The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor

THE ETHICS OF READING IN

MANUSCRIPT CULTURE

THE ETHICS OF

READING IN MANUSCRIPT

CULTURE

GLOSSING THE

LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR

John Dagenais

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

COPYRIGHT © 1994 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET,

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540

IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS,

CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

DAGENAIS, JOHN.

THE ETHICS OF READING IN MANUSCRIPT CULTURE: GLOSSING THE LIBRO DE BUEN AMOR / BY JOHN DAGENAIS.

P. CM.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

eISBN 1-4008-0147-8

MEDIEVAL. I. TITLE.

eISBN: 978-1-400-82107-5

R0

FOR

Ralph Waldo and Julia Ann Casad Dagenais

AND FOR

Gail, Nicolás, and Camille

vna ave sola nin bien canta nin bien llora

Glosyng / is a glorious thyng certeyn

For lettre sleeth / so as we clerkes seyn

Chaucer, Summoner’s Tale, Hengwrt, 80v

And he looked even further than I had read, and I knew not what followed.

Augustine, Confessions bk. 8

But as this Work is chiefly recommended to those who know how to Read it, and how to make good Uses of it, which the Story all along recommends to them, so it is to be hop’d that such Readers will be much more pleas’d with the Moral than the Fable, with the Application than with the Relation, and with the End of the Writer than with the Life of the Person written of.

Daniel Defoe, Preface to Moll Flanders

To a textual critic, a manuscript is of interest only as a vehicle of readings.

James Willis, Latin Textual Criticism

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS xi

PREFACE xiii

INTRODUCTION

The Larger Gloss 3

PART I 31

CHAPTER 1

A Glorious Thyng, Certeyn: At the Margins of the Medieval Text 33

CHAPTER 2

Adaptation and Application 56

CHAPTER 3

The Ethics of Reading the Book of the Archpriest of Hita 80

PART II 109

INTRODUCTION 111

CHAPTER 4

S/Ç: The Manuscripts of the Libro and Their Scribes 118

CHAPTER 5

At the Margins of the Libro 153

CHAPTER 6

Reading the Book of the Archpriest of Hita 171

CONCLUSION

Tolle Lege 213

NOTES 219

BIBLIOGRAPHY 243

INDEX 263

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

FEW BOOKS of the Middle Ages have proven to be as frustrating to modern scholars as Juan Ruiz’s Book of Good Love. The very title by which we know it, Libro de buen amor, was given to it only ninety years ago and has recently become a new topic of critical debate.¹ The precise date of composition and the identity of the author remain in question despite new documentary evidence that identifies an Archpriest of Hita named Juan Ruiz in 1330 (Hernández, Venerable 10).² Can we believe this documentary evidence, or does other evidence suggest that the book was written in the late fourteenth century, too late for this Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, to be the author of the book?³

If basic external facts such as the identity of the author and the date of the work’s composition are still unresolved, the text remains equally obscure. There remain many passages whose literal sense escapes us. What is the sense of puntos in the following lines: dicha buena / o mala por puntos la Juzgat | las coplas conlos puntos / load / o denostat (S:6v;69cd: Judge what I say, good or bad, by ‘points,’ | Praise or blame the verses with the points; for my transcription practices, see pp. xx–xxii). What does Juan Ruiz’s book mean by instrumentos when it says: Detodos Instrumentos / yo libro so pariente (S:6v;70a: I, book, am the relative of all instruments). Musical instruments? Legal documents? The instruments of an art, here specifically of the art of poetry? Instruments of navigation?⁴ And beyond the problem of what known words may mean in a given context, there are a number of words attested only in the Archpriest’s book whose most basic meaning still eludes us: diçia (G:6r;89a), sentia (S:9r;112c), aJeuio (S:83v;1387a), fresuelos (G:53v;1085c), amarga lonJa (S:87r;1443b). In addition to these difficulties with surviving portions of the Libro, we must confront the fact that the text is incomplete in all surviving manuscripts. There is a lacuna of thirty-two stanzas in the key final passage of the Doña Endrina episode. Numerous lyric pieces promised in the body of the text do not appear, not even in the collection of miscellaneous pieces found, with significant differences in content, at the end of the Salamanca and Gayoso manuscripts (but not in the Toledo manuscript).

All these missing pieces—author, date, parts of the physical text, the literal sense of surviving portions—make even more difficult the larger task of illuminating the problematic sense of the Libro. Is the Libro a didactic book that uses humor to enhance its message? Or is whatever didactic intent we might perceive in the book undermined by its relentless exposure of religious and other hypocrisies, its apparent celebration of the delights of this world, and its ultimate failure, from the point of view of modern readers, to take a clear moral stand? Can we use genre or sources or parallels in other medieval European texts to aid us in interpreting the Libro? If so, to what genre does the Libro belong? How does Juan Ruiz use and abuse his sources? Are not the European parallels we find in increasing numbers for the Libro just as problematic as the Libro itself?

These problems have been dealt with in a body of studies that, though not equal in amount to the scholarly ink spilled over Chaucer or Dante, is nevertheless immense.⁵ And inconclusive. The Libro is a book that, even as it protests its own openness, seems, through its language and structure and through various accidents of history, almost demonically to close the reader out. The Archpriest’s failed love adventures seem to mock our own pursuit of meaning in the text. If the Archpriest is looking for love in all the wrong places, then perhaps we too must reorient our quest for understanding that object of our desire, as elusive for us as the dueñas of medieval Castile were for the Archpriest of Hita. My own suggestions for how we might reorient this search are worked out in this study.

The debate over the sense of the Libro has gone on largely untouched by the critical ferment felt in the past three decades in other literary disciplines as well as in medieval studies. This is due in part to the characteristic lack of dialogue between Peninsular studies and their Northern European counterparts. But it is due just as much to the unique interpretive problems posed by the Libro itself. Since Zahareas’s pioneering study in 1965, the interpretatio recepta of the Libro has been that the book is ambiguous, that the author deliberately intends to convey a double or, at times, multiple message (see the latest articulations of this approach in Gyb 60–73 and in Joset, Nuevas 67–86). If we can chart any change in attitudes toward the Libro in recent years, it is a trend toward more nuanced views of the Libro’s didacticism, informed by a deeper understanding of the many ways in which medieval didactic ideas differed from modern ones. Thus we are moving from Empsonian ambiguity to a greater awareness that medieval didactic literature functioned in a region of unlikeness in which few signs had a single constant value, where contradiction and contrast dominated (see Burke, New; Brownlee, Status; Gerli, Recta; Nepaulsingh, Rhetorical, Talavera’s and Towards; Rico, Clerecía and Sobre). It was a world in which the sublimity of God was best conveyed through the most grotesque imagery (M/S 165–96), in which to dwell on the negative was to exalt the positive (Dagenais, Further 44–46). In such a world, the concept of ambiguity loses considerable force. Critics are moving beyond the simple Puritan dualities of the modern age toward the more complex dualities of the Middle Ages.⁶

While these debates have continued among students of the Libro, great changes have been taking place in the larger realm of medieval European literary studies.⁷ To generalize very broadly, it seems that these revisions have come from two directions and two disciplines. Scholars of medieval French literature have worked out from the critical/theoretical excitement of Paris in the 1960s to reexamine medieval texts in the light of the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Kristeva, to name the most important. I am thinking of the work of Leupin, Dragonetti, Cerquiglini, Méla, Poirion, Bloch, and Hult. On the other hand, students of medieval English have approached similar problems from the direction of hands-on work with manuscripts, often in the course of editing a medieval text. In their work one reads a growing awareness that many of their basic assumptions are not supported by the evidence before them (Machan, Scribal is an excellent example) and a new openness to reexamining these assumptions. As Knight (46) puts it, manuscripts contain lots of odd things you don’t expect to find. There are, of course, significant exceptions to these generalizations: Huot’s influential studies of Old French lyrico-narrative texts have brought manuscript work alive for a number of scholars with theoretical backgrounds; and Patterson, working on medieval English, has attempted to place the activity of critical editing in a broader theoretical framework (see also McGann).

If anything has become the focus of our rapidly evolving views of medieval textuality, it is the manuscript itself. In many ways, the present study shares this focus. But it also grows out of a series of dissatisfactions with aspects of both the old and the new philology. These dissatisfactions arise, in turn, from my own struggles with Juan Ruiz’s difficult text. There are problems that neither the new nor the old philology has been willing to address.⁸

My dissatisfactions with New Philology arise when New Philology (and its congener, New Medievalism) begins to look like Old Theory—namely, the theory of the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Too often, the new recognition of la variante, of the richness and variety of the medieval manuscript matrix (Nichols, Introduction 8) of our texts, has celebrated them merely as the opening of a new territory for verbal play, a new object/subject of jouissance. The New Philology continually reveals its own origins in approaches to literature that many in the literary establishment, and especially in medievalist circles, have felt to be self-indulgent or self-serving, pointless, plagued by fundamental misunderstandings or misreadings, or just plain dull. For all its awareness, indeed praise, of the manuscript object and its culture, in the end this approach swerves away from the newly colonized manuscripts and their variants to return to more comfortable views of texte. In many ways, I think it is possible to see in New Medievalism the last gasp of the verbaliconolatry that has characterized so much of twentieth-century thinking about literature. Texts appear to take on a life of their own, to acquire human volition, human values.

On the other hand, traditional philology seems unwilling or unable to rise to the legitimate challenges to traditional ways of looking at texts raised by new approaches to medieval textuality. Too often the response has been shrill, or merely diversionary. The defense has rested on pronouncing the words trendy or fashionable, uttering Derrida in a hoarse whisper, and reaching for the nearest cruciform object. Although the practice of textual editing is clearly evolving, too much energy is still devoted to quibbling about the validity of conjectural emendation, editorial objectivity, Lachmannian versus Bédieriste approaches (and all the approaches in between and beyond), the layouts of text, variants, and plates, and so on. So far textual critics in general have not been willing to let go of the comfortable creative-author/literary-work paradigm long enough to examine the basic assumptions that go into the activity of producing a critical edition of a medieval text. Why should this activity be considered an obligatory precursor to talking about medieval literature? What is the intellectual value (and cultural significance) of taking a text that was written and read in a variety of forms in numerous medieval manuscripts and transforming it into a single printed book?

The present study had its origins a decade ago in the recognizably old philological activity of trying to understand the literary ideas of the Libro through their sources in Latin culture as it was transmitted to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Castile. Because of a dearth of knowledge in this area, I was led to manuscript sources in a search for glosses, accessus, and more extended commentaries that might illuminate Juan Ruiz’s literary background. I did not find much of what I was looking for, but, in the process of looking, I did find manuscripts. And I found that the medieval literature I had been studying till then—the medieval literature based on texts and an established canon of authors—was not the same medieval literature I encountered in the manuscripts. The medieval literature I found was far more fluid and dynamic. It had rough edges, not the clean, carefully pruned lines of critical editions; and these edges were filled with dialogue about the text—glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations. I began to see that it is at the edges of manuscripts and in the various activities by which medieval people transformed one manuscript into another—commentary, translation, adaptation, reworking, and the mechanical act of copying—that the most important part of medieval literature happens.

As I worked through these ideas and became familiar with work in other medieval literatures, I noted an increasing visibility of terms such as re-creation, re-writing, re-authoring, or écriture-lecture (writing-reading; see the Introduction below). These terms suggest that the author/work paradigm is under considerable pressure, that activities assumed until now to be the focus of critical inquiry—creation, writing—no longer serve for understanding medieval literature in its medieval context. And it has seemed to me that the attempt to shore up this paradigm simply by using the iterative prefix re- will not serve either. What we need is not modification, or nuancing of the old terminology, but new ways of looking.

These considerations have led me to propose a reorientation of the way we approach medieval literature, a shift from a view that privileges the author and/or his text (and carries with it both the implicit model of the printed book and all the baggage of the academic study of literary canons) to one that privileges the individual reader and the multitude of medieval literary activities, such as commentary and copying, that mirror reading. This point of view has the additional advantage of being based not on postmedieval models, but on the concrete documentary evidence of thousands of surviving medieval manuscripts. It is these individual, concrete manuscript codices which I would situate at the heart of the study of medieval letters.

The title of this book also includes the word ethics, however, and I should explain that one of my conclusions about the nature of medieval reading is that it was above all an ethical activity. Where we tend to see our texts as webs of language, medieval readers saw a world of human action for good or ill co-extensive with their own. Texts were acts of demonstrative rhetoric that reached out and grabbed the reader, involved him or her in praise and blame, in judgments about effective and ineffective human behavior. They engaged the reader, not so much in the unravelling of meaning as in a series of ethical meditations and of personal ethical choices. They required the reader to take a stand about what he or she read.

This aspect of medieval texts does an end run around most contemporary models of literature, grounded as they are on the idea that the purpose of texts is to signify, to say some thing, and that this thing is located (or worked out by the reading subject) in the words of the text. The ethical reading of the Middle Ages does not function this way. It often maintains only the most tenuous connection with the letter of the text. It treats as chaff the literary work of art that for us is the grain, as it repeatedly confronts basic questions about how one should behave with a view to greater happiness in this world and the next. It continually denies its readers the pose of scientific objectivity that academic literary studies in our century have sought so relentlessly to assume.

And so I argue for a reversal of the old paradigm, a reversal in which the reader, not the author, occupies the central position. Most of my arguments for this reversal are laid out in the Introduction that follows. I take advantage of the utilitarian atmosphere of the Preface to advance a simple and practical argument. Quite simply, there is far more direct evidence of medieval reading than there is of medieval authoring. Tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts exist, not as vehicles for readings to be discarded in the process of edition-making, chopped up into lists of variants and leaves of plates, but as living witnesses to the dynamic, chaotic, error-fraught world of medieval literary life that we have preferred to view till now through the smoked glass of critical editions. We should begin our attempts to understand the phenomenon of medieval literature by examining this vast body of concrete material, not by treating it as the waste product of the process of producing our chimerical authorial texts. Medievalism, as it has been practiced over the past two centuries, is the only discipline I can think of that takes as its first move the suppression of its evidence.

Manuscripts are not just physical support for texts, nor are they simply documents or artifacts for a cultural history of the Middle Ages. Rather they are the object of that discipline we call medievalism. Some might label this approach beyond Bédier or beneath Bédier, and I want to acknowledge at the outset that there are clear limitations to a view of medieval literary lifeways founded exclusively on physical manuscripts. Both Zumthor explicitly (Intertextualité 13) and Carruthers implicitly have suggested that we can no longer ignore oral and memorial culture in favor of written texts. I certainly agree, as the portion of my study that deals with ethical reading will show. I hasten to point out that manuscripts remain one of our few keys to the lost realms of medieval orality, memory (Carruthers, chap. 7), and ethics. But I also think that after 500 years of editing medieval manuscripts, we still have so much left to learn about how they functioned in their own world that we are far from being in danger of paying too much attention to them.

Along with what my book is, I should clarify what it is not. First of all, it is not an argument for ceasing production of critical editions. It is, rather, an argument for rethinking the exaggerated role they have been given in our representations of the Middle Ages and its literature. This book, then, is not a critique of any particular theory of edition or of endless musings about conjectural emendation or editorial subjectivity. Instead it is a demand for a reexamination of the fundamental assumptions that have caused medievalists to devote so much time and effort to producing critical editions or publishing literary criticism based on them.

It may be that these ideas constitute a theory, but if so, it is a theory still in its initial stages of elaboration. It is not a theory whose ontological validity I am trying to prove here. It is merely a different way of seeing. To the extent that it is a theory, I think it is a good one for the same reason that any theory is good: it embraces and explains more features of the object under study than do other theories, most notably the creative-author postulate.

I also want to make clear that the present study of the Libro de buen amor makes no claim to being a full implementation or maximum exemplum of the approaches I advance here. In many ways (in its very title, for example), this book is still caught up in the author/text paradigm it hopes to overthrow. It is not, I fear, an ideologically pure endeavor. By the same token, this book does not and cannot claim to suggest the full range of critical activity that may be possible using its reader/manuscript-centered model. To readers nurtured on the rich feed of authorial creation, much of the material we find ourselves dealing with—fragments of glosses that lose themselves in the gutter or are trimmed at a crucial word, snippets of text rather than works, jumbles of apparently unrelated texts—seems inconsequential, or perhaps just boring. But we have had 200 years in which to apply the author/work approach to medieval letters. Who could have projected what forms author-centered criticism was to take when Sánchez published his Poesías del Arcipreste de Hita in 1790? To attempt to enumerate all the possibilities of the reader/manuscript model here would be at best short-sighted. I can point to some studies, such as those by Huot, that already work along the lines I suggest here. As for the present book, I see it as groping out from that authored Libro de buen amor toward the Libros read in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. I hope at least to have staked out the territory in this specific case.⁹

Let me clarify some of the apparatus of the present study. Concerning the work’s title, I have opted for the short form "Libro." In the spirit of this study, I allow the reader to decide whether he or she wishes to expand this to Libro de buen amor, the title Juan Ruiz himself may have given to his book, or to Libro del arçipreste de Hita, a title popular in the Middle Ages as well as in recent years. I follow tradition in dating the Libro’s composition to the first half of the fourteenth century, perhaps in the years 1330–43. My reason for this choice (for it can be little more than that) is that the three most concrete documentary details—the dates in manuscripts S and T, and the copy of a document witnessed by Juan Ruiz—all point to this person and date. Nevertheless, as should be evident by now, the precise date of the Libro’s creation is not particularly important to my study. The Libro that concerns us dates from the 1370s to the 1560s. Indeed, it is the only Libro we have. As a largely arbitrary, but necessary, convention, I use the name Juan Ruiz to refer to the presumed human author of the Libro. The Archpriest or Arçipreste de Hita and the like will be used to refer to the fictional character whose love adventures are a frayed thread running through the Libro.

Anyone who seeks to argue via the medium of printing that manuscripts, not modern printed editions, constitute the only valid object for an inquiry into the literary life of the Middle Ages faces a very real problem: how do I cite my text? So much is lost in the translation of manuscript text to printed edition. But forcing readers to wade through the manuscript text, even if it were possible to reproduce it integrally here, would be for many readers a distraction, even an irritation, which I, as author of this printed book, would in principle like to avoid. In the end, the pressing need for granting a larger voice to the manuscript witnesses in the course of routine scholarly activities, such as citing texts, took precedence over other considerations. The solutions I have decided upon constitute a series of working compromises.

When I quote the Libro, I use the following format: S:26r;377a. "S" stands for the Salamanca manuscript, the number after the colon refers to manuscript folio and side, the number after the semicolon to the traditional numbering of stanzas, and the letters to lines in the stanza.¹⁰ In citing folio numbers, I use the following: for S, numbers at the lower right of the folio, probably written by Ducamin; for G, numbers in the upper right; for T, numbers in the lower right. I have based my transcriptions on microfilms and published facsimiles, consulting also the transcriptions by C/N and the electronic versions compiled by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies in Madison, Wisconsin. Such are the ironic realities I face in this study of manuscripts.

In those cases where the reading of a specific manuscript is not in question, I have opted for a rotation among the readings of surviving manuscripts based on rough percentages of surviving lines. In this way I hope to give greater presence to the entire manuscript tradition than is possible when scholars cite from a single critical edition. S, although certainly the most important manuscript from a textual-critical point of view, has come to dominate our view of the entire tradition of the Libro, even though manuscripts like G and T may have been more common in the Middle Ages (Faulhaber, "Celestina" 11).

Regarding the transcriptions of manuscript texts, I want to stress from the outset that they do not strive for diplomatic status. Their major function is to serve as a reminder that the material I cite is drawn from a medium radically different from the modern printed page on which we read it. In agreement with the themes of this book, the transcriptions represent the manuscript text as best I can capture it in two stages of existence. At the first level, the transcriptions seek to represent in the print medium certain features of the text on the manuscript page, stripped of modern accretions (capitalizations, punctuation, standard word division) and with portions of the medieval text preserved (most notably scribal errors, punctuation, and physical spacing). I have tried to reflect rudiments of scribal usus, so that readers may eventually be able to recognize the manuscript in question from the transcription. Thus, my transcription uses the tyronian sign, and, when appropriate, paragraphs (calderones) and marginal material. In certain instances, I use uppercase type to indicate manuscript letters whose size is visually striking but may have no literal or aural significance. Thus I routinely use J to represent the outsized jota of these manuscripts. Boldface type is used to represent rubrication. This transcription, then, is not intended to be a scientific representation of the physical manuscript page, but rather a designedly impressionistic one.

The most general transcription practices are the following: I do not distinguish long i and short i. I do distinguish u and v. As a necessary compromise with the limitations of the printing press, I have not attempted to distinguish the various forms of s, except when I use the capital S as a reflection of the often disruptive size this letter assumed, especially in ligature, in late-medieval manuscripts. I have retained s for the looped, "sygmatic s" representing the sound [dz] or [ts] when I can find no distinction between this form and the form for [s] on the folio in question (Millares and Asencio 1:194–95, 227–28). I have mimicked as accurately as I can without resorting to a ruler manuscript word joining and separation. The common practice among Spanish scribes of attaching short prepositions to their object and detaching prepositional prefixes from their verbs may create some initial confusion. But these are easily sorted out with a bit of practice: amal = a mal, en mendar = enmendar. Conjunctions, especially o, can also be found connected to the following word or to the virgula that precedes them. I use the tyronian sign ¬ (usually pronounced [e] in these texts). I also use & to represent the variant form that resembles a large lowercase e.

At a second level, I have sought to reflect in these transcriptions, however remotely, what might be termed the corrected read version of the text. This is the text as medieval readers might have pronounced it to themselves or read it to an audience once the corrector had passed through the text. Thus I expand abbreviations, not silently, but vocally. In these manuscripts, as in the vast majority of medieval manuscripts I have seen, abbreviations are so standardized that their use is as conventional as that of any other medieval alphabetical character.¹¹ For similar reasons, I have transcribed manuscript punctuation (almost always the virgula suspensiva: /), but I have not attempted to distinguish those virgulae which may have been written by readers rather than by scribes.

Again, in order to give maximum voice to the realities of manuscript culture, difficult places or scribal slips in cited texts are clarified in the translations that follow the text rather than in the text itself. I use* in the translations to mark simple confusions in spelling or number of nouns and verbs (often due to the omission of an abbreviation stroke) that I have emended in the translations without further note. More complex variations are explained in brackets in the translation. I have steered clear of the manuscript text itself as much as possible, except to indicate poetic or other line divisions with a | in running quotes. Thus, / represents medieval punctuation that actually appears in the manuscript; | is a mark I introduce into the text.

Most other medieval texts cited in the book are quoted from editions unless otherwise indicated. In reproducing these passages I have changed or eliminated punctuation as I felt necessary without noting it. Any significant features of an individual manuscript transcription will be indicated in a note. I have provided English translations for all passages in premodern languages. These translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. I have also translated all modern critical commentary into English; references are to the original texts.

Some readers will no doubt find my transcription practices distracting. I hope my explanation makes clear that they are intended to be just that. If I have reached any conclusion at all, it is that since some manuscript features will have to be left out in any case, it is perhaps best to tailor the transcription to the specific purposes for which the transcription is being made. To make a virtue of necessity, I might claim that the failings of the system I have worked out dramatize the essential antagonism of the printing press to manuscript culture, that the press must inevitably mask or distort its predecessor. The day is not far off, however, when, through the increasing electronic sophistication of presses, it will be a much simpler proposition routinely to use at least stylized manuscript typefaces in scholarly studies. Optical scanning and increasing graphical power in desktop computers hold the promise that manuscript passages might be quoted in facsimile form.

I am grateful to the following libraries for granting me permission to cite from manuscripts in their collection: Osma, Catedral de Burgo de Osma; El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial; Évora, Biblioteca Pública y Arquivo Distral; Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional; Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia; Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale; Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina; Soria, Biblioteca Pública y Provincial.

I wish to thank the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support of this research. I also wish to thank the Newberry Library, and especially Paul Gehl, for allowing me to work in residence with their rich collections. Charles Faulhaber, Eric Naylor, Brian Dutton, and Spurgeon Baldwin have provided vital help throughout this project from its inception. Joseph Snow, Steve Kirby, and Michael Gerli read an early draft of the opening chapters and made numerous invaluable comments. Alan Deyermond’s published comments on this same draft (Salamanca 4, Edad91 180) also helped me to refocus some of my arguments. John Nitti generously supplied me with electronic copies of the Hispanic Seminary’s transcriptions of S, G, and T; Ivy A. Corfis has also helped me in consulting the Seminary’s rich holdings. Participants in the online discussion group on medieval texts, MEDTEXTL, directed by James W. Marchand, have helped me with many aspects of the book, from its broadest conception to details of translations. William Paden, Sylvia Huot, and Jim Burke read the first full version of the text and offered many comments that have helped me to improve the final version in a variety of ways. Mark Williams reviewed the Latin translations and made a number of helpful suggestions. The errors that remain are my own, and my thanks to those who have helped me by no means signifies that they endorse all the ideas found here. Final thanks must go to Inman Fox, chair of my department, for his support; to interlibrary-loan librarians Marjorie Carpenter and Kathryn Deiss, without whose help this book could not have been written; and to Bob Brown, my editor at Princeton, for his patience. My largest debts and gratitudes are acknowledged in the dedication of the book.

THE ETHICS OF READING IN

MANUSCRIPT CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

THE LARGER GLOSS

GASPAR MELCHOR DE JOVELLANOS, a leading figure of the Spanish Enlightenment, sounds the opening salvos of the critical debate over the moral sense of the Libro de buen amor in his Censura to the first modern edition (1790) of the text. Jovellanos argues that, contrary to the wishes of the text’s editor, Tomás Antonio Sánchez, who would prefer to suppress certain scurrilous and blasphemous passages, the entire text should be published (San xxix–xxxii).¹ Jovellanos’s reasons include the sensible observation that if one began suppressing all the stanzas that violate those most rigid principles of modesty, one would end up suppressing all or nearly all the passages that deal with love (surely an unfortunate fate for a book about love). Making another point, Jovellanos argues against fears that this book may fall into the hands of youths, women, uneducated or incautious readers. The book will represent no danger to these groups

because the obscurity, simplicity, and carelessness of its style and its jokes, and the very way in which it paints and describes objects, no longer suits either our taste or the ideas of our time, so that we can be confident that there will be no one among the already-mentioned groups of persons who has the simple endurance to read this whole book, who will not, in fact, have the book fall from his hands before he reads eight or ten stanzas. (San xxxi)

It remains unclear exactly what force would cause the Libro to fall so readily from the hands of unfit readers. Jovellanos takes full advantage of the Castilian dative of interest here: se le cayga de la mano. It seems most likely, however, that Jovellanos expects the book to put its (young, female, dull-witted, or incautious) readers straightaway to sleep.

Although one occasionally hears the theory voiced by students, the idea that the Libro is a safe and effective soporific is not generally found today in the spectrum of critical positions taken by scholars. Jovellanos’s censura of the first printed edition of the Libro offers, however, a useful and appropriately burlesque point of departure for the present study, which seeks to understand more fully that interaction of reader and manuscript text which I will here call ethical.

We may pause to enjoy the fine irony that the censura in fact argues against censoring the book at all (and that the book was published in censored form anyway). But I cite Jovellanos because I believe he provides a useful model for the goals and limitations of the present study. Jovellanos suggests that the Libro possesses a special power, that it is somehow capable of censoring itself, of sensing the sort of reader in whose hands it lies and of reacting in a way that gives him or her a reading (in this case, it is actually to deny a reading) appropriate to his or her sex, age, or moral or intellectual status.

The idea of an especially powerful and intimate relationship between the Libro and its readers is fostered already by its author. Juan Ruiz offers his book to ome omger de buen entendimiento (S:2r;prol.: the man or woman* of good understanding), as well as to those of poco entendimiento (S:2r;prol.: little understanding).² Those who wish to sin aqui fallaran algunas maneras para ello (S:2r;prol.: will find some ways to do it here). He promises that everyone will find what he or she is looking for in the Libro, then, whether it be salvation or earthly love. The book has the buena propiadad (T:36v;1627a: good property) of making the reader suddenly wish to go to Mass, provided, that is, that his or her spouse is so ill-favored that other pastimes are undesirable.

What I want to draw from Jovellanos’s scenario is the fact that there is a persuasive rhetoric that informs the act of reading the Libro. Somewhere outside the raging debates concerning the moral sense of the Libro sits an individual human reader who is addressed by the Libro and who becomes, in a sense, one of the circumstantiae—who, what, when, where, why—of a dynamic rhetoric. This reader interacts with the text based on his or her own predispositions and goals, whether or not those coincide with any goals the author may have for his text. The rhetorical content of the exchange is an occasional (that is, of a particular occasion) playing off of the res of the text and the particular circumstantiae of the reader.³ I choose Jovellanos’s scene to figure this rhetoric inversely, as an unrhetoric of sorts: his readers interact by not interacting, are persuaded to cease being persuaded, by a postprandial predisposition to somnolence and a curious combination of the perceived deficiencies of the text itself—obscurity, carelessness, archaic style—and their own inherent inadequacies to it. The ways in which such interactions occurred in the case of medieval readers and their Libro is an