SOURCE: Shepard, Sanford. “Undercurrent and Innuendo in the Troba Cazurra of Juan Ruiz.” Neohelicon 17, no. 1 (1990): 281-89.

[In the following essay, Shepard analyzes the sexual symbolism present in the baker episode of the The Book of Good Love.]

In the second amorous episode of the Libro de Buen Amor, the Archpriest embroils himself with Cruz, a baker woman, a panadera. The author tells of his adventure in a lyrical version, the form of which is the Arabic zagal, known in Spanish as zéjel. The poem has attracted the attention of Hispanists as an example of an Arabic poetic form in Castilian.¹ Less attention has been given the nature of the undercurrent of innuendo and ribaldry that commentators have sensed only occasionally. André S. Michalski has drawn attention to the problem of the interpretation of this poem in his interesting note entitled “Juan Ruiz's Troba Cazurra: ‘Cruz Cruzada Panadera.’”² Michalski mentions the supposition of Joan Corominas that the Archpriest intends a risque facetiousness. Concerning the ambiguous passage, “Cruz cruzada panadera,” Corominas is quoted as saying: “es evidente que hay juego verbal, pero en qué forma lo hay, es también mucho menos seguro.”³ In an attempt to clarify the ambiguities seen by Corominas, Michalski suggests that the trade of panadera, by its requiring constant contact with the public, exposed itself to innuendo. He states that the expression comer pan in the line “él comió el pan más duz” has an obscene meaning. He states further that the various shapes in which bread, rolls, and pastries were and are baked should be considered in any estimate of the sexual implications of the Archpriest's verses.

Michalski mentions also that Leo Spitzer admits a sexual coloration to the word trigo in stanza 119.⁴ This approach deserves more attention since the entire context of baking is associated in language and psychology with the sexual act. This relationship reaches into the archaic strata of human fantasy and is in no way limited to a single culture or epoch. Just as the agricultural terms plowing, planting, fertilizing, seed, etc., are connected in verbal fantasy with human reproduction and sexuality and appear in conscious utterances, so too bread and breadmaking carry references to sex and reproduction. The objective phenomena of baking are perceived in terms of sexual activity and are often projected into the conscious level of ordinary speech. The use of ovens and the handling of baked goods may create a vague aura of embarrassment that lends itself to jibe and innuendo. The nature of such ribaldry depends on the person speaking, the atmosphere of the personal contact, and the general environment. Words referring to baking may change their meaning by the manner of their utterance, by the fancy of the hearer, as well as by the intentions of the persons, presumably male and female, engaged in conversations of bantering good humor. One might cast a playful glance at François Villon and his Grosse Margot: “… j'ai mon pait cuit / Je suis paillard la paillarde me suit.”

THE MILL

Among the symbols that have referred to the female as a sexual object, the mill is among the most transparent. Erich Neumann in The Great Mother informs us that, “in Greece and Rome and in the European Middle Ages, mills and bakeries were often connected with brothels …”⁵ The sexual element in the symbol of the mill is seen clearly in a Hungarian poem quoted by Geza Roheim:

A mill on the Kuekuelloe
Makes a big clatter
It makes a big clatter
Because the miller is a rogue
The Kuekuelloe is all frozen
The miller crossed on the ice
Come back, come back my love
Because the mill grinds love.(6)

A similar notion appears in the Archpriest:

Mienbresevos, Don amigo, de lo que desirse suele
Que civera en molino, quien ante vien' muele;

(stanza 712)

Keeping in mind Spitzer's suggestion that the word trigo has a sexual implication in the Troba Cazurra, one might compare stanza 712 of the Libro de Buen Amor with the lyrics of a modern Spanish version of the tale of the miller's wife, best known in Spanish from Alarcon's El Sombrero de Tres Picos: “Vete tranquilo, buen molinero, ve a tu molino / Mo dejes que el vecino, te muela el trigo.”⁷ Still keeping in mind Spitzer's suggestion that the word trigo has a sexual reference, Job 31:10 might be recalled:

If my heart have been enticed
And I have lain in wait at my neighbor's door
Then let my wife grind unto another.

The Hebrew word tahan, used here for “grind,” is the word used for the operation of grinding grain and is cognate to the Hebrew word for mill. “The revolving motion of the mill,” says Roheim, “is coitus, the mill itself the vagina.”⁸

The seventeenth century English dramatist Thomas Dekker in his The Witch of Edmunton, calls the witch who gives her name to the play a prostitute in the following words:

“See, see, see! the man i'th'moon has built a new windmill; and what running there's from all quarters of the city to learn the art of grinding!”⁹

THE OVEN

The Latin fornus means oven. It is related to fornax, also signifying oven, but furnace and kiln as well. Fornax again in Latin is a vault or arch. Fornicaria, a prostitute, is said to be derived from fornax, either because prostitution was centered in the Via Fornicata, a street in ancient Rome leading to the Campus Martius, or practiced in vaulted underground chambers. Of this interpretation Theodore Thass-Thienemann writes:

Realistic-minded interpreters have the explanation at hand, that fornication was practiced in the vaulted subterranean brothels of Rome; yet the imaginary identification of the ‘furnace’ with the female genitals is such a widespread and age-old association of latent meanings that one need not resort to an incidental historical motivation.¹⁰

Such coalescence of meaning reveals a substratum of symbolism that is lost in the Latin lexicon where these two meanings, vaulting and prostitution, are listed separately. This practice of the lexicographers obscures the dynamics of language and metaphor. One need not have the peloriographic imagination of Hieronymous Bosch to understand arching over or vaulting as coition.

The symbolism connecting furnace or oven with sexual fantasies is observed in the technical word delphax, the name given in Greek to metal running directly from the smelting furnace. Delphax is connected to delphys, meaning womb, and adelphos, brother, originally referring to brothers of the same mother.

The relationship between breadbaking and the female is again revealed in the proverbial statement quoted by Erich Neumann apropos of a woman about to give birth: “The oven will soon cave in.”¹¹

The understanding of baking and oven symbolism is very ancient. Herodotus mentions an episode in the life of Periander, the tyrant of Corinth. Inquiring of his deceased wife from an oracle, he learns that her grave goods had not been burned and that she was therefore without clothing in the underworld. In order to prove that she truly spoke through the oracle, she mentioned an act of Periander that only he could know: “he inserted his bread into a cold oven.” Periander had intercourse with his deceased wife; he was therefore convinced that the oracle had indeed reported the words of his late wife.¹²

BREAD

The English word bread is based on the Indo-European root, *bhreu, meaning to swell. Brood is derived from a similar Indo-European root, *bhre, meaning to warm or heat. This series indicates the widespread sexual symbolism of the art of baking.

The ancient Greek festival of the Thesmophoria honored the goddess Demeter who presided over family life and childbirth. The occasion commemorated the rape of Demeter's daughter, Persephone. During this festival, in which only women took part, the celebrants made cakes of honey and sesame in the shape of the female sexual organs. These cakes in the shape of the pudenda muliebria were called mylloi; in the singular, myllos.¹³ This word recalls mylos, a mill. Furthermore, mylass (genitive myllados) means a prostitute. The verb myllein means to have sexual intercourse. To verify that the symbolic connection between bread and the male-female relationship was understood during the Middle Ages we might turn to the English words, lord and lady. The Old English hlaford, from which the word “lord” is derived, can be broken into its component parts: hlaf, meaning loaf, and weord meaning keeper. The lord is the keeper of the loaf of bread. Similarly, lady can be derived from hlaf, meaning loaf, and dige, meaning knead. Lady is etymologically, therefore, the kneader of the loaf. It is also worth noting that the Aramaic nahama means both bread and marital intercourse.

A female student of mine, Elizabeth Gregg, worked for a time in a bakery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At the end of the working day, the bakers made a large female figure out of dough. This figure exaggerated female anatomy. My student supposed for some time that this was a playful lasciviousness, but on questioning the bakers she learned that they believed the success of the next day's baking depended on this ritual modeling. The making of the figure was accompanied by sexual witticisms of the most grotesque type.

Elizabeth Gregg's first impression was not incorrect. Their superstitious and magical intentions confirms an archaic relationship between sexual activity and the baking of bread which reflects psychic tensions that much have originated with the advent of agriculture and the association of women with the baking of bread—a process which alters as if by enchantment, the lump of dough into the staff of life as the English phrase has it. The rising and hardening of the dough under the influence of a woman could not have failed to give impetus to verbal connections that gather both sacred and profane into the playful seriousness of the Haitian bakers.

In Corinthians 1:5, the symbolic symbiosis of baking and sex is expressed in an entirely serious denunciation of lust, porneia. “Do you not know that little yeast causes the entire lump of dough to rise? Purge out the old leaven that you may be new dough. Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us.”

Thus Christ is the feast of unleavened bread and the leavened lump of dough is sexual desire. Lust and its association in fantasy and metaphor with baking seems in Corinthians 1:5 to fall together in natural relationship perhaps in this case by unconscious associations. The metaphorical union of bread baking and sexual desire fall together without premeditation, spontaneously. The choice of symbolism was not made by St. Paul but rath eroccurs ontologically from preestablished philology.

Corinthians 1:5 is a conduit of an ancient and powerful fantasy that has both bantering and serious manifestations belonging to the essential disposition of language.

In modern English, “No one misses a slice from a cut loaf” refers to a sexual promiscuity that is discrete to overlook. “Cheesecake”⁵ in English refers to sexual activity. A seventeenth century rhyme of the epoch of Oliver Cromwell contains the following couplet:

But, ah, it goes against our hearts /
to lose our cheesecake and our tarts.

This couplet is supposed to refer to Cromwell's prohibition of “fraternization” with the ladies of the town. It will be noted that tarts are also bakery goods.¹⁴ The classical Greek word optan means to bake bread but also metaphorically to burn with amorous passion. In Nicaraguan and Honduran Spanish, “pan” (bread) refers to the female organs as does bizcocho (cake) in Mexican slang. In Puerto Rican Spanish, “bollo” (petit pain) is a common expression for the pudenda.

Juan Ruiz refers to his poem as a troba cazurra. Quoting Menendez Pidal, André S. Michalski in his note reminds us that cazurros “were minstrels who specialized in reciting comical, satirical and obscene songs.”¹⁵Cazurro can be derived from the Arabic root cathara, meaning dirty or obscene. The troba cazurra is, then, literally a dirty poem.

“Cruz cruzada panadera” is certainly a troublesome line in the Troba Cazurra. Michalski is correct, I believe, in stating that this line “most probably also contains some sexual gato encerrado. Here I suspect that, like the Latin cruciare, from which it is derived, cruzar, as used by Juan Ruiz, may have meant to impale, a meaning easily translated into sexual terms.”¹⁶ Another possibility may, perhaps, be suggested. Ire (or abire) in malam crucem is the expression in Plautus and Terence meaning, as the lexicon has it, “go to the devil” or some similar implication. This expression appears often as abuse in addressing prostitutes.¹⁷ As a common expression of literary Latin of two Roman writers known in the Middle Ages, it is not unlikely that it stuck in the mind of Juan Ruiz. One might suspect that the phrase, malam crucem, had, for the Roman writers mentioned before, a sexual implication. As a term of abuse directed to a harlot it could, perhaps, have been taken in no other way. The phrase cruz cruzada in a Christian context has a glancing, mischieviousness of sly, irreverent good humor. Leo Spitzer sees conin and conejero (below) as erotic puns. The medieval French coconin and conil refer to the female genital. The use of conceptista complexities was a common feature, one might say the outstanding feature, of Arabic and Hebrew poetry of the Middle Ages. Juan Ruiz's contemporary, the poet-rabbi Shem Tov de Carrion, the author of the Proverbios Morales, wrote a maqama in Hebrew entitled The Battle of the Pen and the Scissors. A line in that work can be read either: “expose all its (city's) foundations” or “expose the buttocks of the bride.” This possibility is given by the convention of writing Hebrew without vowels. This convention makes it possible to give the same words simultaneously different meanings, a device much admired and cultivated in Arabic and Hebrew diction. Another example from the poet-rabbi should be mentioned. The reed-pen of the maqama fails to penetrate the ink-horn because the ink has been frozen by the icy blasts of a blizzard. The Rabbi berates the pen, which has seemingly shrunk from performing its task, with the words: “You have been turned back by ne'oret (the cotton wool placed in the inkwell to retain moisture).” But ne'oret can be read, na'arot, girls. Thus the passage may be construed, “You have been turned back by girls.” The sexual undertone of many passages of the maqama, even some containing religious or biblical associations is reminiscent of the Archpriest's Troba Cazurra.¹⁸ If, as it is believed, Juan Ruiz had some knowledge of Arabic poetry, at least of the oral tradition of the reciters of popular verse, it is likely that he would be aware of this stylistic device. As can be seen from the quotations taken from Shem Tov's maqama, off-color sexual references were readily invoked in the manner of double-entendre.

It would seem that in the Middle Ages sexual symbolism was easily understood without benefit of psychoanalytic theory: that a consciousness of what we refer to today as Freudian symbolism was accessible to the medieval mind. One wonders why this type of material has become so difficult to interpret by the ordinary reader of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Two Spanish Masterpieces (Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), p. 35.

2. André S. Michalski, “Juan Ruiz's Troba Cazurra: ‘Cruz Cruzada Panadera,’” Romance Notes (1970), pp. 434-436.

3. Ibid., p. 435.

4. Ibid., p. 437.

5. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955) p. 285.

6. Geza Roheim, The Gates of the Dream (New York: International Univ. Press. Inc.), pp. 527-528.

7. Version of Joaquin Diaz, De la picaresca tradicional, recorded by Iberofon, S-21.173 Madrid.

8. Roheim, op. cit., p. 527.

9. Thomas Dekker, Plays, Ernest Rhys, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894) p. 448.

10. Theodore Thas-Thienemann, The Subconscious Language (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), p. 179.

11. Neumann, op. cit., p. 286.

12. Herodotus V 92-93. See also Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis, Chapter 10.

13. Neumann, op. cit., p. 266.

14. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (New York: Macmillian, 1984).

15. Michalski, op. cit., p. 434.

16. Ibid., p. 436.

17. Men. 849 and 916, Poen. 271, 347, 495, Eun. 536, Pers. 571, Carc. 693 and elsewhere.

18. Shem Tov, Battle of the Pen and the Scissors (in Heb) in Dibre Hakamin Metz, 1846, pp. 47-55. For an English translation of this work see my Shem Tov, His World and His Words (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1978).