book will recall to ethical behavior; and those who, against the author’s wishes, will read it as an art of love (prologue, 67). He views his book as an example of correct, even exotic, versification (prologue, 1634). It is also a good collection of jokes and solaz (14, 16, 65, 1632). Finally, Juan Ruiz suggests at several points that there is a hidden, perhaps allegorical, message to his book (68–69, 986, 1390, 1631). Juan Ruiz was remarkably clairvoyant in characterizing the future readers of his book. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers primarily viewed the Libro as a repository of useful moral advice in the form of sententiae and exempla. Evidence also suggests that Juan Ruiz’s verse had a profound effect on the writing of verse in Castilian—its themes, its language, its rhyme. In several poetic texts, tales and situations drawn from the Archpriest’s book seem also to have served as points of reference for the creation of new lyrics of an occasional and satiric nature. Demonstrative rhetoric and poetry combine. The alleged allegorical reading, which often strikes us as just one more piece of Juanruizian innuendo, is a major exception. If medieval readers found some overarching allegorical significance (or even a fragmentary one) in the Libro, that reading has not come down to us.

The Libro in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Libraries Before we examine the “early mentions” of the Libro, it is worthwhile to chart the rather broad diffusion of scripta of Juan Ruiz’s book across the peninsula into the sixteenth century. At least one, perhaps two, copies of the Libro existed in Portugal (Moffat, “Evaluation” and “Evidence” 36; Solalinde). An inventory of the library of King Duarte of Portugal (b. 1391, r. 1433–38), made in 1438, includes a reference to “O acipreste de fyta” (“The Archpriest of Hita”; Moffat, “Evaluation” 108). It is impossible to determine if this is the same copy, or same version, as the Portuguese translation that survives today in fragmentary form (Porto, Biblioteca Pública Municipal 785; formerly in the Biblioteca de Santa Cruz in Coimbra; Solalinde 164).1 Moffat argues convincingly that the surviving fragment is a copy of another Portuguese manuscript rather than the original translation (“Evaluation” 108–9). The signs point, then, to a surprisingly rich tradition of the Libro in Portugal.

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Several notices of presumably Spanish manuscripts of the Libro are found. In an inventory of the library of the Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé in Salamanca, made on December 21, 1440, we read: “el acipreste de fita en rromançe” (“The Archpriest of Hita, in the vernacular”; Askins 73; Cátedra 44 n. 64).2 This refers, no doubt, to S. Another copy is listed in an inventory made in January 1484 of the library of Pero Sánchez Muñoz (d. 1483) in Teruel (Aragon): “Item otro libret, cubiertas verdes, maltractado, en paper, intitulado Arcipestre de Yta” (“Item: another little book, green covers, damaged, on paper, entitled Archpriest of Hita”; Monfrin 243). There was also a copy in the royal library in Segovia, according to an inventory of the year 1503: “de quarto de pliego, de mano, en romançe, que son las Coplas del Arçipreste de Hita” (“quarto manuscript, in the vernacular, containing the Verses of the Archpriest of Hita”; Sánchez Cantón, Libros 48, no. 70-C). There appears to have been yet another copy of the Libro in Seville, this one in the library of Fernando Colón (d. 1539), son of Cristóbal. This copy may have been purchased around the year 1536. Askins argues that this copy cannot be identified with any of the surviving manuscripts of the Libro and suggests that another manuscript may survive unnoticed, perhaps in the Biblioteca Capitular y Columbina in Seville (74–75). This reference is unique among the early mentions of the Libro in citing the author’s putative given name: “Jo. Ruiz arcipreste obra en coplas” (“Juan Ruiz, Archpriest, a work in verse”; Askins 72). A final reference comes from the library of another Sevillian, Gonzalo Argote de Molina (1548– 96): “Cancionero del Arcipreste, de canciones antiquissimas de tiempo del Rey Don Alonso XI” (“Songbook of the Archpriest, very old songs from the time of King Alfonso XI”; Moffat, “Evidence” 40).3 Juan Ruiz’s book clearly circulated in more manuscript copies than survive (or are known) today. By the early fifteenth century, perhaps sooner, it had been translated into Portuguese at least once. By the early sixteenth century, copies had reached the far corners of the Iberian peninsula: Portugal, Andalucia, Aragon.4 It was held in private, ecclesiastical, university, and royal libraries. It was available, then, to a broad readership in the peninsula. We examine now the varied ways in which some of that readership approached the Libro.

The “Archpriest of Hita” in Literary Histories Literary history as a scholarly genre was still in its infancy in fifteenthcentury Castile. Ironically, medieval and Renaissance students of vernacular letters seem to have been motivated by the same nationalistic or local goals that have gotten literary history into trouble in the twentieth century. The very concept of literary history is inextricably linked from its

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beginnings to civic or national pride. Certainly this is true in the case of those who try to make the Libro a part of some story of letters in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Spain. Marqués de Santillana, Carta e prohemio al Condestable de Portugal gñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), gives us one of the first broad historical treatments of what we might call “Western literature.” In the Prohemio e carta that precedes the collection of his verse he dedicated to Pedro, Condestable of Portugal (written 1445–49; Weiss, Poet’s 165; see bibliography at 165 n. 1), he includes discussion not just of vernacular letters, but also of biblical and classical poetry. As part of his definition of poetry and historical survey, he cites the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita” as an example of the earliest Castilian verse: Entre nosotros vsóse primeramente el metro en asaz formas; así commo el Libro de Alexandre, Los uotos del Pauón e aun el Libro del Arçipreste de Hita; e aun desta guisa escriuió Pero López de Ayala, el Uiejo, vn libro que fizo de las maneras del palaçio e llamaron los Rimos. (58) Among us meter was used early on in several forms; as in the Libro de Alexandre, Los uotos del Pauón, and also in the Libro del Arcipreste de Hita; and Pero López de Ayala, the Elder, also wrote in this way a book that he made about the customs in the palace, and they called it Rhymes.

Although Santillana stresses metric diversity, the works in this list (the Votos del Pavón is lost) are written primarily in cuaderna vía, though the Libro and the Rimado del palacio include a small sampling of lyric forms. Still, I think Santillana is making the point that early Castilian poets did experiment with a variety of verse forms, and he holds up “the Archpriest’s” book as an example of that variety. It may well be that a broader range of poetic experimentation by Juan Ruiz was known in Santillana’s time. Although all the love lyrics are missing from surviving scripta of the Libro, medieval scripta may have contained these lyrics, or they may have circulated in other formats, such as single-author or multiauthor lyric anthologies, cancioneros. And we should certainly not rule out oral transmission of Juan Ruiz’s lyrics down to Santillana’s time. But Santillana refers specifically to the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita.” Whether or not it contained verse forms unknown to us, Juan Ruiz’s book was one of the few works to document poetic experimentation among early poets who wrote in Castilian rather than Galician-Portuguese, the traditional language for most lyric compositions among Castilians until late in Juan Ruiz’s century. Santillana emphasizes the formal, metrical aspects of Juan Ruiz’s book. His mention of the Libro is in the

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line laid down by Juan Ruiz: the variety of verse forms in his book may serve as a guide to would-be poets. Santillana makes “the Archpriest’s book” into a canonical text of the tradition into which he inserts his own works. His comments suggest a broad familiarity with the Libro as a collection of lyric verse in the mid-fifteenth century. He does not explicitly recognize the moralizing uses to which we see other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers putting the book. His concerns are historical, aesthetic, and political. The “Elogios” of Gonzalo Argote de Molina It is more than a century before reference to the Libro in a “historical” context appears again. Here the goals are far narrower than Santillana’s. As part of a program of civic boosterism, a Sevillian scholar, Gonzalo Argote de Molina, falsifies literary history, apparently deliberately, ascribing one of Juan Ruiz’s works to a fellow Sevillian. We have already seen that Argote owned a copy of the Libro. Argote copied his own Elogios at the close of a manuscript of the Repartimiento de Sevilla (Madrid, Biblioteca del Palacio), a book describing the Christian repartition of the newly conquered Moorish territories in and around Seville (see Chapter 4). Argote’s Elogios were written in praise of certain important personages mentioned in the Repartimiento. Although Argote owned a copy of the “Songbook of the Archpriest of Hita,” he attributes verses we feel certain are by Juan Ruiz to one “Domingo Abad de los Romances,” who, he says, lived in the time of Fernando III, el Santo (1217–52). Entre mis libros vue vno de coplas antiquissimas escritas del mesmo tiempo deste Rei [Alfonso el Sabio], que se puede tener por muy estraño y mucho mas que entre ellas ay coplas de domingo abad . . . y deuio de llamarse de los Romances por ser poeta castellano y hazer coplas en castellano. (Alonso, “Crítica” 64) Among my books I had one containing old poems written in the time of King Alfonso that can be considered very curious, the more so because among the poems there are some by Domingo Abad . . . and he must have called himself “de los Romances” because he was a Castilian poet and wrote poems in Castilian.

Argote goes on to quote stanzas 1023–27 of the Libro, one of the Archpriest’s comic encounters with a mountain lass. Alonso (“Crítica”) has exposed the various “literary frauds” (73) in which Argote engages in his treatment of these verses. The poem quoted differs from the versions we know in several places, and Alonso argues that the variants are mostly the work of Argote himself. He cites as an example the deliberately archaizing “cormano” (“cousin”) in 1023b, not found in either G or S.

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Blecua (Manual 38–39 and n. 4) has shown convincingly that Argote’s scriptum was probably G or one like G, in which the final verses of 1023 and 1025 are lacking. In filling in these lines, Argote gives his penchant for antique poetic pastiche full rein. He uses Juan Ruiz’s verse to enhance the force of his “elogio” of Sevillian native son Domingo Abad, taking these verses from his book “de coplas antiquisimas” (which, it seems likely, is the same “Cancionero del Arcipreste, de canciones antiquisimas” mentioned in his inventory) and attributing them to the early poet (Moffat, “Evidence” 40; Alonso, “Crítica”). Juan Ruiz’s verse helps him to create an illustrious artistic history for his hometown. I find quite intriguing the correspondence of the reference to a cancionero of the Archpriest in Argote’s library and the fact that the verses Argote copied belong to a lyric section rather than a cuaderna vía section. Could it be that the lyrics of the Archpriest circulated separately in a cancionero? Or could the “Cancionero del Arcipreste” have contained works by other, perhaps older, poets as well? Could misordered pages or simply bad memory have led to a false attribution (see the case of the Cancionero de Baena in Blecua, “Perdióse”)? The statement in the Elogios suggests that Domingo Abad’s poems were mixed with poems by other poets. In any case, in this “early mention,” the Archpriest and Juan Ruiz have both, perhaps deliberately, disappeared. Only Juan Ruiz’s text, though mutilated, remains.5

“The Archpriest” Auctor The fact that nearly all the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mentions of the Libro refer to it as “The Book of the Archpriest of Hita” or simply as “the Archpriest” or “the Archpriest of Hita” messes up the system I announced in my preface. In this system “Juan Ruiz” stands for the human author of the book and “the Archpriest” for his pseudo-autobiographical protagonist. For early readers, “the Archpriest” was auctor, exemplary authorial persona, and author, probably in that order. To avoid confusion, I will use “the Archpriest” (in quotes) to refer to the textualized auctor of medieval readers, an auctor who included aspects of both Juan Ruiz and the Archpriest. That textualization of the author in which we would stress an “authorial persona” or “lyric I” was viewed in quite a distinct manner by medieval readers. Authorship is linked directly, etymologically, to the rhetorical, ethical nature of the medieval sign. Auctoritas (“authority”/“authorship”) is, in fact, most often a sententious expression of ethical truth that is “authoritative” because it is true (Minnis, Medieval 10). Hugutio of Pisa’s definition of auctoritas already provides for the ethical function of auctores and auctoritas. Auctoritas is a “sententia digna imitatione” (“a

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saying worthy of imitation”; Minnis, Medieval 10). Authors (“the Archpriest” is no exception) are Authors because their texts contain auctoritates. This validation moves circularly to establish the truth of auctoritates because they belong to “Authors.” The auctor is his text. The medieval text was not constituted as is the modern: by the delimitation and authentication of the fixed boundaries of creation and literary property. Medieval auctoritas functions by continually extending its ethical grasp. In this ongoing growth of auctoritas, new and “spurious” auctoritates are assigned to auctores like Augustine or Ovid; reprobate archpriests become auctores because their texts contain auctoritates. Reading—from glossing, to copying a manuscript, to individual silent reading—and the physical “support” of medieval textuality are inextricably and, again, circularly linked. Handmade textuality allows for the continual growth of auctoritas by continually providing new physical space for the growth of texts. The glosses, interpolations, annotations, and modifications that sprout up in these spaces are not authoritative because they are authorial, but because they are ethically true. They are ethically true because they work. In this way, the medium of the manuscript book functions “ethically.” The role of “the Archpriest” as auctor is the dominant one among fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readings of the Libro. Whether “the Archpriest” is mentioned by name or not, readers appropriated auctoritates from his book, usually in the form of proverbs and other sententious phrases. “The Archpriest” joins the ranks of “authors” of biblical, classical and medieval origin. The Archpriest of Talavera, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (1398–1468) Alfonso Martínez was Archpriest of Talavera, just as Juan Ruiz may have been Archpriest of Hita. In his Libro del Arcipreste de Talavera or Corbacho, completed in 1438, Martínez creates a minor tradition of archpriests who write books about love. In this jolly but largely misogynistic work, we find our clearest statement of “the Archpriest’s” new role as auctor. ¿Quién es tan loco e tan fuera de seso que quiere su poderío dar a otro . . . e . . . ser siervo de una muger que alcança muy corto juyzio, e demás atarse de pies e de manos, en manera que non es de sè mesmo, contra el dicho del sabio, que dize: “Quien pudiere ser suyo, non sea enagenado; que lybertad e franqueza non es por oro conprado”? El enxenplo antiguo es, el qual puso el Arcipreste de Fita en su tractado. (54) Who is so crazy and so out of his mind that he wishes to give his power to someone else . . . and . . . to be the slave of a woman who achieves so little wisdom, and what is more, to tie his own feet and hands so that he is not his

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own man, against the saying of the wise man that says: “He who can be his own man should not be someone else’s; liberty and freedom can’t be bought for gold”? The exemplum is an ancient one, which the Archpriest of Hita put in his treatise.

The lines cited are Libro 206bd. The stanza survives in S alone: “quien puede ser suyo / non sea enaJenado, | . . . | lybertat ¬ ssoltura / non es por oro conplado” (S:15r). This stanza has also been signaled with a marginal hand by some early reader of S (see Chapter 5). The stanza appears as part of the moral of the fable of the frogs who demanded a king. This fable, in turn, is a part of the Archpriest’s denunciation of Don Amor. Juan Ruiz adapted the tale from the collection of Walter the Englishman (Lecoy 117–25). The Archpriest of Talavera is aware that the fable was drawn from other sources, for he states that it is an “ancient example.” The role of “the Archpriest of Hita” is that of “putting” it in his “tractado.” In other words, the Archpriest of Talavera is here assigning to Juan Ruiz the role of compiler, a role common to collectors of fables (Minnis, Medieval 94–103, 190–210). In Juan Ruiz’s text the exemplum serves to illustrate the slightly different, less misogynistic point that Love enslaves his subjects, not that the lover binds himself in servitude to the “short wits” of a woman. But the reference is not entirely out of context, and Martínez seems to be placing the Archpriest of Hita in a chain of authority. “The Archpriest of Hita” chose, in his wisdom, to put this authoritative example in his own authoritative book, his “tractado.” The Archpriest of Talavera participates in this expanding gloss by shifting the general moral against love’s imperious rule, created by “the Archpriest” when he places the fable of Walter in the context of his debate with Don Amor, into a more specific critique of the male lover’s submission, not so much to love as to his inferior: woman. In any case, the “tractado” of “the Archpriest of Hita” is now the place to which a fifteenth-century Castilian cleric may turn for a collection of such moral examples, perhaps in preference to the Latin sources. A second mention of “el Arcipreste” in the Corbacho is more problematic: “Dize el Arcipreste: ‘Sabyeza tenprado callar; locura desmayado fablar’ ” (195: “The Archpriest says: ‘It is wisdom to be quiet in a temperate way; it is crazy to talk too much’ ”). Is this “Arcipreste” the Archpriest of Hita? Perhaps, but the verses cited do not appear in any surviving scriptum of the Libro. The standard explanation has been that Martínez was remembering, badly, features of 553, 570, or 722. Of these, only the latter bears any resemblance to the stanza quoted by the Archpriest: “MeJor cosa es al omne al cuerdo ¬ al entendido | callar do nonle enpeçe E tyenenle por sesudo | que fablar lo que nonle cunple por que sea arrenpentido | o piensa bien lo que fablas o calla faz te mudo” (S:42v: “It is better for the wise and sensible man to be silent when it will not harm him and

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to be considered a wise man than to say what he should not and regret it later; either think well about what you say or be quiet, be mute”).6 Blecua characterizes this as “a quotation from memory” (Manual 38). Another possibility is that the lines come from one of the missing sections of the book. It is more likely, given the unusual syllable count here and the rhyme, that this was a standard versus, one of those rhyming, rhythmic versets which were one of the major ethical genres of medieval Europe.7 Perhaps the connection with the Libro comes, if one exists at all, because this viesso was written in the margin of the scriptum of the Libro seen by Martínez or had somehow been associated memorially by him with similar commonplaces from Juan Ruiz’s book.8 Finally, we should note that Martínez invokes the name of Juan Ruiz’s most influential fictional character, Trotaconventos, the go-between. A woman who has lost a hen cries: “Llámame a Trotaconventos, la vieja de mi prima, que venga, e vaya de casa en casa buscando la mi gallina ruvia” (127: “Get me Trotaconventos, my cousin’s old crone, have her come and go from house to house looking for my golden hen”). Behind this brief mention of Trotaconventos lurks Juan Ruiz’s portrait of the go-between’s skill in talking her way into every house in town (723). The reader may also have paused to wonder just why the woman’s cousin (could she be Doña Endrina herself?) has retained Trotaconventos’s services. We have only scratched the surface of the Archpriest of Talavera’s complex reading of the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita.” Did Martínez view the Libro as a work as misogynistic as his own? Did he hope to correct some of its ambiguities and excesses? Did he feel its message was not clear and strong enough? Or were the complexities we would like to find in the Libro in fact lost on the Archpriest of Talavera? Did he see the Archpriest of Hita as just another compiler whose works could be plundered for use in his own? Salto Miscellany In Martínez’s citation of “the Archpriest” on prudent speech, we may have seen the world of the versus intersect that of the Libro. We find a clear case of this phenomenon in another fifteenth-century mention of the Archpriest’s book: the so-called fragmento cazurro. After Deyermond’s considered exploration of these fragmentary texts (“Juglar’s”), this designation seems entirely inappropriate. I refer to it here by the descriptive but unloaded name “salto miscellany” in view of its second-most memorable lines: “agora quiero dar vn salto cual nunca dio cavalo rrucio nin castano” (C/N 609, ll. 18–19: “Now I want to give a jump like no gray or chestnut horse ever gave”). I do not believe we have enough evidence to determine whether these notes were destined for use in preaching or were merely some reader’s personal collection of favorite sententiae. Whether the per-

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son who wrote them here was their collector or was merely copying from yet another collection (as I think is more likely), clearly some medieval person felt they somehow belonged together. The miscellany is found on the final three leaves of a manuscript of a Galician-Portuguese version of the Crónica de Espanha dating, according to Menéndez Pidal, from the first half of the fourteenth century (Salamanca, Universidad 2497). The same scholar dates the salto miscellany to the first half of the fifteenth century (Poesía 388). The most famous line invokes the auctoritas of “the Archpriest”: “Agora comencemos del libro del açipreste; toma aqueste dexenpro que vos dixere” (“Let us begin now from the book of the Archpriest; take whatever he says as an exemplum”). As Deyermond pointed out, the second part of the heading places the miscellany squarely in the world of learned didacticism (“Juglar’s” 221). Like the Archpriest of Talavera, the compiler of these texts finds in the “açipreste” a source of exemplary wisdom. The miscellany includes citations of slightly garbled versions of stanzas 491d, 492ab, 493abd, and 547. These stanzas deal with the consequences of the abuse of wine and with the power that money wields in Rome. They are quoted in reverse order, a phenomenon we will see again. Material not found in any surviving scriptum of the Libro appears between the citations of 547d and 493a. Is this material by Juan Ruiz? Just where does the “Book of the Archpriest” end? With the famous “salto”? Or is the entire remainder attributed to Juan Ruiz? Let me return to the issue of the merging or mixing of cuaderna vía and verso texts, which I believe we find both here and in the Corbacho. The miscellany opens by citing a series of six versus, introduced with the formula: “Dizen otro verso” (C/N 605: “They say another versus”). Then follows the announcement, “Now let us begin the Book of the Archpriest.” Libro 547 is quoted immediately: “desque pesa mas el vino que el seso do[s] otres meajas | por eso sen contienen coyttas & malles y dollores e barajas | departian los onbres como picaças & gragas | el mucho vino es bueno en cubas & tinajas | mas non aca enlas cabeças” (C/N 607, ll. 3–7: “When the wine weighs two or three grains more than the brain, cares and evils and pains and fights are the result* [?]; men talk like magpies and crows; a lot of wine is good in tubs and pots, but not here in the head”).9 Compare G:23r;547: “do mas puJa el vino que el seso dos meaJas/ | fasen rroydo los beudos commo puercos ¬ grajas/ | por ende vienen muertos contiendas ¬ baraJas/ | mucho vino es bueno en cubas ¬ en tinaJas/” (“Where the wine rises two grains higher than the brain, drunks make noise like pigs and crows, and from this come dead people, quarrels, and brawls; a lot of wine is good in tubs and pots”). The version in the miscellany is more discursive, especially as it explains that wine is good in tubs and pots, but not in heads. “Here in our heads” suggests that whoever

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copied/remembered/emended the miscellany, be he juglar, preacher, or private individual, may have had the physical gesture of pointing to his head in mind. The third line quoted in the miscellany and Libro 547b show interesting contrasts: the salto miscellany portrays drunken chatter as sounding like “magpies and crows,” whereas the Libro compares it to “pigs and crows.” Although C/N identify this line in the miscellany with 547b, it is rather different from the version found in the known manuscripts of the Libro. We may simply be observing a variance in the orthographical register here (puercos/picaças), but magpies are certainly garrulous enough to fit the sense of the passage. In the lines of the miscellany immediately preceding the introduction of “the Archpriest’s” book, we find, however, a versus that restores pigs to their proper place in the critique of wine’s effect on the tongue: “Dizen otro verso | onbres con vino cochinos con frijo | fazen m[u]y gran rruydo” (605, ll. 22–24: “They say another versus: men with wine, pigs with cold, make a lot of noise”). Perhaps the compiler of the miscellany, having already put the verso mentioning “pigs” and “drunks” in his collection, modified 547b to avoid exact repetition. Perhaps the verso itself had been written beside the stanza in the scriptum of the Libro used by the compiler of the miscellany as its own gloss on Juan Ruiz. Such a verso may even have been the source of Juan Ruiz’s line, a source recognized and restored by the compiler of the miscellany. An Aragonese Student Anthology (after 1462) Perhaps the most unusual early mention of “the Archpriest’s” book appears in a manuscript anthology dedicated to a variety of language arts: Geoffroi of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, selections from Guido Faba’s Summa dictaminis; Laurentius de Aquilegia’s Ars dictaminis abbreviata, and finally Johannes Gallensis’s Breviloquium (Faulhaber, “Date” and “Medieval”).10 It also contains an anonymous and otherwise unknown Ars predicandi, published in part by Faulhaber (“Medieval” 53–58). References in the treatise suggest to Faulhaber that its author may have been “an Aragonese master at the University of Toulouse sometime during the 15th c” (44). Faulhaber also locates the manuscript’s composition in Aragon in the period 1462–1508 (Faulhaber, “Date” 33). The manuscript includes another unidentified treatise on accent, punctuation, and the cursus (BNM 9589, [1]r–[2]r).11 The section of this treatise that deals with punctuation includes among its examples of proper punctuation a gloss that cites Libro 553. The treatise is based ultimately on the system of punctuation per cola et commata introduced by Jerome in his translations of Isaiah and Ezekiel (Parkes, “Punctuation”). The marks were referred to variously as positurae or puncta or distinctiones,

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and both the specific marks used and the names given to them varied widely across both time and space. The system used in the Aragonese anthology is based on three distinctiones: media distinctio, called “comma” and written “./”, subdistinctio, called “colon” and written “.” , and plena distinctio, called “periodus” and written “;” .12 The media distinctio “est particula sententie decissa / qua audita animus auditoris suspenditur ad plus vlterius audiendum . . . ¬ voce tantum modo respirari [?] suspensa” (“is a separate particle of the sentence that, when heard, suspends the mind of the listener for listening further . . . and the voice, suspended, only breathes*”). Subdistinctio or “colon” “est pausa ./ qua audita quiescit animus audientis . Amplius nil expectans / tamen Intentio proferentis ad huc remanet in explecta [?]” (“is a pause that, when heard, the mind of the listener rests, not expecting anything more. Nevertheless, the intent of the speaker remains incomplete*”). Plena distinctio or “periodus” “est pausa siue punctus clausule terminalis . qua audita animus auditoris quiescit / loquentiS Intentio Iam finitur” (fol. [1]v: “is a pause or period of the terminal phrase that, once heard, the mind of the listener rests, the intent of the speaker now concludes”). At the close of the section on punctuation, the author offers two examples of the use of distinctiones. The first is from the Bible: Et harum distinctionum exemplum sit nobis In illo euangelii documentum .s. Si vis perfectus esse ./ ecce coma siue primam distinctionem ./ vade Et vende omnia que habes . ecce colum siue secundam distinctionem . Et da pauperibus ; ecce peryodum siue tertiam distinctionem ; (BNM 9589, [1]v) An example of this distinction is documented in the Gospel [Matthew 19:21], thus: If thou wilt be perfect ./ (this is the comma* or first distinction ./ ) go sell what thou hast . (this is the colon or second distinction . ) and give to the poor ; (and this is the period or third distinction ; ).

After “If thou wilt be perfect,” the mind of the listener awaits the completion of the phrase, specifically the information on just how one may be perfect. After “go sell what thou hast,” the sentence is complete grammatically and the listener has a complete thought to work with. Nevertheless, the speaker has more to say in order to complete his “intent”: “and give to the poor.” With this, the entire thought is complete and a period follows. A second example is drawn from a Latin work, which I have been unable to identify. Item alius modus exempli Tunc decimum [?] letus dolor In tristi gaudeo componitur ./ ecce comam ./ dum amor illicitus animas sauciat Inpudicam . ecce colum . ac vulnus Inflictum vsque Incoputrescenciam continuando deducit ; ecce periodus ; ([1]v)

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Item—another example: Then at last* [demum?] happy sadness is combined with sad joy ./ (here is the comma ./ ) when illicit love wounds unchaste* souls . (this is the colon . ) and the wound inflicted, continuing leads to putrefaction ; (this is the period ; ).

Here the “comma” or media distinctio is used as our comma when it separates two dependent clauses (“if” clauses, “then/when” clauses). The “colon” (written like our period) separates independent clauses usually joined by the conjunction “and.” The period (written like our semicolon) closes the completed thought or “period.” Immediately following the section of the treatise dealing with punctuation, someone, probably a reader rather than the scribe, has drawn a small five-pointed star ([1]v) that links this section to another star appearing on [2]r. In the large blank space following the closing dedication of the treatise, the annotator has written Libro 533: *Nota bene in romantio optimum exemplum de distinctionibus /¬ pausis Archipresbiteri hitensis Entodos las cosas / [.s. above line] en faular / y en al escoge mesura ./ [.i. above line] et loque es comunal . quar [above line: como] entodas las cosas posar mesuraual ./ a sin sin mesura todo parece mal ; *Note well an excellent example in the vernacular of distinctions and pauses by the Archpriest of Hita, thus: In all things / in speech / and everything else choose moderation / and what is common . for it is worthwhile to use moderation in all things ./ in the end* without moderation, everything appears bad ; .

The great interest of this mention of the Libro is the detail it reveals regarding how at least one medieval reader may have read and analyzed a stanza of Juan Ruiz’s book. It is the most minute bit of medieval criticism on the Libro we have and merits careful examination. First, we note a new sign not accounted for in the treatise itself: the simple slanted line without a dot beneath it, which follows “cosas” and “faular.” Here the person who has added this gloss shifts from the threefold system to a fuller system involving the virgula, the comma, the colon, and the period. A fifteenth-century Paris manuscript explains this system: “Et nota quod uirgula fit ad distincte proferendum dictiones cum quadam pausula, coma uero quando oratio est suspensiua, et colum quando perfecta est oratio; periodus autem quando nichil illi sententie potest addi” (Hubert, “Corpus” 168: “And note that the virgula is made in order to pronounce sentences clearly with a little pause, the comma when the sentence is suspended, and the colon when the sentence is complete; more-

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over, the periodus is used when nothing can be added to the sentence”). Our glossator is suggesting, then, a “little pause” after “cosas” and “faular.” The first use of the comma is after “escoge mesura.” This may surprise us. According to the system outlined in the treatise and illustrated in the examples I have cited, it seems that the colon, not the comma, is required here, as the sense is complete but the “speaker” has more to add. A second comma appears at the end of the third line of the stanza (“posar mesuraual”). This use is consonant with the treatise and its examples: the preceding “como” alerts the reader that another clause must follow. A colon appears at the close of the second line of the stanza. This usage follows that found in the treatise: the thought is complete, but the speaker has more to say. A period appears at the end of the final line of the stanza. The person who inserts the stanza from the Libro does not follow exactly the system laid out in the treatise, then. What we gain from this example, however, is a rare (perhaps unique) view of a late-medieval reader attempting to subject vernacular verse to the same rules of punctuation to which a biblical text and Latin prose (?) have been subjected.13 What is especially interesting is the way in which both a technical and an ethical lesson develop in parallel in these examples. We move from a lesson taught by Christ in the Gospel of Matthew to an excerpt on the evil effects of illicit love, and on to a vernacular comment on the importance of “mesura” in all things. One possible motive for using this stanza as a gloss on a treatise on punctuation and pausing, then, is that it deals with the subject of using “measure” in speech. There is a double message. One is the technical exemplum on punctuation and pausing; the other is the “lesson” on love taught by Don Amor (also a technical lesson of sorts). The example takes on specific ethical implications in the context of the Latin text, which portrays the unmeasured combination of extreme emotional states that lies at the heart of illicit love. For the reader who knew the context of the citation from Juan Ruiz’s book (Don Amor’s instruction on the art of love), the ironies would be still greater. Lord Love lectures about “measure”; love itself is immoderate. The two examples in the body of the treatise have no obvious thematic link, but the last two certainly do. Perhaps the example of “illicit love” in the treatise even suggested, thematically rather than technically, the citation from the Libro. We can see this principle of simultaneous technical and ethical amplification still more clearly in a second citation from “the Archpriest’s” book that appears in this manuscript (9r). This citation is a gloss to Geoffroi de Vinsauf’s Poetria nova ll. 319–21. This is in the section of the Poetria that treats “Amplification and Abbreviation,” specifically the subject of apostrophe. Geoffroi gives several examples of apostrophe, including one made to a timid man in time of adversity: “si corpus debile / mens sit | fortis . et

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exiguas vires suplere memento | spe grandi” (cf. Faral 207: “If the body is weak, let the spirit be strong; remember to supplement scant physical strength with great hope”). At this point, stanza 1450 appears as a marginal gloss: Iuxta dictum vulgare .s. ¶ El miedo es muy malo sin esfuerço ¬ ardit / esperança y / esfuerço vincen entoda lit / vienen los esforçados e dizen dat e ferit /. los couardes fuyendo mueren e / dizen foit Compare the vernacular saying, that is: “Fear is very bad without strength and daring; hope and strength win in any battle; the courageous come and say ‘hit’ and ‘strike’; the cowards, fleeing, die and say ‘run.’ ”14

“The Archpriest” is not identified here, only the fact that this is a “vernacular saying.” The citation from the Libro extends the ethical range of the example cited in the text. It is a further moral lesson about fear and how to deal with it. More than this, it is another saying that may be used in an apostrophe to a timorous person. I have stressed the personal, private uses to which ethical material might be put by individual readers, but clearly this material could also be invoked in an active, social way. It not only served as a single reader’s “exhortation,” but also furnished him or her with material with which to “exhort” others. The technical lesson on rhetoric is expanded, through the examples it cites, into the larger ethical world that surrounds all rhetoric. These examples again suggest a dual “rhetoric” in medieval technical texts, such as grammars and rhetorics, that contained sententiae, proverbs, exempla. The phrases were not devoid of ethical import simply because they were used to illustrate a technical point. In both these citations, the reader/ glossator is clearly aware of the ethical sense of the passage even as he or she uses it to gloss a technical problem.

Auctoritas without an auctor: Lope García de Salazar, Bienandanzas y fortunas (1471–76) The Vizcayan nobleman Lope García de Salazar was born in 1399 and died in 1476 (Sharrer 3–4). He wrote the Bienandanzas y fortunas (Good Luck and Bad), a universal history, in the final years of his life, while held prisoner by two of his sons in his house in San Julián de Musques. The Bienandanzas draws upon a number of sources: the Trojan legend, a prose version of the Alexander legend, the Mocedades Rodrigo, various works of gnomic literature such as the Bocados de oro, as well as the postVulgate Roman du Graal (Sharrer 11–12). In his prologue, Salazar speaks of his lifelong quest for books both in Spain and through agents abroad

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(Sharrer 5–6). Salazar no doubt had a rich library, then, in the home that served as his prison. In this library there may also have been a copy of at least the opening portions of the Archpriest’s book (Armistead, “Unnoticed” and “Two”). For Salazar, the Libro serves primarily as a source for more famous auctoritates: “Cato,” Aristotle, David, and Solomon. At no time does he mention that “the Archpriest” is the source of the material he uses. In the prologue to his entire compilation, Salazar cites familiar lines from the Disticha Catonis: “Interpone tuis interdum gaudia curis.” But the citation is not in Latin but in the language of Juan Ruiz (I number sections for comment below): E tomando e obrando de [1] lapalabra del sabio caton enque dixo:- quel ome a las sus cuytas que tiene enel su coracon que entreponga plazeres e alegre Razon que la mucha tristeza Mucho pecado pon. en lo qual [2] el profeta dauid dixo en vn salmo alabando al señor · que da entendimiento ememoria e Razon e mantenimiento atodas cosas: que el crio [3] /o trosi loque dize el apostol enel apocalibssi obra buena no se puede hazer sin buen cimiento epor que dios es comienco emedio efin de toda cosa comencare mi libro e tomare por cimiento el nonbre del ·: padre e del hiJo e del espiritu santo (BNM 1634, 2r)15 And taking and putting into practice [1] the word of the wise man Cato in which he said: that man should mix in some pleasures and happy thoughts with the cares that he has in his heart, for much sadness causes much sin. On which [2] the prophet David said in a Psalm praising the Lord who gives understanding and memory and reason and sustenance to all the things he created. [3] And the Apostle also says in the Apocalypse, “Good works cannot be done without a good foundation,” and because God is the beginning and the middle and the end of all things, I will begin my book and will take for foundation the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Compare passage [1] with the version of G, which Armistead (“Unnoticed” 90) feels is closer to the text cited here: “palabra es del sabio ¬ disela gaton | . . . | que omne asus cuydadoS que tiene enelsu coraçon | entreponga plaseres ¬ alegre rrason [cf. S:4v;44: ‘la rrazon’] | Cala mucha triStesa mucho pecado [S: ‘coydado’] pon” (G:2v;44: “It is a word of the wise man and Cato says it: a man should mix pleasures and happy speech with the cares he has in his heart, for much sadness gives rise to much sin”). Armistead suggests (“Unnoticed” 90 n.4) that the reference to Psalms that follows (passage 2) is to Ps. 31, which, in the Archpriest’s exegesis, refers to “memory, understanding, and will,” though not to “reason” or to the “sustenance to all creatures.” As far as I know, Juan Ruiz is the only exegete to give this interpretation to “intellectum tibi

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dabo.” Thus the reference must be to Juan Ruiz’s prologue, and the mention of “mantenimiento” must be an anticipation of the lines from Aristotle that he quotes at 71c (and that Salazar also cites later on). Although the evidence for Salazar’s knowledge of the prologue is at this point rather thin, further confirmation, not cited in evidence by Armistead, appears in passage 3. These words also echo, rather strongly, the close of Juan Ruiz’s prologue and cuaderna vía line 11a: E por que toda buena obra es comienço E fundamento dios ¬ la fe catholica . . . do este non es çimiento non se puede fazer obra firme nin firme hedifiçio ¶ Segund dize el apostol ¶ Por ende començe mi libro enel nonbre de dios . . . Dyos padre dios fiJo dios spiritu santo (S:2v) And because God and the Catholic faith are the beginning and foundation of * all good works . . . where He is not the foundation, firm works cannot be done nor a firm building, as the Apostle says. And so, I began my book in the name of God . . . God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The evidence points to Salazar’s use of a manuscript or fragment that included both a text similar to G and the prologue that survives today in S alone (see Armistead, “Unnoticed” 90 n. 4). Salazar uses these fragments from the Archpriest’s book in two ways: as a source of authorities, and as a guide to the writing of prologues. Salazar takes the citation from “Cato” at 44 as his opening gambit. But then he links “Cato” to the Libro’s prose prologue, which takes “intellectum tibi dabo” as its thema. It seems, in fact, that it is not so much the logical flow of ideas that dominates from this point forward, but rather the structure of Juan Ruiz’s prologue. It is as if Salazar found this material in the prologue of the Libro, and, still imitating the prologue, took Juan Ruiz’s interpretation of the Psalm rather uncritically as equally appropriate to his own prologue. Finally, the close of Juan Ruiz’s prologue, including the citation of “el apostol” (but not of “el apostol en el apocalibssi”), serves as a lead-in to the capsule summary and justification of the literary use of exempla that comprises the rest of García’s prologue. A second series of citations from the Libro is found on RAH 9–10–2/ 2100 fol. 190 (according to Rodríguez Herrero’s aberrant numbering; see Armistead, “Two”). It occurs in a section that follows the story of Alexander the Great and that lists, florilegium-style, the dichos of various sabios of old: ¶ E dixo el sabio aristotiles entre /otraS muchas cosas que por dos cosas se Reuolvio todo el mundo. la primera por [que?: Armistead] omnes /¬ por anjmalias /¬ aves /¬ pescados /¬ toda cosa biua buscan la mantenençia

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/andando /atienpos en busca della por todo eL mundo / ¶ E la /otra por buscar los maS las fenbras para multiplicar ¶ E tomar plazer conellas /. And the wise man Aristotle said, among many other things, that the world goes round for two things: the first, because men and animals and birds and fishes and all living things seek sustenance, going around in search of it throughout the whole world. And the other, to look for females in order to multiply and take pleasure with them.16

I quote the corresponding lines in S:6v;71: “¶ Commo dize aristotiles /cosa es verdadera | el mundo por dos cosas / trabaJa por la primera | por aver mantenençia / la otra cosa era | por aver Juntamiento / con fenbra plazentera” (“As Aristotle says, it’s true, the world works for two things, for the first, to have sustenance, the other thing was to be joined with a pleasing female”). The extended list of God’s creatures who seek maintenance may also derive from S:6v;73b: “omnes aves animalias / toda bestia de cueva” (“men, birds, animals, every beast of the caves”). The second stanza referred to is 105, uniquely preserved in S:8v: “¶ E dixo el sabio salamon /entre los suS proberbios. todas las cosas del mundo son vanidad ¶ E asi commo se vienen se van conla su hedad /¬ amar /adios /¬ serbirlo- es lo meJor del.” (fol. 190: “And the wise man Solomon said, among his proverbs, that all things of the world are vanity [Eccles. 1:2] and just as they come they go with time and to love God and to serve Him is the best in it”). Here the verbal parallels are closer: “¶ Commo dize salamon ¬ dize la verdat | que las cosas del mundo todas son vanidat | todas son pasaderas van se conla hedat | ssaluo amor de dios /todas sson lyuiandat” (“As Solomon says, and he says true, all the things of the world are vanity, all are ephemeral, they go with time; except for the love of God, they are all frivolity”). The parallels to the text here are obvious enough, but it is also worth noting the similarities with the rubric that precedes S:8v;105: “De como todas las cossas del mundo sson vanidat sinon amar adios” (“On How All the Things in the World Are Vanity, Except to Love God”). We may speculate a bit on the physical state of the text as known to Salazar.17 The stanzas taken from the Libro all begin new sections in S and therefore follow rubrics. Could it be that Salazar was extracting his auctoritates from the Libro using rubrics or other forms of division as a guide? Could he have been using an extract in which someone had already done so? The fact that in the final citation (on the vanities of earthly things) the quote resembles the rubric as much as it resembles the cuaderna vía section may help to confirm this.18 But the rubrics themselves do not contain the names of the authorities cited. Did the manuscript Salazar had before him signal auctoritates by name in the margin?19 Salazar uses whatever scriptum of the Libro was available to him as a source of authority on how one should begin a Christian didactic book.

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But, even more than the Archpriest of Talavera, Salazar uses “the Archpriest” as a convenient lens through which to view still more ancient authorities: “Cato,” Aristotle, David, Solomon. The reader who knows the context of these citations may be surprised to see that Salazar misses the deflating humor that accompanies them in Juan Ruiz’s book. PseudoCato’s mandate for the inclusion of pleasure in life is used by Juan Ruiz to justify the inclusion of “bulrras” (S:4v;45: “jokes”) in his book. Aristotle’s naturalist observation serves to justify the insatiable sexual appetite of mankind in general and of the Archpriest in particular (72–76). Solomon is soberly brought in merely to enable the Archpriest to come to terms with his rejection by his first dueña. If “all things in the world are vanity,” then “rresponder do non me llaman” (S:9r;106c: “to answer when they do not call me,” that is, “to love when I am not wanted”) is also a vanity. In the excerpts by Salazar, the sententious “wisdom” of the Libro takes precedence over, perhaps willfully ignores, what for us are clearly dominant humorous perversions of that wisdom. Salazar’s reading, like so many other readings we have seen, is selective, out of context, in the service of goals other than those of literary interpretation or appreciation. In his prologue, Salazar views Juan Ruiz’s prologue as the framework for the “firm edifice” on which he wishes to construct his own. Salazar picks his way through the Juanruizian minefield quite gingerly. Or, to return to medieval metaphors, he picks up the moral grain of the Libro and blows away the chaff.

Personal Miscellanies Auctoritates were frequently collected in the Middle Ages and beyond in florilegia or in personal miscellanies and copia books. In these, material selected from a source text was not integrated into new works, as in the cases of Salazar and of the Archpriest of Talavera. Instead, auctoritates were rearranged topically, alphabetically, by auctor, or simply in the order in which they were encountered. Their context is not as much the scriptum from which they were taken as it was the ethical context created by an individual excerptor based on his or her estimation of the value of a given auctoritas at the moment. The Aragonese Anthology and the Salto Fragments as Personal Miscellanies Portions of the Aragonese anthology and the salto fragments seem to be miscellanies in the sense I have just described: they contain material from two or more sources. In the case of the Aragonese anthology, we have already seen how material, sometimes related only tangentially to the

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work being anthologized in the manuscript, is brought into the margins by student annotators. But there are other sections of the manuscript, most notably 67v, in which miscellaneous material, including citations from the Libro, is jumbled together with no apparent regard for system (Faulhaber, “Date” 32 and n. 7). Here the gradually diminishing space on the manuscript leaf as it filled with citations, rather than any systematic arrangement of auctoritates, seems to have been the major factor in determining the “arraying” of material. Similarly, in the salto fragments the relation among the parts is not always clear. The compiler seems at times to be recalling from memory snippets from a variety of sources, writing them down as he remembers them. On the other hand, the curious fact that stanzas drawn from the Libro are quoted in reverse order hints that a physical copy of the Libro may have been involved at some level. This phenomenon of backward copying appears in another personal miscellany that cites the Libro. dlvar Gómez de Castro There is no question that the lines of transmission of the Libro are both complex and varied, holding many surprises for us. A fine illustration of this is found in the fragments of the Libro copied by the Toledan humanist, dlvar Gómez de Castro (1515–80; Sánchez Cantón, “Siete”; Moffat, “dlvar”; Deyermond, “Juglar’s” 217–18). This postmedieval miscellany includes, among several known stanzas from the Doña Endrina episode, seven lines (including one full stanza) that are found in no other surviving scriptum of the Libro. They probably come from sections of the Doña Endrina episode that are lacunous in other surviving scripta. These lines illustrate the important point that even such an apparently straightforward project as examining “medieval readings of the Libro de buen amor” may be frustrated by the physical realities of the manuscript text, the contingencies of physical transmission, and the arbitrary lines of demarcation we establish. Seven lines of the Libro are, technically speaking, not medieval.20 It is difficult to establish clearly the reasons for Castro’s selections. Some lines appear chosen simply for their sententious force: “Estorua grande hecho pequeña ocasion, | desesperar el ome, es perder coraçon. | que gran trabajo cunple quantos deseos son.” (facsimile before C/N 601 = 804abc: “A small happening can ruin a great deed; for a man to lose hope is just to lose heart; great effort can accomplish anything you desire”). The citations of 781–82 may also fall into this class. Others may show an interest in elements of that art of love Juan Ruiz assures us in his prologue is also a part of his book, for example, 710cd: “pues ella fue casada creed que no se sienta, | que no ha mula de albarda que la carga no consienta.” (C/N 601: “Since she was married before she won’t mind, trust me, | there is no pack mule who will not consent to being loaded”).

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Other citations may offer the disappointed lover some consolation (782 and 796 or the new lines i–vi). I cite two of the new lines (facsimile before C/N 601): “De señor, y de amada, y de monte, y de Rio | alas uezes con algo, alas uezes vazio /” (i–ii: “A lord, a lover, a mountain, a river, sometimes with something, sometimes empty”). An interest in proverbial expression may explain why Castro included what appears to be the transition into a fable (“De mal en peor andan [co]mo el lobo a las hormigas/”; vii: “They go from bad to worse, like the wolf to the ants”). “Like the wolf to the ants” would be another way of saying “things are going from bad to worse.” Some lines may have been included simply as examples of colorful speech (829cd), such as “mezquino, magrillo, no ay mas carne en el / que en vn pollo inuernizo despues de san miguel/” (facsimile before C/N 601: “Wretched, scrawny thing, there is no more meat on him than on a winter chicken after Saint Michael’s Day”).21 Any attempt to assign specific motives to Castro’s selections must consider that all the previously known verses are copied in roughly reverse order. This is strong evidence for the “discontinuous” attitude toward literature. The reader works against the flow of the narration, reducing the possibility that he or she will be distracted by the story itself from the task of gathering flowers. Or perhaps we glimpse here a practice in which stanzas were marked as one read through the text. Then one flipped back through, copying marked stanzas into one’s copybook. The physical realities of medieval and Renaissance “scriptual” transmission seem to have been as strong a factor in the selection made as any thematic motives we might devise. We see the physical text’s influence in the Castro miscellany in other ways. All the lines quoted appear in the section between 710c and 829d. It may very well be that these were the only lines found in Castro’s source. Or 710–829 may have belonged to a separate gathering from a scriptum of the Libro.22 For this reason we should use great care in suggesting that these fragments somehow represent a “reception” of an integral text called the Libro de buen amor. This “text” was received in fragmented form—that is, in physically fragmented form—and was handed on in still more fragmentary form. Castro’s verses are a reception of a scriptum, but here, the essential physical properties of that scriptum and the physical process of working through it may be as important in shaping its mode of “reception” as any particular “textual” aesthetics.

Juan Ruiz as Poetic Model For many students of the Libro, Juan Ruiz’s sense of himself as a poet is the salient feature of the poem (see especially Zahareas, Art). Both the marquis of Santillana and Argote respond to, or at least second, Juan

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Ruiz’s declarations of his poetic skill. But, curiously, when we examine the works of late fourteenth- through late sixteenth-century poets who seem to have been influenced by Juan Ruiz’s verse, although the poetry survives, Juan Ruiz’s name is lost. “The Archpriest” is remembered as an auctor; Juan Ruiz is forgotten as a poet (or his name is suppressed). We are only beginning to appreciate the degree of Juan Ruiz’s influence on Castilian poets in the two-and-a-half centuries following the creation of the Libro. The Rimado del palaçio by Pero López de Ayala (1332–1407) follows the Libro as the last major work in the cuaderna vía tradition. One has only to page through the edition and notes by Joset (who also knows the Libro intimately) to see how profound an influence Juan Ruiz must have had on the rhymes, vocabulary, themes, and expressions of the Rimado. Even the cuaderna vía verses by which Ayala introduces the lyric pieces scattered through his book remind us of the razos with which Juan Ruiz introduced his lyrics, devout and profane. Ayala’s lyrics are all devout, of course, but their devotion often appears inspired by the forms and meditative tone of Juan Ruiz’s religious lyric. This is not to say that Ayala—or any of the poets I discuss here—is another Juan Ruiz. The poetic skill that serves Juan Ruiz’s wit is turned to wholly devout purposes in the Rimado. Juan Ruiz is in the Rimado in what we miss as well. I turn now to look at several poets whose works show traces of readings of the Libro. The Cancionero de Baena The Cancionero de Baena was put together in the years just prior to the death of its compiler, Juan Alfonso de Baena, in the early 1430s (Weiss, Poet’s 15). Its contents reflect the poetry being written in Castile as early as the 1370s, however. Its earliest poems, then, are a bit earlier than the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Libro. In the Cancionero de Baena, we find a rich and complex collection of readings. Poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries strike us at times as too familiar with Juan Ruiz’s own “cancionero.” Early students of the Libro, such as Lecoy (204), Lida (“Notas” 112–21), Le Gentil (1: passim), and Moffat (“Evidence”), picked up Juan Ruiz’s traces in the works of López de Ayala, Villasandino, Garcí Sánchez de Jerena, Diego de Valencia, Fernán Sánchez de Calavera, Ruy Páez de Ribera, Ferrán Manuel de Lando, Pero Ferruz, and Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, among others. Recently both Deyermond (“Early”) and Gerli (“Fernán”) have explored some of these relations in more detail and have added to the list. The Cancionero de Baena seems haunted by the Libro at every level, from its use of language, its rhyme, and the rhythm of its phrases to its choice of themes and imagery. We will never be able to measure the true extent of Juan Ruiz’s direct influence on the Baena collection, however. On the one hand, we know

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too little about poetry in Castile in the years between the appearance of Juan Ruiz’s book and the earliest poets of the Cancionero. We might find, were such evidence to become available, that many features of the poems that we identify with Juan Ruiz had become (or were already before Juan Ruiz) stock features of poetic expression in Castilian. On the other hand, we should recognize that the influence of Juan Ruiz on Baena may be greater than we have thought. Numerous love lyrics announced by Juan Ruiz do not appear in any known scriptum of the Libro. Juan Ruiz may lurk unrecognized, then, behind the few love poems of the Baena poets. In this section I examine three poetic cycles that illustrate some of the complexities of the Baena poets’ readings of the Libro. “DEZIR DE PERO FERRUZ APERO LOPEZ DE AYALA”

This poem is from the late fourteenth or very early fifteenth century. It was certainly written before 1407, the date of death of Pero López de Ayala, the dezir’s addressee (Baena, ed. Azáceta, no. 305). Deyermond (“Early” 320) argues that it is one of our earliest readings of the Libro. Ferruz takes to task “los que tanto /. profazades | quela syerra / vos enoJa” (Baena, Cancionero [facs.] 106v; Baena, ed. Azáceta, no. 305, ll. 1–2: “You who complain that the mountains bother you”). It is a poem about fear and cowardice. After praising the heroes of ancient and recent history who could not have accomplished their great deeds had they feared the cold and other inconveniences, Ferruz returns in the final stanzas to an encomium of the mountains and the life there. At this point, Ferruz engages in a dialogue with Juan Ruiz, answering point-for-point the critique of the sierra contained in the latter’s serrana poems (Deyermond, “Early”). Sy non ay /. las frutas muchas pero son /. nobles ¬ sanas las dueñas /. non son vyllanas nin se pagan /. delas luchas nin es mala /. esta frontera de monte /. nin de rrybera ¬ nin ay /. mengua de truchas. (108r; no. 305, ll. 204–10) No, there are not a lot of fruits, but they are noble and healthy; the ladies are not peasants and do not enjoy wrestling; nor is this region bad in the mountains or along the rivers, nor is there a lack of trout.

This stanza appears to be a direct reply to stanza 969 of the Libro: Ҧ de buen vino vn quartero / manteca de vacas mucha | mucho queso assadero

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/ leche natas&vna trucha | dize luego hadeduro / comamos deste pan duro | despues faremos la lucha” (S:57v: “A quart of good wine, a lot of cows’ butter, a lot of roasted cheese, milk, cream, and one trout; she says: ‘Wretch, let’s eat this hard bread and then we’ll wrestle’ ”). As Deyermond observed (320), the stanza by Ferruz uses the same rhyme, -ucha (although in the plural), found in the Archpriest’s lyric.23 The “one trout” offered by the serrana to the traveler is answered by Ferruz’s assurance that “there is no shortage of trout.” The serrana’s eagerness for a postprandial “lucha” (“tussle”) is countered by Ferruz’s claim that the “dueñas” of the mountains “do not like ‘luchas.’ ” This part of the poem simply cannot be read without Juan Ruiz’s text. Its denials of the rigors of life in the mountains are totally dependent on Juan Ruiz’s description of mountain miseries. In criticizing those who “complain that the mountains bother” them, Ferruz works out whatever anxiety of influence he may have felt toward Juan Ruiz: the Archpriest is painted, tacitly, as a coward and liar. In later verses, Ferruz argues that his audience has never seen the rosycheeked girls of the sierra, only the ugly mountain savages with whom they are accustomed to “fight.” Here the poem may be echoing a particular structure found in 1006–42: the two sides of the serrana (and sirena; cf. my “Cantigas”). The cuaderna vía section describes an apocalyptically grotesque serrana (1006–21). This is immediately followed by a lyric purporting to narrate the same encounter, but which refers to the serrana as “fermosa ¬ loçana ¬ bien colorada” (G:50r;1024de: “beautiful, gay and rosy-cheeked”; note the repetition of “colorada”). This compliment may have been paid ironically, of course. The mask slips a bit when the lyric refers to her as “la heda” (G:50v;1040a: “the ugly one”; see below). These ironies and contrasts are taken up in Ferruz’s poem. El frio /. que mal queredes les faze /. ser coloradas blancas rruuias /. ¬ degaldas las quales /. vos nunca vedes sy non las /. feas montesas que estan /. tras las artesas cuyas luchas /. vos tenedes (108r; no. 305, ll. 211–17) The cold you hate makes them rosy, white, fair, and slim. Those you never see; you only see the ugly mountain beasts who are behind the troughs, the ones with whom you “fight.”

Ferruz’s closing lesson on the power of money seems a rather crass conclusion to a poem that begins so heroically. But it makes considerably

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more sense when read in the context of the mercenary aims of the serrana of Juan Ruiz’s verse. Compare Ferruz’s final lines, “tal vyrtud /. ha la moneda | cara triste /. faze Leda | ¬ apuesta /. el muy feo” (108r; no. 305, ll. 222–24: “Money has this virtue: it makes a sad face happy and an ugly* one pretty”) with the closing lines of the serrana episode in the Libro (1040–42): “¶ Dixo me la heda | do non ay moneda | non ay merchandia | nin ay tan buen dia | nin cara pagada” (S:61v;1040: “The ugly one told me: ‘Where there is no money, there’s no sale; nor is the day as good or the face so happy’ ”). Here again, the structure of Juan Ruiz’s serranilla seems to take over from the poet’s initial artistic or thematic goals and to come to dominate, in inverse key. FERRAND MANUEL DE LANDO

Moffat dates this allusion to the Libro to the early years of the fifteenth century because of its attribution to Ferrand Manuel de Lando, probably an old man in 1414 (“Evidence” 38). The section in question appears as part of an ongoing debate between Ferrand Manuel and Baena himself (nos. 359–63).24 The driving force behind this series seems to be the difficult rhymes in -esta and -ique maintained through five “requestas” and “repuestas.” The -ique rhyme serves Baena in this and another poem (no. 358) because it rhymes with the name of Don Fadrique de Castro, nephew of Enrique II, and one of the judges of the poetic debate. The debate soon degenerates into a series of vituperations in which, among other niceties, Baena accuses Ferrand Manuel of having soiled his saddle in fear (133v; no. 361 l. 10). Ferrand Manuel replies with a reference to a tale also found in the Archpriest’s book: “Señor Juan alfonso /. pintor de taurique | qual fue pitas payas /. el dela fablilla | maguer vos andades /. aca por la villa | a vuestra muger /. bien ay quien la nique” (133v; no. 362, ll. 9–12: “Señor Juan Alfonso, painter of the little bull, just as Pitas Payas of the fable was, although you go about right here in town, there is still someone who ‘nicks’ your wife”). “Although you go about right here in town” sets up a direct contrast with the Breton painter’s lengthy absence in the Libro (474–89). But there is little else here to assure us that Juan Ruiz’s book is the direct source of the story. Other versions are known, though all of them are later (Lecoy 158–60; Labrador and DiFranco 407 n. 20). What is clear is that Don Pitas Payas, “the one in the story,” is a recognized literary figure, recognized not only by the poets involved in the debate but also by the members of the court, including the king, who would hear it and judge it. The example of wifely infidelity is applied to the real figure of Juan Alfonso de Baena. He is even more neglectful than Pitas Payas, in fact. She is even more brazen in her infidelity.

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VILLASANDINO AND PÉREZ DE GUZMdN

Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino’s (d. 1424) “Profeçia de AlfonSo aluarez Contra El CardeNal” (“Prophecy of Alfonso Alvarez against the Cardinal”), found in the Cancionero de Baena, echoes rhymes of the Libro’s troba cazurra “Cruz cruzada, panadera” (stanzas 115–20). A professional poet, Villasandino was probably working as a hired quill in this attack on the hated cardinal. The difficult rhymes in -uz of Juan Ruiz’s zéjel (found only in S) are a central part of Villasandino’s work in the “Profeçia.” Crucial words such as luz (“light”), cruz (“cross”), and marfuz (“traitor”) appear in both poems. The “Profeçia” spawns a cycle of poems (40r–43r, nos. 115–31) written at the time of the fall from royal grace and subsequent exile of Pedro Fernández de Frías, Cardinal de Spain, in 1405 (Gerli, “Fernán”). El sol ¬ la luna / esclarezcan su luZ por que saturno /. amanse su saña ¬ sean mouidas /. las partes despaña en desfazimiento /. del gran abestruz en quanto atañe /. al pro dela cruz el alto maestro /. anpare ¬ ordene en tal guyssa el mundo / por que çedo pene el asno aborrydo . Linage marfuz. (40r; 115, ll. 1–8) May the sun and the moon brighten so that Saturn tames his rage, and may the regions of Spain be aroused for the destruction of the great ostrich; as it relates to the benefit of the Cross, may the Master on high protect and order the world so that the hated ass, of traitorous lineage, will swiftly suffer.

This and the following four stanzas of the “Profeçia,” which are also written in an astrological key, invoke various pagan gods/planets in the punishment of this corrupt churchman for the sins of which we find him accused in other sources: greed, abuse of power, sodomy, simony, “uncleanness” (Gerli, “Fernán”). Villasandino celebrates the realization of his prophecy in a “Respuesta” apparently written after Frías’s fall (40v–41r; no. 116). A dezir by Pérez de Guzmán appears later in the cycle. It introduces a negative note in the midst of all the rejoicing: the former cardinal is still in Soria. All will not be well until he leaves Spain for good. This dezir invokes the same rhymes reminiscent of Juan Ruiz’s troba cazurra on the baker-girl: cruz, marfuz, and luz. Villasandino responds, in a final poem based on this rhyme scheme, that Pérez de Guzmán should not worry about such delay

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tactics as everyone in Spain is out to get the cardinal. It is only a matter of time. In his study of Pérez de Guzmán’s poem, Gerli argues that Juan Ruiz’s poem on his lust for the baker-girl is a subtext. Juan Ruiz’s poem portrays a cleric gone astray in the pursuit of earthly, earthy love, and Pérez de Guzmán echoes the idea of a corrupt and lustful clergyman: “By glossing the latter [that is, “Cruz cruzada”], it draws an explicit comparison between the morally degenerate archpriest-protagonist of the Libro and Pedro de Frías, a contemporary churchman who, like the fictional character, has lost sight of the true light and the way” (370). It is clear from a reading of the entire cycle that the possibility of a reference to the Libro should be extended first to Villasandino and then to the cycle as a whole. The scenario would be that Villasandino read Juan Ruiz’s troba cazurra as a commentary on clerical lujuria, perhaps, as Gerli has elsewhere suggested, through a parody on the via verae crucis (Gerli, “Mal”). Villasandino would then have chosen a rhyme scheme for his “Profeçia” against Frías that echoed these rhymes and specific rhyme words. These echoes would allow him to heap one more layer of opprobrium upon the cardinal. Pérez de Guzmán, who picks up the rhyme and the same rhyme words from Villasandino, would be either a witting or an unwitting participant in the game. This scenario is useful in that it illustrates a liminal situation where the part of the tradition that we identify as Libro begins to merge indistinguishably with a larger textual world, where the lines of relation become so nebulous that it is impossible to verify their existence at all. Is this poem a gloss on the Libro’s troba cazurra? If so, is it, as Gerli observes, an indication that fifteenth-century readers understood Juan Ruiz’s poem as a satire on corrupt clergymen? Unfortunately, the argument becomes circular at this point. It is already based on an interpretation of the troba cazurra as a satire on the clergy rather than as, say, an “erotic” or “venatory” or liturgical parody (Vasvari, “Semiología”), or a satire on lovers in general (or all of the above). Here modern interpretations, historical context, and verbal play all work together both to suggest and to deny certainty of interpretation. If the Libro is behind this cycle, we may be safest in giving priority to the rhyme in -uz as the link. The early fifteenth-century poets who read the Archpriest’s book or knew his lyrics would certainly have considered the difficult rhyme to be one of his verços estraños (T:37r;1634d: “difficult, rare lyrics”). For Villasandino, professional poet, we might posit some perceived economic value in linking his works to those of Juan Ruiz. But I think it is difficult to go beyond this. There is only a limited number of words ending in -uz, and the cycle soon exhausts them. There is noth-

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ing to have prevented Villasandino from choosing this challenging rhyme on his own (or from borrowing the rhyme without thinking of the thematic parallels). The words bearing this rhyme already suggest the theme of treachery to true religion: luz, cruz, marfuz, andaluz (as in “Moor from Al-Andalus”). This cycle of poems remains, then, a tantalizing hint of the Libro, a possible trace, which effaces itself as soon as we try to clarify it. The Cancionero de Baena is an early and extensive reading of Juan Ruiz’s Libro. The poets in it engage in direct dialogue with its language, rhymes, and themes. In addition, characters in the book—the effete lowland Archpriest, Don Pitas Payas—become negative exemplary types that can be “applied” to living persons, in jest or in earnest, as part of the satiric activity of poetic “blame.” But Juan Ruiz’s book continues to serve as a poetic model in the second half of the fifteenth century, and beyond. The readings grow less dependent on the specifics of language and rhyme. Juan Ruiz’s characters continue to serve as satiric mirrors for ridiculing the mores of late fifteenth-century public figures. But as time passes, Juan Ruiz is more often read through the gloss already worked out by poets such as Santillana and Ferrand Manuel. It is their development of Juanruizian genres such as the cántica de serrana which later poets seize upon for their own creations. “Esparsa hecha al Duque de Villahermosa quando se caso con Maria de Soto” The Libro contained memorable portraits of human foibles. The most developed of these was Juan Ruiz’s adaptation of the Latin elegiac comedy Pamphilus, whose Pamphilus and Galathea are transformed into Don Melón de la Huerta and Doña Endrina. These characters serve the cause of political and personal satire in a poem probably written in 1476 or 1477, but not collected, as far as we know, until the mid-sixteenth century. Whinnom, who published this poem (“Fifteenth”), takes a cautious stance in terms of its possible relation to the Libro. Don Melón and Doña Endrina could, after all, have been folkloric figures used independently by both Juan Ruiz and the author of this “esparsa.”25 Whinnom identified the duke of Villahermosa of the poem’s title as Alfonso of Aragon, the illegitimate son of Juan II of Aragon, and the woman he married as Leonor, not María, de Soto, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabel. Alfonso was then in his sixties and Leonor apparently much younger, one of the factors, in addition to the possible birth of an unwanted heir, that led Juan to oppose the marriage (Whinnom, “Fifteenth”).

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Sepa el rey y sepan todos quantos en su carta son que por muy ceuiles modos doña Endrina y don Melon se casaran hasta los codos. Don Melon es desaguisando a guisa de cocatriz doña Endrina y su nariz an de andar siempre picando entrel cuero y la ceruiz. (Whinnom, “Fifteenth” 91–92) Let the King and everyone who is in his bad books know that in a very civil way Doña Endrina and Don Melón will marry come hell or high water. Don Melón is bold as a cockatrice; Doña Endrina and her nose will always have to go pecking between the skin and the nape of the neck.26

Whinnom suggests some possible explanations for the final verse, but as with so many other songs of occasional satire, it remains difficult at our remove from the events narrated to assign precise meaning to the hodgepodge of images that assaults us here. In this poem the vegetable forms of Don Melón (melon) and Doña Endrina (sloeberry) appear in new animal disguises: cockatrice/basilisk/ crocodile for Don Melón (according to Whinnom) and, perhaps, some sort of bird that pecks with its beak for Doña Endrina.27 But the key is the fact that both works present the couple as about to be married. Could part of the satire here be the suggestion that this was in some way a marriage of necessity like that portrayed in the Libro? Could the fact that Doña Endrina is a widow suggest some secrets in Doña Leonor’s past? Whinnom suggests that Don Melón and Doña Endrina may have been folkloric figures of a couple mismatched in age, as were Alfonso and Leonor. Because marriage plays a central role here, and in the absence of other clear references to Don Melón and Doña Endrina as a traditional couple, I am less skeptical than Whinnom about its status as direct reading of the Libro. The names rely too much on the overall context of the Libro for their sense, as I have suggested elsewhere (“Mulberries” and “Calame”). I believe they are Juan Ruiz’s creation. Contemporary personages become actors in a story written long before. The “Esparsa” transfers the blame attributable to Don Melón and Doña Endrina (he is essentially a rapist; she is “easy,” or maybe just naive) to the public figures of the duke of Villahermosa and his bride. In a similar way, we saw the biblical example of Sennacherib’s treachery applied to the duke’s father, John II of Aragon, in a manuscript gloss (Chapter 2). Public blame via satire is applied through fictional and biblical example.

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Serranillas and Dueñas chicas The readings we have reviewed thus far hold one surprise: among the surviving lyric pieces by Juan Ruiz, the serrana poems are quoted most often and most explicitly: once in Pero Ferruz’s line-by-line response to the Archpriest’s critiques of mountain girls (969 and 1006–42), and again in Argote’s direct citation of 1023–27. Juan Ruiz seems to have been the founder, if not the inventor, of the serranilla genre in Castilian, though he does not use this term. Le Gentil believes that Juan Ruiz began with the Galician-Portuguese variant on the Provençal pastourelle. In this variant, the shepherdess becomes a mountain girl. Juan Ruiz, relying on elements already present in the pastourelle, added elements of the sotte chanson, most notably the sexual aggressiveness of the mountain girl, to produce his own burlesque/grotesque genre (Le Gentil 1:546–50; see also Marino, Serranilla 2–41). These assertions make sense as long as we allow Juan Ruiz to have known an indigenous Iberian tradition of sotte chansons, not just the French tradition. In any case, it is clear that the cántica de serrana was Juan Ruiz’s most influential invention/adaptation. In the Carta e Prohemio, the marquis of Santillana attributes some poems “commo en serranas” to his grandfather Pedro González de Mendoza (1340–85), who was lord of Hita (interestingly enough) and Buitrago (Santillana 60 and note, p. 115). One of these is found in the Cancionero de Baena (no. 252, with additional stanzas quoted in Baena, ed. Azáceta 2:517 n. 252). A serranilla by the marquis’s father, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, is also known (Le Gentil 1:551–54). Ferruz’s critique of “those who complain that the mountains bother you so much” may have been intended, then, for a whole group of poets who engaged in writing serranillas. In fact, at the heart of Ferruz’s poem may lie a courtly poetic debate concerning whether the serrana is to be portrayed as a grotesque wild woman, as in Juan Ruiz’s work, or as a kinder, gentler, and more visually pleasing figure, as in the later poems by the marquis of Santillana. It is the marquis of Santillana himself who makes the greatest contribution to the serranilla tradition, writing ten of his own. These poems, rather than those of Juan Ruiz, may have had the most direct influence on poets following the marquis. At about the same time, Carvajal was composing his own serranillas at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon in Naples (Marino, Serranilla 109). As I have suggested (“Cantigas” 262–63 n. 28), like Ferruz, Carvajal may have been influenced by the juxtaposition of apocalyptic monstrosity and delicate beauty that appears in the final serrana sequence of the Libro (1006–42) and used it in his own sequence of encounters with two rustic women, one a grotesque serrana, the other a beautiful woodland nymph (Cancionero de Estúñiga nos. CLV–CLVI).

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Carvajal also writes a serranilla in which a mountain girl tells a lost traveler that women between the ages of thirteen and fifteen are ideal for love (no. CXXIII, ll. 13–20). Gerli (“Carvajal’s”) suggests that this is an allusion to Juan Ruiz’s poem in praise of dueñas chicas (“little women”; 1606–17). Chica would refer not to size, but to age. I find this an intriguing suggestion, although the praise of small women is offered at a place where Juan Ruiz is praising physically small books, not young books. In any case, poems about dueñas chicas are Juan Ruiz’s most enduring legacy. Labrador and DiFranco have found such poems late into the sixteenth century. In these cases, it seems unlikely that a direct reading of the Libro was involved. Rather, we must imagine a chain of readings and glosses across two centuries in which Juan Ruiz’s “little ladies” were handed on.

Textual Mergings The language of Juan Ruiz’s book deeply penetrated the consciousness of poets of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their readings of the Libro seem almost second nature, as if they had thoroughly internalized the Libro, “consumed” it. But poetry was not the only place where Juan Ruiz’s language made an impact. His versions of popular tales and exempla may well have become the “standard” version for Castilian speakers, whether through oral or written tradition. Manuscripts P and M of the Conde Lucanor Copyists of two fifteenth-century manuscripts of Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor amplify portions of two exempla told by Patronio with colorful motifs and language drawn from the Libro (Goyri 321). Blecua dates ms. P (Puñonrostro) to the beginning of the fifteenth century (Transmisión 13). In two places copyists have modified the text based on their knowledge of the Libro. In Conde Lucanor, Ejemplo 45, a poor man has sold his soul to “don Martín,” the devil, and has gradually enriched himself through theft. Finally the thief is caught. He calls to Don Martín for help. The version in J. M. Blecua’s edition (based on S) reads: “llamo a.don Martin que lo acorriesse; et don Martin llego muy apriessa et librolo de la prision” (Obras 2:370: “He called to Don Martín to come and help him, and Don Martín came quickly and freed him from prison”). The matter-of-fact “and he freed him from prison” was apparently unsatisfactory to the scribe of P. He preferred Juan Ruiz’s version: . . . acorriese; ¬ don Martin llego luego apriesa. Et seyendo ya judgado mandol don Martin que fuese ¬ metiese mano asu lynjauera ¬ conlo que fallase

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seria quito; ¬ aparto al alcalle, ¬ fallo en su lynjauera vna taça de plata, ¬ diola al alcalle; ¬ fizolo soltar luego. (ed. Krapf 170) . . . help him; and Don Martín came hurrying right away. And as the man had already been condemned, Don Martín ordered him to go and put his hand in his sack and with what he found there he would be free; and he took the judge aside and found in his sack a silver cup and he gave it to the judge and the judge freed him immediately.

This “silver cup” corresponds to the gold cup that the thief in Juan Ruiz’s version of the tale finds in his shirt following similar detailed instructions from the devil himself (1460). A bit later, the thief is taken again and this time finds himself about to be sent to the gallows. J. M. Blecua edits: Et puniendolo en.la forca, vino don Martin et el omne le dixo quel acorriesse. Et don Martin le dixo que sienpre el acorria a.todos sus amigos fasta que los llegaua a.tal lugar. Et assi perdio aquel omne el cuerpo et el alma (Obras 2:371) And as the man was being punished on the gallows, Don Martín came and the man asked him to help him. And Don Martín said that he always helped all his friends until he got them to such a spot. And thus that man lost his body and his soul.

Ms. P amplifies. Don Martín offers to stand with the condemned man’s feet on his shoulders as long as he can, but after just a little while he complains: “ ‘Amigo, ¡como pesas! non te puedo sostener mas.’ ¬ asi murio ¬ perdio” (ed. Krapf 171: “ ‘Friend, how much you weigh! I cannot hold you up any more.’ And so he died and lost . . .”). The detail of the devil holding up the hanged man, as well as the dialogue, seem to have been taken directly from the Libro. There the devil reluctantly agrees to hold the thief up so that the rope will not strangle him, but soon begins to complain: “ay que mucho pesas” (G:79r;1470a: “Ouch! How much you weigh!”). A few lines later he jumps away and leaves the thief to hang. The person who added the material from the Libro clearly found Juan Ruiz’s version preferable to Juan Manuel’s matter-of-fact narration of the tale. Another enxemplo from ms. P gives evidence of the presence of Juan Ruiz’s book in the mind of at least one copyist or reworker. It is the Vulpes story, the tale of the fox who plays dead. The fox has been raiding a hen house and finds that daylight has overtaken him; it is no longer safe to leave the town. He lies down in the street to play dead, and various people who pass begin to remove nonvital portions of the fox’s anatomy (hair,

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thumbnail, tooth) that they believe will be useful. Finally, however, someone comes along who wishes to take the fox’s heart: “Et despues, a cabo de otra pieça, vino otro que dixo que el coraçon del raposo era bueno paral dolor del coraçon” (Obras 2:253: “And a little later someone else came along who said that the heart of the fox was good for a pain in the heart”). Here the fox draws the line. He makes a desperate escape and manages to save his life. The version of ms. P provides for a fuller mutilation of the fox than do most other scripta of the Conde Lucanor. In this manuscript, between “a cabo” and “que dixo” in the passage just cited, a cobbler comes by and takes the tail for making shoes; someone else takes an eye for medicinal purposes (ed. Krapf 117). These details appear to be drawn from the version of the tale found in the Libro in which a cobbler cuts off the fox’s tail for use as a shoehorn (1415) and an old crone plucks out an eye for medicinal/magical purposes (1417a–c). Ms. P also adds the detail, presumably drawn from Libro 1418–19, that it is a “físico” who wishes to remove the fox’s heart. Another manuscript of the Conde Lucanor (ms. M) bears still closer similarities to the text of the Libro. A. Blecua dates this manuscript to the second half of the fifteenth century (Transmisión 14). Its version of the fox’s misadventures reads, after “a cabo” in the text established by J. M. Blecua (cited above): “a cabo] de poco paso por alli vn çapatero, et desque lo vio asy, dixo que la cola del rraposo era buena para fazer traynel della para calçar los çapatos engrasados, et cortogela, et estudo muy quedo” (Obras 2:255 n. 41; see A. Blecua, Transmisión 61: “A bit later a cobbler went by, and when he saw the fox thus, he said that the tail of the fox was good to make a shoehorn to put on oiled shoes, and he cut it off, and the fox was very still”). Compare the text of the Libro: “¶ pasaua demañana por y vn çapatero | E dis que buena cola mas vale que vn dinero | fare traynel della para calçar lygero | /¬ cortola /¬ estudo queda / mas que non vn cordero” (T:22r;1415: “In the morning a cobbler was passing by. ‘Oh!’ he says, ‘What a fine tail! It’s worth more than a dinero. I’ll make a shoehorn out of it to put shoes on more easily.’ He cut it off and the fox was quieter than a lamb”). These additions clearly did not occur at the level of text of the Libro de buen amor (someone sitting down with manuscripts in hand to work on an authorial text). They occur at the level of the fable itself, at the level of its existence as part of a literary and ethical inheritance, and it is at this level that the Conde Lucanor, the Libro, and the various manuscript traditions of each exist and intermingle. In strict terms, this is a reading of Libro, but I do not think we can call it a “reception” of the Libro as “aesthetic entity” (Gumbrecht, “Aspectos” 609) or even as “text.” This reading may even

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reflect an oral tradition of Juan Ruiz’s fable that circulated among people who had never heard of Juan Ruiz or read his book. The salto miscellany provides another opportunity to see these liminal cases of “reception” at work. Salto Critics have tacitly accepted the idea that the “salto” that appears at C/N 609, ll. 18–19 ends the portion of the miscellany that cites the Libro directly. But there is considerable doubt concerning just what this salto signifies. Does it represent a juglar’s plan to turn a somersault at this point in his presentation (Menéndez Pidal, Poesías 237)? Is it merely a thematic “jump”? A jump to another topic or away from the Archpriest’s book to another source? It is certain that the citations obviously drawn from known portions of the Libro end by this point. As we look at the totality of the texts collected here, however, we are struck by how much they resemble the Libro in content and tone, if not in literary polish. Thus, in addition to the critique of wine already discussed, there is a celebration of the good wines of Jaen, Ubeda, Baeza, and Antequerra (C/N 611, ll. 22–24; compare 1339b, which describes the oenological preferences of nuns). Another didactic theme found in the Libro is the power of money. Portions of 491–493 are cited directly in the miscellany (609, ll. 1–6), but this theme appears again at 607, ll. 24–27. These lines have no obvious parallels in the Libro as we know it. Some verses of the miscellany recall Juan Ruiz’s mock didactic pose: “quien me oyere & me viere & me criyere | escarmienten cabeza agena” (607, ll. 8–9: “Whoever hears and sees and believes me, take warning from someone else’s head”). This recalls 905d, “En agena cabeça Sea bien castigada” (T:2r: “Take your lesson well from someone else’s head”), or 88c, where the vixen observes the “capital” punishment meted out to the wolf for retaining the best part of the bull’s corpse for himself. Wisely she gives the lion everything he wants: “enla cabeça del lobo tome yo esta liçion” (S:7v: “I took a lesson from the head of the wolf”). In fact, a few lines later in the miscellany, there is a rhyming piece, perhaps the shadow of a versus, that could easily be an alternate moralitas for the episode of the lion and the wolf: “quien con su mano rreparte | & tien poder de dar | con rrazon deve de tomar | para si la mejor parte” (607, ll. 15–18: “He who divvies out with his own hands and has the power to give, with reason ought to take the best part for himself”).28 “Non vos dira vn mentira | por quanto ay de aqui a sevilla” (607, ll. 28–29: “It will not tell you a single lie for everything between here and Seville”) recalls Juan Ruiz’s pronouncement, “non uos dire mintira en quanto enel [el rromançe] Jas” (G:1r;14c: “I won’t tell you a lie in anything included in my book”). And the dénoue-

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ment is equally deflating in both. The salto miscellany continues (607, ll. 30–31): “mas a poco de rato | dezir vos a tres dozenas o a cerca de cuatro” (“But in a short time it will tell you three dozen or almost four”). The Libro continues (G:1r;14d): “ca por todo el mundo se vsa ¬ se faz” (“Because everything in it is done throughout the world”). Most of the medieval readings we have observed focus on apparently sober ethical material, but this reading of the Libro includes both ethical material and a comic send-up of that material in about the same mix we find in the Libro. Other fragments, most of them rhyming by assonance if at all, recall the poems found at the end of S and G and announced in 1514: “¶ cantares fis alguno que disen los çiegos | E para escolares que andan nocharniegos | /¬ para otros muchos por puertas adariegos | caçurros de bulrras non caberian en dies pliegos” (T:29r: “I made some* songs that blind men sing, and for students who go about at night, and for many others who go* from door to door, low silly songs, they wouldn’t fit in ten gatherings”). The students’ songs are indeed found in S and G, and the cantares de çiegos in G. Several pieces contained in the salto miscellany would fit the third category mentioned here, songs for those who go begging from door to door, if we include juglares in this category. Thus one fragment begins: “sabed fidalgos | que vengo mas de ccc leguas de alende de Roma | otras tantas alende de santiago | oy alla tantas de vuestras bondades | que faziades mucho bien a proves & mas a gogralles | vengo rogando adios por vuestros dias” (609, ll. 8–12: “Know, Lords, that I come from more than 300 leagues beyond Rome and just as many beyond Santiago; there I heard so many things about your good deeds, that you do much good for poor people and even more for minstrels; I come praying to God for your long life”). The attention-grabbing “Sabed, fidalgos” recalls the “varones buenos ¬ onrrados” (G:85r;1710a: “good and honored gentlemen”) that opens one of the cantares de çiego, or the “Señores dat al escolar” (S:99v;1650a: “Lords, give to the student”) that opens a student song. Another beggar’s song appears at the close of the salto miscellany (613, ll. 21–22). Further fragments may fit the Archpriest’s category “de burlas”: the city-by-city tour of Spain (609, ll. 24–613, l. 3) recalls the attack on Don Carnal (1105–15) or the adventures of Don Amor (1304–12). Also reminiscent of the Libro is the celebration of the merry innkeepers’ wives of Uclés (609, ll. 24–27) and the “hot” women of Córdoba (611, ll. 27–28). Deyermond says, in reference to 607 line 1 through 609 line 6, that this material is “probably not by the Archpriest” (“Juglar’s” 221). What is certain is that it is not by the Archpriest we know. Given the liberties that the author of the miscellany takes with the drunks and pigs of 547 (see above), however, it is possible that some of the lost lyric pieces of the Libro lurk behind the fragments quoted here. I do not feel it is important now

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to ascribe this doggerel to Juan Ruiz or to any other known author. The investigation of medieval reading relieves me of this burden. I wish merely to make the point that to the fifteenth-century juglar or preacher or reader who introduces a section of the fragments, “Now we begin from the book of the Archpriest” (and to the people who listened to this juglar or preacher or reader), these fragments were, in fact, one more manuscript of the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita.” This Libro del açipreste included warnings (striking a traditional didactic pose) against wine, a critique of the power of money, especially in Rome, assorted burlesque songs, and a prose satire on the clergy (see the “Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera”). It is, in fact, a libro not very different from our own in its major outlines. Except for the cuaderna vía narration of the Archpriest’s love adventures (certainly a significant omission), the meditation on death, and such downright pious pieces as the gozos of the Virgin and the arms of the Christian Knight, it manages to cover most of the thematic bases of the Libro. It also manages to capture in its short and often garbled lines the flip and boastful tone that, for modern readers, is one of Juan Ruiz’s most distinguishing characteristics. I would submit that these fragments, in their totality, come as close as any other work that survives from the Castilian Middle Ages to being a “parallel” to the Libro. By their very crudity, they may reveal what some Castilian readers perceived to be an essential facet of the Archpriest’s book.29 Burlas, too, as Juan Ruiz asserted, were a part of the reading of the Libro. Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal, el Tostado The modern impulse to search for a specific ideological program or, at the very least, mindset that informs a literary work of art has been largely frustrated in the case of Juan Ruiz. We have been unable, with the means at our disposal, to characterize him either as a wholly pious defender of traditional religious values or as a cynical critic of these values. Medieval readers seem much less preoccupied with these matters. Perhaps Juan Ruiz’s or “the Archpriest’s” ideology was clear for them. Perhaps it was irrelevant. We have only one instance in which a medieval reader may have been working with the intellectual, as opposed to the aesthetic, thematic, or ethical, material of the Libro. This is the case I mentioned in the preceding chapter, that of El Tostado, who, according to Cátedra, had some passages of the Libro, probably read in ms. S, in mind as he wrote his Breviloquio de amor y amiçiçia. Cátedra (41–56; see also 70–72) finds traces of the Libro in El Tostado’s presentation of the Aristotelian and naturalistic justification of sexual desire found in stanzas 71–76: “¶ Commo dize aristotiles / cosa es verdadera | el mundo por dos cosas / trabaJa por la primera | por aver mantenençia / la otra cosa era | por aver

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Juntamiento / con fenbra plazentera” (S:6v;71: “As Aristotle says—and it is true—the world labors for two things. The first, to have sustenance, the other was to have sex with a pleasing woman”). We have seen that this stanza also attracted the attention of Salazar, although in his case the interest is more in the auctoritas it represents than in its specific intellectual content or its background. Rico (“Por”) has suggested that in having the Archpriest rehearse these lines, Juan Ruiz was setting his character up as a negative exemplar, a “heterodox Aristotelian.” I remain skeptical that we can draw so specific a doctrinal stance from these lines (see my “Se usa”). I am not convinced that, even here, El Tostado is engaging in any intellectual dialogue with Juan Ruiz. Juan Ruiz is one among many sources who discuss the topic of the natural sex drive. The ideas are more complex, but the discussion no less topical. Fray Lupus, autor del Libro de buen amor In his story, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” Borges presents the work of the twentieth-century French author Pierre Menard, whose “admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (49). If I were to describe a scriptum copied before 1491 that contains Pamphilus, the Fables of Walter the Englishman, Filoberto’s Vision, a citation of Ps. 31 (“Intellectum tibi dabo”), a Castilian text in praise of the Virgin, an explanation of the seven deadly sins, the sacraments, and the virtues, together with pseudo-Ovidian material on love, we might think that Brother Lupus, “baccalarius in sacra theologia,” who signs his name in the book, was attempting for Juan Ruiz the same goal Pierre Menard was to undertake for Cervantes. Friar Lupus signs his name on the verso of the first leaf, at the close of a table of contents he had drawn up for BNM 4245. Most of the works are written in Latin, though they are glossed from time to time in Castilian. In addition to the works mentioned, the manuscript contains, according to Lupus, works by Terence and Boethius, vocabulary material from the Graecismus, and miscellaneous prayers. “Intellectum tibi dabo” appears in the course of an exposition of the seven penitential psalms, pseudoOvidian material in the Facetus, doctrinal material in the pseudo-Bernardian Floretus. The striking coincidence of materials found in this scriptum and the collective scripta of the Libro suggests to me another way in which fifteenth-century readers may have approached the Libro: as a student miscellany, as textbook, perhaps even as trot. The Pamphilus is the student text par excellence of the later Middle Ages, as the title’s English descendant, “pamphlet” suggests. Already in antiquity, students had begun to

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translate and rework fables as a common school exercise. Friar Lupus’s text lacks most of the burlas of Juan Ruiz’s book, and its naughty fabliaux, of course. It also lacks the Archpriest and his bumbling love adventures. Nevertheless, I think medieval students may have viewed the Libro in part as a schoolbook, a particularly entertaining text, perhaps, in which the dry matters of the classroom could be read in more digestible form.

Conclusions The quest for the global sense of the Libro has been the salient characteristic of twentieth-century study of Juan Ruiz’s book. Our quandaries are based on our presumption that books signify as unities and as totalities. Apparent contradictions in the book undermine totalizing interpretations. Much twentieth-century criticism is a search for some critical position outside the text—via history, sources, allegory, modern critical theory, or simply very clever reading—from which the contradictions may be viewed as harmonizing to form a coherent and consistent whole. The now well-established critical commonplace that the Libro is ambiguous is among the most popular of these positions. When we examine medieval readings of the Libro, however, we find that although the Libro was certainly widely read, medieval readers seem not to have been troubled by the contradictions, if they perceived them at all. Among the medieval and sixteenth-century citations of or allusions to the Libro, there is not a single reference to those stanzas which have been the cruces of twentieth-century debate on the Libro: Juan Ruiz’s opening instructions on how to read his book (portions of the prologue, 11–19), the episode of the Greeks and Romans (44–70), or the parting salvo, which treats his book as a ball to be tossed out to the ladies of Castile (1626–34). In fact, the evidence suggests that medieval readers were not at all concerned with the sort of interpretation that is the bread and butter of twentieth-century readers of the Libro. Medieval readers read the Libro piecemeal, selectively, in fragments. There are two major reasons for the fragmentary nature of medieval readings of the Libro. One is medieval reading habits themselves. The other is the physical state of the text of the Libro in the Middle Ages. The “Libro” was certainly widely known and read in Iberia, but we must ask ourselves what truly was the physical state of the text that hides behind the many references we have seen. All three of the major manuscripts of the Libro are missing leaves. One part of the Libro underwent mutilation or censorship early on: the scene in which Doña Endrina suffers date-rape at the hands of Don Melón (but see Jenaro, “Sobre” 150). But there are other indications that the text of the Libro was unstable at an early phase

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of its production or distribution. There are significant differences between the tradition represented by manuscripts G and T on the one hand and manuscript S on the other. And, of course, there are lyric pieces announced in all three manuscripts that are not today found in any of them. It is possible that a collection of lyric works by Juan Ruiz circulated separately. This collection would have had its own textual life and would have been only incompletely integrated into the cuaderna vía “Libro del Arcipreste.” This possibility is suggested by Argote’s possession of a “Songbook of the Archpriest, with very old songs,” and by his attribution of one of Juan Ruiz’s lyrics to another early poet: Domingo Abad de los Romances. These thoroughly muddled references suggest the intriguing possibility that Argote possessed a cancionero containing the lyric works of early Castilian poets, including Domingo Abad and Juan Ruiz. It is possible that this cancionero circulated under the name of “the Archpriest.” Perhaps Juan Ruiz was its compiler. The most telling evidence for the fragmentary nature of the Libro in the Middle Ages comes from references that quote specific stanzas directly. Except for the Archpriest of Talavera, those who cite specific passages from the Libro work within a very narrow range. It seems odd that they would confine themselves to such brief sections of the book if they had had access to complete manuscripts. Gómez de Castro Argote de Molina García de Salazar Aragonese Anthology salto miscellany Ms. P (Conde Lucanor) Ms. M (Conde Lucanor)

710, 781–82, 796, 804, 811, 829 (plus lost stanzas between 765 and 766) 1023–27 prologue, 44, 71–73, 105 (plus S-like rubrics?) 553, 1450 492–93, 547 1415–19, 1460, 1470 1415–17

The broadest separation in stanzas cited is the 900 stanzas that separate the references in the Aragonese anthology. But in this case it is not at all certain that both citations were made at the same time by the same person. After this, the widest distance we find is that separating 710 and 829 in the Castro miscellany (120 stanzas) and that separating the prologue and 105 in García de Salazar (90 stanzas). This is our most telling evidence that the Libro circulated in separate cuadernos containing only portions of the book. Now, it is possible that these cuadernos contained discrete units of the book: Pitas Payas, serranillas, Melón-Endrina, lyrics. But it is also possible that these were simply physical cuadernos detached from a “complete” manuscript and reproduced and distributed in this form. T, as I have noted, was rediscovered

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unbound. Further support for this idea comes, as we have seen, from readers’ marks in G and T. Readers’ marks appear largely in the final third of the manuscripts, from stanza 1317 through stanza 1363 in G and from 1313 on in T. The evidence suggests, then, that the physical text of the Libro in the Middle Ages was a shadowy, fragmentary entity, quite different from the medieval “text” modern scholars study as the Libro de buen amor. And the fragmentary nature of the physical text went hand-in-hand with medieval techniques of reading. As Badel has shown for readers of the Roman de la rose, medieval reading was “discontinuous.” Medieval readers read books in pieces, skipping from one part of a text to another, without seeking to understand the work in its entirety. This was due in large part to what I call habits of “florilectura,” the tendency of medieval readers to read for “quotable quotes,” proverbial quips they might include in their personal miscellany or memorial storehouse. That this was the most common way of reading the Libro is amply demonstrated in two ways. The first is by the early mentions of the Libro, the vast majority of which cite proverbial or other pithy expressions. The Archpriest is clearly an auctor, like Ovid, read, enjoyed, and excerpted because of his special gift for the proverbial turn of phrase. Second, especially in S, the overwhelming majority of lines signaled by readers with a pointing finger or a nota bene are proverbs that can stand alone outside the text of the Libro. It does not seem to matter to the medieval reader whether these proverbs are spoken as part of Trotaconventos’s strategies of seduction or as part of Garoza’s defense of virtue. It was their timeless proverbial truth, la sentençia, regardless of the proverbs’ misapplication and abuse in the specific context of the Libro, that was of interest to medieval readers. The Libro was also read for its rich mine of exempla. Like the proverbs, exempla were appropriated regardless of the specific light shed upon them by their context in the Archpriest’s book. We see this clearly in G, where the beginnings of exempla are indicated by spaces left for initials, and occasionally by the word insienplo appearing in the margin. Similar tendencies may be found to a lesser extent in S and T. We also see the use of the Libro as a source of exempla in the many allusions to figures from the Libro found especially in cancionero verse. Ferrand Manuel de Lando compares his satiric target, Juan Alfonso de Baena, to Pitas Payas. By reference to this well-known exemplum, Ferrand manages to paint the behavior of Baena’s wife with the same brush. Don Melón and Doña Endrina serve the cause of an anonymous satire on Alfonso of Aragon and Leonor de Soto. The figures presented by Juan Ruiz are part of the vast storehouse of exemplary types by which medieval and Renaissance poets held the targets of their barbs up to ridicule. And it is not out of place in

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this connection to note that in the autobiographizing rubrics to S, the Archpriest himself joins the cast of exemplary characters whose misadventures can serve as a warning to others. Those references to the Libro which appear to be to the book as a unit treat it not as we would treat a literary work, but as a source of auctoritas: the “book” or tractado of the Archpriest. In general we can say that Juan Ruiz’s lyric plays a slightly larger role than we might suspect, whereas the Archpriest of Hita as character and the love manual play a considerably smaller one. The readers’ comments or mentions reviewed in this chapter allow us to establish a preliminary list of “Juan Ruiz’s Greatest Hits,” those lines or stanzas which received the most attention from medieval readers in the admittedly small sample available to us. If we include in the survey only those marks or citations which clearly indicate that a reader found a passage significant, we find but one, 206, which is marked with a hand in S and is cited by the Archpriest of Talavera: “Quien tiene lo que.l cunple.” Both García de Salazar and El Tostado may have taken an interest in the Aristotelian sexual naturalism portrayed in 71–76, though for very different reasons. The Art of Love adapted in part from Pamphilus is heavily marked with notas in 622–645 in S. The serrana episodes are probably Juan Ruiz’s most enduring creation. In addition to the many poets who copied or modified the lyric serranillas, readers of S annotated several proverbial expressions that appear in the narrative cuaderna vía sections that accompany the lyrics (973–95, 1020). The fables intercalated in the Doña Garoça episode also received a good deal of attention from readers. Insienplo appears in the margins in G when a new fable begins. Readers of both S and T mark 1380, 1383, and 1384, the moralitas of the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse. Portions of these fables also find their way into manuscripts of the Conde Lucanor. The reader of T marks numerous stanzas in the “imprecation” against Death with an ojo, adding to the importance of this theme in the manuscript: in T we also find the prose debate between the body and the soul after death. A twentieth-century list of Juan Ruiz’s greatest hits would differ considerably from this fifteenth-century one. I make no claim to have done more here than to stake out the range of fifteenth- through sixteenth-century readings of the Libro and to have suggested some paths for further exploration. Especially in the case of writers like the Archpriest of Talavera or El Tostado, whose readings of the Libro may have been quite complex, much more needs to be said. My conclusions based on this overview, however, are as follows: among medieval readers of the Libro, there was no search for the sense of the book as an artistic unity in our understanding of that term. There was also very little preoccupation with the pseudo-autobiographical frame, except as it

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might serve familiar ethical purposes. Medieval readers were chiefly interested in the Archpriest as auctor, as poetic model, and as negative exemplary type, probably in this order. Nowhere do we find them agonizing, as modern critics have, over the global sense of the Libro, or the issues of linguistic ambiguity and literary interpretation that Juan Ruiz has seemed to twentieth-century readers to place at the very center of his book. If there was indeed a crisis of language in Castile, it seems to have been well over by the early fifteenth century. Our readers are blithely unaware of it. At least those readers who have left their trace in the book seem to be reading it just as readers of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries might have read it had it existed then: as a source of proverbs and exempla. It also seems that readers such as the compiler of the salto miscellany enjoyed Juan Ruiz’s personal mix of humor, didacticism, and social critique. Students of fifteenth-century readings of the Canterbury Tales have spoken about a “narrowing” of the practice of reading Chaucer, an increasing emphasis on the sober, pious elements of the text or on ethical material alone (for example, Strohm, “Chaucer’s”). It is tempting to posit such a narrowing in the case of the Libro. But the works most closely associated with the Libro, chronologically as well as thematically (García de Castrojeriz’s Glosas castellanas on the De regimine of Giles of Rome, the Libro del Cavallero Çifar, the works of Don Juan Manuel), suggest that fourteenth-century readers may have been just as “narrow” in their reading of the Libro as were their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Much more work (and much more documentation) for the fourteenth century is needed before we can begin to answer this question with any certainty. In the end the medieval Libro is rather like the fox of the Vulpes tale. Various medieval readers found useful things in bits and pieces of the book and appropriated these parts for themselves. But, from our point of view at least, the heart of the book was for them, as it remains for us, just beyond our grasp.

CONCLUSION TOLLE LEGE

T

HE READINGS of the Libro we have observed in the final two chapters leave the twentieth-century reader of medieval literature distinctly dissatisfied. Medieval readers skim across the surface of the text. They miss, or are uninterested in, the riches we like to find there: the political or intellectual program of the author, his artistic goals, the complex interplay and interweaving of ideas, images, motifs, the text’s dramatization of the conflict between desire and denial, natural impulses and social controls, love and death. Medieval readers read piecemeal, in patches, like scavengers combing our master text for whatever they can use. They are self-centered, greedy, disrespectful. They are reductive. In defense of medieval readers, I can only point out that one chooses one’s reduction. These readings, which open into a world of ever-changing human experience while ignoring the “story” or the “art,” are no more reductive than those which reduce a text to its codes or which see the end of interpretation at the classroom door. The simile of the scavenger I have just used is, after all, their own: the “Egyptians” must be despoiled of their riches. It would be easy to dismiss the readers of the Libro as “bad” readers, a special subset of medieval readers somehow incapable of grasping the complexities of the texts before them. Alternatively, we might try to pass them off as “official” readers, readers who do the dull, bread-and-butter reading while other “unofficial,” “transgressive” (and more interesting) readings go on about them. I think it would be a mistake to dispense with these readers so readily, however. For one thing, the dichotomy “official”/“unofficial” (or “carnivalesque”) is far too simplistic to be of intellectual value in understanding the lifeways of medieval manuscript culture. If we take official/unofficial as poles about which texts and readings cluster, we miss the dynamic struggles between text and gloss, the cycles of sin and repentance, of fall and redemption, which are, I think, the rather exciting places where medieval readers work. This style of reading is typical of that found in thousands of manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. It is also typical of the reading techniques—adaptation and application—dramatized in many late-medieval narratives. Even if we choose to set up this type of reading as the “official” style, it behooves us to gain a fuller understanding of it (certainly it was far more complex than the small sample I have been able to include here can show),

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if only to establish the standard against which other types of reading “transgress.”1 My hope is that our dissatisfaction can lead to a search for equally concrete evidence of other types of readings: irreverent, naughty readings, for example. But when we find such evidence, we must be extremely careful not to underestimate the power of medieval reading technology to bring even pornographic material under ethical control. It is all too easy to grant to pornography and scatology a universal, unchanging function that we deny to other forms of the literature of the past. All too frequently, medievalists uncritically impose the standards of our own society’s strictest moral censors when evaluating medieval texts. Elsewhere (“Cantigas”) I have shown how closely the imagery in the most scatological poem in Old Provencal coincides with the language recommended in medical texts for curing love madness with all its self-destructive consequences, surely a positive social goal. This does not mean absolutely that it (or the medical text) was not scatological, but it suggests a function for the scatological not readily apparent to us. Reading with this gloss, the disgusting perversion of Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Quan la freid’ aura venta” (“When the Cold Breeze Blows”) comes down on the side of sanity and health against the mad passion celebrated in the courtly canso it parodies. A cantiga d’escarnho, full of phallic innuendo, together with its tongue-in-cheek marginal razo, engages a biblical gloss by Hugh of St. Cher (on Jer. 10:20) in a complex conversation about the corruption and adulteries of men of the church. I am not trying to argue that the ethical gloss always stands outside the naughty gloss. Glosynge does not work this way. But I think we can isolate any number of moments when it does so, at least temporarily, in ways usually not obvious to us at first glance. It is certainly in the complex trumping and countertrumping of naughty and “moral” gloss that we will locate our most lively view of the process of medieval reading. Another type of reading we miss is the “global,” “totalizing” reading, the style of reading that takes the whole text as a unit of inquiry (even when our goal is to expose its disunity). Are medievalists who wish to say something about the significance of the medieval text of Juan Ruiz, in its medieval context, to be left only with crumbs? It seems to me that if we are going to do totalizing interpretations, we will have to develop a new working definition of the “unity” for medieval works. We assume that most of medieval readers of S did read the whole Libro, even if they marked only fragments. Individual titles are listed in library inventories. Scribes generally seem to have strived to copy “whole works.” Medieval authors seem often to have produced “whole” works (Guillaume de Lorris, Chaucer, and Juan Ruiz are notable exceptions).

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But the reality behind these comfortable patterns is not as simple as our typographical concept of unity implies. In the Middle Ages it does seem that authors are the readers who come closest to living up to our “global” ideal. Perhaps it is in their readings that we may draw closer to a type of reading that we find more satisfying. Even a rapid glance at the ways authors received whole works (Chaucer’s Boece, Juan Ruiz’s version of Pamphilus) suggests, however, that the mode of this reception was quite different from ours. We must also take into account the unique nature of the medieval scriptum, which snatches away from us before we begin certain important foundation-stones of our concept of unity. Scripta themselves are fragmentary, not just through reading, but through accidents of their physical construction and transmission. Leaves get lost, from beginning, end, and middle. Scribal production continually transforms the cues out of which we seek to construct the internal coherence (or contradictions) of a work: repetition of key words or concepts, narrative structure, the forms of proper names. Where would Derrida be if a scribe had written compliment or souplement for supplément at a key passage in Rousseau’s Confessions? If we wish to work in “unities,” “wholes,” as they may have functioned in medieval Europe, we will have to be willing to understand this term in new ways. We will also have to bear in mind that whatever unities we may discover were constantly transformed by the text’s projection into the ethical world of the reader and by the ongoing process of Glosynge. I promised to address practical matters relating to the approaches I suggest, specifically questions surrounding access to manuscripts for scholarly and educational purposes. Concerning the need for medievalists to work directly with manuscripts rather than with editions, I can only say that this must be a goal rather than a prerequisite. This book, which takes as its most important argument the need for working with scripta rather than with editions, is based chiefly on work with facsimiles and microfilms. I wish the geographical and economical realities were different, but they are not. I think we must do the best we can in getting close to manuscripts in our work. Most important, we should recognize the contingent nature of observations we make based not just on facsimiles and films, but on direct observations of the manuscripts as well. The computer has seemed to many scholars (Cerquiglini: “édition écranique”; Faulhaber, “Textual”: “hyperedition”) to offer much promise for the future of editions and textual work. I confess I have little interest in the dream of computer-generated editions (Marcos); but perhaps the computer is finally the proper place for such activities. New technologies will make it possible for us to have scanned images of manuscripts on our desktop machines (deans will be faced with the awful realization that

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their average medievalist has hardware needs equivalent to those of their physicists). At this writing, for example, graphic images of selected manuscript leaves are available for retrieval over the Internet from the online version of the Library of Congress’s exhibit on “Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture.” Imaging and analytic techniques may allow us to sit at our machines and obtain information not available even through a direct examination of the manuscript with the naked eye: the readings of faded characters, the distinguishing of hands through changes in the chemical composition of inks. It is not at all fanciful to suggest that virtual reality technology will enable us to recreate that elusive experience of reading a manuscript “when it was new.” We may be able to know what it felt like (and smelled like) to turn over a new leaf before it was covered with the dust of centuries and the oils of hundreds of fingers. It will even be possible to recreate the environment of that reader who, in the fading light of, let us say, a December afternoon, in the year 1463, sat annotating T in (a guess) the library of the cathedral of Toledo. Such reconstructions may seem to be of limited scholarly purpose now, but the past decade has taught us not to reject in advance the intellectual potential of any new computer technology. Before we postpone manuscript studies in hopes of such innovations, however, we need to recognize that the “problem” of access to manuscripts has probably been exaggerated. I feel safe in asserting that more people have read T in the twentieth century than did so in the fifteenth.2 When I began this study, I had (and some friendly readers had) doubts about the practice of using manuscript readings (crudely represented in typographic form) rather than a critical edition in citing from the “Libro.” I can certify that this practice is a lot more bother than plucking a citation from a handy edition. But I for one am pleased with the results, and I think the effort was worthwhile. For one thing, I think my problematic representations successfully illustrate what an alien presence the manuscript text is in a typographic world. Manuscript texts do not quite fit into a printed book. It is this irreducible difference which the critical edition has sought to suppress, with great detriment to our understanding of medieval manuscript culture. As I read over them now, I find that the manuscript citations themselves do as much as anything I have written to recapture the rich, error-prone, and multifarious textual life of the Libro. Even scholars who have spent years studying the Libro in editions may have been surprised to hear certain lines of our Libro sounding different, new, if sometimes unexpectedly flat. But where does all this leave the critical edition? As I have said, I believe the edition has a limited usefulness, especially in teaching beginning students and as an access point for manuscript material not readily available in other forms. But I would hope (indeed, it is becoming more often the

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case) that teachers would take some time to make beginning students aware of the artificiality of the edition and the reality it mirrors so dimly and often with such ill will. It seems to me that the knowledge and energy that go into producing these editions could be put to excellent use in guiding readers to the manuscripts themselves, instead of merely defending editorial choices. Such introductions could discuss in more extensive and less sibylline terms many of the same features that concern critical editors: scribal usus, the relative readability of the scripta involved (and the reasons for treating them as a group), how the manuscripts are put together physically, their history, the dialects of scribes, the history of the manuscripts, important variants and cross-fertilizations. They should be a sort of handbook that the scholar takes to the library when he examines a given scriptum: a vade mecum written by an informed and benevolent guide. The philological impulse should be redirected toward sharing the knowledge it produces, and away from the creation of an ersatz text that is only a hollow sign for that knowledge. “Old” philologists are a vital link in the renewal of the discipline of medieval studies that would make the scriptum the object of study and discussion for all medievalists, not just the few. We have a recent example of this type of handbook in Blake’s The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales. The simple comparison of A. Blecua’s La transmisíon textual de “El Conde Lucanor” and J. M. Blecua’s edition of Don Juan’s Obras completas can quickly give us a feel for how the study of the medieval scriptum with the aid of such handbooks differs in its intellectual goals and possibilities from the study of texts or works based on editions. At the heart of the issues I raise in this book is the unfortunate division that exists between medievalists who “do manuscripts” and those who do not. Whatever the scholarly or intellectual goals of this book, one of my personal goals has been to suggest the means for a marriage of philology and the mercurial readings of critics who are eloquent appropriators of medieval texts, and often, it appears to many, the messengers of heathen gods. Such a marriage can succeed, I believe, if we take the scriptum as our community property. Traditional philology has much to teach us all about the lifeways of the scriptum. “Newer” approaches to medieval texts, refocused on the scriptum, can restore to all medievalists the freedom and confidence that medieval readers enjoyed, can free us from servitude to the coherent, correct text. I do not think the answer for twentieth-century medievalists is a spate of new, fragmentary, ethical readings of great medieval works, then. Medieval ethical reading frees rather than limits us. It frees us to read as we will (even as it causes us to examine our will). As I have just suggested, many “new” approaches to “textes,” medieval or modern, in which the subject works through the strands of a text and discovers/constructs a

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system of values within it, come far closer to capturing the essence of medieval reading than do traditional philological readings, which strive to reduce the readings to a single, “coherent” text. If Dragonetti sees a connection between “la cope d’uevre” and the “coupure” of the text (see Introduction, note 12), he is investing the text with a certain value system that, however flimsy it may appear to many of us, has sense and value within the confines of his discussion and for a small group of academic readers and followers. Nothing I have said in this book would cause me to quarrel with the occasionality of this appeal.3 But I also think that medieval reading teaches us that we can ask, and give, more in reading. It enables us to see how very much a simple blip of history is our ever narrower focus on literature as aesthetic object, object of language, spider’s web of words. If medievalists feel embattled in an academy increasingly concerned with job training, practical matters, and concrete results, it is no doubt because we are. For no matter how much we might wish to deny it, in asserting the transcendent, perennial, and increasingly abstract values of literature against some contingent and local use, we have ended up defending literature’s right to be useless. In the end, what medieval ethical reading suggests to me is that we must once again find ways to build bridges between literature, even medieval literature, and life experience, to find ways for literature to have positive function in the world we and our students confront outside the academy. I claim no special vision of how we might go about building these bridges. I am sure that the answer is not to have our students memorize proverbs and exempla or adhere to a narrow ethical framework (or attempt to impose it on others). It most certainly does not mean we should send our students out with a head full of great ideas, a stomach full of great books, and a certificate of cultural literacy. One possible starting place is a recognition, often undervalued in a scientific age and a mobile society, of the functionality of accumulated human experience. As medievals saw themselves as standing on the shoulders of giants, as fulfilling the texts of the ancients, so too, I think, we can show our students the values of the literature of the past as one stage of a cumulative process of human experience, as a stage to which we can add our own gloss. Literary history is not a succession of isolable works, readings, expectations, but an unbroken cumulation that leads directly to us, a chain along whose links we may travel and to which we can add links of our own. The ethical reading of the Middle Ages can show us and our students the power and the joy of choice made in the unscientific world of human activity and the flux of human experience. It can teach us that we can, indeed must, find the values that enable us to function humanly, humanely, in the face of uncertainty.

NOTES

PREFACE 1. The title Libro de buen amor was conferred by Menéndez Pidal, “Título,” based chiefly on lines S:55r;933b (“buen amor dixe al libro”; “I called the book “Buen Amor”) and T:36v;1630ab (“pues de buen amor en prestad lo de grado | nol negedes su nonbre”; “Because it [the book] is* about buen amor | don’t deny it its name”). Prieto (77–114) argues for Libro del Arcipreste de Hita, believing this to be the most common medieval way of designating the Libro. Zah (ix) also adopts this title for reasons distinct from Prieto’s: “We understand by Libro del Arcipreste . . . not only the body of episodes referring to a fictitious ecclesiastical character as narrated by the character himself, but also the modern editions we read.” In “Como,” I suggested the title Arçipreste de Hita, based on my own survey of the medieval title. Joset (Nuevas 69–70) argues that the title Libro de buen amor should be retained. 2. See the photographic reproduction of part of the document in Hernández, Cartularios pls. 27–28. Joset (Nuevas 19–29) points out some of the problematic features of the document. See also Gyb 7–16. 3. Kelly (Canon and “Archpriests”) is the chief (sole?) proponent of the idea that Juan Ruiz’s book was written in the late fourteenth century. For initial reactions to Kelly’s ideas, see Kirby and Linehan, as well as further installments in the debate: Hernández (“Juan . . . arciprestes” and “Juan . . . mundo”) and Kelly (“Juan”). 4. That “instrumentos” represents musical instruments has been the generally accepted reading of this passage. Jenaro (“Nuevas” 177–78) suggests that these might be legal instrumenta (cf. his “Libro”). Di Camillo (265–67) suggests that instrumentos means “poems,” following Spaniard Dominicus Gundissalinus’s comment in De divisione philosophiae that the instrumentum of poetry is a poem. I suggest the nautical context based on G, which reads: “dicha mala ¬ buena por vientos la Jusgat | las coplas con los pintos [with stroke above n] load o denostat” (G:4v;69cd: “Judge a saying bad or good by the winds; praise or blame the stanzas with the points [spots?]”). If we read “puntos” here as in the following stanza, we have “points” of the compass, perhaps illuminating the meaning of “y fas punto ¬ tente” (G:5r;70c: “choose a heading and keep to it” [?]). On the other hand, “pintos” suggests a possible connection with “las coplas pintadas” at G:4v;69b (“the painted [i.e., ornamented] verses”). Such a connection was apparently made by the reader who adds a long stroke to the u in “puntares” in G:5r;70b, transforming it into “pyntares.” See now Ble92 notas suplementarias 69b. 5. Deyermond has given us several useful annotated surveys: Lecoy, Recherches ix–xxxvii; Deyermond, “Libro,” Edad80 214–21, and Edad91 177–84. The bibliography prepared by Mary-Anne Vetterling in electronic format (1987) occupies seventy-odd pages (see La Corónica 16.2 [1987–88]: 118). Nepaulsingh has a concise survey of major positions (Towards 126–34), Joset (Nuevas 19–86) a more detailed one. I provide a short outline of major trends in note 6 below.

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6. Contemporary theory has cropped up in only a few, largely isolated studies of the Libro: dlvarez, Parr and Zamora (structuralism); Fleischman (“Signs”), Bandera (Juan Ruiz as Derrida avant la lettre), Seidenspinner-Núñez (“On ‘Dios’ ”), Gumbrecht (“Aspectos”), Rössner (reader response). The works of Burke and Brownlee also reveal an openness to a broad range of critical inquiry. The most interesting work on the Libro has appeared in a variety of highly personal studies that have not led to any dominant theory of the Libro: Beltrán, Brownlee, Burke, Ferraresi, Gybbon-Monypenny, Hart, Seidenspinner-Núñez (Allegory), and the largely unpublished but generously shared work of the late John K. Walsh. Walsh’s work is particularly important in bringing to life a view of the Libro as oral and performance text, full of song and gesture. It is an important complement to studies, like my own, that focus on Juan Ruiz’s debt to written culture. Other significant trends: a more nuanced idea of the social background of the Libro, especially the issue of clerical celibacy and the office of archpriest: Menéndez Peláez, Zahareas (“Structure” and “Celibacy”), Hernández (“Juan . . . mundo”), Kelly (Canon), and Linehan. Juan Ruiz’s indebtedness to scholastic thought has been studied by Cantarino, Lawrance, and Rico (“Clerecía”). The bawdy nature of the Libro has been explored in several entertaining articles by Vasvari. Unfortunately, Vasvari does not give any clear idea of how the numerous obscene references she finds in the Libro should affect our understanding of the Libro as a late medieval literary work (see also Reynal). Textual issues will be discussed in Chapter 4. The foundational studies remain those cited in the bibliography by Castro, Lecoy, Lida de Malkiel, Spitzer, and Zahareas (Art). 7. The following survey is by no means exhaustive. It is intended only to sketch the background of the present study. Most would trace the beginning of these changes to Zumthor’s tremendously influential concept mouvance, though as Speer (“Wrestling” 317) points out, Rychner was already playing with similar ideas and terminology in the 1950s (see also Pickens, “Jaufré”). Jauss’s “alterity” is another master concept (see the articles on this topic by Bloomfield, Jauss, Burrow, Vance, and Zumthor in New Literary History 10 [1979]), as is his “aesthetics of reception.” Some would push the renovation of medieval studies back as far as Bédier. Major areas of innovation follow. Authors: Zumthor’s mouvance is central, but so is Minnis’s thorough survey of changing medieval attitudes toward human (and eventually vernacular human) authors (Medieval). Van Vleck is especially noteworthy for her attempt to see how Occitan troubadours may have understood and worked with and/or against the modes of production and transmission available to them. Readers: Early studies are by Smalley, Jeauneau, and Leclercq. Jauss’s ideas are basic, but important work focusing specifically on the medieval period has been done by Allen (Friar and Ethical), Saenger, and, most recently, Carruthers and Copeland. On individual medieval readers, see Patterson (115– 53), Strohm (“Chaucer’s” and “Jean”), Hult (“Gui”), and Lerer (“Rewriting” and “Textual”). M/S have provided an important anthology of formal medieval approaches to texts, which they call “medieval literary theory and criticism.” See also Hexter and Hunt. Scribes: “The scribe as . . .” has become a minor scholarly genre as we undergo a general revision of our views of medieval scribes: Alexander, Huot (“Scribe”), Kennedy, Shonk, and Windeatt. In these studies the scribe is viewed as occupying one or more of the roles of modern printed book

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production or consumption: editor, illustrator, reader, or critic. See also Blakey, Machan (“Scribal”), and Lerer (“Rewriting” and “Textual”). Manuscripts and their margins: Huot’s work is the most fully developed in this regard. But a growing number of individual studies have dealt with glosses, commentaries, or illustrations from a variety of perspectives: Kiernan (“Reading”), Caie, Schibanoff, Marx, Camille. Manuscript culture: The term, perhaps coined by Ong (119ff.) and used by Bruns and Nichols (“Introduction” 7), remains a nebulous concept. Its use suggests a growing awareness among scholars that there is such a culture and that its lifeways must be taken into account in any analysis of the “texts” it “supports.” Studies that might previously have been of interest only to a narrow group of codicologists have entered the mainstream of critical discussion. I mention a few collections and monographic works: Bataillon et al.; Calames; Weijers; Martin and Vezin; Parkes and Watson; Ganz; the series Codicologica; Pearsall, ed. Manuscripts; de Hamel; Boffey; Avrin; and Questa and Raffaelli. Memory, manuscripts, orality, culture: Medieval society has come to be viewed as a complex and shifting interplay of manuscript culture, memorial culture (Carruthers), and oral culture: Ong, Stock, Bäuml, Clanchy, Kittay, Zumthor (Lettre), and Doane and Pasternack. Textual criticism: The surveys by Foulet and Speer and Speer (“Editing”), although focused on Old French, provide a useful overview of broader trends, as does the collection edited by Kleinheinz. Blecua (“Textos”) has given us a similar study for Old Spanish. For medieval England, I note as representative Pearsall (“Editing”), whereas Patterson provides a valuable theoretical perspective. 8. I base the following comments on New Philology/Medievalism on certain of the ideas expressed in the January 1990 issue of Speculum dedicated to “The New Philology,” on the collection entitled The New Medievalism, edited by Brownlee, Brownlee, and Nicholas, and on the work of scholars frequently invoked in these collections, especially Cerquiglini. I take the attitudes expressed in the August 1991 issue of Romance Philology to represent the response of traditional philology. 9. There will be many “practical” objections to a theory that privileges manuscripts over authorial texts: “What text do I teach?” “What text do I cite?” I address these and other practical concerns in the Conclusion below. 10. Zah adopts the laudable practice of indicating beside each stanza the manuscripts that include it. This practice should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the “same” stanza may vary widely in content from manuscript to manuscript, however. As it would complicate an already complicated system, I have not adopted Zah’s practice here, but refer readers to Zah, or to the tables in C/N xxix–xxxi, or Gyb 511–12. 11. I have indicated expanded abbreviations in some cases of extremely doubtful transcriptions or in which the expansion is of particular interest. INTRODUCTION 1. Portions of the Libro (1125–1234) had been published thirty years earlier in Esteban de Terreros y Pando’s Paleografía española, Madrid, 1758 (Joset, Nuevas 30 n. 1).

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2. Jovellanos is merely echoing in negative form Juan Ruiz’s promise that his book is for “every man or woman.” In this same passage Juan Ruiz explicitly offers his book to “los de poco entendimiento” (S:2r;prol.: cf. Jovellanos’s “uneducated readers”). He also cites as one of its goals “por que sean todos aperçebidos ¬ se puedan meJor guardar” (S:2v;prol.: “so that all may be alerted and may better protect themselves”; cf. Jovellanos’s “incautious readers”). There are also frequent direct addresses by the author to “mancebos” (cf. Jovellanos’s “youths”) and to women. Even his “ande en manos” (“may fall into the hands”) echoes ironically Juan Ruiz’s envoi: “ande de mano en mano” (T:36v;1629c: “Let it go from hand to hand”). Jovellanos’s strategy in his censura is not the apparently open-minded one of making available in its entirety an important text that the too-fine scruples of a cleric, Sánchez, would deny the reader. In a move far more sweeping than Sánchez’s suppression of specific passages, Jovellanos goes beyond the obvious sexism and classism of his remarks to deny the whole of the Libro to the very readers for whom its author explicitly writes it. Jovellanos, the liberal, seeks to neutralize the ethical power of the Libro by transforming it into a text of mere antiquarian interest; Sánchez, the conservative cleric, views the text as one of perennial ethical force. 3. We still have not focused sufficiently on the complex ways in which text and reader interact in the medieval textual world, nor on the relation of this interaction to our idea of authorial or textual meaning. Carruthers (191): “ ‘Intention’ is in the work, as its res, a cluster of meanings which are only partially revealed in its original statement.” Carruthers implies that this res is “independent of the reader” but goes on to describe the way in which this independent textual meaning is “amplified and ‘broken-out’ from its words, as they are processed in one’s memory and re-presented in recollection.” Copeland’s view is closer to mine: “In a sense . . . the commentator uses the plot, matter, and stylistic procedure of the text in the way that an orator uses rhetorical topics like the attributes of the person and the act, that is, to supply information out of which the exegetical narrative is constructed”(64). I would extend this view of the activities of commentators to the general reader as well. L. Williams (64) exemplifies traditional views in attempting to assign the “responsibility” for meaning to either the author or the reader. 4. Read pulls back from this view at the close of his study (47). Burke (“Counterfeit”) also ventures into this territory with considerable reservation, it seems to me. 5. I think Nichols (“New”) portrays very well the larger implications of man’s situation in this sublunar world of flux. 6. Brownlee (Status 110) comes closest to my own reading in recognizing that Juan Ruiz allows “for the interpretations of good and wayward readers simultaneously.” But I am not convinced that this indicates any unusual or innovative “belief in the limits of exemplary discourse” on Juan Ruiz’s part. Perhaps I am merely less skeptical than Brownlee on this point. We often choose to place “limits” where medieval readers recognized a fully functional uncertainty. The idea of “functional uncertainty” can be applied both to “exemplary discourse” and to the wide-open medieval scriptum that modern medievalists seek to “limit” through the processes of textual criticism. In Chapter 6, we see that Juan Ruiz’s fifteenth-

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century readers seem unaware of any limitations on the functionality of his exemplary discourse. 7. E.g., L. Williams (61): “I find it very hard to believe that the Archpriest intended the reader to take seriously the stated moral of the exemplum, ‘non á mala palabra. . . .’ ” Brian Stock has suggested to me that we might trace this expression back to Augustine’s De dialectica. It would also seem to be related to more aggressive, popular formulations such as “Honni soit qui mal y pense.” 8. Cerquiglini (43–44) uses similar imagery, but applies it solely to the traditional philology, which “has opted for a maximum reduction of the manuscript to the contemporary textual object and to the idea of Letters which accompanies it.” 9. Barthes allows that it is the spider’s own web into which the subject dissolves. This implies some degree of identity between the text and its reading subject. What I dissent from is the idea of the subject’s dissolution. In the end medieval reading constantly reminded the reader of his difference from the text. 10. Orduna bases the argument for the “minor,” and therefore separate, status of poems such as the student songs and blind men’s songs, in part, on 1513–14. “The Archpriest-author refers here to his musical knowledge and to his poetic gifts as a fact in itself, external to the story [historia] of the Lba [Libro de buen amor]” (“Libro . . . arcipreste” 3). Though Orduna suggests otherwise, “despues fis muchas cantycas” (T:29r;1513: afterwards I wrote many songs”; my italics) clearly links these stanzas to internal events in the Libro, although the link is, admittedly, weaker than in other cases. 11. Ironically, the solution reached by traditional philology to the problems of “Textual Criticism in the 21st Century” is essentially the same as that proposed by Cerquiglini: the production of computer-based “hypereditions” (Faulhaber, “Textual”). 12. I will have to allow Dragonetti’s discussion of a line by Chrétien to stand for a whole school. Dragonetti works out from a phrase in Cligés, “Molte est boene la cope d’uevre” (l. 1525; “The cup is very fine in its workmanship”), toward a pun on coupe (“cup”) and coupure (“cutting,” “break”). He offers a second reading: “The cutting of the work is the source of its beauty” (198–99). From this, Dragonetti determines that “what is suggested here” (by whom or what? to whom?) is Chrétien’s “art of interruption,” either through “hidden breaks” in the continuity of the narration or (as in the Perceval, written after Cligés) the cutting off of the work before it is completed (a feature of the text traditionally attributed to Chrétien’s death rather than to his, or his text’s, artistic theories). Bloch (“Medieval”) and Jeay provide further examples. 13. This approach to literature is simply not the dominant academic mode of thought. There are, of course, many useful parallels between Gadamerian hermeneutics and medieval reading practices, as Copeland has recently shown. For the most part, however, the substantial literary-critical activity of medieval readers has been in modern literary theory’s blind spot. It is not surprising that Gilbert’s 1962 anthology, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, skips from Longinus to Dante. But similar skips may be found in Tompkins’s “Reader in History,” which leaps from “The Classical Period” to “The Renaissance” with nary a tip of the hat to what may have been the golden age of reading. M/S have now put us in the position to begin to appreciate many facets of this golden age.

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14. In “That Bothersome” (257 n. 5), I propose the term résidance on the model of more famous -e/ance’s to stand for both the medieval manuscript text’s résidence, that is, its “plenary inhabitation of a physical location,” and its capacity to remain, to be the residue of a variety of processes such as writing, reading, glossing, and, more recently, critical editing. 15. Knight (46) describes how one scribe decorates a hole in the parchment with “elegant curlicues.” 16. Though I think it is legitimate to see the coming of printing as a major technological watershed, many of the characteristics we identify with print culture—concepts of authorial property and control, the ability to produce virtually identical exemplars—are not fully in place until the nineteenth century. As Tanselle (286) reminds us, “Printed books resemble manuscripts more than many people seem to think.” See the more detailed account in Cerquiglini (18–29). 17. Many of the “issues” in editing practice are simply quarrels over how to divide up the spoils. Thus we have endless debates on proper placement of the list of variants, where illustrations should go (and how many), how different traditions of the “same” text should be presented on the printed page, etc. (see Speer, “Editing” 25–43). My position is that they are all found in precisely the correct place in the medieval scriptum. 18. Thus even Gybbon-Monypenny (Gyb 93 n. 1) strips Leonisms from his “bédiériste” edition of S. 19. Among the numerous editors of the Libro in the past quarter-century, Corominas (Cor) is the only one to note systematically readers’ or correctors’ marks in the text. He does not, however, catalogue notas and other markings. Ducamin (Duc) notes many, and Criado de Val and Naylor (C/N) appear to follow him closely. 20. The once received idea that there was a “1330 edition” or “version” of the Libro, represented in G and T, and a second, longer version of 1343, represented by S, has lost considerable force in recent years. Blecua believes that these differences can be explained “for causes well known in the transmission of medieval texts” (“Textos” 87 and Ble92 LXXXI–LXXXVI). 21. The Visión is also corrected by the same reader who worked through the text of the Libro in 1463. I am presently preparing a version of the text of the Visión for Exeter Hispanic Texts. 22. In his comments based on an early, incomplete draft of this book, Deyermond (Edad91 180) suggests that my approach “is that of the history of culture, which can be very different from literary criticism.” It certainly can. I hope my more fully developed arguments will show that, if we have any aspirations to understanding literature of the past in its past context, we can only separate cultural history (or technological history) from “literary criticism” at great peril to the accuracy and completeness of our results. 23. I do use the word “text,” but in most cases this stands for text as it occurs in the medieval opposition “text and gloss.” An important medieval argument for the genuine functionality of the “scriptum” as opposed to the abstract text is found in Hugh of St. Victor’s preface to his Didascalicon. Carruthers (93) paraphrases: “One should always read a text from the same codex, so that the features

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of the page on which the particular segment of text appears become part of one’s mnemonic apparatus.” The physical text is thus intimately linked to the experience of the “work.” I suspect that this same relationship is widespread in print culture as well. My appreciation of Yeats suffers when I do not read him in the worn copy of M. L. Rosenthal’s anthology, sedulously annotated in my own sophomoric hand. I confess that I cannot read Wilfred Owen at all except in the Mentor Book of Major British Poets. 24. Brownlee (Status) also discusses Augustinian theories of communication as they are worked out in the Libro but reaches different conclusions (see note 6 above). 25. I am not proposing a variety of reader-response criticism for the Middle Ages. The word “response” retains primacy of “artistic creation” and limits the active role in the production of the text that I attribute to the medieval reader. It also invokes restrictive terms such as “work” and “aesthetics.” 26. I am suggesting, then, that we “bracket” the concept of author and our fixation on “creativity” for a time. There are plenty of cases in which this paradigm does not apply to medieval manuscript texts: anonymous texts, unidentified fragments, florilegia, texts produced by dictation or reportatio, texts transmitted orally for decades before being written down. To attempt to reduce all medieval texts to the “creative” paradigm, or to say that only those texts which can be reduced to this paradigm are worth talking about, engages us, once again, in suppressing considerable amounts of medieval evidence. Over the past two centuries medievalists have at various times bracketed readers, allegory, manuscripts, scribes, values, and even the medieval languages themselves in their discussions of medieval texts. At the very least, I think it is a worthwhile exercise to remove, if only temporarily, the bright light of “creativity” from our manuscripts and try to see what they do in the dark. 27. Curtius’s great book, by identifying and classifying a number of such topoi, seems to have had the effect of emptying them of sense. 28. Cf. T:36v;1629ab: “qual quier omne quel oya sy bien trobar sopiere | puede mas añedir /¬ en mendar lo que quisiere” (“Whoever hears it, if he knows how to write poetry well, can add more to it and emend whatever he wishes”). Hugo von Trimberg (274), prologue to his “Solsequium,” ll. 9–15: “Lector, quisquis eris, hec qui proponere queris, | Omnia longare, si vis, potes aut breviare” (“Reader, whoever you may be, who seek to relate these things, you may lengthen or shorten any of them if you wish”). There are further examples in Jos74 and Gyb at the notes to 1629ab, and in Simon. For the possible relation between the prologue to Zifar and the prologue to the Libro, see Deyermond and Walker, and Kinkade (“Intellectum”). 29. I have not been able to identify the source of the quote within the quote. Is it possibly a remote echo of Horace’s Ars poetica 128–35, or of a medieval commentary upon these lines? 30. Juan Manuel gives an example of oral reading to a single individual in the prologue to the Libro del cauallero et del escudero (Obras 1:39). Walker (“Oral” 39) defines three types of oral presentation: “(a) Singing or recitation by a minstrel of an oral text, involving some degree of improvisation or oral composition by the minstrel himself; (b) Diffusion by a minstrel of a written text, without

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improvisation; (c) Reading aloud of a written text by someone, who is not normally a minstrel, to another individual or a small group.” 31. For example, the “reader” who is being distracted by a snoring neighbor is bound to “read” differently than one seated farther away. Frenk sounds an important cautionary note on the difficulties of attempting to understand orality, and especially the phenomenon of oral reading, by relying on cues in written texts. 32. The term magna glossatura or glossatura maior generally referred to the gloss on St. Paul and the Psalter by Peter Lombard (Smalley 64–65; Häring 176). CHAPTER 1 1. The basic collection of accessus is by Huygens; the classic introduction to their study is by Quain. An important selection of commentary material in English translation is found in M/S, which also includes useful introductions. I refer readers there for a fuller bibliography. Copeland, though ostensibly focused on that type of commentary we call translation, does much to illuminate the rhetorical function of medieval commentary in general. For Juan Ruiz’s debt to the accessus and other marginalia, see my studies: “Avrás,” “Se usa,” and “Further.” 2. This accessus adds with rare candor, “quod ipse tamen minime uidetur facere” (“which, nevertheless, he doesn’t really seem to do at all”). 3. There are still, of course, plenty of occasional notes in the margins. Of special interest are the thousands of fading scratches that haunt the margins of manuscripts of all kinds. These notes, written in a thinner, perhaps cheaper, ink than that used in formal codex production are visible but generally illegible, to me anyway. Many appear to be snippets of verse. In any case, they seem to reflect a more personal intervention in the scriptum than do formal glosses. The recovery of the annotations, perhaps through imaging techniques now available (Benton et al.; Kiernan, “Digital”), could dramatically increase our knowledge of medieval reading practices, especially at the level of the individual reader. 4. The Latin text and a Spanish translation can be found in Beltrán 73–74. 5. I take “lur sen” to refer to the understanding of future readers. It may also refer to a sense contained in ancient books. I do not believe this second sense would affect my argument materially here, as I focus on the “surplus” itself that readers add and leave open the question of where this surplus originates. This must be one of the most frequently cited passages in medieval literature. As a starting place, I refer the reader to Bloch, “Medieval” 111 n. 9. 6. Spitzer (“En torno” 107–9) links these lines to Juan Ruiz’s pleas that the reader “entiende bien mios dichos e piensa la sentençia” (G:3r;46a: “understand my sayings well and weigh their meaning”) and to the various integumentum metaphors that appear in 16–18. But Spitzer confines the activity of the reader to that of elucidating the “meollo” (“marrow”) that the author says he has hidden in his text. 7. Both entender and pensar had far more active meanings in the Middle Ages than they do today. I discuss entender in the next chapter. Pensar retains much of its etymological sense, “to weigh,” and thus carries with it an implicit balancing of values.

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8. I follow the typographical presentation by García Larragueta (139) in consultation with the facsimile edition. See also Díaz, Primeras 26–32. 9. Whinnom (Spanish 6–7), making the same point, used the perfectly apt metaphor of Castilian literature as a chain of islands peeking up above an ocean of Latin letters. But “margins” grants us a metaphor that is both literally and physically true. 10. Although I have been stressing the movement from gloss to text, Copeland (83) points out that the extraordinarily common practice of beginning marginal glosses with lemmata drawn from the text effectively imports the “action” of the text into the glossatory apparatus. 11. I am indebted for much of the information in this paragraph to those colleagues who responded to a query on “vernacular literature as gloss” that I posted on the MEDTEXTL discussion list. I would especially like to thank Louise M. Bishop, George H. Brown, Karen Fresco, James W. Marchand, Daniel F. Melia, John F. Plummer, and Charles Wright. 12. Weiss observes that the Auto is the only known medieval Magi drama that refers to Jeremiah alone. Other religious plays that mention Jeremiah list him with other major and minor prophets (“Auto” 130). 13. I am much indebted in this paragraph to the corrections and clarifications suggested to me by James W. Marchand and Timothy Reuter. 14. To mention a few examples (all of them later than the Auto de los Reyes Magos): for the Apostles there is the massive Mystère des actes des Apôtres, probably written between 1452 and 1478. In it the Apostles are hunted down one by one by the relentless bourreau (“executioner”) Daru (Douhet 95–96). The man blind from birth is found in the Passion d’Arras (before 1414). He is also found in several plays in Spain. The earliest one for which we have information is from 1510 (Torroja and Rivas). 15. BNM Va 5–9, 68v. Notes: *above line: .s. m.o scyenda est (has points beneath it in the ms.); ** the l in this word may have been added later. The passage is very difficult to read in places. The text I give represents my best attempt at a reconstruction. I underline all expanded abbreviations and place editorial emendations in brackets. I wish to thank Manuel Sánchez Mariana for graciously permitting me to examine this folio under ultraviolet light. Cf. this text in the Liber sententiarum in PL 83:578–79. 16. Nepaulsingh (Towards 30–31) is one of the few scholars to appreciate the importance of such details. He notes that the unique manuscript of the Cid bears, at the end of the poem, “the first two verses of Ps. 109 and the first two words of the third verse, a copy of the Paternoster prayer, and a copy of the Ave Maria prayer.” This is especially interesting because, as Nepaulsingh points out, the version of the Cid’s death found in the Estoria de España ends with “Et agora dezit sendos paternostres con su ave maría” (“And now say each of you paternosters with their Ave Maria”). 17. I have consulted the facsimile published in Menéndez Pidal, “Razón,” and a xerox supplied by BNP. Line numbers refer to the paleographic edition in Menéndez Pidal, Crestomatía 1:92–99. 18. Morel-Fatio, who first published portions of this manuscript, presented two separate poems. It is now standard practice to use the title Razón de amor to

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refer to both parts of the poem together, not just to the portion containing the cleric’s amorous adventure. Thus, for most scholars, Razón de amor is the equivalent of Menéndez Pidal’s “Siesta de abril.” I have used Menéndez Pidal’s general title and subtitles here for the sake of clarity. 19. Poems of this type from the Galician-Portuguese tradition have been widely anthologized. See, for example, Nunes 307–10, 315–16, nos. 1–4, 12, 14 (etc.), for parallelistic cantigas de amigo using the alternation of amigo/amado. Cárdenas (237) is no doubt correct in seeing these lines of the Razón as the reflection of a similar Castilian tradition. 20. Both of these “lacunae” occur in mid-line and are the result of scribal omission rather than physical loss at line’s end. 21. But Nepaulsingh concludes: “The document on confession is, of course, more important to the study of works that are arranged around the Ten Commandments and the five senses . . . than to the study of the Razón de amor” (Towards 61). 22. The confessional text seems especially preoccupied with the danger that the sinner will return to sin (127v). For the cyclical worldview in the Libro, see Burke (“Juan”) and De Lope. 23. Franchini has recently published a transcription and brief study of these texts. These are difficult texts, and there are errors in the transcription. Its usefulness is also limited because, in what is probably an uncorrected typographical glitch, the tyronian sign is represented only by a blank space. One hopes that these problems will be corrected in the larger study Franchini promises. He dates the exorcisms to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the “Siesta” to ca. 1250, and the confessional text to ca. 1275 (80 n. 9), suggesting an interesting sequence of Glosynge. 24. Both of Juan Ruiz’s chief exemplary figures in the Libro, the Archpriest of Hita and Don Melón de la Huerta, are described as “mançebos.” The importance of this audience may be justification enough for the “cosas alegres” found in the Libro. Don Melón is described by Trotaconventos as “mançebillo de verdat” (S:43r;727c; cf. 738cd: “a true youth”), the Archpriest as a “mançebo bien adante” (T:16v;1345b; cf. 1392d and 1489a: “a prosperous* youth”). Youth is described in terms quite similar to those used by the editors of the General estoria in 673: “pero sea mas noble para plasenteria | E para estos Juegos hedat ¬ mançebia | la vegedat en seso lieua la meJoria | a entender las cosas el grand tienpo las guia” (G:29v–30r: “But the age of * youth is more noble for delight and for these games, old age is superior in sense; in understanding things, the length of time guides it*”). 25. These commentaries were ascribed by Rojo to Petrus Comestor, based on the indication given on a flyleaf (“Biblioteca” 206–7). My own investigation shows that these are in reality a previously unnoticed copy of the commentaries by Langton. Cf., with regard to the commentary on Proverbs, Stegmüller, Repertorium no. 7802. The precise relationship between this codex, proceeding from the monastery of Santa María de Huerta, and copies of Langton’s commentaries that we know to have belonged to Bishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, who donated his collection to Huerta, has yet to be clarified.

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CHAPTER 2 1. The Moralia were, if anything, more popular in Spain than in the rest of Europe, due in part to the dedication to Leander of Seville (PL 75:509–11). Pero López de Ayala, one of the earliest documented readers of the Libro, translated the Moralia into Castilian at about the time G was being copied (in BNM 10136– 10138). 2. He quotes Gregory: “menos firien al onbre los dardos que ante son vistos E meJor nos podemos guardar delo que ante hemos visto” (S:2v;prol.: “The darts that are seen coming wound man less, and we can protect ourselves better from the things we have seen before”; cf. Gyb n. 86–88). 3. On the other hand, the complaint of many teachers of literature these days seems to be that higher education has become too practical. Our students, on the fast track to a job and a Saab, are unwilling to pause to enjoy the eternal, impractical riches of literature that we can offer them. Medieval ethical reading reminds us that our desire to isolate literature historically, aesthetically, theoretically from the practical world is a rather late development. 4. The Catalan corts forced John to release his son Charles, whom he had imprisoned, and to recognize Charles as his heir in 1461. Although Charles died in September of that year, the Catalans rebelled, and civil war broke out in 1462. I am unable to decipher the number following the king’s name, but the events described clearly refer to John II. I wish to thank Lynn Nelson for helping to clarify this reference for me. 5. Four centuries later, Correas records the proverb .S. was remembering (399): “Kien da lo suio antes de su muerte, ke le den kon un mazo en la frente.” 6. These glosses are found in many manuscripts of De rerum and seem to have formed a sort of glossa ordinaria on Bartholomew’s text. I wish to thank Juris G. Lidaka for his useful comments on the manuscript tradition. 7. The interpretation “badger” for melón was introduced by Cor (n. 727c), who relates it to Hispano-Latin melo, melonis. In general, this etymology has not found favor with Libro specialists, but Seidenspinner-Núñez (Allegory 42–44) and Michalski (“Triple”) have found reasons to accept it, at least in part. 8. The presence of most of the Excidium Troie in this manuscript has not been noted previously, so far as I know. Both Rojo (“Catálogo . . . Osma” 95:222) and Rubio (no. 38) (who copies Rojo, introducing a few new inaccuracies) treat it as the text of Dares alone. Dares’ text in fact occupies only 61r–72v. The manuscript also contains (72v) the list of who killed whom during the Trojan war that often accompanied this text (see Dares of Phrygia, De excidio, viii–x). The Excidium Troie is truncated at the beginning to pick up where Dares leaves off, i.e., with Aeneas’s exodus (cf. 64, l. 5). It occupies 72v–82v (cf. the structure of BNM 10046). 9. See the brief but informative survey of “empirical reception theory” in Holub (134–46). 10. My argument puts me in partial agreement with scholars like Diz who see the Conde Lucanor as an open book whose examples may contain more meanings than the one(s) made explicit at the end of each chapter. It also puts me in opposi-

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tion to readings, such as those by Biglieri, that see the book as “more or less closed” (214). But we must be careful not to see this plurality as a “closed plurality” in which the Letter contains multiple senses. The plurality derives from the reader’s finding “his likeness” in the exempla. I am obviously working with a different definition of “ethics” than is Biglieri, who views the Conde Lucanor as “not a ‘realist’ text, but an ‘allegorical’ one.” For him, the characters of Juan Manuel’s exempla “refer to a higher plane, of ethical order, which transcends historical facts, the animal world, or everyday happenings and saves them from the ephemeral, perishable character of earthly existence” (211). CHAPTER 3 1. In the case of the Castigos and Estados, this influence seems to come through the De regimine of Giles of Rome (Castigos 18–19 and n. 20). But we should not discount the influence of translations such as Hermann the German’s version of the Ethics (made in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity in Toledo in 1240) and of the Summa Alexandrinorum (on the Ethics; 1243 or 1244; see Ferreiro 17– 22). 2. I have explored the relation of the Libro to academic commentary more fully in “Further.” See also Rico (Alfonso 167–88), Nepaulsingh (“Rhetorical” and “Talavera’s”), and Jenaro (“Presupuestos”). 3. Perhaps the ideas I have just cited can account, in part, for the progressive obscurity, to the point of near nonsense, of the proverbs that Patronio tells the Conde in the second, third, and fourth parts of the Conde Lucanor. Cf. Cherchi, who discusses stylistic motivations for this obscurity. 4. The version in S is more familiar to students of the Libro: “fasta que el libro entyendas / del byen non digas nin mal” (S:58v;986c: “Until you understand the book, speak neither well nor ill of it”). Cor calls the reading of G “conceivable, but much less convincing” (n. 986c). Cf. the Libro . . . Zifar (10). 5. Cf. Clemente Sánchez de Vercial’s Sacramental (before 1434?): “ruego . . . alos que este libro leyeren si algunas cosas fallaren no bien ordenadas /o defectuosas que las quieran [?] /e corregir /e emendar /e interpretar ala mas sana parte que dios les diere ha entender” (BPP 25-H, 1v: “I ask those who read this book, if they should find things not well ordered or faulty, that they may wish to [?] correct and emend and interpret them in the most sensible way that God will grant them to understand”). Scholars have tended to see Juan Ruiz’s use of “verços estraños” (T:37r;1634d: “strange verses”) as a reference to his poetic art. In the light of Dante’s use of the term, I think we might also see these as yet another reference to the supposed “hidden,” even allegorical, sense of his book. 6. Cor suggests making “los porfiosos de sus malas maestrias” the subject of the sentence by suppressing the “¬” that precedes it in the manuscript. 7. This justification is quite different from that found in other accessus to the Ars amatoria. In these, teaching the art is justified because youths who are unable to obtain the objects of their passion often commit suicide. The art, by helping them to satisfy their obsession, will protect youth from dying in sin (cf. Ovid, Art 63, 67–68). See also my “Further” (40–41).

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8. There is some doubt that the prologue was written by Juan Ruiz. In Chapter 4, I examine some features of the prologue that may suggest that it was not by him. 9. Ble83, Ble92, and Gyb supply the adjective “buenas” (“good”) before “obras” (“works”). Similar ideas are expressed by Juan Ruiz five lines above. 10. It is interesting to speculate on how much of the etymological sense of the verb instruo remains here. Could Juan Ruiz be thinking of the practice of “constructing” or “arraying” things understood in the memory according to some more or less formal mnemonic technique using architectural or grid imagery (cf. Carruthers, chs. 2 and 3)? 11. The version in G might read, “You will not find one in a thousand troubadours who knows how to speak ill well, subtly and elegantly, for not all of them do it with very subtle skill.” This makes Juan Ruiz into a poet of strictly escarnho, without the compensating practice of also speaking well of certain people. 12. Aristotle had already established this relation in his Rhetoric (1366a23– 24): “We have now to consider excellence and vice, the noble and the base, since these are the objects of praise and blame.” 13. I owe several of the references in this paragraph to James W. Marchand. 14. For the charming tale of the angelic visit, see the Vita Sancti Martini by Lucas of Tuy, PL 208:10–11. In his simplicity, St. Martin is reluctant to eat the book because he fears it would break his vow to fast! 15. Minnis has expressed a healthy skepticism about the general familiarity with Hermann’s translation throughout medieval Europe (rev., Allen, Ethical; see also M/S 277–88). Juan Ruiz, whose close connections with the cathedral of Toledo where some of Hermann’s translations were made (see note 1 of this chapter) may be attested in the document discovered by Hernández (“Venerable”), would seem, potentially, to have had more access to this text than any other major medieval vernacular author. 16. Note that “mal dir” (equivalent to Juan Ruiz’s “mal dezir”) is here set up in direct opposition to “lauzor,” a strong indication that what Juan Ruiz means by “bien dezir” is “to praise.” Similarly, in the description of the alba (Marshall 96), “bendir” is opposed directly to “blasmar.” Such evidence represents for me a convincing proof that when Juan Ruiz says “saber bien e mal dezir,” he means “to know how to praise and blame.” 17. Llull, whose moral sincerity can hardly be questioned, engages in far more complex trap-setting throughout his Libre de meravelles and especially in his “Book of Beasts.” There Na Renarda (“Lady Vixen”) uses traditional “moral” exempla as a means of manipulating the other animals in the court for her own devious ends. Cf. my discussion in Chapter 2 on the technique of using the narrative frame to exemplify the application of the exempla for both good and bad ends. 18. This figure is based on the total stanzas, counting the estribillos only once. I exclude the prose prologue and the cuaderna vía sections, such as “the arms of the Christian Knight,” or the meditation on death, which can be considered largely or wholly religious in tone. I do include in the count the first ten cuaderna vía stanzas of the poem, which make up Juan Ruiz’s invocation. Interestingly, the

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scribe of S, the only manuscript to contain these stanzas, has written them differently from the rest of the cuaderna vía stanzas, as if he felt (or found) them in some way distinguished from the more narrative cuaderna vía that comprises the bulk of the Libro. 19. Lida (“Nuevas” 41) is one of the few scholars to invoke these poems, here in the service of her defense of Juan Ruiz’s didactic goals. “Nor does Juan Ruiz joke about God, the Passion, the Virgin, the saints, confession and absolution, the ceremonies of Ash Wednesday (1177ff.), about death, about the ‘arms’ of the Christian and the sternness of several of the beloved women. In many other topics, the Archpriest exercises his humor without this authorizing us to suppose that said topics were not important and respectable for him.” 20. Only the “Eya velar,” which forms part of Berceo’s Duelo de la Virgen, is earlier, so far as I know. Berceo produced a large body of religious verse, much of it potentially meditative in nature, using the cuaderna vía form. Juan Ruiz’s gozos must also be seen against the background of Galician-Portuguese religious lyric, especially as it is represented in the Castilian king Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria. 21. Burke (“Libro” 124) and Morreale (“Gozos II” 3 and “Lectura” 354–56, 362) have recognized the meditative nature of some of these lyrics but have not studied them in depth. Both Burke (124) and Jenaro (“Presupuestos” 181) have noted the meditative function of the prologue. 22. For the fifteenth century see Le Gentil (1:325–36) and Weiss (Poet’s 143– 51). 23. Jeffrey links the English poems to Franciscan spirituality, whereas Wenzel explores their relation to preaching. See also Bestul. 24. The brackets represent a wavy line, perhaps added over the virgulae that appear at line’s end in some cases. The lines to the left of the brackets are read first, then the lines to the right. This layout clearly reveals the scribe’s debt to older traditions of Latin and vernacular verse display, but it may also have provided extra mnemonic cues for readers, intentionally or not. S follows the modern arrangement by metrical verse line. PART II: INTRODUCTION 1. Speer (“Editing”) reaches the conclusion already evident in her earlier collaborative survey of editing Old French texts (Foulet and Speer): each separate tradition (or each editing project) demands its own method. If this is the case, it is hard to believe in the possibility of a methodology of critical editing. As we read Speer’s survey we are struck by just how much energy has been dedicated to getting medieval scripta to “fit” our printed books. One has to ask why so much effort and ingenuity should be dedicated to agonizing over the transition from one medium to another. This suggests to me that there is something fundamentally wrong, not with the specific practices of editors, but with the endeavor of editing. The enterprise is irredeemably alien to its object. 2. Blecua attempts to reduce the difference between “neo-Lachmannian” and “neo-bédiériste” editions to a simple choice: “Either the hand of the Copyist or the voice of the Author” (“Textos” 88). He does this in order to stack the deck in

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favor of what he sees as the obvious preference we must have for Lachmann, “the least bad of the known methods” (87). But Blecua exaggerates for his own purposes the servitude of bédiériste editors to scribes. Bédier entitled the first “bédiériste” edition: Le Lai de l’Ombre par Jean Renart. Holmes’s observations about bédiériste editors’ nostalgia for the “perfect” medieval poet holds true today, I think. One is struck by how much “Lachmannian” thinking goes into the production of Gyb’s “bedierista” edition of S: “lectio singularis” (n. 1302c), “lectio facilior” (n. 536b). The fact is that both Ble83 in his neo-Lachmannian edition and Gyb in his bédiériste edition make the same false claims on the title pages of their editions. Ble83: Arcipreste de Hita, Libro de buen amor; Gyb: Arcipreste de Hita, Libro de buen amor. This common editorial practice is certainly the “silentest” emendation of them all. Even Blecua can only claim that the neo-Lachmannian method produces “of all possible words, the word closest to the author” (“Textos” 88). A more straightforward title to his edition might have been, then, “Almost the Archpriest of Hita . . .” or “As Close as Possible to the Archpriest of Hita. . . .” Gyb should probably have entitled his “Ms. Salamanca 2663 (with Certain Dialectal and Orthographical Variants Suppressed or Regularized) Supplemented, in Cases of Lacunae, by Ms. Gayoso of the Real Academia Española, with Occasional Reference to Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. Va 6–1 and the Methodologies of Karl Lachmann.” That neither of these would be acceptable titles for a printed book simply makes my point again that the realities of the world of medieval scripta cannot be shoehorned into our present technologies of representing them without great distortion. That both editors, and hundreds of others, choose to gloss over these “small” distinctions, giving their editions both authors and titles, makes Speer’s claim that it is only “unsophisticated readers” who “unquestioningly bestow authority on printed editions” seem rather disingenuous (“Editing” 25 n. 24). I may as well deal with one more red herring thrown up in defense of Lachmannian editions: that those who want to know what the (other) manuscripts said can always consult the list of variants (see Blecua, “Textos” 87). It would be interesting to know how many medievalists in the course of their careers have “read” more than a few lines from a “manuscript” using a list of variants. That editors can even suggest this as an experience equivalent to looking at the manuscripts (as Blecua does) shows just how “vehicular” their view of manuscripts remains. 3. Carruthers’s work (especially 158–62) shows that, in making this statement, we must add that memorial transmission was a frequent part of this process as well. 4. Interestingly, Don Juan precedes this description of the scribal process with an exemplum that explains it in terms of the oral mouvance of a song. A knightly troubadour is outraged to hear one of his songs, “tan bien las palabras commo el son” (Obras 1:31: “the words as well as the tune”), being butchered by a cobbler and takes revenge by cutting to shreds all the shoes the cobbler has made. The cobbler complains to the king, but the king finds in the knight’s favor: the cobbler has destroyed the knight’s art; it was fair for the knight to destroy the cobbler’s. 5. We see this struggle exemplified by scribes in the endless puerile games they play at the end of their manuscripts with their names or with explicit formulas (example in my “Avrás” 42).

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6. I base this assessment on a survey of Colophons in progress. See also my “Avrás.” CHAPTER 4 1. The descriptions of the manuscripts are based on C/N x–xxi, on Cor, “Prólogo” passim, and on my own observations. See the preface for the materials I have used in consulting the manuscripts of the Libro. 2. G:78v bears a calligraphic initial in the empty space, probably added by a reader. 3. I do not believe that the arguments advanced by Moffat (“Evaluation” 108) convincingly rule out the possibility that in the library catalogue and the fragment we are dealing with the same manuscript. 4. Division as an act of signification was a tool of still broader application in medieval Spain. Newly reconquered territories on the frontier had to be divided among their conquerors. Such division was not always merely economic, political, or administrative. Even the division of a town itself could have significance, as in the case of the town of Ecija in the year 1264. An imaginary (?) cross is traced in the city, dividing it into four quarters “in remembrance of the Cross.” The largest “quarter” represents the cross, to the right the quarter of St. Mary, to the left, Saint John, and, in front of this trio, Santa Barbara, “figuring the people which is before the Cross asking for mercy and praising Jesus Christ” (Hillgarth 1:23; J. González 1:58–63). 5. Riera has challenged the authenticity of the attribution of the Catalan works that Valenzuela published under the saint’s name. How this challenge will affect the attribution to Pedro Pascual of Castilian works such as this one remains to be seen. 6. In this section, the superscript minuscule letter separated from the rest of the word in G represents the guide letter written in the margin of the manuscript, never filled in by the rubricator. 7. G, which does not divide the poem into stanzas, also omits 474b. 8. The Portuguese fragment has three visible divisions made using large red initials (C/N xxi): (1) At stanza 60: “E eu lhe [disse]” (C/N 581: “And I told him”). This is an odd place for a division, and neither G nor S have divisions there. The initials in this manuscript, possibly produced by royal commission, may simply have performed a decorative function. (2) At stanza 124: “Esto disse tolomeo” (C/N 595: “Thus says Ptolemy”). G is lacunous in this place, but S divides a stanza earlier, before stanza 123: “los antiguos astrologos” (“the ancient astrologers”). This fits the general pattern of differences in division between S and G that I have been discussing. (3) At stanza 129, the division corresponds to a space left for a large initial in G: “Era huum rrei de mouros” (C/N 597: “There was a Moorish king”). S has no rubric in this place, since the rubric for this section, the story of the “Rey Alcaraz,” has appeared at stanza 123. This evidence suggests that P and G may have shared not only the same family of Libro manuscripts, but also a system of decorated initials signaling similar divisions. 9. S:2v/G:1r;11, S:7v/G:5v;82, S:8v/G:6v;98, S:30r/G:18v;457, S:44r/

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G:35v;746, S:57r/G:46r;959, S:58v/G:47v;987, S:61r/G:49v;1022, S:81r/ G:74r;1348, S:81v/G:74v;1357, S:82v/G:75v;1370, S:83v/G:76v;1387, S:84r/ G:77v;1401, S:85r/G:78v;1412, S:87r/G:68r;1445. 10. Two further divisions in G that have no correspondence in S occur in the early stanzas of the Melón/Endrina episode. One occurs at 26v:596a, where Doña Endrina is first named; a space is left for the D of “Doña.” A more unusual division occurs at 27v:607d. This follows the Archpriest’s/Don Melón’s opening confession of his love sufferings and occurs at the precise point at which Doña Venus begins to respond: “/ rr espondio doña venus los segidores vençen/” (G:27v: “Answered Lady Venus, “The persistent person conquers”). This corresponds to a still clearer division in the original Pamphilus : “Tunc Venus hec inquit: Labor improbus omnia uincit” (l. 71). It is possible, then, that this division may be traced back to the Latin manuscript upon which Juan Ruiz based his translation. These divisions parallel certain marginal annotations in G. The division of the text at “Doña Endrina” may be like the writing of Trotaconventos’s name in the margin at the point at which she is first introduced. See Chapter 5. 11. Octavio (42) says that the manuscript is written on “apparently thirteenthcentury paper.” This seems early. He also observes that the Visión must have been written after 1330, the year in which, according to the explicit in T, the Libro was finished. Since scholars believe that the hand of T is of the late fourteenth century or early fifteenth, this would be the terminus ante quem for the creation of the Visión. The only arguments Octavio advances for a late date of composition (i.e., for a date that would make it impossible for Juan Ruiz to have written the Visión according to traditional dating) are linguistic. He finds the language “very developed” in comparison with work written at the beginning of the century. But he does not support this assertion with any specific examples, and, so far as I know, no one else has done so either. González Ollé (216–18) edits a fragment of the Visión and dates it to the end of the fourteenth century. Until more work is done on this question, the possibility remains that the Visión is yet another of Juan Ruiz’s translations from Latin. 12. Walker (“Towards” and “Con”), Lapesa, and Michalski (“Parodia”). These scholars do not mention the Visión, although Walker (“Con” 237) and Michalski make interesting observations on the roles of love, money, and death in the Libro, observations that might have been more strongly supported by reference to the Visión. 13. The problem is, as critics of Lachmann’s methods have repeatedly pointed out, that such principles do not work in situations in which “contamination” has taken place. It is worth asking just how the negative term contaminatio enters the textual-critical vocabulary. What is being contaminated is in no sense the concrete manuscript text itself, certainly not the medieval tradition or medieval readers, but rather the pure, abstract text needed to create (I do not say restore) the authorial text. 14. Hult (“Lancelot’s” 852 n. 53) has suggested it may be best to reserve the term mouvance for discussions of orally (I would add “memorially”) transmitted texts. The term “variance,” then, would refer to texts transmitted by the act of scribal copying.

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15. S:44r;747d, S:52v;893d, S:64r;1082a, S:71r;1187c, S:90r;1491b[?], G:30r;677b (before correction), G:41v:853c, G:41v;855ab, G:72v;1315b, G:79v;1474c, T:4r;1142d. 16. S:56v;951d, S:70r;1178bc, S:81r;1346b, G:13r;469c, G:30v;686b, G:41v;853a, G:71v;1307a, G:83r;1525b, T:11r;1252b, T:18r;1365d. 17. G:30r;673d, G:12r;396a, S:27r/G:11v;393c [?], S:36r/G:24v;567cd [?], S:47r/G:37v;802d [?], S:99r/T:37r;1634c [?]. The “?” indicates cases in which either reading may be correct. 18. S:35v;545d, S:44r;747d, S:48v;828a, S:28v/G:14r;414b, S:36r/ G:25r;571a, G:1r;15d, G:20v;507c, G:27v;606d, G:27v;610b, G:29v;668c, G:37r;797b, G:39v;826a, G:41r;845d, G:75v;1370, and many more. 19. S:36r;567a, S:53v;904d, S:62r;1047a, S:73r;1223a, S:78r;1301c, S:69r/ G:59v;1158b, G:4v;68a, G:20v;512b, G:21r;516c, G:24v;564c, G:25r;577ab, G:26v;596a, G:37v;805c, G:40r;833d, G:49v;1013d, G:74r;1354b, T:2v;951d, T:11r;1253d, and many, many more. 20. Editors have been unable to document the form “fresuelos” (see notes to 1085c in Cor and Gyb). See now Ble92 (n. 1085c) for the meaning “morcillas” (“blood sausages”). 21. It is also possible that a reader or corrector added an abbreviation stroke to the first a in “fraquesa” in the exemplar from which ScribeT copied, and that the latter simply expanded this spurious abbreviation when copying the word. 22. Nepaulsingh (Towards 30–31) has noted an interesting variant of this phenomenon in the manuscript containing the Poema de mio Cid. At the end of the text, we find, among other texts, a copy of the Paternoster and the Ave Maria prayers. It is as if the scribe or a reader offered up a prayer for the hero. 23. My brief review of Gyb may have suggested misleadingly that this edition, too, relied on standardized Latin texts. I should have made clear that my problem with this edition (as well as with Ble83, Jos74, Jos90, and now Ble92) was the lack of clear criteria by which Latin readings of S were accepted or rejected and the silent emendation in cases in which S was rejected. 24. This raises serious, though not insuperable, doubts about the scribes’ (and their readers’) ability to recognize the remainder of the phrase implied: “And how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” According to Gyb (n. 374c), the recollection of the remainder of the phrase is essential to the understanding of the parody. I am not convinced of this necessity in this specific case. “Ecce quam bonum” may simply be an exclamation of the joy of the moment as the clerics set out on their evening’s amorous adventures. The remainder simply extends the range of the reference to embrace the narrational context of the “brothers” setting out for a night of revelry. But I do think Gyb is correct that readers would have added the full biblical context to these and similar citations in the Libro and found new resonances of meaning, parodic or otherwise, in them. The common practice of citing only part of a biblical verse or other familiar text is yet another way in which the reader’s active participation in creating the text is demanded by the nature of medieval textuality. 25. Scribal usus suggests that in transcribing G, following phonemic rules of old and contemporary Spanish, we should expand all word (and syllable?) final nasals represented by an abbreviation stroke as n (“paçen”), except in cases in

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which assimilation is at work, as in “cum mis.” Similarly, scribal usus in S suggests transcribing these as m. 26. There is an abbreviation stroke above the first “sant” that I do not know how to interpret. 27. The absence of the second half (the lower half) of the description of the serrana in 1016–20 in G and T may reflect a bit of censorship early in the tradition (cf. Jos90 textual n. 1016–20). 28. Another example of the oral overlay is found in the so-called author’s variants, some of which are used to found the two-version theory of the Libro’s composition (Gybbon-Monypenny, “Two,” esp. 213–15). Is true authorial revision at the textual level at work here, or has the scribe heard a distinct version of the tale (original with the author or resulting from oral mouvance?) that he inserts into the written text? 29. I agree fully with Kendrick (Chaucerian 157), who is talking about visual images, that “we should take [images of animals behaving like people] for people behaving like animals.” 30. I will examine this reader’s marks in detail in a study in progress entitled Medieval Reading: Theory and Practice. 31. Could they have made such corrections on the fly as they engaged in the common practice of reading to another individual or group? How did they avoid, if in fact they did avoid, publicly stumbling over bad texts in bad light? CHAPTER 5 1. In this discussion, I confine my comments to those marginalia which I am reasonably certain belong to the Middle Ages. Thus, I do not discuss the extensive underlining of words and phrases in G, attributed by Duc (and by C/N following him) to “a fairly ancient epoch” (xx). Duc gives a full list of these (xxi–xxvii). The style of the capital letters written in the margins beside these underlined words suggests that, although they may be “ancient,” they are not medieval. That they seem to have been used to prepare a glossary of unfamiliar words helps to confirm the postmedieval nature of this particular set of marginal interventions. On the limitations and difficult nature of this type of evidence, see Huot (“Medieval” 401 n. 2). Huot’s study is a pioneering effort in using the cumulative effect of minimalist evidence such as notas as a way of understanding “that all but mythical figure, the medieval reader” (401). See now her “Romance.” 2. For glosses and other annotations in The Canterbury Tales, see Manly and Rickert (3:483–527) and Blake (93–94, 133–35, 146–49). For annotations in Roman de la Rose manuscripts, see Huot (“Medieval”); for glosses, see the bibliography at Huot’s n. 1. 3. Juan Ruiz seems to have preferred to incorporate marginal genres such as accessus and explicits directly in his text (see my “Avrás,” “Further,” and “Se usa”). 4. This date is based on the corrector’s marginal note that read, according to Duc (312), before the manuscript’s rebinding in 1899: “año de xpisto de LXIII son CXXXIIIIo años.” By subtracting 134 from [14]63 we arrive at 1329, approximately the same date given in the colophon: “Era de mill /¬ tresyentos /¬ sesenta /¬ ocho años” [Era 1368–38 = 1330 A.D.].

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5. The reader would have come up with a rather different reading, and a rather different view of the effects of love, than readers of SG: “dexome con cuydado pero con allegria” (S:78v ≅ G: “He left me with care, but with happiness”). 6. 15r:1316; 19r:1380(?); 19v:1383–85; 21v:1407–8; 22v:1422; 26r:1477, 1479; 28v:1508; 29v:1519–20 (linked by a line); 30r:1524–28; 30v:1531, 1535; 31r:1538, 1542; 31v:1544, 1547, 1549; 32r:1552; 33r:1566–67, 1569; 33v:1574 (long straight mark), 1577 (faint curved mark?). 7. The ojo in this stanza is substantially different from the others in that it is comprised of three circles rather than one: one larger circle with two smaller circles joined by a line below it and to the left (o-o). Unlike all the other examples, these do not touch the vertical shaft of the calderón. 8. Both the Hengwrt (197v) and Ellesmere (138r) manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales quote Chaucer’s source, Eph. 5:18 (“And be not drunk with wine, wherein is luxury”), in Latin in the margin, at the beginning of the “Pardoner’s Tale” l. 484: “luxure / is in wyn / and dronkenesse” (Hengwrt). 9. “enero,” “março,” “abril,” and “mayo” and possibly “Junio” are written between parallel slash marks (e.g., /abril/). The remaining months and the seasons are fully surrounded by boxes, but “verano” and “febrero” have both boxes and slash marks. One possible scenario would be that a scribe or early reader wrote in the names of the months and seasons (see below) and that they or a subsequent reader surrounded “Noviembre,” “enero,” “verano,” “febrero,” “abril” and “mayo” with slash marks. Yet another reader (or scribe) then came along and put in the boxes. Why he put boxes around some and not others is not clear to me. 10. On the importance of such cyclical themes, see Burke (“Juan”). 11. C/N transcribe “ensienplos” (plural). It seems to me, however, that what C/N take to be a “long s” is, in fact, a part of the box that surrounds the word. I transcribe it in the singular, noting also the rarity of “long s” in word-final position. 12. In addition, I note hands pointing from the first initial on the page toward the top margin at 24v and 67r. 13. Two other styles of hand show a general interest in sententious phrases, but there is little else to suggest particular interests. One of these does carry out a particular reflex of manuscript annotation, the signaling of the names of auctores, in pointing to 36r;568c, where the name of “caton sabyo Romano” is mentioned. It is intriguing to speculate whether the reader who made this mark might have been Lope de Salazar, who refers to “Catón” in one of the quotes from the Libro found in his Bienandanzas e fortunas and seems to have had access to S or a manuscript like it (see Chapter 6). 14. The phrase is followed by signs that I have been unable to decipher. It seems to me most likely that the “fin” refers to the end of the “Arms” section alone, but it is possible that it refers to the entire remainder of the text. 15. In Chapter 2, I argued, however, that even the “misappropriations” or “misapplications” serve a didactic function. 16. We should also remember that the marks made by readers and the scribes remained in the scriptum, became a part of it. These marks not only affected one reading, but served to shape the approaches and attitudes of readers who followed. A nota or a hand signaled to future readers that a particular line or stanza

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was worthy of special attention. It may also have had the complementary effect of causing readers to pay less attention to, or even to ignore, the many passages not so marked. CHAPTER 6 1. One argument in favor of identifying the Portuguese fragment with that mentioned in the inventory is the obvious care that went into the production of the original manuscript. In a little-noted article, Criado (“Libro”) argues that it was produced at the Castilian royal court. 2. The reference, first noted by Faulhaber (Askins 73), is found in BNP Esp. 524, 56v. 3. Alonso (“Crítica” 76–77 and 77 n. 1) shows that by “Alfonso XI,” Argote means “Alfonso X, el Sabio.” 4. This distribution suggests several avenues of approach to medieval reading of the Libro (and other medieval works) that have scarcely been explored: how were books bought, sold, traded, transported in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iberia? Who was involved in these activities? We know very little about the book trade in these periods, or about scriptoria or, in fact, about how books were produced and distributed in general. A document of 1302 shows that in the reigns of Sancho IV (1284–95) and Fernando IV (1295–1312), some Dominican friars were engaged in the transportation and/or itinerant copying of books (AHN, Clero, cpta. 185, no. 9). But would the Archpriest’s book be the sort of book transported or copied by friars or other religiouses? The ecclesiastical connections of both G and T suggest that this is not impossible. Although Alfonso el Sabio’s Siete partidas (Partida II, Título XXXI, Ley XI) calls for the creation of an estacionario at the university, as far as I know, no books actually produced by the pecia system in, say, Salamanca, have been identified. G bears certain signs we might associate with the pecia system: catchwords, a rudimentary system of signatures. So does S, a manuscript we know to have been written in the academic ambience of Salamanca. Given the general decline of the pecia system by the fourteenth century in the rest of Europe, it is difficult to know whether such a system existed at all in late-medieval Spain or what its relation may have been to the copying of vernacular texts. 5. It may be that, despite the entry in the inventory, Argote genuinely did not know of Juan Ruiz or his Libro. As Moffat notes (“Evidence” 40), Argote fails to mention Juan Ruiz or “the Archpriest” in the Discurso on Castilian verse that precedes his edition of the Conde Lucanor. 6. As noted in Chapter 5, in S, this stanza has a sketch of a bird beside it. 7. Versus were one of the ways in which the memorial culture of the Middle Ages stored knowledge of all kinds: technical and scientific, as well as ethical (Thorndike). In them we can see memorial culture and manuscript culture functioning in tandem. These mnemonic versets were extremely popular in late-medieval Castile. The much-maligned viessos of Don Juan Manuel clearly belong to this genre rather than to poetic verse. See also Esc P.I.4 (S. XIV), where versus are signaled in the margin of the Chronica by Gonzalo de Hinojosa, e.g., 4v, and see Salamanca, Universidad 2251, work by Gonçalo, bishop of Salamanca, where fre-

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quently “versus” or “verso” signals the appearance of a mnemonic verset in the text. BPP 9-H, Ecclus. 37v, bottom: “versus . Pectoris archanum ./ non est comittere sanum / Rimis seruorum ./ quia fictile pectus eorum. (“Versus: It is not wise to tell the secrets of the heart to loose-lipped servants because their hearts are false”). BPP 4-H, a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses copied in Castile, also includes a number of these versets in its commentary. 8. In several other places in the Corbacho we glimpse possible traces of the Libro. The “Archpriest’s” proverb, “quando te dan la cablilla / acorre conla soguilla” (S:51v;870b: “When they give you the kid, come running with the rope,” i.e., “Make hay while the sun shines”), appears with only slight variation (Corbacho 145). Curiously, like stanza 722 (which Martínez may also cite), this stanza also bears a sketch, of a mammal, in S (Chapter 5). Compare also 1537b and 1541d, on the reactions of loved ones to the impending death of the “rrico pecador,” with Corbacho 255. 9. I follow the transcription in C/N, which is based in turn on that found in Menéndez Pidal, Poesía 389–92. I have restored e as &, as this seems to be the most common form in the facsimile published by C/N. I have also rejoined words separated by editors in the transcription. Line divisions represent Menéndez Pidal’s best attempt at restoring verse forms, not physical lines of manuscript. 10. The references to the Libro in this manuscript were discovered by Jules Piccus and first published by Brey Mariño in her modern Castilian version of the text in 1966. See Faulhaber, “Date” 31–32. 11. I have not been able to identify a single source for this treatise, though it contains many similarities to a number of the texts collected by Hubert (“Corpus”). It may be that it, like the Ars predicandi edited by Faulhaber (“Medieval”), is an original composition. The final section of the treatise suggests that it was composed by a student and presented to his professors. 12. On the various systems of punctuation in the Middle Ages, see Parkes (“Punctuation”), and the important collection (“Corpus”) and study (“Vocabulaire”) by Hubert. See also Marchello. For medieval Castilian texts, see the useful collection of articles edited by Roudil. 13. Faulhaber (“Date” 34) also makes this point. Although the use of familiar texts as illustrations of proper punctuation was quite common, none of the numerous texts cited by Hubert (“Corpus”) uses vernacular texts among its examples. 14. This and the previously cited stanza are found again on 67v. The word “esforçados” in 1450c is glossed “.i. audaces” (Faulhaber, “Date” 32, 32n. 7, and 33 n. 10). 15. I transcribe from the photographs found in García de Salazar, Bienandanzas 1, Rodríguez’s folio 1. Most punctuation I have included comes at the end of a manuscript line and seems to serve a largely decorative function. See Armistead, “Unnoticed” 88–89 n. 2 for early corrections to the text as transcribed. This portion of the facsimile uses BNM 1634 to supply folios missing from RAH 9–10–2/ 2100, which is used in the remaining transcriptions. 16. Word-final capital letters in this and the following transcription from this manuscript represent letters written large to fill up line space.

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17. It is impossible to determine whether Salazar knew that his citations came from the Libro. Perhaps the citations of 71 and 105 already formed a part of the gnomic miscellany in which they appear and were copied from it without García’s being aware that he was copying from the “Book of the Archpriest of Hita.” It seems less likely, however, that the verses of Pseudo-Cato, which are quoted in Salazar’s prologue, and which also seem to refer to the prologue to the Libro, were drawn from any source but the Libro itself. This and the proximity of all three citations in the original text (44, 71, and 105) suggest that they were all drawn directly from a (perhaps fragmentary) copy of Juan Ruiz’s book by Salazar himself. 18. I agree with Ble83 (3 n. *) that the rubrics antedate S. It is possible that these fragments are all from a source that had extracted portions of Juan Ruiz’s prologue and rubrics as well as the citations themselves. 19. For students of the textual tradition of the Libro, and especially for partisans of the “two-version” theory, it should be of great interest that Salazar’s scriptum of the Libro seems, on the basis of this slim evidence, to share characteristics of both S and G. 20. Castro at first transcribes “muy” for “inuernizo,” then crosses it out. This suggests he was copying from a manuscript in which the minims were not clearly distinguished by spacing or marks above the i’s and in which the n of “inue” was not abbreviated. If this is correct, the fragment could not have been copied from either G:39v (“yuerniso”) or S:48v (“envernizo”). There is some debate as to where the missing stanzas belong in the Libro. Moffat would situate them in the lacuna of thirty-two stanzas that occurs between 765 and 766. “De mal en peor andan como el lobo a las formigas” (see folowing paragraph) is probably Trotaconventos’s lead-in to the fable of the wolf ’s lucky sneeze. The lines that precede it in Castro (“por mucho que uos digo sienpre dezides non”; facsimile before C/N 601 = new line v: “For all I say to you, you always answer ‘no’ ”) would be the lead-in to the story: Doña Endrina is always saying “no,” like the wolf who is not smart enough to seize good fortune when he has it in his grasp. Blecua (Manual 38 n. 3, Ble83 n. 877–78, and Ble92 528, n. 877d–878a) says that these stanzas go between 877 and 878 but offers no supporting arguments. 21. Editors explain that this refers to a chicken born after September 29. 22. Neither S nor G originally contained these lines in a single gathering, though they fit into two (Vàrvaro, “Nuovi” 136–37 and “Stato” 550–51). 23. See Deyermond (“Early” 320) for other arguments in favor of a direct relation between this poem and that of the Archpriest. 24. See Scholberg, Sátira 256–58 on this type of debate, and 258–59 on these poems in particular. 25. Ble83 notes (n. 596a) that the names Don Malón and Doña Androna both appear in the Libro de Alixandre. See my comments in “Mulberries” 402 n. 2. 26. Whinnom translates (“Fifteenth” 95 and 97–98): “Tell King John [II of Aragon]—and others who have incurred his displeasure will doubtless be interested to hear the news—that his son, Don Alfonso, is quite determined, despite the King’s fulminations, to marry his Doña Leonor, with all due legal and religious ceremony.” “Don Alfonso de Aragón is as treacherous and deadly as a cockatrice/ basilisk/crocodile, so that the long-beaked Doña María/Leonor de Soto is forever condemned to peck only at the back of his neck.”

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27. Michalski (“Triple”) might have used this in support of his argument that the name “Endrina” has an avian echo. 28. It is useful to compare these lines with another collection of Castilian proverbs that appears in Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina 5-3-41, 287r–291r. Among the Castilian and Latin proverbs collected there are “bien abenturado es ell varon que por otro se castiga e por si non” (“Fortunate is the man who learns his lesson through someone else and not himself”) and “en burlas nin en beras con tu señor non partas peras; sinon comera las maduras e dar tea las duras” (fol. 289r: “Neither in jest nor in earnest should you divvy up pears with your lord; if you do he will eat the ripe ones and give you the hard ones”). 29. Criado (Historia 118–20), writing in 1976, still considers the miscellany to be a juglar’s prompt book. But his comments on the character of the fragments, if not all of his conclusions regarding it, are worth reading. CONCLUSION 1. The fragmentary “reading for types” is the one I have found most frequently represented in the Spanish manuscripts, both Latin and Castilian, that form the background of this study. My reading is probably skewed within the larger European context, but I do not believe it is skewed very much. We must recognize, of course, that I have only dealt with readings recorded in writing. It seems likely that this type of reading was selected from a spectrum of simultaneous readings as the one appropriate (for social, customary, or habitual reasons) for inscription on the manuscript leaf. The challenge is to find concrete ways of studying other styles of reading that may have been going on, and how they interacted with the readings we can document. 2. In fairness, we should not demand greater standards of “practicality” from manuscript-oriented studies than we do from author-oriented studies. For two hundred years, scholars have been using phrases such as “Chaucer says” or “Juan Ruiz intends” without apparent embarrassment. We should bear in mind that the worst microfilm of the most damaged medieval manuscript provides us with far more solid evidence for interpretation than does the best-preserved medieval author. 3. My only criticism of this approach is that its techniques, generally limited to puerile puns and false etymologies, appear rather timid and impoverished beside the much more various and inventive activities of medieval readers. Perhaps the difference is, after all, a system of broadly shared values that enables and empowers medieval readers to range so freely in their search for these values in resistant texts. This is a minor argument for value-driven interpretation, then. It is also true that the ethical readings of the Middle Ages offer critics convinced of the notion that our world, experience, and consciousness is constructed primarily or exclusively through language a unique opportunity to observe how bits of language—proverbs, exempla—shape the experience and behavior of medieval readers and their authors.

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INDEX

U

NTIL I BEGAN work on the index to this book, I had not realized the extent to which the apparatus for retrieving information from printed books has, in the centuries since the Middle Ages, adapted itself to the paradigm of authors and works. How does one index a book according to a different paradigm, a paradigm based on Glosynge and scripta? How does one remain faithful to the lively, intricated, fallen, and unfinished world of medieval scripta in the index to a printed book? How does one provide access to the complex intersection of author, scribe, text, gloss, and unique, physical manuscript leaf that was the medieval scriptum? What values might be implicitly reinforced, what relations and realities obscured by the simple act of placing an accessus to Horace under “Horace”? What, in fact, is our path of access to and the true locus of a gloss in the margins of a Latin/Castilian grammar text, a gloss that may or may not have any relation to that text? I thought I might at least raise these issues by placing the entire index under the heading of “Glosynge,” just as most indexes to scholarly books are tacitly under the rubric of “Authors.” But a brief introduction to the index would present these problems in more congenial fashion, I thought better. These questions suggest another vital source for the investigation of medieval reading: the indexes to medieval books themselves as prepared by both authors and readers of specific scripta. A very broad generalization is that medieval indexes stressed topics, types, and auctores and leaned toward a combination of rational and loose alphabetical ordering (Rouse/Rouse, “Statim”); modern indexes stress subjects and authors and employ letter-by-letter or word-by-word alphabetical ordering almost exclusively. Indexes to printed books are prepared from page proofs before the book goes to press, generally by the author or a person granted temporary auctoritas for this purpose. The index thus prepared is valid for each single copy of the book. Indexes to scripta might be prepared by authors in the form of tabulae, but where reference to precise folios was desired, indexes were necessarily prepared by scribal indexers or, sometimes decades or centuries after the codex’s production, by readers themselves. Medieval indexes referred to unique, individual manuscript books, then, and although their structure might be transferred to other scripta containing the “same” text, in all but a very few instances of carefully controlled manuscript production, the folio or page references could not. In the following index I have striven for some usable compromise. A courteous cross-reference from “Horace” to “commentaries, on Horace”

does not, after all, betray the cause significantly. I have tried to provide access to the book, then, from several directions, without losing sight of the unique, concrete, yet fluid world of medieval scripta. This may help to explain a certain redundancy, discursiveness, ellipsis, and occasional inconsistency in the index which follows. Abad, Domingo, de los Romances, 175–76, 209 abbreviations in manuscripts, 135, 137, 144, 151, 236n.21, 236–37n.25, 237n.26 Abelard, Peter, commentary on Romans, 96–97 accessus, 27, 34–35, 81–82, 93–97, 102, 171, 226nn. 1–2, 230n.7, 237n.3. See also accessÖs accessÖs: to Avianus, 94–95; to Horace’s Sermones, 95; to Ovid’s Ars amatoria, 230n.7; to Ovid’s Heroides, 93–94, 96, 101, 102; to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 34, 94; to Pamphilus, 171; to Prudentius, 94; to pseudo-Ovid’s De sompno, 81–82; to Valerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta, 94 Accursius, commentary on Digest, 37 Adam Scriveyn (scribe), 114 adaptation (by authors of source texts), 22, 26, 62, 126. See also adaptations of source texts; Glosynge; translation adaptation (preparation of textual material for ethical application), 62–64, 67–72, 73, 74, 75–76, 78–79, 157–58, 213–14 adaptations of source texts, 171–212; of Alexander the Great legend (RAH 9-10-2/ 2100), 185; of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in Brunetto Latini’s Trésor, 81; of Bocados de oro (RAH 9-10-2/2100), by Lope García de Salazar, 185; of Boethius’s De consolatione, by Chaucer, 171, 215; of Dares of Phrygia’s De excidio Troiae and Excidium Troie (BdO 126 and BNM 10046), 229n.8; of Isidore of Seville’s Liber sententiarum, by Martín of León, 97, 171; of Lucan’s Pharsalia in General estoria (Esc R.I.10), 64; of Mocedades Rodrigo, by Lope García de Salazar (RAH 9-10-2/2100), 185; of Roman du Graal, by Lope García de Salazar (RAH 9-10-2/2100), 185; of Trojan legends, 70 (into Castilian and Galician-Portuguese), 185 (by Lope García de Salazar,

RAH 9-10-2/2100), 229n.8 (of Latin prose versions in BdO 126 and BNM 10046). See also Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): passages discussed: Pamphilus adaptation; translations aesthetics of reception, 23, 203–4, 220n.7, 229n.9 Albertus Magnus, 60, 89 Alexander (Paris of Troy). See moralizations: Alexander Alffonsus Paratinensis. See Alfonso de Paradinas Alfonso V, of Aragón, 200 Alfonso X, el Sabio, of Castile-León (author?/royal patron?/project originator and director/promulgator), 175, 239n.3; Cantigas de Santa Maria, 232n.20; Estoria de España, 70, 227n.16; General estoria, 52–55, 70, 83, 121–22, 228n.24; Siete partidas, 239n.4 Alfonso de Paradinas (scribe?/book owner?), 119, 120–21, 127, 140–42, 143, 170 Alfonso of Aragón (son of John II), 198– 99, 210, 241n.26 aliquid minus. See surplus and aliquid minus allegories: Bathsheba, 62; David, 62; Ecclus. 24:11, 88; “Jason,” 51; “Jason’s” glass shield, 51; “Jason’s” knife, 51; Medusa, 51; peacock, 10; Uriah, 62 allegory (sensu etymologico), 26, 27–28, 47– 48, 54, 57–58, 74, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 100, 107, 147, 225n.26, 230n.5 Allen, Judson B., 21–22, 23, 59–60, 231n.15 Alonso, Dámaso, 41–42, 175–76 alphabet, 116, 135–36 alterity, 220n.7 amor illicitus. See loco amor amplexus versus eliminatio in textual criticism, 128–29 amplification, 24–25, 42, 55, 65–67, 137–

INDEX

39, 142–43, 171, 201–4; simultaneous technical and ethical, 184–85 amplifications, of Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor in Mss. P (Madrid, Real Academia Española, 15) and M (BNM 4236), 143, 201–4, 211 Anaya, Diego de, 119, 142 application, 62–64, 73–79, 213–14, 231n.17 Aragonese Anthology (BNM 9589), 163, 181–85, 189–90, 209, 240nn. 10–14 Archpriest of Hita: as auctor, 95, 101–2, 162, 163, 170, 176–89, 192, 204–7, 210, 211, 212; cancionero circulating under his name, 176, 209; as compiler, 178–79; as exemplary figure, 95–96, 101–2, 124, 127, 176, 194, 197, 198, 207, 210–11, 212, 228n.24; fictional life of, xix, 74–75, 123–24, 127, 154, 167, 170, 208, 211–12, 223n.10; in literary histories, 173–76. See also Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita); Ruiz, Juan Archpriest of Talavera. See Martínez de Toledo, Alfonso Argote de Molina, Gonzalo, 173, 191–92, 200, 209, 239n.3; Discurso and edition of Conde Lucanor, 239n.5; Elogios (in Madrid, Biblioteca del Palacio, 880), 175–76 argumenta, 27, 34 Aristotle, 81, 186, 187–89, 206–7, 211; Nichomachean Ethics, 6, 60, 86, 89, 96, 230n.1 (translated/adapted by Hermann the German); Poetics, as adapted in commentary (Averroes)/ translation (Hermann the German), 59–60, 93, 97–98; Politics, 93; Rhetoric, 93, 96, 231n.12 Armistead, Samuel G., 186–87 Arnulf of Orleans, Allegoriae super Ovidii Metamorphosin, 10, 34 Ars predicandi (in BNM 9589), 181, 240n.11 Artigas, Miguel, 137–38 Askins, Arthur L.-F., 173 assimilatio, 21, 59–60, 71, 76, 78–79, 83, 98, 229–30n.10 assimilation. See assimilatio auctoritas/auctoritates, 150, 176–91; copied in reverse order, 180, 190–91; relation to manuscript space, 177, 190; relations to ethics and rhetoric, 176–77. See

265 also Archpriest of Hita: as auctor; authors, medieval: as auctores Augustine, 6, 22, 35, 86, 177; De civitate Dei, 90, 96; De dialectica, 223n.7; De magistro, 21–22; On Christian Doctrine, 21 Augustine (pseudo-), 41–42 author/work paradigm, xvi–xvii, xix, 8–10, 10–12, 13, 15, 18–20, 21–26, 33, 38, 47, 50, 107, 111–17, 125, 128–29, 133– 34, 139, 148, 168, 176–77, 222n.3, 225nn. 25–26. See also text, concepts of: “classical” authors, medieval: attitudes toward control of their texts, 10–12, 23, 114–15; as auctores, 93–96, 101, 176–77; exemplary function of, 101–2; investigation of specific scripta used by, 169–70, 171–72; invitation to emend/amplify their works, 10–11, 24–25, 113–14, 225n.28; medieval ideas of, 14, 20, 23–26, 34–36, 52– 55, 93–103, 114–15, 176–77; new approaches to, 220n.7; as readers, 24, 59, 148, 215; relationship with scribes, 25, 114–16, 233n.4 Auto de los Reyes Magos (in BNM Va 5–9), 43–47, 50, 55, 56, 129 Averroes, Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 59–60, 93, 97–98 Avianus. See accessÖs: to Avianus Badel, Pierre-Yves, 150, 169, 210 Baena, Juan Alfonso de, 192, 195, 210. See also Cancionero de Baena Barthes, Roland, 5, 9–10, 13, 20–21, 152, 223n.9 Bartholomew the Englishman. See glosses, on Bartholomew the Englishman’s . . . Bede. See glosses: on Bede’s . . . Bede (pseudo-), 62 Bédier, Joseph, xviii, 220n.7, 233n.2 Beltrán, Luis, 220n.6 Berceo, Gonzalo de, Duelo de la Virgen, 232n.20 Bernard (pseudo-), Floretus, 207 Bernart de Ventadorn, 84, 214 Bersuire, Pierre, 34 Bible, 22, 43, 64–66, 82–83; cited in gloss or commentary, 35, 43–47, 51, 52, 54– 55, 64–65, 68, 86–87, 157, 161, 182, 227n.16, 238n.8; cited in medieval works, 139–40, 141, 143, 149, 186–87;

266 Bible (cont.) as master gloss, 51–55, 71; threefold interpretation of 45–47. See also commentary: biblical biblical exegesis. See commentary: biblical Biglieri, Aníbal A., 229–30n.10 binary oppositions/hierarchies, 57–58, 71, 81, 93–103 Blake, N. F., 217 Ble83, 92, 132, 139, 231n.9, 233n.2, 236n.23, 241nn. 18 and 20. See also Ble92; Blecua, Alberto Ble92, 92, 119, 132, 139, 147, 231n.9, 236n.23, 241n.20. See also Ble83; Blecua, Alberto Blecua, Alberto, 119, 176, 179, 217, 224n.20, 232–33n.2, 241n.20. See also Ble83; Ble92 Blecua, José Manuel, 217 Bloch, R. Howard, xv, 13–14 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 122 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, 34, 207; medieval reception of, 34, 117, 171. See also adaptations . . . : of Boethius’s . . . ; translations, of Boethius’s . . . Book of Alexander. See Libro de Alexandre Borges, Jorge Luis, 133, 207 Brownlee, Marina Scordilis, xiv, 5–6, 220n.6, 222n.6, 225n.24 Bruns, Gerald L., 6, 56, 61 buen amor, 5, 57, 80, 90–91, 126, 219n.1 Burke, James F., xiv, 220n.6, 222n.4 Caedmon’s “Hymn,” 42 calderones, 122 Cancionero de Baena (BNP Esp. 37), 176, 192–98, 200, 210 Cancionero de Estúñiga (BNM Va 17–7), 200–201 canso, 99–100 cantigas d’escarnho, 100, 214, 231n.11. See also maldezir; satire cantigas de amigo, 48–49, 198–99, 228n.19 cantigas de maldizer, 100, 192–95. See also maldezir; satire Carruthers, Mary J., xviii, 22–23, 60–64, 89, 163, 164, 222n.3, 224–25n.23, 233n.3 Carvajal, 200–201 Castro, Américo, 5 Castro, Fadrique de, 195 Cátedra, Pedro, 169, 206–7

INDEX

Cato (pseudo-), 34, 186, 238n.13; Disticha Catonis, 161–62, 186–87, 189, 241n.17 Cej, 92 Cejador y Frauca, Julio. See Cej Cerquiglini, Bernard, xv, 12, 22, 130, 223nn. 8 and 11 charity, law of, 57–58, 88, 91 Chartier, Roger, 23 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 42–43, 171; “Adam Scriveyn,” 114; Boece, 116–17, 171, 215 Canterbury Tales, 33, 63, 122, 214; “narrowing” of fifteenth-century readings of, 212. See also fragments . . . : separate circulation . . . ; glosses: in scripta of Chaucer’s . . . Chi, 92, 133, 139 Chiarini, Giorgio. See Chi Chrétien de Troyes, 114, 223n.12 C/N, 153, 224n.19, 238n.11 codex descriptus, 134 Coimbra, Biblioteca de Santa Cruz, 172 Colón, Fernando, 173 colophons. See explicits commentary, 25, 59, 61, 226n.1, 230n.2; allegorizing, 27 (see also allegories; allegory); biblical, 22, 27, 35–36, 43–47, 51–55, 56, 57, 62, 64–66, 82–83, 85– 86, 96–97, 157, 171, 186–87, 207, 214; on classical authors, 22, 34–36, 62; moralizing, 27 (see also moralizations). See also accessus; commentaries; Glosynge commentaries: on Aristotle’s Poetics, by Averroes, 59–60, 93, 97–98; on Digest, by Accursius, 37; on Ecclesiastes, by Stephen Langton (BPP 9-H), 54–55, 157; on Ecclesiasticus, by Stephen Langton (BPP 9-H), 50; on Gospels, by Gregory the Great, 96, 229n.2; on Horace (Esc R.I.10), 52–55, 56, 225n.29; on Job, by Gregory the Great, 60, 86, 229n.1; on Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla, by Pablo de Santa María, 39–40; on Peter Riga’s Aurora, 83; on Proverbs, by Stephen Langton (BPP 9-H), 228n.25; on Romans, by Peter Abelard, 96–97; on selected Psalms, by Honorius of Autun, 57; on Solomon’s biblical books (Évora CXXV.2.3), 53–55, 56; on Song of Songs, by Gregory the Great, 85; on Song of Songs, by Honorius of Autun, 85–86, 97, 100 on Ovid: Ars amatoria, 230n.7; Heroides, 34–35, 95; Metamorphoses, 10

INDEX

(by Arnulf of Orleans and John of Garland), 34 (by Arnulf of Orleans, Pierre Bersuire, and Ovide moralisé), 51, 153, 240n.7. See also accessÖs; argumenta; glosses compilatio, 22. See also Glosynge compilations, 74 computers and editions of medieval texts, 12, 215–16, 223n.11, 226n.3 contaminatio, 132, 235n.13 continuation, 22, 25, 26. See also Glosynge Copeland, Rita, 42–43, 59, 60–61, 171, 222n.3, 226n.1, 227n.10 Cor, 19, 92, 119, 120–21, 133, 139, 142, 153, 224n.19, 229n.7 Corominas, Joan, 113–14, 142. See also Cor Criado de Val, Manuel, 239n.1, 242n.29. See also C/N critical editions, 18, 107–13, 128–35, 142, 149–52, 221n.7, 222–23n.6, 224n.17, 232n.1; amplexus versus eliminatio, 128– 29; Bédiériste, xvi, 112–13, 114, 133, 140, 220n.7, 224n.18, 232–33n.2; codex descriptus, 134; and computers, 12, 215– 16, 223n.11, 226n.3; contaminatio, 132, 235n.13; Lachmannian, xvi, 112–13, 128–35, 140, 232–33n.2, 235n.13; place in medieval literary studies, xvi, xviii, 134. See also manuscript: versus critical editions/printed books Crónica de Espanha (Salamanca, Biblioteca Universitaria, 2497, salto fragment on final leaves of), 180 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 225n.27 Dagenais, John, xiv, 129, 171, 224n.14 Dante Alighieri, 84, 122, 230n.5 Dares of Phrygia, De excidio Troiae. See adaptations . . . : of Dares of Phrygia’s . . . ; glosses: on Dares of Phrygia’s . . . David, as auctor, 186, 189 “Denuestos del agua y el vino.” See “Spanish cuaderno” Derrida, Jacques, 57, 215 “devout errors,” 137–39 Deyermond, Alan D., 179–81, 193–94, 205–6, 224n.22 Diego de Valencia, 192 “Dionysian imagination,” 96 divisio textus, 19, 121–25, 128, 160, 234nn. 4 and 8, 234–35nn. 9–10 Diz, Marta Ana, 229n.10

267 Doctrina de compondre dictats, 99–100, 231n.16 Domingo Abad de los Romances. See Abad, Domingo, de los Romances Dominicans, 239n.4 Dominicus Gundissalinus. See Gundissalinus, Dominicus Dragonetti, Roger, xv, 12, 23, 218, 223n.12 Duarte, of Portugal, 120, 172 Duc, 153, 156, 224n.19 Ducamin, Jean. See Duc Egerton, 157, 161 eliminatio codicum descriptorum, 128–29 Ellesmere, 33, 160, 238n.8 emendation, 24–25, 112 Enrique II, of Castile-León, 195 entendimiento. See understanding epideictic. See rhetoric: demonstrative El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Esc); Ms. P.I.4, 239n.7; Ms. R.I.10, 52–53, 64 L’Estoire Joseph, 83–84 Estoria de España. See Alfonso X Évora, Biblioteca Pública y Arquivo Distral, Ms. CXXV.2.3, 53–54 Évrard de Béthune, Graecismus (anthologized in BNM 9589, Aragonese Anthology), 207 Excidium Troie. See adaptations . . . : of Dares of Phrygia’s . . . ; glosses: on Dares of Phrygia’s . . . exegetical criticism. See Robertsonian criticism exempla, 15, 50, 58, 61, 64–65, 70, 73, 74–79, 94, 99, 101–2, 123–24, 127, 142, 150, 160, 167–68, 177–78, 180– 81, 185, 187, 195, 199, 201–4, 210–11, 222–23n.6, 229–30n.10, 231n.17, 242n.1; applied, as foundation of medieval narrative, 63, 74–79, 213, 231n.17 exemplary types: Anthiocus, 44; Catalan people, 65; Charles (son of John II, of Aragón), 65, 229n.4; Cornelia, 64; Don Melón, 101, 198–99, 210, 228n.24; Doña Endrina, 101, 198–99, 210; Doña Garoza, 101; la dueña cuerda, 101; Greeks and Romans, 95; Herod, 43–47; Hezekiah, 65; Jews, 65; Job, 44; John II, of Aragón, 65; man blind from birth, 44; Mooress, 95, 101; paralytic, 44; Paul, 44; Pitas Payas and wife, 95, 101, 195, 198,

268 exemplary types (cont.) 210; Rhea, 70; Sennacherib, 64–65, 199; Tobias, 44; Trotaconventos/Urraca, 95, 101, 102. See also Archpriest of Hita: as exemplary figure explicits, 48, 116, 121, 171, 233n.5, 237n.3 Faba, Guido, Summa dictaminis (anthologized in BNM 9589, Aragonese Anthology), 181 fables, 22, 63, 77–78, 82–83, 94–95, 142, 171, 177–78, 207–8, 211; morals of, 154, 178, 204, 211 Faulhaber, Charles B., 223n.11 Fernández de Madrigal, Alfonso, el Tostado. See Madrigal, Alfonso Fernández de, el Tostado Fernando IV, of Castile-León, 239n.4 Ferraresi, Alicia C. de, 220n.6 Ferruz, Pero, 192, 193–95, 200 figura etymologica, 132–33 Fleischman, Suzanne, 13 florilecture, 169, 191, 177, 210 florilegia, 22, 171, 189, 225n.26. See also florilecture; Glosynge fragmento cazurro. See salto miscellany fragments or selected portions of texts copied as glosses or in miscellaneous manuscripts or anthologies, xix, 18–19, 111, 129–30, 167–69, 171–212, 215; fragment of gozo of the Virgin (BNP n. acq. lat. 1300), 137–39; fragment on God’s afflictions of biblical characters (BNM Va 5–9), 43–44; line of Disticha Catonis probably copied as source quote in marginal gloss, 161–62; passage from Isidore of Seville’s Liber sententiarum copied at close of scriptum (BNM Va 5–9), 44–46, 50, 56, 129, 168, 227n.15; portions of Andreas Capellanus’s De arte honesti amandi copied with religious works, 86, 168; separate circulation of individual tales from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 168. See also Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): missing or fragmentary lyrics; Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): passages/ themes quoted . . . ; Portuguese fragment Franchini, Enzo, 228n.23 Frías, Pedro de, 196–98

INDEX

G (Madrid, Real Academia Española, Ms. Est. 2 Er. 5a or Ms. 19) = “Gayoso,” xiii, xx, 19–20, 114, 118, 120, 121, 125, 126–27, 131, 139, 141, 144–45, 155, 175–76, 186–87, 205, 208–9, 224n.20, 229n.1, 232n.24, 233n.2, 234n.8, 234– 35nn.9–10, 236–37n.25, 237n.27, 239n.4, 241nn. 19 and 22; concentration of readers’ marks at end of, 155, 156–57, 168; corrector of, 156, 160–61; as distinct medieval book, 127–28, 129; marginalia in, 124, 153, 156–62, 168, 210, 211, 235n.10, 237n.1, 238nn. 9 and 11– 12; possibility that it circulated unbound, 155, 156–57; readers of, 238n.5; spaces left for initials in, 123–24, 159, 234nn. 2 and 6, 235n.10 specific readings of: 20a, 138; 33bc, 138; 38d, 138; 44, 186; 44a[bis], 161; 65cde, 91–93, 231n.11; 69bcd, 219n.4; 70bc, 219n.4; 374b, 140; 374c, 139–40; 381c, 140; 385c, 140; 393c, 136; 432d, 143; 434b, 132; 474b, 234n.7; 507c, 146; 512b, 132; 528cd, 143; 547, 181; 568c, 161; 605c, 146–47; 731c, 132; 829d, 241n.20; 831b, 130; 986c, 83, 230n.4; 1072d, 132; 1085c, 132; 1091b, 136; 1094c, 132; 1103b, 132; 1126d, 137; 1149b, 148–49; 1215d, 149; 1221d, 130, 147; 1227b, 133; 1241d, 140; 1294a, 144; 1313c, 238n.5; 1362b, 136–37; 1371a, 133; 1375c, 136; 1377d, 144; 1446a, 135; 1447b and d, 133; 1450c, 144; 1649e, 138. Consult also listings at 236nn. 15–19 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 6, 223n.13 Galician-Portuguese, 48–49, 70, 100, 174, 180, 200, 228n.19, 232n.20 García de Campos, Diego, Planeta, 56, 59, 88 García de Castrojeriz, Juan, Glosa castellana al “Regimiento de Príncipes,” 81, 212 García de Salazar, Lope, Bienandanzas e fortunas, 185–89, 207, 209, 211, 238n.13 Geoffroi of Vinsauf, Poetria nova, 181. See also glosses: on Geoffroi of Vinsauf’s . . . Gerli, E. Michael, xiv, 21–22, 196–98, 201 Gil de Albornoz, Cardenal, 119, 127 Gil de Zamora, Juan, Prosodion, 171 Gilbert, Allan H., 223n.13 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum, 15,

INDEX

60, 102, 230n.1. See also glosses: on Giles of Rome’s . . . ; translations: of Giles of Rome’s . . . gloss. See glosses; Glosynge; interlinealia; marginalia; text and gloss Glossa ordinaria, 82, 83 glosses, 153–70; on Bartholomew the Englishman’s De rerum proprietatibus (in BNM 12739 and other scripta), 67–70, 229n.6; on Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Caedmon’s “Hymn”), 42; on Dares of Phrygia’s De excidio Troiae and Excidium Troie (BdO 126), 69, 70–72; on Geoffroi of Vinsauf ’s Poetria nova (BNM 9589), 184–85; on Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, by Juan García de Castrojeriz, 81, 212; on Langton’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, by .S. (BPP 9-H), 54–55; on Langton’s commentary on Ecclesiasticus, by .S. (BPP 9-H), 65–66; in Latin/Castilian grammar text (BNM 10073), 40; on Lucan’s Pharsalia in General estoria (Esc R.I.10), 64; on Luke concerning types of glosses (BdO 92), 38; on Martin of Tours’s Chronica (BNM 10046), 40; on pseudo-Augustine’s homilies (RAH 60), 41–42; in scripta of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 157, 160, 161, 237n.2, 238n.8; in scripta of Petrus Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, 40 (RAH Aemilianensis 11), 64–65 (BNM 130); in scriptum of Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor (BNM 4236), 75, 160; in scriptum of Poema de mio Cid (BNM Va 7–17), 227n.16, 236n.22; in scriptum of Sánchez de Vercial’s Libro de los ejemplos por A.B.C. (BNM 1182), 51. See also Bible: cited in gloss or commentary; marginalia Glosynge, xvi–xvii, 6, 11–12, 18, 22–23, 24–26, 27–29, 33–55, 57, 59, 61, 64– 72, 79, 107, 171–72, 177, 213–14, 215, 218, 228n.23 Gómez de Castro, dlvar, 190–91, 209, 241n.20 Gonçalo, bishop of Salamanca, 239–40n.7 González de Mendoza, Pedro, 200 Gower, John, 153, 171 gozos of Virgin, 104, 137–39. See also Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): passages discussed: gozos de la Virgen

269 Gregory the Great, 71–72, 140; Expositio super Cantica canticorum, 85; Homiliae in Evangelia, 96, 229n.2; Moralia in Job, 60, 86. See also translations: of Gregory the Great’s . . . Guillaume de Lorris, 214. See also readers, medieval: of Roman de la rose . . . Guiot (scribe), 114 Gundissalinus, Dominicus, De divisione philosophiae, 219n.4 Gyb, 92, 133, 139, 143, 224n.18, 231n.9, 233n.2, 236nn. 23–24 Gybbon-Monypenny, G. B., 220n.6. See also Gyb habit (habitus), 62, 89, 103 Hart, Thomas R., 220n.6 Hengwrt, 33, 238n.8 Henryson, Robert, 82 Hermann the German: translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and Summa Alexandrinorum, 230n.1; translation of Averroes’s Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 59–60, 93, 97–98, 231n.15 Hinojosa, Gonzalo de, 239n.7 Historia troiana polimétrica, 70 Holmes, Urban T., 114, 233n.2 Homer, 71 homoeoteleuton, 128, 135 Honorius of Autun: Expositio in Cantica canticorum, 85–86, 97, 100; Selectorum Psalmorum Expositio, 57 Horace. See commentaries: on Horace Hugh of St. Cher, 214 Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, 58, 224– 25n.23 Hugo von Trimberg, Registrum multorum auctorum, 24, 225n.28 Hugutio of Pisa, 176 Hult, David F., xv, 13, 235n.14 Huot, Sylvia, xv, xix, 221n.7, 237n.1 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego, 200 illicit love. See loco amor Impey, Olga Tudorica, 47 indeterminacy, 6, 37–38, 56–57, 80, 107, 111, 149–52, 153, 154 integumentum, 9–10, 82, 147, 189, 226n.6 intellectus. See understanding interlinealia, 27, 40–42, 154–56 Isidore of Seville: De fide Catholica contra

270 Isidore of Seville (cont.) Judaeos, 45–46; Etymologiae, 56. See also fragments . . . : passage from Isidore of Seville’s . . . Jauss, Hans Robert, 220n.7 Jeay, Madeleine, 23 Jenaro-MacLennan, Luis, 171–72 Jerome, 6, 35, 181 jest and earnest, 82, 169, 172 Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo, Bishop, 228n.25 Jofre de Foixà, Regles de trobar, 99. See also Doctrina de compondre dictats Johannes Gallensis, Breviloquium (anthologized in BNM 9589, Aragonese Anthology), 181 John II, of Aragón, 198–99, 229n.4, 241n.26. See also exemplary types: John II, of Aragón John of Garland; Integumenta Ovidii, 10; Parisiana poetria, 16 Jos74, 91–92, 139, 236n.23. See also Jos90; Joset, Jacques Jos90, 91–92, 139, 149, 236n.23. See also Jos74; Joset, Jacques Joset, Jacques, 192. See also Jos74; Jos90 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 3–5, 27, 222n.2 Juan Manuel, 212; General prologue, 115, 233n.4; Libro de los estados, 81, 230n.1; Libro del cauallero e del escudero, 225n.30 Conde Lucanor, 74–76, 78–79, 83, 114–15, 217, 229–30n.10, 230n.3; edition by Argote, 239n.5; viessos in, 239n.7. See also amplifications, of Juan Manuel’s . . . ; glosses: in scriptum of Juan Manuel’s . . . Kaske, Robert E., 57 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 219n.3 Kendrick, Laura, 87, 237n.29 Kiernan, Kevin, 42 Knight, Stephen, xv, 130 Lachmann, Karl, 13. See also critical editions: Lachmannian Lando, Ferrán Manuel de, 192, 195, 198, 210, 241n.24 Langton, Stephen, 54–55, 65, 122, 157, 228n.25

INDEX

Latin and the vernacular, 40–47, 50, 65– 66, 136, 139–42, 178, 184, 227n.9, 232n.24, 236n.22, 240n.13 Latini, Brunetto, Libro del tesoro (includes adaptation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), 81 Laurentius de Aquilegia, Ars dictaminis abbreviata (anthologized in BNM 9589, Aragonese Anthology), 181 Lawrance, Jeremy N. H., 106 Lázaro Carreter, Fernando, 44 lecturature, 20–26, 28–29 legal texts, 22, 37 Leomarte, Sumas de historia troyana, 70 Leonor de Soto, 198–99, 210, 241n.26 Leupin, Alexandre, xv leveling, 132–34. See also scribal process Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): accessus and explicits incorporated into, 171–72, 237n.3; allegory in, 27– 28, 168, 172, 230n.5; ambiguity of, xiv, 6, 7, 101, 103, 166–67, 208, 212; and art of love, 84–86, 142, 162, 164, 167–68, 172, 211; authorship of, xiii, 19–20; bibliographies on, 219n.5; burlas of, 82, 83, 86, 167–68, 169, 172, 189, 204–6, 212; as collection of lyric verse, 174–75, 176; as collection of proverbs, sententiae, and exempla, 142, 172, 178–79, 201, 212; as compilatio, 11–12, 19–20, 107, 122–23; compounding of ethical density in, 63, 78, 91, 102; critical debate on, xiii, 3–8, 14–15, 35, 38, 46, 62, 63–64, 80–81, 125, 206, 208, 212; critical studies of, 220n.6; date of composition, xiii, xix, 219n.3; death as theme in, 19–20, 104– 6, 125–28, 142, 167, 211, 235n.12, 240n.8; as didactic tractado, xii–xiv, 169, 172, 175, 176–85, 212, 232n.19; difficulty of lexicon, xiii, 236n.20; divisio between cuaderna vía and lyric/prose pieces at end of, 123–28; fallen state of language in, 5–6, 14–15; Latin passages in, 139–42, 161–62, 236nn. 23–24, 236–37n.25; medieval versus modern understandings of, 167–70; missing or fragmentary lyrics, xiii, 103, 139, 174, 193, 209; “openness” of, xiv, 5–8, 10–11, 25; as poetic model, 172, 174–76, 211–12; razos in, 192; as satirical work, 95, 107, 172, 212; as schoolbook, 207–8; title of, xiii, xix, 11–12, 172–73, 219n.1; two-

INDEX

version theory, 19, 118–19, 224n.20, 237n.28, 241n.19; versos estraños, 197– 98. See also Archpriest of Hita; buen amor; Libro de buen amor; Ruiz, Juan manuscripts of, 19–20; composite nature of, 19, 125–28; fragmentary state of, xiii, 145; as gloss on Libro, 127; grammar/rhyme problems in, 130–31, 148, 236n.15–19; in medieval and Renaissance libraries, 172–73, 214, 234n.3, 239n.5; medieval and Renaissance readers of, 11–12, 153–70, 171–212, 222– 23n.6; possibility that they circulated in unbound cuadernos, 191, 209–10. See also G; S; T passages discussed: arms of Christian knight, 106, 107, 167–68, 238n.14; blind beggars’ songs, 223n.10; canonical hours parody, 139–42, 236n.24; “Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera,” 125; Cruz the baker-girl, 103; Don Amor’s lesson on love, 183–84; Doña Garoza, 77–78, 101, 168, 210; la dueña cuerda, 101; dueñas chicas, 150, 200– 201; envoi, 10–12, 82, 208, 222n.2, 230n.5; explicits, 170; fable of frogs desiring a king, 178; fable of old hound who cannot hunt, 77; fable of town mouse and country mouse, 77–78; fables, 77–78, 107; Furón, 163; glosa on Ave Maria, 139, 104; gozos de la Virgen, 81, 103–4, 232nn. 20–21; Greeks and Romans, 95, 208; hymns to Don Amor, 139, 141; imprecation against death, 106, 126–27; Juan Ruiz’s instructions for reading, 4, 6– 7, 37, 80–103, 172, 174–75, 208, 219n.4, 222n.2, 226n.6; loores de Santa María, 104; lyrics, religious, 81, 103–6, 107, 231–32n.18; Melón/Endrina, 66– 67, 101, 123, 145, 168, 190–91, 198– 99, 228n.24, 229n.7, 241n.20, 241– 42nn. 25–27; Mooress, 95, 101; opening prayer, 103; Pamphilus adaptation, 62, 63, 66–67, 107, 123, 142–43, 171, 215; pasiones, 81, 103–5, 107, 232n.21; Pitas Payas, 95, 101; procession of Don Carnal and Don Amor, 147–148; prologue in prose, 40, 52, 59, 60, 62, 81–82, 84–85, 86–91, 107, 122, 141, 186–89, 208, 222n.2, 229n.2, 231nn. 10 and 16, 232n.21, 241n.17; prologue in verse, xiii, 80–81, 82, 84, 88, 91–93, 219n.4,

271 226n.6; proverbs, 66, 75, 82–83; students’ songs, 105, 223n.10; serranillas, 83, 107, 237n.27; Trotaconventos/ Urraca, 66, 78, 101–2, 168, 210; Urraca’s epitaph, 95, 102; Vulpes, 212 passages/themes quoted or alluded to, in medieval and Renaissance reception of: abuse of wine, 180–81, 204; Aristotle’s justification of sex drive, 187–88, 206–7, 211; art of love, 190–91; corrupting power of money, 180, 204–6; Cruz the baker-girl, 196–98; debate with Don Amor, 177–78, 211; didactic language of, 204–6; Doña Garoza, 77–78, 211; dueñas chicas, 200–201; fable of frogs desiring a king, 177–78; lyrics, 174–75 (see also serranillas under this heading); Melón/Endrina, 190–91, 198–99, 210; need for courage, 185, 240n.14; Pamphilus adaptation, 198–99, 211; Pitas Payas, 195, 198, 210; prologue in prose, 186– 87; prologue in verse, 186–87; religious lyric, 192; serranillas, 175–76, 193–95, 198, 200–201, 211, 241n.23; summary table, 209; Trotaconventos/Urraca, 77– 78, 179; unidentified, 178–79, 180, 190–91; use of moderation in speech, 183–84, 240n.14; vanity of love, 188– 89; Vulpes, 202–4 Libro de Alexandre (adaptation/translation of Alexandreis and other sources), 149, 174, 241n.25 Libro de Alixandre. See Libro de Alexandre Libro de buen amor (as modern critical construct), 11–12, 127–28, 129, 130–31, 190–91, 203–4, 210, 212, 223n.10. See also Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita) Libro de los cien capítulos, 100–101 Libro del arçipreste de Hita. See Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita) Libro del cauallero Zifar, 24–25, 81, 90, 212, 225n.28, 230n.4 Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa, 232n.19 likening. See assimilatio literature studies in the twentieth-century academy, 8–9, 14, 64, 74, 217–18, 229n.3; literary theory, xiv–xvi, 28; obsession with language, xvii, 9–10, 21, 242n.3; recent innovations in medieval studies, xiv–xvii, 220–21n.7; search for scientific objectivity, xvii, 13

272 Llull, Ramon: Libre de contemplació, 58, 101–2, 122; Libre de l’orde de cavalleria, 122; Libre de meravelles, 103, 231n.17 loco amor, 57, 84–86, 94, 96, 162, 182–83, 184. See also buen amor López de Ayala, Pero, 193; Rimado del palacio, 174, 192; translation of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job into Castilian, 229n.1 Lucan, 34, 36; Pharsalia, translation/prosification/adaptation of in General estoria, 64 Lucas of Tuy, Vita Sancti Martini, 231n.14 Lupus, Friar (anthologizer?/book owner?), 207–8 Lupus de Moros (scribe?/poet?), 48 McGann, Jerome J., xv Machan, Tim William, xv, 116–17, 171 Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Clero, cpta. 185, no. 9, 239n.4 Madrid, Biblioteca del Palacio, Ms. 880 (Repartimiento de Sevilla), 175–76 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional (BNM): Ms. 507, 157; Ms. 1182, 51–52, 56; Ms. 1634, 186, 240n.15; Ms. 4236 (Conde Lucanor, Ms. M), 75, 160, 203–4, 209; Ms. 4245, 207–8; Ms. 6376 (Conde Lucanor, Ms. S), 75, 201–2; Ms. 9256, 70; Ms. 9589, 181–85; Ms. 10046, 40, 229n.8; Ms. 10073, 40; Mss. 10136– 10138, 229n.1; Ms. 12739, 67–70; Ms. Va 5–9, 43–47, 50, 51, 56, 129, 168, 227n.15; Ms. Va 6–1 (see T); Ms. Va 7– 17, 227n.16, 236n.22; Ms. Va 17–7, 200–210 Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia (RAH): Ms. Aemilianensis 11, 40; Ms. 60, 40–42, 55, 56, 139; Ms. 99, 157; Ms. 9-10-2/2100, 187–88, 240n.15 Madrid, Real Academia Española: Ms. 15 (Conde Lucanor Ms. P = “Puñonrostro”), 201–4, 209; Ms. 19 or Est. 2 Er. 5a (see G) Madrigal, Alfonso Fernández de, el Tostado, Breviloquio de amor y amiçiçia, 169–70, 206–7, 211 maldezir, 92–93, 100, 107. See also cantigas de maldizer; satire manuscript culture, xiv–xvii, 14, 15–20, 36–37, 39–40, 153, 213, 216–18, 221n.7

INDEX

manuscripts, 221n.7, 225n.26; autograph, 23, 116–17; centrality of, for medieval studies, xviii–xix, 15–20; composite nature of, 19, 47–50, 86; fragments of texts in, xix, 18–20, 43–47, 107, 215, 225n.26 (see also fragments . . . ); interglossatory links among, 69; layout and design of, 19, 43–45, 47–49, 122, 144–45, 231– 32n.18, 232n.24; physical construction of, 49; practical considerations for study of, xviii, xix, 215–16, 221n.9, 242n.2; production of, 17–18, 111; readers’ and correctors’ marks in, 150, 153–70; versus critical editions/printed books, xvi–xxii, 12, 15–20, 23, 28–29, 35–37, 42–44, 55, 72, 108, 111–17, 128–35, 148–50, 215–18, 222n.6, 224n.16, 232n.1, 233n.2 marginalia, xvi, xix, 19, 27, 34, 36–37, 41– 42, 59, 111, 124, 127, 152, 153–70, 210, 221n.7, 224n.19, 226nn. 1 and 3, 237nn. 1–4, 238nn. 7–9 and 11–14, 238–39n.16; clustering of in limited sections of manuscripts, 155–57, 161, 168, 210; doodles, 164, 167; exempla identified with, 75, 159–60, 168; hands, 27, 164, 166–67, 169, 178, 238nn. 12–13; as mnemonic keys, 162–63, 164; names of characters, 158–59, 235n.10; notas, 27, 153, 161, 162, 164–66, 167, 169; ojos, 154, 161, 168, 238n.7; signaling auctores, 188, 238n.13; signaling liturgical and seasonal divisions, 158, 159–60, 238n.9; signaling proverbs, sententiae, and moralizations, 154, 161, 162, 164– 67, 169; sketches, 40, 162–64, 237n.29, 239n.6, 240n.8; source quotes, 161–62, 188–89, 238n.8; symbols, 153, 160–61, 238n.14; topical annotations, 156–60; used to play riddles and games in text, 155, 159–60; versus, 179, 181. See also glosses; Glosynge; text and gloss Marie de France, prologue to her Lais, 37– 38, 56, 226n.5 Martín of León, 60, 97, 171, 231n.14 Martínez de Toledo, Alfonso, Archpriest of Talavera, Arcipreste de Talavera or Corbacho, 104, 124, 163, 177–79, 180, 189, 209, 211, 240n.8; as gloss on Libro, 177, 179 Martorell, Joanot, and Martí Joan de Galba, Tirant lo Blanc, “plagiarism” in, 171

INDEX

meditation. See reading, medieval: meditative Méla, Charles, xv memory and mnemonics, xviii, 23, 39–40, 52, 60–63, 70, 76, 78, 86, 89–91, 98– 99, 105–6, 107, 111, 135, 140, 145–46, 158, 160, 163, 164, 167, 169, 179, 190, 221n.7, 224–25n.23, 231n.10, 232n.24, 233n.3, 236n.24, 239–40n.7 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 44–45, 47, 48– 49 minims, 136 Minnis, A. J., 23, 220n.7, 231n.15 “misapplication,” 58, 169, 210, 238n.15 “misappropriation.” See “misapplication” miscellanies, 17, 189–91, 210; personal, 171. See also Glosynge mnemonics. See memory and mnemonics Moffat, Lucius G., 172, 234n.3, 241n.20 moralizations, 51, 58, 67–70, 72–74, 88; Achilles, 71–72, 74; Agamemnon, 69; Alexander (Paris), 70–72; Argus, 10; badger, 68–70; Cornelia, 64; Dido, 34– 35; Hector, 71; Hecuba, 71–72; heel, 71–72, 74; Leander, 35; Palamedes, 69; Polyxena, 71–72; Priam, 71; Rhea, 70; Roboam, 71; Solomon, 71; Thetis, 72; wolf, 69–70. See also tropology Morreale, Margherita, 92, 103–4, 120, 138 mouvance, 22–23, 130, 146, 220n.7, 233n.4, 235n.14, 237n.28 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Clm. 5426, 84–85 Mystère des actes des Apôtres, 227n.14 mythography, 57 Naylor, Eric W. See C/N Nepaulsingh, Colbert I., xiv, 49, 227n.16, 228n.21, 236n.22 New Medievalism. See New Philology New Philology, xv–xvi, 10, 12–15, 217–18, 221n.8, 242n.3 Nicholas of Lyra. See commentaries: on Nicholas of Lyra’s . . . Nichols, Stephen G., xv, 12–13, 222n.5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57 Nithard, History, 42 Octavio de Toledo, José M., 125, 235n.11 Old and Middle English, 33, 42–43, 63, 114, 116–17, 122, 153, 157, 160, 161,

273 168, 171, 212, 214, 215, 237n.2, 238n.8; modern scholarship on, xv Old French, 42, 83–84, 87, 200; modern scholarship on, xv, 12–14 Old Irish, 42 Old Occitan. See Old Provencal Old Provencal, 23, 48, 84, 87, 98–100, 200, 214 Old Welsh, 42 orality, xviii, 17, 27, 48, 135, 140–41, 145– 46, 174, 179, 201, 203–4, 221n.7, 225n.26, 225–26n.30, 226n.31, 233n.4, 237n.28 Orduna, Germán, 10–12, 223n.10 Osma, Catedral de Burgo de Osma (BdO): Ms. 92, 38; Ms. 126, 69, 70–72, 229n.8 Ovid, 13–14, 22, 34–35, 36, 142, 177. See also accessÖs : to Ovid’s . . . ; commentaries: on Ovid Ovid (pseudo-), Facetus, 207. See also accessÖs : to pseudo-Ovid’s . . . Ovide moralisé, 34 Pablo de Santa María, Additiones ad Postillam Magistri Nicolai de Lira, 39–40 Páez de Ribera, Ruy, 192 Pamphilus, 66, 142–43, 171, 198, 207, 235n.10. See also Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): passages discussed: Pamphilus adaptation; Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita): passages/themes quoted . . . : Pamphilus adaptation Paradinas, Alfonso de. See Alfonso de Paradinas paragraphs (or paraphs), 122 Paris (of Troy). See moralizations: Alexander Paris, Gaston, 12, 42 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (BNP): Ms. Esp. 37, 176, 192–98, 200, 210; Ms. Esp. 524, 239n.2; Ms. lat. 3576, 47–50 (see also “Spanish cuaderno”); Ms. n. acq. lat. 1300, 138 Pascual, Pedro, 122, 234n.5 Passion d’Arras, 227n.14 pastourelle, 200 Patterson, Lee, xv Paul, Apostle, 10 Pearsall, Derek, 117 pecia system, 17, 239n.4 pensar, 38, 88, 226n.7

274 Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán, 192, 196–98 personification, 159 Peter Lombard, glossatura maior, 226n.32 Peter Riga. See commentaries: on Peter Riga’s Aurora Petrus Cantor, 84–85 Petrus Comestor, 228n.25; Historia Scholastica, 22. See also glosses: in scripta of Petrus Comestor’s . . . philology. See New Philology; traditional philology phronesis (practical wisdom), 15; versus episteme (knowledge), 6, 60, 64 physical text. See manuscript culture; manuscripts; scriptum Pickens, Rupert T., 22, 113 Poema de mio Cid. See glosses: in scriptum of Poema de mio Cid Poirion, Daniel, xv, 22 Porto, Biblioteca Pública Municipal, Ms. 785. See Portuguese fragment Portuguese fragment (P = Porto, Biblioteca Pública Municipal, Ms. 785), 19, 119–20, 172, 234n.8, 239n.1 poststructuralism, 4–5, 12–16. See also text, concepts of: poststructuralist texte practical wisdom. See phronesis praise and blame, 14, 16, 57–58, 61, 64, 81, 88, 91–103, 107–8, 231n.16 prayer, 41–42, 55, 106, 137–39, 227n.16, 236n.22 printed books. See manuscripts: versus critical editions/printed books Priscian, 37 prosification, 22, 171. See also Glosynge; translation prosifications. See translations: of Dialogus . . . ; translations: of Lucan’s . . . proverbs, 61, 63, 65–67, 70, 73–74, 75, 78–79, 99, 137, 143, 150, 154, 164–67, 178–79, 185, 190–91, 210, 212, 229n.5, 238n.13, 240n.8, 242n.28; “other” sense of, 82–83, 230n.3; signaled in margins of manuscripts, 161, 164–67. See also sententiae prudence, 6, 60–62, 64, 67, 69, 81, 89 Prudentius. See accessÖs: to Prudentius punctuation, 122, 181–85, 240nn. 11–13 and 15 Puñonrostro manuscript of Conde Lucanor.

INDEX

See Madrid, Real Academia Española: Ms. 15 Pythagoras, 56 Raimon Vidal, Razos de trobar, 98–99 “Razón de amor.” See “Spanish cuaderno” razos and vidas, 48, 192, 214 Read, Malcolm K., 5–6, 222n.4 reader response criticism, 225n.25 readers, medieval, 153–70, 171–212; approaches to, 149–52, 213–14, 220n.7; individual reader as master gloss, 54–55, 58, 80–81, 111; power of, 7; as producers/performers of text, 38–39, 131, 142, 152; reader’s age, intellectual state, or spiritual maturity determines sense or appropriateness of text, 52–55, 90; reader’s state of faith determines understanding, 45–46; of Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, 210, 237n.2. See also reading, medieval; “real reader” reading, medieval: according to law of charity, 57–58, 88, 91 (see also buen amor); aloud, 26–27, 122, 225–26n.30, 237n.31; associative, 7, 57–59, 68–69, 70–72, 107; and the book trade, 239n.4; captiva gentilis, 35; as central literary activity of Middle Ages, xvi–xix, 20–26, 33, 55, 83, 87, 222n.3; of classical authors, 13–14, 34–35; by contraries, xiv, 7, 88, 95–96, 102, 107, 157; cyclical patterns in, 160, 213, 228n.22, 238n.10; discontinuous, 27, 150–51, 168–69, 191, 208, 210, 213, 242n.1; through elect understanding, 88; as ethical praxis, 62, 75–76, 81, 86–91, 151–52; as ethical/rhetorical interaction of reader and text, xvii, 3–5, 7, 8, 14–15, 16–17, 20–22, 26, 28–29, 38–39, 41–42, 59–61, 63, 64–67, 73– 74, 75–76, 78–79, 93–97, 101, 111, 151–52, 215, 217–18, 223n.9; grain and chaff, 169, 189; and humor (burlas), 82, 169; and idea of coherent texts, 16, 111– 17, 130–31, 142, 148, 150, 215, 217– 18; and idea of textual unity, 35, 62–63, 111, 150–52, 167–68, 170, 208, 211– 12, 214–15; marrow and husk, 26, 82; medicine with honey, 78, 169; meditative, 81, 86, 103–6, 107, 127–28, 137– 39, 192, 232nn. 20–23; methodologies

INDEX

for studying, 26–29, 61, 151, 213–18; occasional nature of, 4, 27, 58, 63–64, 80, 87, 111; out of context, 168, 189, 210; physically fragmented nature of, 156–57, 168–69, 208–9, 215; and pornography, 107, 214; as process of assigning authorial praise and blame, 93–103; as public, communal experience, 36, 238–39n.16; reader completes missing or corrupt text, 49, 114, 150–52, 236n.24, 237n.31; as ritualized act, 169, 242n.1; social, interpersonal uses of, 185; spoliatio Aegyptorum, 35, 213; technology of, 57–59, 80, 88–89, 214; warning function of, 81–82, 85. See also divisio textus; florilecture; integumentum; readers, medieval; “real reader” “real reader,” 73–74, 229n.9 registers, scribal, 134–49, 151–52; “accidental” physical register, 145; causa finalis of manuscript production, 145; causa suscepta operis of manuscript production, 145; cultural, 148–49; design, 144–45; of discourse, 135, 137–43, 147, 148; formal, 144; generic, 144; ideological, 135, 143–44, 147, 148; linguistic, 135, 136– 37, 144, 146, 147, 148, 151; narrative, 142–43, 148; navigational, 134, 135, 144, 148; oral/memorial, 145–46, 147, 237n.28; orthographic, 134–35, 135– 36, 140–41, 144, 147, 148, 149, 151, 181; physical, 145; production, 144–45; scribe’s degree of respect for exemplar, 145; sets of, 147–48 rehandling. See remaniement Reid, T.B.W., 114 remaniement, 22, 25, 26, 171. See also adaptation (by authors . . . ); Glosynge Repartimiento de Sevilla (Madrid, Biblioteca del Palacio, Ms. 880), 175–76 repetitio, 132–34, 149–50. See also scribal process résidance, 16, 224n.14 rhetoric, 184–85, 226n.1; demonstrative, xvii, 60, 93–103, 172. See also phronesis; reading, medieval: as ethical/rhetorical interaction . . . Rico, Francisco, xiv, 34, 207 Riffaterre, Michael, 13 Robertson, D. W., Jr., 57, 85, 102. See also Robertsonian criticism

275 Robertsonian criticism, 57–58, 63 Rodríguez Herrero, dngel, 187 Rojas, Fernando de, Celestina, 67, 73–74 Rojo Orcajo, Timoteo, 228n.25 Ruiz, Juan, xix, 36, 214, 231n.15; authorship of lyric pieces, 125; authorship of prologue to Libro, 141–42, 231n.8; authorship of salto miscellany, 205–6; authorship of Visión de Filoberto, 235n.11; comments on his own art, 91–93, 98, 100, 101–2, 230n.5; identified in document, xiii; influence on poets of Cancionero de Baena, 191–201, 211–12; possibility that his lyrics circulated in separate cancioneros, 174, 176; as troubadour, 91–93, 98–101. See also Archpriest of Hita; Libro (de buen amor or del Arcipreste de Hita) Rychner, Jean, 220n.7 S (Salamanca, Biblioteca Universitaria, Ms. 2663) = “Salamanca,” xiii, xix, xx, 11, 19–20, 103, 114, 119, 126–27, 131, 139, 141, 154, 155, 169–70, 173, 175, 188, 196, 205, 206–7, 208–9, 224nn. 18 and 20, 232n.24, 233n.2, 234–35nn. 9– 10, 236n.23, 236–37n.25, 238n.13, 239n.4, 241nn. 19 and 22; as distinct medieval book, 127–28, 129; explicits of, 121, 124–25, 170; marginalia in, 106, 124, 153, 161, 162–67, 168, 210, 211, 238n.13–14, 239n.6, 240n.8; readers of, 169 (Alfonso de Madrigal), 178, 187 (Lope García de Salazar), 188 (Lope García de Salazar), 206–7 (Alfonso de Madrigal), 214, 238n.5; rubrics in, 19, 106, 119, 120–21, 123–24, 127, 142, 158–59, 160, 170, 188, 210–11, 234n.8, 241n.18 specific readings of: prologue in prose, 141, 230n.6, 231n.9; 20a, 138; 33cde, 138; 38d, 138; 44, 186; 65cd, 91–93, 107–8; 374b, 140, 141; 374c, 139–40; 381c, 140; 381d, 140, 237n.26; 385c, 140; 393c, 136; 432d, 143; 434b, 132; 507c, 146; 512b, 132; 528cd, 143; 568c, 161; 605c, 146–47; 731c, 132; 747d, 149; 786d, 133; 829d, 241n.20; 831b, 130; 986c, 230n.4; 1072d, 132; 1085c, 132; 1091b, 136; 1094cd, 132; 1103b, 132; 1126d, 137; 1149b, 148–49;

276 S (cont.) 1215d, 149; 1221d, 130, 147; 1227b, 133; 1241d, 140; 1294a, 144; 1313c, 238n.5; 1362b, 136–37; 1370, 133; 1371a, 133; 1375c, 136; 1377d, 144; 1446a, 135; 1447b and d, 133; 1450c, 134, 144; 1541d, 149; 1649e, 138. Consult also listings at 236nn. 15– 19 .S. (glossator/scribe), 54, 65–66, 67, 229n.5 Salamanca, Biblioteca Universitaria: Ms. 2251, 239–40n.7; Ms. 2497, 179–81; Ms. 2663 (see S) salto miscellany, 157, 179–81, 189–90, 204–6, 209, 212 San, 133 San Bartolomé, Colegio de, 119, 140, 162, 169–70, 173 Sánchez, Tomás Antonio, xix, 3, 222n.2 Sánchez de Calavera, Fernán, 192 Sánchez de Jerena, Garcí, 192 Sánchez de Vercial, Clemente, Sacramental, 230n.5. See also glosses: in scriptum of Sánchez de Vercial’s . . . Sánchez Muñoz, Pero, 173 Sancho IV, of Castile-León, 239n.4; Castigos e documentos para bien vivir ordenados por el rey don Sancho IV, 81, 230n.1 Santa María de Huerta (monastery), 228n.25 Santillana, gñigo López de Mendoza, marqués de, 191–92, 198; Carta e prohemio al Condestable de Portugal, 174–75, 200 satire, 95, 99, 102, 107, 172, 193–99, 210– 11, 231n.11, 241n.24 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 24 Schutz, A. H., 87 scribal process, 17–18, 22, 107, 111, 113– 17, 128–52, 153, 171–72, 215, 233nn. 3 and 4, 235n.14 ScribeG, 121, 129, 138, 140–46 passim, 148–49, 161, 236–37n.25 ScribeS, 67, 129, 138, 140–45 passim, 231–32n.18, 237n.25. See also Alfonso de Paradinas scribes, 17–18, 48, 107–8, 111–17, 129– 49, 153, 214, 220–21n.7, 225n.26, 231– 32n.18, 233n.5; dialects of, 19, 136–37,

INDEX

224n.18; dictation to, 17, 23, 225n.26; psychology of, 116. See also scribal process ScribeT, 118, 121, 129, 137, 140–42, 144, 148–49, 236n.21 scriptoria, 17, 121 scriptum, 15–20, 23, 25, 28–29, 33, 38, 39, 40–50, 55, 73, 107–8, 111–17, 129, 148–49, 171–72, 191, 215, 222–23n.6, 224nn. 17 and 23, 232n.1, 233n.2; and modern literary theory, 149–52 models for interpreting: cyclical, 50, 160, 228n.22; debate, 48–49, 127; generic parataxis, 48–49; leixa-pren, 48– 49; sequential, 46; verso relation, 46–47, 50 Seidenspinner-Núñez, Dayle, 220n.6 semejanza. See assimilatio sententia, 26, 76 sententiae, 58, 67, 70, 154, 164–67, 171, 176–77, 179–81, 185, 210, 238n.13. See also proverbs Serments de Strasbourg, 42 sermons, 22, 41, 53, 86, 122 Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Columbina, 173; Ms. 5-3-41, 242n.28 Siesta de abril. See “Spanish cuaderno” similitudes. See assimilatio sirventés, 99. See also satire Smaragdus, Diadema monachorum, 52 Solomon: as auctor, 186, 188–89; as author, 53–55. See also commentaries: on Solomon’s . . . Soria, Biblioteca Pública y Provincial (BPP): Ms. 4-H, 240n.7; Ms. 9-H, 54, 65–66, 157, 240n.7; Ms. 25-H, 230n.5 sotte chanson, 200 “Spanish cuaderno”: confessional manual, 49–50, 228nn. 21–22; exorcisms and conjurations, 50; Siesta de abril, 47–50, 227–28n.18, 228nn. 19–23 Speer, Mary B., 232n.1, 233n.2 Spitzer, Leo, 21–22, 47, 50, 226n.6 Stock, Brian, 223n.7 Stoddard, Roger E., 23 surplus and aliquid minus, 37–42, 55, 56– 57, 64, 74, 80, 153, 226n.5 T (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Ms. Va 6– 1) = “Toledo,” xiii, xix, xx, 19–20, 106, 113–14, 118–19, 125–27, 131, 139,

INDEX

141, 208–10, 216, 224n.20, 233n.2, 235n.11, 237n.27, 239n.4; concentration of readers’ marks at end of manuscript, 155, 168; as distinct medieval book, 127–28, 129; explicit of, 124–25, 235n.11; marginalia in, 153, 154–56, 161, 162, 168, 210–11, 238nn. 6–7; possibility that it circulated unbound, 155; reader/corrector of, 149, 150, 154– 56, 211, 224n.21, 237n.4, 238n.5 specific readings of: 374b, 140; 374c, 139–40; 375d, 140; 1149b, 148–49; 1215d, 149; 1221d, 130, 147; 1227b, 133; 1294a, 144; 1313c, 154, 238n.5; 1362b, 136–37; 1371a, 133; 1375c, 136; 1377d, 144; 1446a, 135; 1447b and d, 133; 1450c, 134, 144; 1516– 1517, 135; 1541d, 149; 1619d, 155; 1634d, 152. Consult also listings at 236nn. 15–19 Terence, 22, 34, 36, 157, 207 Terreros y Pando, Esteban de, 221n.1 text, concepts of, 7–12; biblical model, 21, 22, 39, 51–55; “classical,” xv, xvii, 8–12, 15–16, 19–20, 23, 73, 217–18; poststructuralist texte, xv, xvii, 8–10, 12– 16, 20–21, 73, 217–18 text and gloss, 11–12, 27–29, 34–47, 56, 111, 213, 224n.23; contra, de, and sicut used to establish ethical relation between, 65, 67–70; migration of glosses to text (and vice versa), 22, 227n.10. See also commentary: biblical; glosses; Glosynge texts, fragmentary. See manuscripts: fragments of texts in textual criticism: medieval, 149–52, 154– 56, 221n.7; postmedieval (see critical editions) theater, medieval, 43–47, 227nn. 12 and 14. Thomas Aquinas, 60, 89 Tompkins, Jane P., 223n.13 topoi, 11, 24–26, 57, 126, 225n.27 El Tostado. See Madrigal, Alfonso Fernández de traditional philology, xv–xvi, 10–12, 111–17, 134–35, 217–18, 221n.8, 223n.11 transcription practices followed in this book, xx-xxii, 48, 112–13, 140, 216,

277 221nn. 10–11, 227nn. 8 and 15, 228n.17, 232n.24, 234n.6, 236–37n.25, 238n.11, 240nn. 9 and 15–16 translation, 19–20, 22, 26, 61, 126, 142– 43, 171, 226n.1, 235n.11. See also adaptation (by authors . . . ); Glosynge; translations translations: of Aristotle’s Ethics and the Summa Alexandrinorum into Latin by Hermann the German, 230n.1; of Averroes’s Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s “Poetics” into Latin, by Hermann the German, 59–60, 93, 97–98, 231n.15; of Boethius’s De consolatione, by Chaucer, 171, 215; of Brunetto Latini’s Trésor into Castilian, 81; of Dialogus inter corpus et animam into Castilian prose, 126; of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum into Castilian, by Juan García de Castrojeriz, 81, 212; of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job into Castilian, by Pero López de Ayala, 229n.1; of Lucan’s Pharsalia into Castilian prose, in General estoria, 64; of Roman de Troie into Castilian and Galician-Portuguese, 70 Trojan legend, 69, 70–72, 185 tropology, 44–46, 58, 67–70. See also moralizations troubadours, 23, 87, 91–93, 98–101. See also Bernart de Ventadorn; versificador types. See exempla; exemplary types understanding, 6–8, 26, 38, 45–47, 54–55, 76, 81, 83, 84, 86–91, 226nn. 6–7; intelligere sane, 84, 88 Valerius Maximus. See accessÖs: to Valerius Maximus’s . . . Van Vleck, Amelia E., 22, 23, 220n.7 variance, 130, 133–49, 235n.14 variants, xv, 12, 112, 128–30, 224n.17; author’s, 237n.28; lists of, 224n.17, 233n.2. See also variance Vasvari, Louise O., 220n.6 versificador, 100–101 versification, 22. See also Glosynge versus, 75, 76, 179–81, 204, 239–40n.7 viesso. See versus Villasandino, Alfonso dlvarez de, 192, 196– 98 Virgil, 13–14, 34

278

INDEX

virtue and vice, 93–94 Visión de Filoberto, 19–20, 106, 125–28, 147, 149, 154–55, 207, 211, 224n.21, 235n.11; as gloss on Libro, 127–28. See also T Votos del Pavón, 174

Wil, 92–93, 118 will, 86, 89–91; as love, 90–91 Williams, Lynn, 222n.3, 223n.7 Willis, James, 113 Willis, Raymond S. See Wil Woolf, Rosemary, 104–6

Walker, Roger M., 126, 225–26n.30 Walsh, John K., 12, 220n.6 Walter the Englishman, 77, 82, 124, 171, 178, 207 Weiss, Julian, 43 Whinnom, Keith, 42, 198–99, 227n.9, 241n.26

Yale University, Beinecke Library, Ms. Marston 37, 94 Zah, 221n.10 Zahareas, Anthony N., xiv Zumthor, Paul, xviii, 22–23, 130, 134, 220n.7