by Juan Ruiz
(1343)
Juan RUIZ’s The Book of Good Love, perhaps the most important long poetic text surviving from medieval Spain, is a miscellany of 12 poems, each focused on a different love affair. The book opens with a prose sermon, or parody of a sermon, in which Ruiz claims to be presenting many examples of loco amor (that is, carnal love) in order to demonstrate the sort of sinful love that his readers must learn to eschew in favor of God’s spiritual love or buen amor, the “good love” of the title. The tone of this sermon, and indeed of the entire work, which juxtaposes so abruptly coarse or ribald sexual exploits with sententious moralizing, makes it difficult for readers or scholars to determine the author’s intent. Is he satirizing the moralistic attitude toward art so popular in his day? Is he satirizing the clerics, who, like the “Ruiz” of the book, engage in loco amor against their vows of chastity? Is he perhaps serious in his own moralizing? There is no consensus among readers.
The narrative portion of the text begins with two unsuccessful love affairs undertaken by “Ruiz.” The hapless narrator then consults the personified Don Amor, who gives him advice borrowed from Ovid and then sends him to Venus, who reiterates much of the same advice. This is followed by the story of the affair of Don Melón’s wooing of Doña Endrina, a tale based on a 12th- or 13th-century Latin comedy called Pamphilus, which was written to show how Ovid’s teachings might be applied in real life. In Ruiz’s tale Melón is able to win the girl through the aid of a go-between, an old bawd named Trotaconventos. This crone is one of the first great comic characters in European literature, and is a prototype of the even more famous and admired bawd in Rojas’s later 15th-century classic La CELESTINA.
Trotaconventos attempts to help the narrator in subsequent episodes: First she advises him to seek the love of a nun, and accosts one named Faroza.The outcome of this affair is ambiguous, but after the death of Faroza, Trotaconventos tries to obtain the favors of a Moorish girl for the Archpriest, but the girl spurns her suit. Ultimately Trotaconventos dies, and the narrator denounces death and, after expressing a number of further opinions, ends with some rather ambiguous advice on how to understand his Book of Good Love.
Ultimately only two of the 12 love stories end successfully for the wooer—a fact that might suggest something about Ruiz’s final intent. But its ambiguity aside, the text is entertaining, witty, ironic, and boisterous, and presents a vivid and humorous picture of social life in 14th-century Spain. Ruiz displays a familiarity with a wide range of medieval and classical sources, including Ovid, contemporary sermons, French fabliaux, GOLIARDIC VERSE and perhaps the CARMINA BURANA, possibly the ROMAN DE LA ROSE, and The Dove’s Neckring by the Moorish scholar IBN HAZM. A puzzling and uneven work, the Book of Good Love remains one of the founding classics of Spanish literature.
Bibliography
■ The Book of True Love. Old Spanish edited by Anthony N. Zahareas. Translated by Saralyn Daly. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978.
■ Burkard, Richard. The Archpriest of Hita and the Imitators of Ovid: A Study in the Ovidian Background of the Libro de buen amor. Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1999.
■ Dagenais, John. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
■ Lida de Malkiel, Maria Rosa. Two Spanish Masterpieces: The Book of Good Love and The Celestina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961.