[In the following essay, Lida de Malkiel discusses why Ruiz chose to write in the form of fictitious autobiography, concluding that he did so as a means of promoting his views on moral conduct.]

The great Spanish poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though vigorously original, have their counterparts in other European literatures: the Spanish Lay of the Cid is comparable, for example, to the Song of Roland, the Spanish Book of Alexander to the German epics about the same hero. But the Book of Good Love has no pendant in any other literature of Western Europe. This fact has in no small way detracted from its appreciation, because the concepts put to use by literary criticism have been fashioned by analyzing the standard European production and, consequently, are quite unsuitable for apprehending what is atypical of it.

Now, aside from a Prologue in prose, added in the 1343 version, the elements of the Book of Good Love include: (a) a novel in autobiographical form, repeatedly interrupted, which serves as a frame-story for (b) a series of tales and fables; (c) a large number of didactic disquisitions on civil and canonic law (stanzas 221 ff., 1131 ff.), on points of literature and music (Prologue, stanzas 15, 65 ff., 1228, 1634 ff.), on love and morals, moral teachings being scattered throughout the entire work. Additional elements are (d) a free version of Pamphilus (a twelfth century Latin comedy); (e) an allegorical story of the battle between Sir Carnal and Lady Lent, and the triumph of Sir Love; (f) a miscellany of lyrical poems: the devotional ones being almost all songs to the Virgin; the worldly ones comprise a mocking song and four burlesque pastourelles (all of them lyrical variations on themes previously expressed in narrative verse), and songs for blind men and mendicant students.

Of all these elements, the most important from the structural viewpoint is the autobiographical novel, which narrates thirteen amorous adventures, curiously similar; the locale is in nine cases the town and in four the sierras. In the town, the poet proffers verses and gifts through his messengers to various loves, among them a baker woman, a pious widow, a nun, a Moorish girl; all his efforts are of no avail. In the sierras, four enterprising mountain lasses try to make love to him: twice the poet manages to dodge them, twice he falls prey to the shrews; the result is always the same—a defeat exposing him to ridicule. Obviously, this is not a closed novel, with an exposition, a climax, and a conclusion, moving around a central action or a psychological trajectory of a character, as the modern novels of Balzac, Dickens, or Tolstoy. If it invites comparison with something, it is with the Spanish novel of the Golden Age—a century in which Juan Ruiz was totally unknown—the picaresque novel and Don Quixote, whose protagonists give unity to a succession of parallel adventures in which they always end up in an unenviable position.

What is the significance of this autobiographical frame-story? For the naïve reader it is an authentic record historically true. In addition to the scribe of the latest manuscript, various Spanish critics of our time maintain that much of what the Book of Good Love narrates in the first person actually happened to the man Juan Ruiz, since he recounts it “with a realistic criterion.” The truth is that with that same “realistic criterion” the poet reports his colloquies with Sir Love, with Lady Venus, and with Sir Carnal; moreover, the “biography” thus inferred from the poem turns out to be a fabric of unedifying adventures having among themselves a similarity quite remote from the variety of life, and finally, in two key passages, on commenting upon the longest episode, and on concluding the Book, the poet addresses his public and solemnly avers (909ab and 1634bc):

And realize full well I spin my tale of Lady Sloe
To teach a moral, not because it happened to me so …
                                                                      this my poem has been writ
To check the wrongs and injuries which persons ill commit.(1)

The individual, Juan Ruiz, figures frequently in the poem, but this autobiography is no narration of his personal history. Autobiography, written directly, in the first person, was very rare in Western Europe, both in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.² In the vernacular literatures it remained unknown, I think, until the thirteenth century, when Ulrich von Lichtenstein wrote his Frauendienst, followed by Dante's Vita Nuova, so that the fictitious use of the autobiographical form was not natural as it would have been after the Renaissance, and above all, after the Romantic movement. Moreover, the Frauendienst and the Vita Nuova unfold a chain of dissimilar events and dynamically outline the character of the respective protagonist; Dante, above all, whatever the relationship between truth and fantasy may be, not only builds his book around his love for Beatrice, but also around the irreversible growth of his own character. His reactions on the last page cannot be confused with those of the first, very much in contrast to what happens in the Book of Good Love—and even in Don Quixote: Juan Ruiz, like Cervantes, absent-mindedly quotes as already written an episode which has not yet appeared, for the simple reason that the episodes are essentially repeated actions implying no psychological development nor causal relationship in time.³

Within the Christian environment of mid-fourteenth-century Spain, the autobiography of the Book of Good Love is entirely unique. For this reason, in 1894 the Arabist Francisco Fernández y González identified the poem, in terms of literary genre, with the Semitic maqāmāt. This genre was created in the tenth century by al-Hamadhani (an Arabic author, born in Persia, the same man who created the song for blind men, cultivated by Juan Ruiz), and perfected in the eleventh by al-Hariri, likewise a Persian Arab. In the maqāmāt a rogue preaches a virtue and piety which he is far from practicing. A master of grammar, rhetoric, poetry and schemes for thriving at the cost of his neighbor, he declaims in sessions (i.e., maqāmāt) where the narrator repeatedly confronts the rogue and reports in the first person the latter's deviltry (of which he, the narrator, is at times the victim), and transmits as well the rogue's declamations. These two persons give unity to the different adventures, set in bourgeois surroundings and expressed in rhymed prose with the interpolation of lyric poems, of debates and disquisitions on moral and erudite themes, in a style which is a display of verbal pyrotechnics. All this agrees remarkably with the Book of Good Love, but these Arabic maqāmāt differ in that their poems are not variations on earlier narratives, they contain no tales or fables, and hardly touch the love theme. Also their two characters are as far removed from the single “I,” which links the Book of Good Love, as al-Hamadhani and al-Hariri, Arabs from Persia, are removed from Juan Ruiz's Spain.

From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, the Jews of Catalonia, Languedoc, and Provence, informed by a non-traditional and lay orientation and, consequently, sympathetic with the Arabic art and science, assiduously cultivated the maqāmāt, reworking them with great originality. If we compare the masterpiece of the Hispano-Hebraic maqāmāt, the Tahkemoni by Yehuda ben Selomo al-Harisi (between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) with Arabic maqāmāt, we realize that the Jew coincides with Juan Ruiz in profusely commenting on the origin of his book, on its literary and moral intention, contents and merits, amid alternate professions of mastery and modesty. He further coincides with Juan Ruiz in that his hero is not a rogue, and that the inserted poems are lyrical variations on the subject-matter previously dealt with in a narrative form. A second example of the Hispano-Hebraic maqāmāt shows radical departures from the Arabic model, which are so many steps in the direction of the Book of Good Love: I refer to the Book of Delights⁴ by the physician from Barcelona, Yosef ben Meir ibn Zabarra (second half of the twelfth century), a work in which the protagonist and narrator appear fused into one character, identified with the author. He, exactly as Juan Ruiz, is the protagonist of a single, rather loose narration, functioning as a frame-story for debates, dissertations, aphorisms, proverbs, portraits, parodies, tales and fables which, in turn, may introduce other tales and fables. The Book of Delights begins and ends with explanatory pieces and dedications in lyric verse at the beginning and in rhymed prose at the end, characteristics which recall the 1330 version of the Book of Good Love, with its initial lyrics to the Virgin and its epilogue in narrative verse. The narrator-protagonist reports that there appeared to him, a giant, his future interlocutor throughout the rest of the work, a situation which recalls the appearance of Sir Love as “a tall man” (181c), who is Juan Ruiz's interlocutor in the most important debate in his poem. The giant, with all kinds of promises, offers to conduct Yosef to his city. After a long deliberation for and against trips, comparable to Juan Ruiz's deliberation for and against love, Yosef accepts, just as after the debate with Sir Love, the Archpriest starts his longest episode. The wanderings of the two travelers bring to mind Juan Ruiz's journeys through the cities and across mountains. Finally, Yosef's displeasure with the unfamiliar city and nostalgia for his native land recall the line in which the lonely Juan Ruiz, passing through the city of Segovia, expresses the nostalgia for his home—that exquisite line which stirred Azorín's imagination (973b):⁵

Neither well of waters fresh, nor eternal source I found.

Such is the skeleton of the autobiographical narrative in the Book of Delights; to the similarities already indicated, we should add an equal taste for reminiscences of the Scriptures, a tract on physiognomy, the caricature of an ugly woman, a humoristic portrait based on antithesis and verbal paradox, an invective against wine, a series of vilifications of the interlocutor, strung not at his first appearance, but much later in a quarrel ending in a reconciliation—all of which have their exact counterparts in the Book of Good Love. There are also various jokes common to both works; let me mention only one. Yosef reports that Socrates, married to a petite woman, apologized: “I have chosen the least of evil.” On finishing the droll sermon “Concerning the qualities which little women have” Juan Ruiz counsels his audience (1617cd):

Now of two evils choose the less,—said a wise man of the East,
By consequence, of woman-kind be sure to choose the least.(6)

Into this fictitious autobiography—and the long intervention of a supernatural interlocutor, the giant or Sir Love, underlines its fictitious quality—the two authors introduce their personal learning, a pattern which explains why the dissertations are medical in the Book of Delights and ecclesiastic in the Book of Good Love. The obvious difference, in regard to the content, consists in that, although Yosef now and then treats of women, he refrains from narrating amorous episodes; but other Hispano-Hebraic maqāmāt, especially those of Selomo ibn Siqbal of Cordova, offer them, in the guise of repeated disappointments of the protagonist. It would be ill-advised to posit for Juan Ruiz the bookish imitation of the Hebrew maqāmāt, but the priceless confession: “Next after that I wrote the words to many a dancing song / For Jewesses,” and his familiarity with the Ghetto, prove that specific knowledge of such works may well have reached him.

What remains to be asked is why Juan Ruiz chose this autobiographical structure and not the frame-story in the form of a tale including a cluster of other tales—as in the Thousand and One Nights—a form no doubt familiar to him from several Arabic collections translated into Castilian in the thirteenth and widely imitated in the fourteenth century. The truth is that if anything stands out in the Book of Good Love it is an exuberant, irrepressible personality, which refused to be satisfied with a frame-story barring the author from a personal appearance. Therefore, Juan Ruiz preferred the fictitious autobiography of the Hispano-Hebraic maqāmāt, which permitted him to step into the foreground of the narrative in order to proclaim his instructive experience, be it true or imaginary. For a proven way, apparently spontaneous, to enhance the pedagogical efficacy of any teaching, consists in presenting it as the teacher's personal experience. The Psalmist, objectively asserting that the good man suffers no poverty, affirms (XXXVII, 25): “I have been young, and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.” Ovid—if you will excuse the medieval juxtaposition of the Scriptures and the Art of Love—teaches that the penniless lover cannot afford the luxury of indulging in bad temper, and he brings home the point with a personal anecdote (II, 169 ff.):

Once in a rage her hair I towsed about.
How many days that tantrum cut me out!
I never felt … don't think … but she declared …
I tore a frock; my purse the loss repaired.
You, if you're shrewd, your master's errors flee:
Shy from the damage my guilt brought to me.(7)

Summing up: the books that medieval learned men held dearest authorized the spontaneous habit of instructing in the first person, a habit which no doubt confirmed Juan Ruiz in choosing the autobiographical structure of the Hispano-Hebraic maqāmāt as a frame-story for his poem.

Concerning the didactic purpose that guided Juan Ruiz's pen, a heated controversy has been raging since the poem was first rediscovered. The reader of our days—I refer especially to the Hispanic reader—tolerates symbolic, indirect didacticism in the novel and in the theater: in poetry he categorically rejects it. Neither does he admit compromises and jests in moral and religious instruction, and condemns as antipedagogical any teaching through negative examples. For these reasons, many readers of the Book of Good Love challenge its didactic intention. Now, such reasons are ways or styles of our times: the resistance of those readers stems only from the fact that Juan Ruiz conducted himself as a fourteenth- and not as a twentieth-century man.

1. First of all, the didactic intent is not a conjecture; it follows from the poet's express and insistent declarations. Of course, every masterpiece, once achieved, transcends the specific intent with which the author started: the Aeneid is much more than the glorification of Emperor Augustus, just as Don Quixote has outgrown the mere attack on the romances of chivalry. But an author's avowed point of departure is an invaluable datum, which one ought not to cast aside simply because it is not in harmony with present-day thinking. Juan Ruiz's declarations agree with many traits of his text; those critics, unwilling to take at their face value the author's declarations, must venture for these traits explanations extremely hazardous. True, an author may, more or less sincerely, attribute to his work, once it has been written, an intent which did not guide him while he was at work on it.⁸ As for the Archpriest, he has stated his didactic aim in his Prologue in prose, in the first 71 quatrains by way of introduction, at the beginning and the conclusion of many episodes (76, 105 ff., 161 ff., 892 ff., 944d, 950, 951d, 1319c, 1503 ff., 1508d), at random junctures (for example, 986cd, 1390cd), and in the final peroration. Obviously, his didactic purpose, far from being an afterthought, permeates the entire poem.

2. The Book of Good Love belongs to the literary genre of the Semitic maqāmāt, an essentially didactic genre. The teaching of the maqāmāt is, above all, moralizing; they also display the author's literary virtuosity and diversified knowledge, that is to say, those very same categories of teaching which the Book of Good Love offers. Experts in the history of Spanish law, music and poetry do, of course, draw on Juan Ruiz's declarations though, paradoxically, they are wont to reject the moral declarations which the poet points out as his most important didactic purpose. Moreover, and again following the model of the maqāmāt, the didacticism of the Book of Good Love expresses itself not only in the autobiographical novel serving as a framework, but also in the tales, fables and satires enclosed in this framework, all of which would be jarring appendages if they were divorced from the general didactic intent of the work.

3. The title of the poem, Book of Good Love,⁹ corroborates the intention here assumed. Juan Ruiz formulates the title three times in the body of the work (13cd, 933ab, 1630ab), and the first time he indicates, leaving not a shadow of a doubt, that he aspires to the ideal of a didactic and, at the same time, aesthetically satisfying literature, for he asks God's aid

That with Thy help my Book of Good Love may I write,
A book to improve the soul and the body to delight.

At the second mention, the poet reports that to placate the old go-between with whom he has quarrelled, he calls her “Good Love”; and for the sake of his attachment to her he has given this title to the Book, although at the same time he adds (933a):

and because it seemed right.

Does this joke prove that Juan Ruiz is not in earnest about the title and subject of his poem? Certainly not. Calling the agent of foolish love “Good Love” is a travesty no less obvious than imagining that the sinful go-between dwells in Paradise among the martyrs (1570ab). But just as it would be unwarranted to infer from this last joke that Juan Ruiz failed to believe in Paradise or in the martyrs, so one must not infer from the first joke that he lacked any belief in the superior hierarchy of Good Love and in the purpose of his Book as a guide to it.

4. Various traits of structure, the presentation of characters, the style and meter are inherent in the didactic purpose. The most salient structural characteristic is the repetition of parallel episodes. The thirteen amorous adventures of the autobiographical novel, very similar to one another in their details and identical in their outcome, each frustrating the poet's desire, illustrate through their repeated failure the didactic thesis which Juan Ruiz explicitly sets forth when he muses on his first defeat (105):

As King Solomon has said (and indeed he preaches true)
All wordly things are vanity, all pass like morning dew,
All things vanish through age, the ancient and the new,
All things, save to love God, are frivolous to do.(10)

Moreover, there are various didactic passages which Juan Ruiz displays twice, very deliberately, since the later passages refer back to the earlier ones (608 ff. to 423 ff., 937 ff. to 699 ff., 1583 to 217 ff.), clear evidence that he feels so intensely the urge to impart his doctrine that he joyfully welcomes any opportunity to revert to it.

The presentation of the characters offers what at first sight seems a singular paradox: the more important the person, the less individualized he or she is. Not only do the personifications and mythological figures show this unusual trait, but the protagonist too. Though introducing himself by his name and profession, the protagonist affirms solemnly his universal nature when starting his autobiography, and repeats it with variations on beginning his sundry adventures (76a):

So I, because I am a man, the same as any sinner.(11)

That is to say: I, Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, will tell of my love adventures not in the name of the individual man Juan Ruiz, not as personal and romantic confidences in the manner of Rousseau or of Goethe, but as a universal human confession: I will speak as the sinner that every man is, like the pilgrim Gonzalo de Berceo in the Miracles of Our Lady or Everyman in the morality-play of that title. To such a degree is this true that, when one of the ladies asks for the Archpriest's portrait, the description which follows is not individualized; rather it combines the generic marks which medieval doctors attributed to a sanguine temperament, that is, to a buoyant and sensual type of man. Neither is the picture of the go-between individualized; Sir Love describes what “these convent-trotters” are like in general (441d); then the protagonist evokes the particular Dame Convent-trotter who will figure in the Book, still subsuming her under the general type (699 ff.):

A hawker was she, one of those who sell and peddle gauds,
Those who lure girls to their traps, those who bait them with frauds …(12)

The same thing happens to the women loved by the protagonist: the poet praises their beauty or their nobility in the most general terms; even when describing at some length Lady Sloe and Lady Garoza (653, 1499bc and 1502a), the descriptions share some common traits, and suspiciously coincide with the archetype of loveliness sketched earlier by Sir Love (432 ff.). The detailed portrait of one of the mountain lasses is not individual either: it is a caricature which fuses all the conceivable features of feminine ugliness, a rhetorical exercise which was not infrequent in the Middle Ages: witness the parallel mentioned in the Book of Delights, and others, for instance in the French prose Perceval, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in Skelton's “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming.” On the other hand, Juan Ruiz individualizes with conspicuous vigor the quite secondary figures introduced in comparisons and descriptions: the dancing girl and the weaver, who cannot keep their feet still, the one while operating the loom, the other at the sound of the tambourine (470 ff.); or the month of June, personified as a peasant who “had eaten unripe grapes, and now his voice was hoarse,” while “his hands were stained full red, as there was such plenty of cherries” (1290 f.).

Now, this discrepancy is inherent in the didactic literature of all times. The fable, or the theater of types, do not individualize the fox, the wolf, the miser, the hypocrite, precisely because they aim to present them as conventional typifications of human conduct, but authors who are great artists—fabulists like Juan Ruiz, Don Juan Manuel, Lope de Vega, La Fontaine; dramatists like Alarcón, Ben Jonson, Molière—enrich their didactic works with the concreteness they have freely observed outside the conventional typification of the genre.¹³

Since the didactic purpose is the kernel of the Book of Good Love and is not an appendage to it, it also appears in its style. Thus, each concrete episode has a general range of application (76, 260, 592), each character is ascribed to a category (433cd, 699a); each thought is referred to a learned text which lends it authority (44a, 446c); the numerous sayings and proverbs add weight to the end of the stanza; above all, we notice the typical procedure of the educator and of the preacher: the variation on a given theme which, as a matter of fact, is the essential technique of the poem. Finally, it should be remembered that the metric form prevailing in the Book of Good Love is the “fourfold way” [quaderna vía], a monorhyme quatrain with lines oscillating between fourteen and sixteen syllables. It had been introduced into Spain in the preceding century by ecclesiastic poets who, for the enlightenment of the lay public, composed in the vernacular those narratives which the clerics had all along been reading in Latin. That is, it had been introduced by a poetic school of markedly didactic aims.

5. The most extensive episode in the Book of Good Love is a brilliant paraphrase of the twelfth-century Latin comedy, Pamphilus; very significant is the fact that Juan Ruiz injected his didactic preoccupation into this foreign material. (a) As the comedy was the story of a seduction which ended in marriage, Juan Ruiz has added on his own a long moralization, the longest in the poem, evidently as a foil to the happy ending. (b) Compared with the Old Woman in Pamphilus, Dame Convent-trotter is a much livelier figure. Even so, Juan Ruiz—hemmed in by the typification inherent in didactic literature—limits himself to developing a single aspect of her character: the mastery of the arts leading to foolish love, the only aspect he intends to censure severely. On the other hand, Fernando de Rojas shapes his Celestina as a multi-faceted personage because, having shed didactic typification, he aims to present an integral human creature. Or, to put it differently: Celestina is a character in a drama; Dame Convent-trotter is a character in a fable. (c) In the Latin original the protagonists bear classical names: Pamphilus, borrowed from the comedies of Terence; Galatea, from the Eclogues of Virgil. Juan Ruiz rejects the ornate ancient names, rich in esthetic and erudite connotations, and replaces them with morally significant Spanish names. He does so not in the abstract manner of Langland, Ben Jonson or Bunyan, but rather in a very personal manner, halfway between the metaphor and the proverb: Pamphilus becomes Sir Melon; Galatea, Lady Sloe. Sir Melon, because in popular parlance the melon symbolizes especially persons (or things) with whom success depends not on careful choice but on chance, a view underlying the saw: “In melons and marriages one depends on a chance hit.”¹⁴ Lady Sloe, because the sloe is the wild downy plum symbolic of the delicacy of feminine honor. A later poet embroiders: “A maid is like the sloe, which even if scarcely touched shows the fingers' mark.”¹⁵ The substitution for the lovely ancient names of these popular ones, at once jocose and moralizing, served the purpose of alerting the public from the start to the didactic significance of the characters.

6. Today's reader, unfamiliar with medieval mentality, finds it difficult to take seriously a moral teaching which, in order to preach divine love, assiduously inserts case-histories of worldly love. But this procedure was dogma for medieval pedagogy, relying upon Saint Paul's precept to the Thessalonians (I, 21), with which Juan Ruiz heads his autobiography (76cd) and the narrative of his adventures in the sierras (950a):

No harm is done to man by putting things to test,
By knowing good and evil, choosing from all the best.(16)

The basis of teaching through fables is no different, since the predominant moral is the one which admonishes: “Do not act like the grasshopper,” “Do not act like the crow.” Nor is there any departure in the principle pervading the Spanish picaresque novel, the most typical of which (Guzmán de Alfarache) is subtitled “The Watchtower of Human Life,” and, according to some laudatory verses,

                                                                                          teaches
By its opposite example
How to lead a righteous life.

The same applies to Cervantes' Exemplary Novels and to their seventeenth-century imitations, to the comedy of types and to the thesis plays of more recent vintage, let us say Bertolt Brecht's dramas depicting life in Nazi Germany, or Arthur Miller's The Crucible, centering about the persecution of witches in Salem.

The habit of presenting moral and religious teachings in a facetious way goes against the grain of the modern reader, but the medieval authors who advocate and practice this device are too numerous to be cited.¹⁷ Moreover, as the notion of what is facetious and decorous has notably changed through six centuries, it happens that at times episodes now classified as risqué could very well have been used without hypocrisy in order to impart edifying lessons. This habit, so shocking for us, disappeared—not in a day. Suffice it to recall that toward the middle of the sixteenth century, Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, a princess of unimpeachable conduct, pious, mystically inclined, and even very much concerned with the orthodox reform of Catholicism, wrote—not in her youth but in her last years—the Heptaméron, a collection of tales, lewd and scatological in the main, whose edifying message she relentlessly expounds.¹⁸

7. The habit of making an abstract lesson palpable by means of a jocular story received support also from the allegorical exegesis of the Scriptures, obligatory in the Middle Ages for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. In accord with this precedent, any respected text could be allegorized, i.e., the medieval reader was bound to discover in it what he was striving to discover. Thus, Chrétien Legouais, John of Garland and a host of other medieval worthies, read into Ovid's Metamorphoses all they knew about Biblical history and Christian morals. Conversely, the writer felt authorized to compose stories totally devoid of austerity, and to point out later that, aside from the literal, purely entertaining meaning, the reader could detect other more valuable meanings, in harmony with his moral and intellectual capacity. Such a concept of the book, and its various layers of meaning, dependent upon the merit of the reader, befits the medieval vision of the world. This philosophy regards all creation as valuable, but hierarchized with respect to the Creator, on a scale which goes from worldly pleasure to ascetic renunciation, from carnal lovemaking to divine love. Just as man chooses freely and responsibly, according to his degree of insight, the best or the worst possibility of all those which the world offers him, so the reader, equally responsible for his selection, is free to open a book at the profitable or at the frivolous page; he may content himself with the frivolous literal meaning or search for the profitable allegorical meaning. It would be an easy matter to illustrate these ideas with works as significant as the treatise The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, Boccaccio's Decamerone and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In his maqāmāt the Arab al-Hariri, addressing the unlettered and coarse-minded reader, insists upon the moral value of his work—which the discreet reader will understand and judge on a par with fables and apologues. In the Prologue to his Tahkemoni, the Spanish Jew Yehuda ben Selomo al-Harisi declares:

You may liken this book to a garden where all kinds of flowers are to be found. It offers to everyone that which he desires; grants to everyone that which he yearns for, according to his nature and learning, according to his capacity and aptitude. Whoever reveres the word of God, learns there to fear God. Whoever pays no attention to it, can apply himself to the earthly matters which it contains. From its vast scope the fool and the sage, the young and the old, may benefit, each in a different way.

Thus we understand how Juan Ruiz could write in all earnest that in the gay stories of his Book the reader “of sound judgement, eager to be saved, will choose and act accordingly,” while the sinner will find instructions for sinning (Prologue, p. 6):

And thus this book of mine, for every man or woman, wise or unwise, whether he perceives the good and perceives the way to salvation and works through loving God well, or otherwise desires worldly love, in whatsoever direction he may go, each one may well say, “I shall give thee understanding.”¹⁹

This attitude is to such an extent the key to the Book of Good Love that Juan Ruiz, not satisfied with expounding it in his Prologue and Epilogue and alluding to it in several passages, interpolates as a guide, before entering upon the autobiographical frame-story, a delightful apologue, the “Disputation between Greeks and Romans” (44 ff.). The Romans asked the Greeks for laws, the latter laid down as a preliminary condition a disputation, and by request of the Romans, who spoke no Greek, agreed to carry it on by signs. Lacking wise men, the aggrieved Romans took a knave:

In a dress of finest cloth well and richly attired was he,
As a teacher of Philosophy, with a doctoral degree.

When the moment arrived, the wisest among the doctors of Greece stood up and raised his index finger; the knave very fiercely showed his index, middle finger, and thumb; the Greek extended his palm; the Roman showed his fist. The Greek doctor, then, declared himself highly satisfied with the wisdom of the Romans since, he explained, when he raised one finger to indicate that God is one, the Roman raised three to indicate that He has three persons; when he extended his palm to show that the world is under His will, the Roman showed his fist, meaning that God has the world in His power. When the knave was questioned, he in turn explained: “The Greek told me that he would split my eye with one finger; I answered him that I would smash his teeth with one finger and that with the other two I would poke out his eyes; then he told me that he would box my ears; and I promised to give him such a blow that he would never be able to avenge it, and then he stopped threatening me.” Indeed, the sign has many meanings. All its meanings are admissible, but not all are equally valuable; the vulgar meaning which the knave chooses in accordance with his knavery is inferior to the theological meaning which the doctor chooses in accordance with his wisdom and learning.

In short, the Book of Good Love, a work of mudéjar art, fits its Christian motifs into the structure of the Hispano-Hebraic maqāmāt. As a result, it is an artistic composition with a didactic purpose, which above all proposes to inculcate precepts of moral behavior, and to that end utilizes the autobiography of the author who acts as protagonist and teacher, repeatedly heaping ridicule on himself so as to warn the public against his own moral misconduct. In Juan Ruiz's century and in the following one, his doctrinal intention lost him no sympathizers. All the early quotations (down to 1450) correspond to didactic passages, while none of the various lacunae and omissions which mar the extent text has damaged those moral passages. Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the great master of Spanish philology, has discovered a curious manuscript containing some kind of outline or program for a minstrel recitation of about 1420. In that program, the minstrel

on feeling the interest of his audience wane, stirred it with magic words: “Now let us begin the Book of the Archpriest,” certain that this simple announcement would make his listeners rejoice in advance, expecting a thousand fanciful stories of townspeople and mountain lasses, of scurrilous lampoons, skillful fables, inimitable imitations of Pamphilus and Ovid, and songs and ballads.²⁰

The illustrious critic has omitted from this list every didactic element, doubtless because it happens to run contrary to present-day taste, but what the minstrel in fact recites after the magic words “Now let us begin the Book of the Archpriest” is a couple of moralizing passages upon the evils of excessive drinking and upon the power of money. After all, why should we impose our twentieth-century tastes and prejudices on a poet of the fourteenth century and his immediate audiences?

Notes

1. Kane's translation [The Book of Good Love, translated by Elisha Kane, Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1969], slightly modified in stanza 1634b. “Lady Sloe” [doña Endrina].

2. A few examples could be culled from Hellenistic and Roman literature, such as Petronius', Apuleius', and Lucian's autobiographical fiction (see G. Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, transl. by E. W. Dickes, Cambridge, Mass., 1951, which however focuses more on autobiographical content than on autobiography as a literary genre), but it may be safely assumed that Juan Ruiz had no inkling of such authors. He shows no knowledge even of Saint Augustine's Confessions and Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, two autobiographical works then widely read. Two considerations alert us to the medieval aloofness from autobiography: (1) when Cassiodorus (ca. 490-583) had Josephus' works translated into Latin, he omitted the historian's Life, one of the all too rare autobiographies transmitted from Antiquity, as if this writing made no sense to him; (2) when Guibert de Nogent (1053-1124) composed De vita sua, he adopted a style far less elaborate than his own style used in his historical works and, after Book I, abandoned the autobiographical narrative, except for a few passages, and objectively narrated the events in Nogent and in Laon. While his religious and historical treatises have come down in numerous MSS, De vita sua has been preserved in a single modern copy because, as its editor remarks “l'œuvre de Guibert ne rentrait pas dans les genres littéraires admis du moyen-âge” (Guibert de Nogent, Histoire de sa vie; ed. G. Bourgin, Paris, 1907, p. xxxv). P. Lehmann, “Autobiographies of the Middle Ages,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, III (1953), 41-52, points out that Saint Augustine's Confessions and Retractations “were widely copied, read and used in the Middle Ages, but were neither of them ever effectively imitated” (p. 42; cf. p. 46), and that even in confessions written in the ecclesiastical sense, “the individual autobiographical touch is normally avoided” (p. 43).

3. In the Book of Good Love, 1323c, Dame Convent-trotter, the procuress, alludes to her fruitless conversation with the Moorish girl, a passage which in all extant MSS, occurs only in stanzas 1508-12. Compare the report on the three lawsuits judged by Sancho in Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. xlv: to praise Sancho's verdict in the first (the case of the five caps), Cervantes asserts that it was more admired than the sentence he had pronounced in the case of the drover's purse—which, in fact, is the third lawsuit.

4. English translation by Moses Hadas, New York, 1932. I. González-Llubera's Catalan translation (Barcelona, 1931), with excellent Introduction and notes, also deserves consultation.

5. Azorín [José Martínez Ruiz], Al margen de los clásicos [Marginalia on the Classics], Madrid, 1915, “Juan Ruiz,” pp. 20 ff.

6. Longfellow's translation, published in “Spanish Language and Literature” in The North American Review, April, 1833, and later included in The Poets and Poetry of Europe.

7. Translation by E. Phillips Barker, The Lover's Manual, Oxford, 1931.

8. This, I believe, is the case of The Celestina, whose avowed didactic purpose (“in reprehension of foolish lovers … and advising against the deceits of go-betweens and of wicked and wheedling servants,” I, p. 27) is far narrower and triter than the bitter message that flows from the work as a whole. In the Prologue to his Exemplary Novels, Cervantes announces: “I have called them exemplary, because, if you rightly consider them, there is not one of them from which you may not draw some useful example” (translation by Walter K. Kelly, London, 1855, p. x). There is no ground for disputing Cervantes' sincerity in the Prologue; yet, we may not unreasonably doubt that the reader's edification was foremost in his mind when he was describing with such gusto the doings of two lads who, instead of joining the university chosen by their fathers, embraced a rogue's life (The Illustrious Scullery Maid), the pleasant freedom of gypsies (The Gypsy Girl), and Seville's bizarrely organized underworld (Rinconete and Cortadillo). For a full discussion of Juan Ruiz's didacticism, see “Nuevas notas para la interpretación del Libro de buen amor,” pp. 28-60.

9. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, “Título que el Arcipreste de Hita dio al libro de sus poesías,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, Serie III, II (1898), 106-109, has definitely shown that Book of Good Love [Libro de buen amor] is the authentic title. None is preserved at the beginning of the MSS, and in the fifteenth century the poem was quoted as “The Archpriest's Book”—a tribute to Juan Ruiz's striking personality.

10. The second hemistich of the last line is borrowed from Kane.

11. Kane's translation.

12. Kane's translation slightly modified. This and other didactic features have been pointed out by the late L. Spitzer, “Zur Auffassung der Kunst des Arcipreste de Hita,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, LIV (1934), 237-270, though not in connection with the maqāmāt.

13. Note that even though Juan Ruiz's descriptions of his animal protagonists vastly surpass those by most fabulists (witness the portrayal of the overworked horse, 242 f.), he is at his very best when sketching animals in comparisons or in brief, secondary evocations (cf. 563b: the peacock; 569c: the heron; 1092a: the old ox; 1219b: the greyhound; 1293cd: the gad-fly, etc.).

14. “El melón y el casamiento ha de ser acertamiento.”

15. Luis Quiñones de Benavente, Entremés de Pipote (E. Cotarelo y Mori, Colección de entremeses, Madrid, 1911, I, 2, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, XVIII, p. 715a, No. 301): “que también la doncella es como endrina, / que apenas la han tocado / cuando el dedo le dejan señalado.”

16. Many, of course, forgot the second half of the precept, as the lady in William Langland, The Vision of Piers the Plowman, Passus III, v. 334 ff. (done into modern English by W. W. Skeat, London, 1922): “Thou'rt like a lady that read once a lesson, 'Twas ‘prove ye well all things,’ and pleased was her heart, For the line was no longer, at the end of the leaf. Had she looked any longer or turned the leaf over, More words had she found there, that follow close after, ‘Hold fast what is good.’” As far as I know, the first Spanish moralist to oppose the medieval teaching of wisdom by exhibiting folly was Fray Juan de Pineda, Diálogos de la agricultura cristiana [Dialogues on Christian Agriculture], Salamanca, 1589, I, xxii, 25. Apropos of the alleged moral purpose of The Celestina, Pineda argued that it was by far safer not to awaken the reader's sensuality, than to incite it by a too lively artistic presentation of vice.

17. To the Arabic authors favoring the alternation of comic and serious matters, quoted by Castro, La realidad histórica de España, pp. 282 and 415, add the Christian counterparts identified by Otis H. Green, “On Juan Ruiz's Parody of the Canonical Hours,” Hispanic Review, XXVI (1953), 13.

18. See P. Jourda, Marguerite d'Angoulême, Paris, 1930, II, pp. 887, 911, and more especially E. V. Telle, L'Œuvre de Marguerite d'Angoulême, Reine de Navarre, et la Querelle des Femmes, Toulouse, 1937, pp. 94, 139-145, and L. Febvre, Autour de l'Heptaméron; amour sacré, amour profane, Paris, 1944, pp. 208-213. A case in point is the widespread medieval practice of enlivening sermons with stories and fables, a practice first prohibited by the Council of Bordeaux, 1624. The celebrated Bavarian preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644-1709) still upheld religious teaching by means of scurrilous tales and parody: see T. G. von Karajan, Abraham a Sancta Clara, Vienna, 1867, pp. 234, 241 f., and G. Highet, The Classical Tradition, New York, 1949, pp. 308, 649.

19. Kane's translation, pp. 4 f. The quotation is taken from Psalm 31:8, verse 8 being the Biblical authority for the whole Prologue.

20. Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y orígenes de las literaturas románicas, Madrid, 1957, p. 209; cf. 234 ff.