[In the following essay, Lawrance contends that Ruiz's intended audience was much more sophisticated than is generally supposed.]

Juan Ruiz's relationship to three great literary traditions—the Arabic, the Hebrew, and the medieval Latin—has been hotly debated. The chief weapon in the debate has been source-hunting. Félix Lecoy established beyond all doubt that Juan Ruiz was thoroughly familiar with the Latin and French courtly and scholarly literature of his day.¹ The influence of confession manuals, sermon handbooks, and exemplum-collections; the adaptations of Ovid, of Pamphilus, of Walter Map's animal fables, of Goliardic parody and satire; and the allusions to the liturgy, to the medieval auctores, to the native lyric tradition, and to many other literary genres reveal that, however fresh and spontaneous Ruiz's treatment, the fundamental inspiration behind his poem is bookish.

Yet consideration of a literary work's place in tradition raises some questions which cannot be answered by source-hunting alone. One of these is the audience for whom the poem was written: what sort of audience was it? What kind of education and what level of literary sophistication did it have? What was “the Tradition,” in T. S. Eliot's sense, for this audience, and what kind of predispositions did it arouse in them? We sometimes forget that a writer works with a living, contemporary audience in view; unless, like some modern poets and like many Castilian poets in the fifteenth century, he chooses to provide his readers with footnotes, the writer must be bound by his audience's sense of tradition.

These problems have received little attention from Hispanic medievalists, who might profitably learn from their colleagues in English, French, and German. With one important exception (to be mentioned in a moment), the unspoken consensus on the question of the audience of the Libro de buen amor seems to be that in adapting his learned material Juan Ruiz attempted to “conceal his art” and to tone down the bookish element for the benefit of a popular and unlearned public. This “popularist” view has stressed the spontaneity and originality in Ruiz's use of sources, and rightly so. It is also true that in the controversial distinction between mester de clerecía and mester de juglaría, certain passages in the poem appear to envisage his art as falling into the latter, more popular category: “en general a todos fabla la escritura” (copla 67a); “Señores, hevos servido con poca sabidoría; / por vos dar solaz a todos, fablévos en juglaría” (copla 1633ab).² Menéndez Pidal's treatment of the so-called fragmento cazurro exemplifies the subconscious pressure of the “popularist” concept of Ruiz's audience. Menéndez Pidal assumes that the jottings and half-remembered quotations from the poem which he discovered on the spare endleaves of a manuscript chronicle represented the notes of “una sesión de juglarías cazurras ante un público callejero.”³ The theory is incredible; a folio manuscript of a chronicle would make an unwieldy promptbook for a street-balladmonger. Nevertheless, Menéndez Pidal's description has stuck, and has preserved flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth.

The important dissenter from the general opinion is Erich Auerbach. In his profound and wide-ranging study of “The Western Public and its Language,” Auerbach attempts to trace the rise of an educated and sophisticated reading public in Europe, which culminated in the Renaissance.⁴ In Juan Ruiz's time, he opines, there was no educated public in the modern sense; lay education and literacy were undeveloped. Latin was still the dominant language of serious literary enterprise: “The leading classes of society [i.e., the noble laity] possessed neither education nor books nor even a language in which they could have expressed a culture rooted in their actual living conditions” (p. 255). But Auerbach sees precisely in Juan Ruiz, as with his contemporary Dante in Italy, the first signs of the growth of such a language and such a public: “[Ruiz's] language is vibrant with reality and reacts with precision to innumerable shadings of experience and feeling; correspondingly, his public may be pictured not as humanistic and cultured but as socially heterogeneous, sharp-witted, and intelligent” (p. 324).

These words suggest many avenues of thought. Historically speaking, the theory needs revision and elaboration; an audience such as Auerbach postulates does not arise ex nihilo, and we would need to consider the role of Alfonsine prose more carefully than he does. But here I wish to follow another line, the sophistication of language and thought which this “sharp-witted,” and I might add learned, audience permits.

That the audience of the Libro de buen amor was as educated and literate as its author is clear in many passages. To take an obvious example, Hamilton's study of the so-called “digression” on confession (coplas 1128-72) shows that here Ruiz touches on complex disputes of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in a way intelligible and interesting—the latter is the more important qualification—only to educated letrados.⁵ I cannot follow Hamilton, however, when she argues that the citation of the Canon Law authorities Gratian, Durand, and the Decretals not only marks a change of tone but also “suggest[s] that [Ruiz] is no longer addressing all Christians as before but more particularly his own fellow clerics” (p. 154). The idea that the poet envisaged such radical switches from one audience to another, if literally meant, cannot be accepted. It is just the sort of incoherence that an author who writes for oral diffusion must avoid, for the audience of an oral recitation, unlike the reader, cannot skip over a boring passage, but must either lose the thread or leave altogether. Either way, the minstrel has lost the spell which binds his audience.

It may be objected that if the Libro de buen amor was generally transmitted orally (as it clearly was), this in itself argues that the audience was illiterate, and hence uneducated. The modern mentality which lies behind this assumption has recently been attacked; oral performance remained the norm in Spain throughout the Golden Age and did not necessarily imply illiteracy on the part of the audience, nor is an illiterate society—or rather an illiterate subgroup in a literate society, for European culture has been literate since the Roman Empire—necessarily uncultured.⁶ In fact, the very orality of the poem emphasizes how learned and sophisticated the audience of the Libro de buen amor must have been. In such passages as the parodistic lawsuit of the wolf and the fox judged by Don Ximio de Bugía (coplas 321-71), or the obscene travesty of the Canonical Hours (374-87), the humor depends, in an oral performance, on an instant and penetratingly accurate recognition of the technicalities and jargon of the legal profession and on a practiced familiarity not only with the meaning and context of the liturgical Latin quotations but also with their double meanings. It follows, as night follows day, that Juan Ruiz's allusions to medieval learning are not remains of undigested reading dressed up for an unlettered audience but skillful literary artifices which exploit the doctrina he shares with his listeners, a small group of courtly or clerical companions or patrons. I wish now to examine an implication of the role of doctrina in Juan Ruiz's poem which has received much less attention than the excavation of his sources.

As long ago as 1939, in his review of Lecoy's book, Leo Spitzer pointed out the limitations of simple source-hunting: “¿No habría que insistir un poco más sobre la vida que late tras el lugar común, sobre lo que cabalmente no lo hacía commonplace, mecánico y letra muerta, sino materia espiritual? Una novela no brota, ni siquiera en la Edad Media, ‘de los libros,’ sino de las ideas que son el fundamento de esos libros.”⁷ This is not a fair criticism of Lecoy's great book, but it does draw our attention to the fact that certain aspects of medieval learning and language in the Libro de buen amor cannot be elucidated by postulating a written source, but must be explained by a more general comparatist approach to what we might describe as a medieval habit of thought.

The habit I refer to is scholasticism. I use this term not in its technical sense but in the broader sense represented by Paré's useful coinage, “scolastique courtoise”; that is to say, the universally known and watered-down version of the scholastic view of the world which came to form the subconscious mental furniture of the educated man in the Middle Ages. C. S. Lewis described this as the “discarded image” of the medieval world, and Paré showed how the courtly version of scholasticism was used, with complete assurance of familiarity to its noble audience, by the authors of the Roman de la rose. Other scholars have applied the same approach to other authors, notably Chaucer.⁸

The characteristic frame of mind implied by this courtly scholasticism was based on a single premise: the whole truth about the world in which we live is enshrined in a series of textbooks from the classical and late antique world (the auctores), and the key to this truth lies in the interpretation of these texts by means of the codified disciplines known as the artes. In the strict sense, as everybody knows, this meant in practice the supreme auctor, Aristotle, and the supreme ars, dialectic; but in my looser sense it meant a multiplicity of auctores and a greater interest in grammar and rhetoric. So Juan Ruiz, seeking like any good medieval writer to begin his discussion of love with the scholastic definitio, appeals first to the scientific authority of Aristotle (coplas 71 ff.), but follows this with a disquisition on the astrological nature of love based on Ptolemy and Plato (coplas 123 ff.), a description in terms of the seven deadly sins, probably from a confession manual (coplas 217 ff.), and the amplificationes of poetic and rhetorical exempla.

The scholastic model of the universe is not based on empirically observed categories, but on artificial logical and symbolic connections. The most succinct description of this is the lucid though disconcertingly titled chapter “The Effects of Realism” in Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages.⁹ He notes how “without the brake of empirical observation, the habit of always subordinating and subdividing becomes automatic and sterile, mere numbering” (p. 208). We could never accuse Juan Ruiz of a lack of observation—he has the finest eye for empirical reality in medieval Spanish literature—but even he cannot shake off entirely the more trivial effects of the scholastic outlook. We can see this clearly in the passages where he plays with artificial correspondences between the seven deadly sins and the diets of the seven days of the week imposed as a penance upon Don Carnal (coplas 1162-70), or between the arms of the Christian and their numerically corresponding virtues, works of mercy, and sacraments (coplas 1579-1605). This is as near as Juan Ruiz ever comes to writing rubbish.

Such a system, with its emphasis on artificial hierarchical codification and its imaginary correspondences, was clearly doomed to trivialization and death as a philosophical model. But Huizinga and Lewis comment on the aesthetic value of the system, with its infinite possibilities for symbolism and metaphysical connection. In the scholastic system a walnut could symbolize Christ (Huizinga's example): the sweet kernel is his divinity, the soft green outer shell his humanity, and the mediating wooden shell his cross.

Accepting that Juan Ruiz was a sophisticated poet and that his audience also was sophisticated, and accepting as a premise the strikingly sophisticated milieu of courtly scholasticism, it will hardly be possible to read passages such as the following mock-disputation on dueñas chicas merely as “una de sus predilectas asociaciones verbales,” as one commentator lamely remarks:¹⁰

          1606. Quiero abreviarvos, señores, la mi predicación,
ca siempre me pagué de pequeño sermón,
e de dueña pequeña e de breve razón;
ca lo poco e bien dicho finca en el coraçón.
          1607. Del que mucho fabla ríen, mucho reír es de loco;
tiene la dueña pequeña amor grande e non de poco;
dueñas di grandes por chicas, por grandes chicas non troco,
e las chicas por las grandes non se arrenpienten del troco.
          1608. De las chicas que bien diga, el Amor me fizo ruego,
que diga de sus noblezas, e quiérolas dezir luego;
dirévos de dueñas chicas que lo avredes por juego:
son frías como la nieve e arden más que el fuego.
          1609. Son frías de fuera, en el amor ardientes;
en cama, solaz, trebejo, plazenteras e rientes;
en casa, cuerdas, donosas, sossegadas, bienfazentes;
mucho ál fallaredes, bien parad y mientes.
          1610. En pequeña girgonça yaze grand resplandor,
en açúcar muy poco yaze mucho dulçor;
en la dueña pequeña yaze muy grand amor;
pocas palabras cumplen al buen entendedor.
          1611. Es pequeño el grano de la buena pemienta,
pero más que la nuez conorta e más calienta;
assí dueña pequeña, si todo amor consienta,
non ha plazer del mundo que en ella non se sienta.
          1612. Como en chica rosa está mucha color,
e en oro muy poco grand precio e grand valor,
como en poco bálsamo está grand buen olor,
assí en dueña chica yaze muy grand amor.
          1613. Como el robí pequeño tiene mucha bondad,
color, vertud e precio, nobleza e claridad,
assí dueña pequeña tiene mucha beldad,
fermosura e donaire, amor e lealtad.
          1614. Chica es la calandria e chico el ruiseñor,
pero más dulce cantan que otra ave mayor;
la muger, por ser chica, por esso non es peor;
en doñeo es más dulce que açúcar nin flor.
          1615. Son aves pequeñuelas papagayo e orior,
pero qualquier d'ellas es dulce gritador,
adonada, fermosa, preciada cantador:
bien atal es la dueña pequeña con amor.
          1616. De la muger pequeña non ha comparación:
terrenal paraíso es e consolación,
solaz e alegría, plazer e bendición:
mejor es en la prueva que en la saludación.
          1617. Siempre quis' muger chica más que grande nin mayor;
non es desaguisado de grand mal ser fuidor;
del mal, tomar lo menos, dízelo el sabidor;
por ende de las mugeres la menor es la mejor.

The passage is ostensibly introduced as a defence of the commonplace that “brevity is the soul of wit.” The poet goes on, in typical fashion, to quote sententiae,¹¹ as if this proposition needed discussion, and also a “proof from experience” (on this type of prueba see below, pp. 234-36): “dueñas di grandes por chicas, por grandes chicas non troco.” Perhaps only a medieval poet, writing in the scholastic tradition of artificial conceptual correspondences, could introduce the far-fetched comparison between a short sermon and a small woman, even as a joke, with so little ado.

Having introduced the comparison, Ruiz plays a sophisticated trick on his audience. He develops the point as a formal, or mock-formal, scholastic quaestio on the noblezas of little women. These are first defined in a series of analogies, and the quaestio is then concluded by a syllogism based on a pseudo-Aristotelian axiom, “Ex malis eligere minima oportere.” Lida de Malkiel, in a futile note intended to support the contention that the source of the joke in copla 1617 was the Book of Delights of Yosef ben Meir ibn Sabarra (her own evidence shows it to have been current in the Western tradition at least since Plautus), was the first to realize fully the recondite scholastic crux of the humor: “La reelaboración de Juan Ruiz es altamente original, pues sustituye la anécdota por un entimema cuyo formalismo escolástico acentúa la comicidad, deja en intencionado silencio la premisa menor (la mujer es un mal).”¹² This insight was carried further in an excellent and too little known article by Vicente Cantarino, who shows that the point is not only the use of an enthymeme (suppression of one of the premises of a syllogism) but also a characteristic and deliberate use of fallacy and sophism in the equivocatio between the different senses of “large/small” and “good/morally good” (as if a woman's badness were proportional to her physical size).¹³

All this is straightforward enough, but it does not explain the core of the passage in coplas 1609-16, which the poet twice states is to be sought beneath the surface (1609d, 1610d). Comparisons of women to precious stones, spices, and birds are common in courtly poetry, both Latin and vernacular. Many examples could be cited, but the most striking and best known, at least for English-speaking readers, is the thirteenth-century poem from the Harley Lyrics, “Annot and John,” which begins:

Ichot a burde in a bour ase beryl so bryht,
ase saphyr in selver semly on syht,
ase iaspe the gentil that lemeth with lyht,
ase gernet in golde ant ruby wel ryht;
ase onycle he ys on yholden on hyht,
ase diamaund the dere in day when he is dyht;
he is coral ycud with cayser ant knyht;
ase emeraude amorewen this may haveth myht.
          The myht of the margarite haveth this mai mere.
          ffor charbocle ich hire ches bi chyn ant by chere.(14)

The anonymous poet goes on to compare Annot to flowers (roses, lilies, primroses, periwinkles, etc.), birds (parrot, turtledove, thrush, lark, falcon, nightingale), and spices (nutmeg, licorice, sugar, cumin, ginger, etc.). His torrent of similes probably owes something to the Welsh poetic devices of dyfalu (kenning descriptions) and cynghanedd (alliterative music), but many of the comparisons can be paralleled in Romance literature; the idea that a lady can have the medicinal powers of a gem, for example, lies behind the Provençal troubadour Arnaut de Mareuil's secret name for his lover, “Belhs Carboncles.”¹⁵

A modern reader unacquainted with the scholastic view of nature may fail to respond correctly to passages like these. Such comparisons were usually suggested to medieval writers by the medicinal powers and symbolism of gems and spices described in lapidaries and herbals. I have already cited the example of the walnut. In the Legenda Aurea the name of St. Margaret, which means “pearl,” is glossed:

Margarita dicitur a quadam pretiosa gemma, quae margarita vocatur; quae gemma est candida, parva, et virtuosa. Sic beata Margareta fuit candida per virginitatem, parva per humilitatem, virtuosa per miraculorum operationem. Virtus autem hujus lapidis dicitur esse contra cordis passionem, et ad spiritus confortationem.

(She is called after a precious gem named margarita ‘pearl,’ which is white, small, and full of virtue. In the same way St. Margaret was white for virginity, small for humility, virtuous for her working of miracles. This gem is said to have virtue against passions of the heart and for the comfort of the spirit.)¹⁶

Strong evidence that this sort of association would have affected a medieval audience's interpretation of the Libro de buen amor passage is given by the rubric added by Alfonso de Paradinas, the fifteenth-century compiler of the Salamanca manuscript: “De las propiedades que las dueñas chicas han.” These words show that Paradinas, close to the Archpriest's own time, saw the point of the passage. The word propiedades has a specific meaning in medieval terminology, a meaning exemplified by those treatises De proprietatibus rerum which were an invariable feature of medieval libraries.

According to the scholastic scheme, all sublunary objects are composed of four elements (fire, air, earth, and water), and each has particular proprietates such as hot and dry, cold and wet, and so on, according to the mix of elements (complexio). But each body also has powers, called “virtues” (virtutes), which affect the complexion of other bodies. In the quotation about St. Margaret we are told the three properties of the pearl—whiteness, smallness, virtue—and its virtus is then stated. The theory of the occult virtues or emanations of stones and herbs was universally believed in the Middle Ages, and lives on in the language of the Friar's speech in Romeo and Juliet:

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities …
Within the infant rind of this weak flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.

(II.iii.11-12, 19-22)¹⁷

The point about language is important. A passage in a Castilian scientific handbook, Alfonso X's Lapidario, illustrates the scholastic theory and, more importantly, also explains a vital word in Juan Ruiz's text:

Aristótil … dixo que todas las cosas que son so los [cielos] se mueven e se enderezan por el movimiento de los cuerpos celestiales, por la vertud que han dellos segund lo ordenó Dios …

Et mostró que todas las cosas del mundo son como travadas et reciben vertud unas d'otras, las más viles de las más nobles; et esta vertud paresce en unas más manifiesta, así como en las animalias e en las plantas, e en otras más asconduda, así como en las piedras e en los metales.¹⁸

The word vertud is used here in the same technical sense as in the passages cited from the Legenda Aurea and the Libro de buen amor (copla 1613b). When the Lapidario says that things receive vertud from one another, “the lower from the more noble,” it appears that noble, too, has a technical sense, “endowed with greater vertud.” So we can see what Ruiz means by the “noblezas of small women” (copla 1608b), which puzzled commentators render weakly as “cualidades, perfección.” Ruiz puns on the technical sense of noblezas, going on to discuss them as if he understood the word to mean propiedades. Hence the disconcerting procedure of describing the “properties” of small women in terms of heat and cold: “son frías como la nieve e arden más que el fuego” (copla 1608d). This has nothing to do with the Petrarchan antithesis it so closely resembles. It should suggest, as it did to the scribe of the Salamanca manuscript, that nobleza is here used in its technical sense of virtutes.¹⁹

The purpose of the comparison with precious stones is clear. We must follow the poet's own invitation to look below the surface (“mucho ál fallaredes, bien parad y mientes,” copla 1609d). Copla 1610a mentions the girgonça or jacinth, whose “property” is resplandor. Albertus Magnus, for example, tells us that its virtus is cold, a fact revealed by its green color: “Est frigidus sicut viridis, et confortat corpora sicut omne frigidum, quod constringit virtutes corporum.” (“Being green, it is cold, and like all cold things it comforts bodies, because it restrains their virtues.”)²⁰ A little later Albert adds another telling detail: “Et expertum est, quod somnum provocat propter frigidam complexionem.” (“Experiment proves that it induces sleep by its cold complexion.”) Turning back to Ruiz, we read that açúcar has the property of dulçor. Albertus Magnus again: “Habet autem arundo haec in se humorem spissum dulcem valde, qui per decoctionem dessicatur ad modum salis … Est autem naturaliter calidum et humidum, quod dulcedo eius indicat” (Dv, VI.i.37). (“This cane contains a thick juice, extremely sweet, which is dried to resemble grains of salt … It is naturally hot and moist, which its sweetness indicates.”) The sweetness of sugar is a sign of its hotness, just as the blue-green sheen of the jacinth is a sign of coldness.

The properties of these minerals subtly parallel the contradictory properties of small women, who are “frías de fuera,” but “en [manuscript S reads ‘con’] el amor ardientes” (copla 1609a). The poet further explains: their cool exteriors make them “en casa, cuerdas, donosas, sossegadas, bienfazentes” (copla 1609c)—repose, as Albert's words on the jacinth imply, is the result of the operatio of frigid virtue—but their hot interiors account for their sweetness in the strenuous activities of the bed: “en cama, solaz, trebejo, plazenteras e rientes” (copla 1609b).

More scientific detail follows in the next copla. Small women, says Ruiz, are like to the grain of pepper “que más que la nuez conorta e más calienta” (copla 1611ab). Once again, the audience must pick up the technical word conortar (Latin confortare). In scholastic usage this means to “strengthen” (the root is fortis ‘strong’) an already existing property or complexion. In the quotation from Romeo and Juliet above, Shakespeare uses the word “cheer” in just this technical sense of confortare: “For this [flower], being smelt, with that part cheers each part.” The Latin word occurs in the quotation from the Legenda Aurea (“Virtus … ad spiritus confortationem”) and in Albert's words on the jacinth (“confortat corpora sicut omne frigidum, quod constringit virtutes corporum”). We find the same technical sense of the word when Dante calls Venus “lo bel pianeto che d'amar conforta” (Purg. I.19), and Saturn “quel pianeta che conforta il gelo” (Rime, C. 7).

So Juan Ruiz's description of the peppercorn refers to its hot and “comforting” operationes, which are greater than those of the nuez. The latter is usually translated “walnut,” but this is rather weak. Might it mean “white pepper” here? Albert, after saying that the dried black peppercorn is “calidius et siccius, magis corrosivum et mordificativum” (“hotter and drier, more biting and mordant”), goes on to say of the larger, untoasted white pepper that “quod ante piper album vocamus, sunt nuces quaedam sicut avellana, praeterquam quod habent testam albiorem et molliorem” (Dv, VI.i.30). (“What we called white pepper before are certain nuts like hazels, except that they have a whiter and softer shell.”) These “nuts” are cooler and more moist.

If this is so, the ribald sense of the stanza becomes clear. The small woman, “si todo amor consienta” (copla 1611c), once she is inflamed with passion, quickly becomes burnt up like a pepper (the medieval term was “adust”); in this state she is ardent and fortifying, more spicy than her cooler, wetter big sister.

The comparisons in copla 1612 must also be understood in terms of properties: color, value, aroma. The ruby or carbuncle of copla 1613 is worth comparing with Albert in detail. The rubinus, Albert says, is a “lapis perlucidissimus” (“claridat”), and it excels other gems in value (“precio”) as far as gold excels other metals. It has more virtutes than any other stone (“vertud”). Its splendid color, “ignescens et rutilans,” is a sign of the sun's influence on its complexion (“color”), and this marks it as the “most noble” of all gems (“nobleza”). It is hot and dry, and its chief virtue and operation is to gladden the heart and dispel sadness (“laetificare cor et pellere tristitiam”; Dm, II.ii.3). This explains its correspondence with the small woman, who is comely, beautiful, merry, loving, and loyal above all others.

Juan Ruiz's sharp-witted audience would have been alerted to the point of this passage by such technical terms as noblezas, conorta, calienta, and vertud. Whether they would have picked up the logic of the switch to the seemingly unconnected subject of birdsong (coplas 1614-15) I cannot say. The poet of “Annot and John” (quoted above) compares his lady to various birds for her beauty, but here it is the birds' song that is in question. Corominas, in his edition of the Libro de buen amor, quotes Provençal spring poems to show that birdsong was taken as a sign of desire to procreate. Albert explains: since birds appear to float in the air, their bodies must be rarified and lighter than air. This is proved by the fact that birds sing more than other animals “propter levitatem spirituum,” because of the lightness of their spirits. The smaller and hence lighter the bird, the greater is its tendency to sing (Da, XXIII, exordium). Here, then, is the scientific point behind Juan Ruiz's passage. The relevance of the theory is thrown into relief when Albert remarks that “vocant maxime quando coitum desiderant” (“they sing most when they desire copulation”), because sex is the “lightest” of passions. We can see why medieval physiognomists believed a keen, high-pitched voice (“vox subtilis et alta”) and love of singing (“cantat libenter”) to be “signa mulieris calidae et quae libenter coit.”²¹

Most commentators have seen an obscene double meaning in this passage. It is strongly suggested in copla 1610d (“pocas palabras cumplen al buen entendedor”) and easily detectable in copla 1616, where there is probably a pun in paraíso (compare gloria, a common euphemism for sexual ecstasy), and innuendo in the contrast between a chaste saludación and the ribald prueva. But only Peter N. Dunn, I think, has shown an awareness that the obscenity must have a scientific explanation. In his suggestive article on the use of medieval physiognomy and metoscopy in the “Figuras del arçipreste” section (one of the few studies which approach the Libro de buen amor from the point of view taken here), he suggests that the point is that smaller bodies distribute their “vital heat” or “radical moisture” more effectively and swiftly than larger ones, thus causing phlegmatic slowness in larger people and a correspondingly licentious quickness in smaller ones.²² No doubt a similar thought lies behind the parallel quoted by Francisco Rico from the pseudo-Ovidian De remedio amoris, lines 17-18: “Si brevis est, forsan per singula membra superbit, / Uritur interius, corde superba furit.” (“If she is short in stature, perhaps she is haughty in all her [outward] parts; / but inside she burns, in her heart she rages despite her pride.”)²³ Small women are quick off the mark.

The point is above all linguistic, as Auerbach hinted in the discussion of Ruiz's audience quoted at the outset. A modern reader can respond partially (we still apply the term “hot” to passion, in a way which preserves traces of medieval teaching about the humors), but our insensitivity to the various levels of technical meaning in certain common words keeps us from recognizing the complex logic of courtly scholasticism which lies behind this and many other passages of Juan Ruiz's poem. An interesting parallel is provided by Chaucer. The older view, expressed, for example, in Bennett's handbook Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, was that Chaucer's language is simple and naïve, lacking the peripheral overtones of meaning and association which are the essence of a fully-developed literary language. In this view, Chaucer's words had a “clear-cut and limited meaning” without resonance.²⁴ This analysis has recently been challenged. Burnley, for example, has shown that since literate men in Chaucer's day were virtually trilingual,²⁵ such words as propretee or vertu could carry all the peripheral overtones, all the literary and philosophical associations of their Latin and French cognates. The “little women” passage of the Libro de buen amor shows that the same is true of Juan Ruiz and his audience, a small-scale confirmation of Auerbach's intuitive insight. In fact, we could go further and say that Ruiz consciously exploits the various levels of resonance in such words, just as he exploits the rustic dialect of the serranas of Guadarrama (coplas 959 ff.) or the Arabic of the Moorish girl (coplas 1508-12). Part of the delight of the audience at our passage must have been the solemn scientific language employed to prove such a preposterous point. We may apply to Juan Ruiz A. H. T. Levi's observations on Rabelais: “The literary register, which was that of the common people, was deliberately set in tension with the ideological content … Rabelais moves without warning from the obscene to the philosophical, and frequently combines both.”²⁶

But language is only part of the “discarded image.” The nature of scholastic argument forces the critic to consider how very greatly the medieval concept of logic differed from our own. I pointed out above that the passage on the properties of small women is cast in the form of a quaestio, with a preliminary definitio and terminal conclusio. Earlier, when discussing the scholastic system of access to the auctores through the artes, I noted how the Libro de buen amor opens, after the invocation and instructions on how to understand the book, with a quaestio on carnal love. The definition makes the usual appeal to auctoritas: Aristotle's theory that carnal love is a “natural” appetite, Ptolemy's that the planets incline men to venery, and a less well-developed argument, again based on Aristotle, that lechery is a kind of second nature to the man who is used to it (coplas 71-76, 123-27 and 140-54, and 166-67). In all this the processes of medieval logic, which would have been familiar to Ruiz's audience, are constantly at work. Cantarino has shown that each argument is deliberately specious and fallacious, just as the concluding syllogism about small women is fallacious. To show how Juan Ruiz exploits his audience's response in this field, let us examine the first argument.

          71. Como dize Aristótiles, cosa es verdadera,
el mundo por dos cosas trabaja: la primera
por aver mantenencia, la otra cosa era
por aver juntamiento con fembra plazentera.
          72. Si lo dexies' de mío sería de culpar;
dízelo grand filósofo, non só yo de reptar;
de lo que dize el sabio non devemos dubdar,
ca por obra se prueva el sabio e su fablar.
          73. Que diz' verdad el sabio ciertamente se prueva:
omnes, aves, animalias, toda bestia de cueva,
quieren segund natura compaña siempre nueva,
e mucho más el omne que toda cosa que s' mueva.
          74. Digo muy más el omne que toda criatura:
todas a tiempo cierto se juntan, con natura;
el omne de mal seso, todo tiempo, sin mesura,
cada que puede quier' fazer esta locura.
          75. El fuego siempre quiere estar en la ceniza,
comoquier que más arde quanto más se atiza;
el omne quando peca bien vee que desliza,
mas non se parte ende, ca natura lo enriza.
          76. E yo, porque só omne, como otro pecador,
ove de las mugeres a vezes grand amor;
provar omne las cosas non es por ende peor,
e saber bien e mal, e usar lo mejor.

That the structure of this passage is that of a quaestio needs little emphasis. It opens with an appeal to authority followed by a proof (see below). This leads into what a scholastic author would call a divisio, a development of the initial proposition, beginning at “Digo muy más el omne” (copla 74a). Finally, the conclusion is marked by the syllogistic “por ende” (copla 76c).

Medieval logicians distinguished three types of argument: by authority, by reasoning, and by experience. It was normal to use two or more of these for a proof. So Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath begin her life-story:

          Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage.(27)

Similarly, in Le Roman de la rose, Reason disputes with Hope, using an auctoritas from Boethius, and then proceeds: “Et se d'auctorité n'as cure, … Preste sui que raison i truisse” (lines 6300-04). In our passage, an argument from authority is supported by an argument from experience (“por obra se prueva,” copla 72d).

The appeal to the authority of Aristotle has been traced to various sources, but we do not need to discuss this because the idea of copla 71 is one of the linchpins of Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy. It appears in many of Aristotle's works, in all the medieval Summae, and in various courtly versions, notably Le Roman de la rose.²⁸ Briefly, Aristotle argues that all nature above the sphere of the moon is eternal, while everything below it (the “sublunary” world) is subject to the great principle of motus ‘movement, change,’ either of birth and growth (generatio) or of death and decay (corruptio). But sublunary nature, seeking participation in the divine and eternal which is denied to the individual, attains it in the perpetuation of the species. So nature endows every individual with the instincts necessary for the survival of the species, namely life support (Ruiz's term is “mantenencia”) and sexual reproduction. By this argument, procreation can be described as the most “natural” act in the living world, and also the most “divine.” As Aristotle says: “This act is the most natural of all acts for living beings … and everything they do according to nature (secundum naturam), they do for [the eternal and divine's] sake … Hence it partakes of eternity and the divine condition (‘aeternitatis condicionisque divinae particeps est’)” (De anima, II, 4). This argument is taken up by medieval philosophers, and then by the poets, particularly in the celebrated passage in Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose where sensual love is defended (lines 15893-977): sensual love is necessary “por continuer les espieces,” and that is why Nature has made it pleasurable. Equally celebrated is Dante's attack on the blind men who, taking Aristotle's dictum that sensual love is “naturale” au pied de la lettre, draw the mistaken conclusion that it is necessarily a “laudabil cosa” (Purg. XVII.91 ff.); Dante argues that love, though potentially good, can be perverted to evil ends.

The debate about the ambivalent nature of love (“sementa in voi d'ogne virtute / e d'ogne operazion che merta pene,” Purg. XVII.104-05), between natural, divine copulation and base concupiscence lies at the heart of the Libro de buen amor. Leo Spitzer pointed out the modern anachronism inherent in presenting the two views of love as simply incompatible, but his warning has gone largely unheeded by critics who still insist that medieval morality was unequivocally hostile to sexual love, and therefore take Juan Ruiz's confessions of sexual passion as unambiguously immoral.²⁹ Such critics dismiss Ruiz's declaration “Si lo dexies' de mío, sería de culpar” (copla 72a) as ironic, no more than a tongue-in-cheek quip to divert attention from the poet's wrongdoings. This is mistaken; the intelligent audience of the Libro de buen amor would have been aware that the premises of the Aristotelian argument are perfectly serious. Their laughter was aroused not by the proposition that copulation is an operation secundum naturam (“segund natura” in copla 73c is a technical phrase) but by the sophistic logic of the application to the Archpriest's own case.

The first proof of the Aristotelian axiom is an argument from experience. Once again, it is easy to miss the technical language. “Por obra se prueva” (copla 72d) uses the word probar in a special sense. I quote Lewis: “In the Middle Ages there were three kinds of proof; from Reason, from Authority, and from Experience … But unfortunately the word experience is not always used for the third type of proof … knowledge by experience may be preve (that is, proof).”³⁰ “Probar por obra” means “to prove from experience”; the experience (the observable behavior of animals) is advanced as a technical step in the argument, not as a rhetorical simile or parodic smokescreen.

The argument from preve has an ulterior purpose. This is shown in the divisio, where Aristotle's axiom is applied not only to animals but specifically to men; and this is “proved” by another argument from experience. The argument goes back at least to Pliny: “Ceteris animantibus statum et pariendi et partus gerendi tempus est: homo toto anno et incerto gignitur spatio.” (“All the other animals have a fixed season both for copulation and for bearing offspring, but human reproduction takes place all the year round.”)³¹ This is an important point: Ruiz says that it is only the “omne de mal seso” who is driven by Nature to indiscriminate copulation. Put into medieval terminology, a spontaneous inner volition like the sex drive, a motus naturalis, is a product of the inferior part of the soul, the anima sensibilis or appetitus concupiscibilis. This is the part of the soul which Man shares with the other animals. But according to scholastic science Man also has a higher soul, the anima rationalis, which in a properly complexioned man controls and directs the lower. By deliberate vagueness on this fact, Ruiz obscures the vital difference between Man and the other animalias.

This is also the point of copla 75, the most difficult in the whole passage. Aristotle himself cites the example of the burning log in his discussion of the two governing principles of sublunary life, generation and corruption.³² He explains that the two processes are complementary: a leaf changing color is the destruction of the old green leaf but the creation of a new brown one, and a burning log is the corruptio of the wood but a generatio of ashes. By giving the log human feelings (“siempre quiere estar en la ceniza,” copla 75a), and by making its self-destruction in the heat conscious (“comoquier que más arde quanto más se atiza,” copla 75b), Ruiz performs a sleight of hand which turns the theory of “natural copulation” and the preservation of the species on its head. The implication of the simile of the burning log is that a rational man who indulges in indiscriminate copulation at the spur of nature knowingly encompasses self-destruction without the divine compensation of the propagation of the species.

Having brought the argument to this point, Ruiz's conclusion in the last copla is deliberately evasive. Cantarino's comment on the sophistry is apt: “El error, y la falacia, consiste, claro está, en la equipolencia entre el querer = inclinación que presenta la premisa mayor [Todo animal quiere ‘segund natura conpaña siempre nueva’] y el tener = hecho de la conclusión [‘ove de las mugeres a vezes grand amor,’ 76b]. La presencia del instinto es aceptable, pero no su realización y ejercicio en cada instancia, porque la natura en este sentido acondiciona e induce pero no obliga.”³³ In the last two lines the “por ende,” which ought to signal the triumphant ergo of the conclusion, does nothing of the sort; a moment's reflection (Juan Ruiz's audience would have had time for no more) shows that nothing he has said so far leads to the conclusion that his pecadillos are excusable. In fact the lines, which contain a humorous allusion to a famous tag of St. Paul's (“omnia autem probate,” 1 Thess. 5.21), lead into the first erotic confession.

The argument about natural copulation, like the quaestio on small women, shows that the apparent simplicity and artlessness of Juan Ruiz's diction and arguments are belied by his subtle scholastic terminology and reasoning. Such passages require the complicity of a quickwitted and learned audience. I believe that Ruiz's original listeners were able to pick up instantly the themes and technicalities which I have had to expound in ponderous detail. We should beware the assumptions which befuddle us, perhaps unconsciously, when we talk of oral delivery and an illiterate audience. There never was a “público callejero”; nor was the Libro de buen amor ever intended for the repertory of a juglar cazurro.

Notes

1. “Avant tout une culture de clerc” (Recherches sur le Libro de buen amor (Paris, 1938), p. 334.

2. I quote from Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, edited with English paraphrase by Raymond S. Willis (Princeton, N.J., 1972).

3. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y orígenes de las literaturas románicas, 6a. edición aumentada (Madrid, 1957), pp. 233-39 and Appendix 3, pp. 388-92 (originally published in 1924 as Poesía juglaresca y juglares: aspectos de la historia literaria y cultural de España).

4. In his Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim, (London and New York, 1965), pp. 235-338 (see esp. pp. 320-24).

5. Rita Hamilton, “The Digression on Confession in the Libro de buen amor,” in “Libro de buen amor” Studies, ed. G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny (London, 1970), pp. 149-58.

6. See, for example, Herbert Grundmann, “Litteratus-illitteratus: Der Wandel einer Bildungsnorm von Altertum zum Mittelalter,” AKG [Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte], 40 (1958), 1-65, and Franz H. Bäuml, “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum, 55 (1980), 237-65.

7. Review of Lecoy's Recherches, Revista de Filologia Hispánica, 1 (1939), 271.

8. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964; rpt. Cambridge, 1978); Gérard Paré, Le Roman de la rose et la scolastique courtoise (Ottawa, 1941), and Les Idées et les lettres au XIIIe siècle (Montreal, 1947; Walter C. Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2nd ed. (New York, 1960).

9. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (1924; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 206-11. Also relevant is the chapter “Symbolism in Decline,” pp. 193-205.

10. Juan Corominas, in his edition of the Libro de buen amor (Madrid, 1967).

11. Compare “ca lo poco e bien dicho finca en el coraçón” with the proverb “Lo bien dicho, presto es dicho” in Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), ed. L. Combet (Bordeaux, 1967), p. 216.

12. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, “Nuevas notas para la interpretación del Libro de buen amor,” NRFH [Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispanica], 13 (1959), 26-27, n. 18. Rpt. in her Juan Ruiz: Selección del Libro de buen amor y estudios críticos (Buenos Aires, 1973).

13. “La lógica falaz de don Juan Ruiz,” Thesaurus, 29 (1974), 445-47.

14. See the text and notes in English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1932), number 76, pp. 136-38.

15. Alfred Jeanroy, Anthologie des troubadours: XII^e-XIII^e siècles, 2nd ed., with notes by J. Boelcke (Paris, 1974), p. 81.

16. Quoted in Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon (Oxford, 1953), “Symbolism of the Pearl,” pp. xxvii-xxix. English translations are my own unless noted otherwise. For medieval lapidaries, see Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Oxford, 1922), especially “Medieval Popular Lapidaries,” pp. 51-72, and “Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages,” pp. 110-20, showing that “the belief in the magical virtues of gems … was not merely theoretical, but played a real part in everyday life,” and tracing their role in the vernacular romances, and so on.

17. Romeo and Juliet, ed. Brian Gibbons, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York, 1980).

18. Cited from Antonio G. Solalinde, Antología de Alfonso X el Sabio, Colección Austral (Madrid, 1965), p. 196, with correction from Evans, p. 42.

19. The word is used again in copla 1613b, at least in Willis's text.

20. De mineralibus, II.ii.8. It should be noted that the medieval jacinth was a blue-green stone like the sapphire, not the reddish-orange variety of zircon which has that name today (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. jacinth). The Latin is quoted from the Lyons edition of Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia (1651); Vol. II contains the De mineralibus, Vol. V the De vegetabilibus et plantis, and Vol. VI the De animalibus, to be quoted below (hereafter cited in the text as Dm, Dv, and Da, respectively). Albertus is cited as a parallel, not as a source.

21. See Curry, p. 109, and the same author's “More about Chaucer's Wife of Bath,” PMLA, 37 (1922), 45, n. 36, quoting Michael Scotus, Liber physiognomiae et procreationis.

22. “De las figuras del arçipreste,” in Gybbon-Monypenny, p. 83.

23. “Sobre el origen de la autobiografía en el Libro de buen amor,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 4 (1967), 307. The praise of small women also occurs in the Ovidian dream-interview with Don Amor earlier in the poem (coplas 431 and 446).

24. H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1948), pp. 82-85.

25. “Culture, whether courtly or scholastic, was international and multi-lingual; the linguistic boundaries which trouble modern critics did not constrain their consciousness” (J. D. Burnley, Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers' Tradition, Cambridge, 1979, p. 8).

26. Review of M. A. Screech, Rabelais, in The Times Higher Education Supplement, February 22, 1980, p. 17.

27. Canterbury Tales, Wife of Bath's Prologue, lines 1-3; cited from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, 1957).

28. Paré, Les Idées, pp. 54 ff.; and Le Roman, pp. 16-21 and 76 ff.

29. Spitzer, p. 269: “El problema del sacerdote medieval que cuenta historias alegres … es simplemente un falso problema: para la Edad Media, la sensualidad era tan susceptible de transcendencia como el espíritu … puesto que existe y puesto que Dios lo juzga conforme a su mérito.”

30. Lewis, p. 189.

31. Natural History, VII.v.38, trans. H. Rackham, The Loeb Classical Library, II (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1942), 530-31.

32. Paré, Les Idées, p. 56; Aristotle, Physica, V.i (224b), and De generatione et corruptione, I.v (322a).

33. Cantarino, pp. 439-40.