University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for its Department of Romance Studies

Chapter Title: QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? “JUAN RUIZ” AS “OVID”

Book Title: Reading, Performing, and Imagining the Libro del Arcipreste
Book Author(s): E. MICHAEL GERLI
Published by: University of North Carolina Press; University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill for its Department of Romance Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469637891_gerli.9

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of North Carolina Press and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for its
Department of Romance Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Reading, Performing, and Imagining the Libro del Arcipreste

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CHAPTER 5

QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? “JUAN RUIZ”

AS “OVID”

“In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas cor-

pora” Ovid, Met. 1.1-2
“Ingenio perii . . . miser ipse meo” Ovid, Tristia 2.2
Señor Dios . . . saca a mí, coitado, d’esta mala pre-
sión . . . tira de mí tu saña. “Juan Ruiz”

S INCE the publication of Rudolph Schevill’s Ovid and the Re-

nascence in Spain (1913) and Félix Lecoy’s Recherches sur le Li-
bro de buen amor (1938), the extent of an Ovidian and pseudo-
Ovidian presence in the Libro del Arcipreste has been regularly
asserted and taken as established fact. Schevill describes the Libro
as “the high-water mark of borrowings from Ovid in Spanish litera-
ture of the Middle Ages” (29), while Lecoy, who devoted a thirty-
eight page chapter to “L’Inspiration Ovidienne” of the work where
he explored both the similarities and differences between Ovid and
Juan Ruiz, categorically notes that “Juan Ruiz a connu Ovide et l’a
utilisé” (306). That said, however, in 1999 Richard Burkard sought
to correct Schevill’s and Lecoy’s conclusions by examining closely
the extent to which residues of actual Ovidian texts were present in
the Libro, only to conclude that “he [Juan Ruiz] probably knew
nothing of any authentic work of the Roman poet,” and that “his
knowledge was limited to certain imitative compositions which cir-
culated in the West during the Middle Ages” (11). Lida de Malkiel
(1959), Francisco Rico (1967), Alistair Minnis (2001), and Bien-
venido Morros (2004) appear to cleave to a middle ground, accept-

159

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
160 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

ing the presence of allusions and references to the Ars amatoria,

whether at the first or second degree of separation, while at the
same time asserting the influence of a broad spectrum of pseudo-
Ovidian elegiac Latin comedies and texts.
Whether these critics are correct remains a matter of philologi-
cal dispute reserved for source hunters and scholars interested in
questions of frank textual influence; for the positivist practitioners
of a form of Quellenkritik that by the standards of contemporary
Medieval Studies has largely fallen by the wayside. In contradistinc-
tion to them, John Dagenais eschewed a strictly philological,
source-bound approach to the question of Ovid and the Libro, and
saw the book more as “a compendium of fourteenth century liter-
ary ideas” (47), underscoring the coincidence of its interest in en-
tertainment, moral instruction, and models of poetic composition
that largely coincide with a textual tradition that looked to Ovid
not so much as a source, but as both a wide-ranging moral and lit-
erary exemplar and inspiration, as a model worthy of imitation.
Amplifying Dagenais’ insight, Margaret Parker took the ques-
tion of Ovidian resonances in the Libro to a deeper level, arguing
that Naso’s presence in the work was more a question of style and
not one of specific sources that may have been used to compose it.
Parker argued for a far-reaching Ovidian presence in the Libro’s
“self-conscious exploration of the themes of seduction and media-
tion” in which the text itself is viewed as part of the process, and
that responds to a literature that reflects “an emergent new order of
things” in which “the common denominator is Ovid” (353). That is
to say, Ovid is generally present in the Libro’s discourse, and not
necessarily in the form of direct textual borrowings or calques on
the Roman poet’s texts or the pseudo-Ovidian tradition. Rather
than rely on discreet borrowings, the Libro thus generally identifies
itself, along with the other works and authors Parker touches upon
in her study (Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Jean de Meun), with an am-
ply conceived Ovidian literary model, an Ovidian tradition that
seeks to equate itself closely with, but does not necessarily rest di-
rectly upon, the texts of the Latin poet.
One thing remains sure regarding Ovid and the Libro del Ar-
cipreste. In its pages the work seeks to invoke Ovid’s name and asso-
ciate itself repeatedly, both directly and indirectly, with a figure of
the Roman poet that is more legendary than historical or philologi-

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 161

cally correct. In cuaderna 429 alone don Amor refers to Ovid twice,
mentioning him first by his name and then by his cognomen, Naso,
demonstrating a more than passing awareness of the legendary poet:

Si leyeres Ovidio, el que fue mi criado,

En él fallarás fablas que le ove yo mostrado,
Muchas buenas maneras para enamorado:
Pánfilo e Nasón yo lo ove castigado.

At the same time, this citation portrays Ovid not just as a person
but as an auctor, as a storehouse of stories and literary anecdotes
dealing with love, thus joining the subjects of love advice and the
lover to the notion of a wellspring of erotic narratives and exempla.
The significance of this invocation of Ovid in the text, in con-
junction with Dagenais’ and Parker’s fuller understanding of how
Ovid interacts with the Libro, lead me here to explore a perhaps
even more nuanced symbolic relationship between the Castilian
work and the Roman poet, one that likely existed and shaped the
way the book and its putative author, “Juan Ruiz,” came to be re-
garded and used in the late Middle Ages. My concern is thus not
with specific textual influence or borrowings, or with the existence
or non-existence of an historical Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, or
indeed with the historical person Publius Ovidius Naso, an actual
poet and a member of the Roman Centumviral Court, but rather
with both poets’ iconic, legendary profiles and the manner in
which they may have been linked in the medieval imagination by
means of a series of correspondences that probably identified one
with the other. Ralph Hexter’s study, Ovid and Medieval Schooling:
Studies in Medieval School Commentaries on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria,
Epistulae ex Ponto, and Epistulae Heroidum (1986) serves as the
underlying point of departure for my exploration of this iconic re-
lationship.
What follows is thus about “the figure” cast by both the poets
and their works, and not about how “Juan Ruiz” might use Ovidian
texts in the Libro del Arcipreste. The major interest here is about
the way the fictions regarding the two poets and their work were
perceived and intertextually linked during the Libro’s circulation
and reception in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. By in-
tertextuality I mean the way in which one text may connect to, in-
teract with, and shape another. Intertextuality constitutes a dynamic

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
162 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

best defined in terms of what Gérard Genette refers to as transtexu-

alité, or “tout ce qui le met [une texte] en relation, manifeste ou se-
crete, avec d’autres textes” (7). We know that, as Foucault states,
“the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the
first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration
and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references
to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a
network . . . The book is not simply the object that one holds in
one’s hands . . . Its unity is variable and relative” (23).
Ovid was arguably the most imitated and influential Roman au-
thor of the Middle Ages. His works and the apocryphal works at-
tributed to him served in the schools to instruct students at various
levels and with a variety of educational needs, but especially with
the mastery of Latin and of grammar and rhetoric, to the point that
one can confidently say that the curriculum in letters was almost
adapted to Ovid rather than vice-versa. To be sure, Ovid was so
powerful a presence in medieval education that historians and
philologists since Ludwig Traube (1905) have spoken of an aetas
ovidiana in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. For most
students in the late Middle Ages Ovid offered the means for learn-
ing basic Latin declensions and sentence structure; for others, the
more advanced, he–“Ovid” the poet and Ovid the person–was pre-
sented as a once living, historical master whose texts displayed con-
summate examples of subtle rhetoric and argumentation in verse,
forms which were to be imitated and considered as paragons of elo-
quence. For all to varying degrees, Ovid was also looked to as an
authoritative source of classical mythology, as the basis for historical
information about the details of Roman social life, the pantheon of
the gods, the pagan world in general, and, much like the literary
“Juan Ruiz,” as a source of stories regarding Ovid’s own problemat-
ic personal history, and his human fallibility as a lover and a poet.
An especially important episode in Ovid’s life which abides as one
of the mysteries of literary history defined a crucial dimension of his
literary reception in the Middle Ages. It relates to his banishment
by the Emperor Augustus from Rome to Tomis, a distant spot on
the Black Sea at the fringe of the Empire in current day Romania,
where the poet remained until his death in 17/18 AD. In the Tristia
Ovid attributes his exile to duo crimina, carmen et error (Tristia, II,
207) [two crimes, a poem and a transgression]. However, his discre-
tion and reticence in discussing the details of the case and the caus-

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 202u, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 163

es of his expulsion from Rome have resulted in nothing but copious

speculation among scholars throughout the ages.
While in exile Ovid wrote what are thought to be his last com-
positions. These are the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, two
verse collections illustrating his sense of isolation, wretchedness and
ostracism, and Ibis, an elegiac execration of an adversary who had
remained behind who is thought to be connected to the poet’s ex-
pulsion from Rome. The Tristia is perhaps the most original and
well-known composition of the three. It expresses Ovid’s desolation
at his banishment. In it he pleads for his return to Rome. The Epis-
tulae ex Ponto constitute a series of letters to named friends in
Rome entreating them to exercise their influence and advocate his
delivery from his terrible punishment. It is evident from these
works that Ovid’s exile was for him a form of cultural and linguistic
isolation–a solitary confinement–as he claims even to have lost his
grasp of Latin in Tomis. In addition to the well-known lover of me-
dieval fame–as the narrator-protagonist and author of the Ars ama-
toria–, in his last works written from exile Ovid’s poetic voice takes
on the poignant cast of the suffering expatriate who seeks to return
home, who yearns for deliverance and reconciliation from unjust
persecution. His exile poetry is understandably particularly emotive
and personal and where the figure of the marginalized, castigated
writer that he fashions for himself at the end of his life takes on a
tinge of pathos as well as the firm shape that will serve as the
springboard for the later legend of “Ovid,” the disgraced poet. The
image of banishment and the poet in conflict with authority enact
an emotional drama in these works that becomes an enormously ap-
pealing figure for later medieval writers to imitate. The specter of
Ovid’s exile persona, in addition to the more well-known one of
him as the libertine lover, thus casts a long shadow over the Middle
Ages and came to influence the reception of his work as well as the
composition of the work of a vast number of later writers.
Although the medieval commentaries regarding Ovid’s exile are
generally categorical about its occurrence, they offer no reliable ex-
planations for it. Indeed, the lack of historical specificity regarding
the motives for Ovid’s banishment led during the Middle Ages to
wild hearsay and invention, producing statements that are, like the
vidas and razos of the troubadours or the Libro del Arcipreste, trans-
parent fictions drawn from the works of the poet himself. Thus, al-
though Ovid constituted the epitome of Latin verse throughout the

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
164 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

Middle Ages, and he stood as the model for the rhetorical employ-
ment of the elegiac couplet and mythological subject matter in the
service of love, his person became a matter of legend and fabrica-
tion as he was invented and reinvented, portrayed as a passionate,
profligate poet subject to controversy and always in conflict with
authority.1 As Hexter notes, “the biographical speculation that cir-
culated in many [medieval] manuscripts link Ovid’s exile to the po-
et’s imagined involvement in a world of sexual mischief” (2002,
439). Indeed, by the beginning of the ninth century, during the Car-
olingian Renaissance and the revival of Latin at Charlemagne’s
court, he was so highly regarded as the source of amorous counsel,
mythological stories, proper Latin grammar, and the ideal of poetry
that scholars from all over Western Europe traveled to Aachen
where he was taught, and where scholars like Modoin, bishop of
Autun (815, d. 840/843), so imitated the Roman poet that in sign-
ing his own works Modoin used the name Naso, adopting Ovid’s
cognomen, as he celebrated Latin letters and Charlemagne as the
new Augustus (see Hexter, 1986, 93-94, 214). To be sure, Modoin
so identified with Ovid that his own poetic self-representation cast
him as the victim of authority and as an unwarranted exile, one of
the two indelible features of Ovid’s work and personality that came
to abide in the medieval imagination.
Modoin was not alone. Many other poets imitated Ovid’s works
and impersonated the Roman poet during the Middle Ages. In the
generation after Modoin Theodulf of Orleans, banished from the
court by Pippin, fashioned himself after the outcast Ovid; and
Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Tours, who faced the hostility of
his own clergy and that of two kings–William II of England and
Louis VI of France–, mounted an Ovidian self-defense in verse in
which he portrayed himself as the maligned, ostracized victim of
the abuses of power; an inner exile victimized by both church and
monarchy. Hildebert’s successor Baudri, abbot of Bourgeuil, whose
poetic persona rests on a reputation for prodigality and Ovidian
nequitiae, also masqueraded as the mistreated poet and complained
of iniustam duri Cesaris iram [the unjust wrath of implacable Caesar].

1
Despite Ovid’s claim to the sincerity of his suffering and estrangement in exile
(cf Trist. 3.1.5-10, 5 .1.5-6; Pont. 3.9.49-50) modern scholarship has become in-
creasingly alert to the possibility of exaggeration and that Ovid might be striking a
pseudo-autobiographical pose to enhance the pathos of his poetic fiction. See Fit-
ton Brown (1985) and Classen (1999).

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 165

Indeed, by the beginning of the Twelfth-century Renaissance Ovid

had become a poet who could influence writers as much through his
legendary biography as by means of his literature. The weight of
Ovid as pariah extended even into the vernacular beginning with the
works of the itinerant Troubadours, while later the pose of the un-
justly suffering, persecuted poet would be brilliantly adapted by oth-
er vernacular authors like Chaucer, who in the Legend of Good
Women (1380) depicts himself as personally under threat resulting
from some earlier verse, writing desperately like the disgraced Ovid
of the Tristia to recuperate the good graces of a higher-up, while
covertly recording his continued disappointment and resistance to
the powers that oppressed him. Dante and Petrarch would as well
strike poses of the exiled or castigated poet-lover at different stages
of their literary careers, thus ensuring human interest in their stories
while paying notable homage to the master poet of Antiquity. By the
middle of the fourteenth century, the period corresponding to the
apogee of the fictional biographies and autobiographies of Ovid (see
Ghisalberti 36), the art of fictionally re-embodying him as victim,
exile and lover could scarcely be re-enacted in the vernacular more
eloquently and on more levels than by these remarkable poets.
Despite all the work that has been carried out on the Ovidian
and pseudo-Ovidian, sources of the Libro del Arcipreste (notably by
those scholars cited above), and on the person-poet-persona “Juan
Ruiz” (particularly by Spitzer, 1955, rpt. 1968; Kelly, 1984; Sáez and
Trenchs, 1973; Martín Martín and Sena Medina, 1994; C. Sáez,
1999; Márquez Villanueva 2002; Gonzálvez, 2002; De Looze, 1997;
Juan Lovera and Toro Ceballos, 1995), the allusive relationship be-
tween the legendary life of the Augustan poet Ovid and the puta-
tive biography of “Juan Ruiz” has yet to be adequately examined.
Research has been limited to probing minutely the connections be-
tween Ovid’s works, pseudo-works, and the Libro, textual Quel-
lenkritik, as noted, in the best nineteenth-century tradition. Yet no
one has pursued what is the most obvious and compelling corre-
spondence between the Ovidian tradition and the Libro del Ar-
cipreste: namely, the legendary status of both authors, “Juan Ruiz’s”
Ovidian pose, the mythologies surrounding the composition of
their poetry, and the uses of their works as propaedeutic texts in the
late Middle Ages. The Ars amatoria, Epistulae ex Ponto, and Tristia
all correspond to literary types and genres that were immensely
popular in the Middle Ages: the didactic poem, but especially the

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
166 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

“art of love”, and the epistles, verse as well as prose, all generated
great interest as literary models. All of them were composed in the
persona of their legendary poet-author, created to cajole, or to pur-
sue one or more lovers, and some were written, as we have seen,
while Ovid was in exile, detained under the orders of the emperor.
Read against this Ovidian horizon, the Libro del Arcipreste would
doubtless have resonated deeply with medieval readers and seemed
immediately familiar to many medieval writers and, like Ovid’s
works for Latin, come to be seen, and then accepted, as helping to
define what poetry was and could become in the vernacular. To
speak of an Ovidian influence on the Libro del Arcipreste is thus
much more than a matter of sources and textual imitations: it is as
much a question of the idea of the poet that can be found in the
book as it is one of an idea of the poem. And the idea of “Juan
Ruiz,” the errant poet-clerk-narrator-author of the Libro del Ar-
cipreste, as yet another fourteenth-century literary re-enactment of
the legendary Ovid is a tantalizingly powerful one.
Ovid’s fabled career as poet, lover and exile offered medieval
writers a weighty pattern to imitate. When the image of the reject-
ed classical poet is placed in dialog with the figure of the incarcer-
ated, disgraced Archpriest, it seems as if the later writer re-presents
a medieval simulacrum of the earlier one, but now in a vernacular
context. In what follows, I will explore this and some other notable
similarities between Ovid, the Libro and “Juan Ruiz’s” presentation
and perception, especially as regards the mythologies of authorship
that inform both their traditions, and suggest that they go beyond
coincidence.
Up until 1984 we could not confirm that like Ovid there actually
had been an historical Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita. Thanks to
Francisco J. Hernández, who discovered a reference to a Juan Ruiz
of Hita in a legal document from 1330 referring to church business
in the Archdiocese of Toledo, the existence of someone with the ap-
propriate name and ecclesiastical title around the date of composi-
tion of the Libro could finally be confirmed. However, other than
the name and title there is nothing that links him to the Libro or to
poetry, as there is with the historical Ovid. “Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de
Hita” is the identity assigned by the narrator-author of the Libro to
himself (19). However, even if the Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita,
mentioned in the document and in the Libro are one in the same
person, it would be more than risky to deduce any actual facts about

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 167

the life and circumstances of the historical Juan Ruiz in the docu-
ment from the content of the book.2 To be sure, if the historical Juan
Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, were the actual author of the Libro del Ar-
cipreste, and the person whose name the narrator of the Libro
adopts, we should not assume that there is any biographical accura-
cy in the latter’s self-portrayal as a character in the book, especially
as an imprisoned, penitent cleric who had fallen into disfavor and
been victimized by mescladores, or conspirators and sowers of dis-
cord. Quite the opposite, especially since the narrator of the Libro is
too much of an ungainly, comical caricature of a cleric and evinces
too many fictional signs and symptoms to be taken for an historical
person (see Haywood 2008). Yet “Juan Ruiz” the character in the Li-
bro and “Ovidius Naso,” the legendary author-character of the Mid-
dle Ages, do have a surprising number of features in common–I
stress the Naso to heighten the caricature of “Ovid”‘s depiction in
medieval books about him, in which he appears as the ideal lover
but with one outstanding physical imperfection, his sizeable pro-
boscis. Although no authentic likenesses of Ovid are known to exist,
the verbal portraits of the Middle Ages steadily lengthened the liter-
ary promise of Ovid’s cognomen, Naso, and turned it into the poet’s
most salient physical trait (a big nose was, of course, supposed to in-
dicate a well-endowed membrum virile, according to folklore and
the medieval science of physiognomy, see Dunn 1970, and Bakhtin,
1984, 316). To be sure, the first striking physical resemblance be-
tween “Ovid” and “Juan Ruiz” is in fact the purported large size of
their noses. When Trotaconventos draws what some traditionally
take to be the self-portrait of the Archpriest author of the Libro
(1485-1489) she calls attention to his elongated nose as a peculiarity
that, like in the figure of the medieval “Ovid,” skewed the counte-
nance of an otherwise good-looking lover: “la su nariz es luenga:/es-
to lo descompón,” (1486d) she avers, before going on to complete
the verbal likeness of Doña Endrina’s more than run-of-the-mill pre-
tender. Clearly, in Trotaconvento’s portrait of “Juan Ruiz” Ovidius
Naso met his fourteenth-century Castilian counterpart, while at the
same time bringing to mind all the extended noses that protrude

2
Indeed, the name “Juan Ruiz” is so common in fourteenth-century Castile
that it has been suggested that it is used in the Libro to evoke a sort of fictional
Everyman author-protagonist. For the Libro as pseudo epigraph and the large num-
ber of ecclesiastics with the name “Juan Ruiz” that fit the likely chronology of the
book’s composition, see Kelly (1984, 1987, 1988).

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
168 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

from the margins of manuscripts, including those in some of the

very manuscripts of the Libro del Arcipreste itself.
The nasal reference in the archpriest’s portrait would have con-
stituted a play both on “Ovid”’s nose and his cognomen not unlike
the one finds of Ovid in Dante’s Commedia, which points both to a
literal interpretation and to the larger context of “Ovid”’s leg-
endary iconography (Inferno 25, 45, see Sowell). In his exhaustive
study of the medieval biographies of Ovid, Ghisalberti underscores
the extraordinary intensity of the prolonged debate stemming from
the significance of “Ovid”’s extra-large nose, the exact meaning of
the poet’s cognomen Naso, and the wide-ranging possibilities of
their symbolic connotations (1946: 27-29), which gravitated regu-
larly around the themes of wisdom and sexual potency. The evoca-
tion of the large nose reflects the generative possibilities of the fa-
bled image of Ovid, and the way the Middle Ages sought to portray
him. In both Juan Ruiz and the popular medieval portraits of Ovid,
each poet’s conspicuous nose was meant to suggest that, in their
roles of magistri amoris, both of them were somehow connected,
equally wise and erotically potent, experienced sexual athletes who
could both teach the art of love as well as perform it. The portraits
of “Juan Ruiz” and “Naso” are thus evocative one of the other.
They conjure images of two intellectual voluptuaries whose physical
traits are intended to speak not just to their mastery of texts and
their libidinal competencies, but to their close literary kinship.3
But beyond the physical resemblance, many of the traditions as-
sociated with the Libro’s author also call to mind other Ovidian fic-
tions that circulated in the Middle Ages, especially the popular por-
trayal of him as an errant, ill-treated poet, arguably one of the
broadest, most long- lasting, and most profound Ovidian influences
on the Libro. First and foremost, there is the striking similarity be-
tween the two legendary poets’ notorious lives, one centered on ex-
ile, the other on imprisonment, both told in the first person from a
supposed autobiographical perspective tinged with penance and
pathos. Ovid’s stated intention for writing much of his work was
taken at face value, at least in medieval commentaries on the Ars

3
Although no portrait of the historical Rabelais is known to exist, he too seems
to have shared an iconic kinship with “Juan Ruiz” and “Ovid.” Like both these lit-
erary forbears, Rabelais was customarily portrayed as a wayward scholar with an
oversize nose, see Lefranc (1926).

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 169

amatoria, the Tristia, and the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which we find

his plaintive petitions allegedly written at Tomis, where he suffered
in exile as a consequence of “duo crimina, carmen et error” (Tristia,
II, 207). In the Tristia (II, 207-252) he suggests that he was charged
with promoting sexual promiscuity by means of his poetry and to
have seen something he should not have seen, a trespass whose ex-
act details remain a mystery.4 Fallen from Augustus’ grace, as Juan
Ruiz is said to have fallen from the favor of Cardinal Gil de Albor-
noz, at least according to the explicit at the end of MS S (“Este es el
libro del Arcipreste de Hita, el qual conpuso seyendo preso por
mandado del cardenal don Gil arçobispo de Toledo”), much of
Ovid’s writing is consequently interpreted as a penitential gesture
aimed at regaining the emperor’s favor, and like Juan Ruiz’s pre-
sumably to receive a pardon for his noncompliant ways, to be liber-
ated from confinement and ostracism:

Tú, Señor e Dios mío que el omne formeste

Enforma e ayuda a mí, el tu arçipreste
Que pueda fazer libro de buen amor aqueste,
Que los cuerpos alegre e a las almas preste (13)

Falling into the biographical fallacy of the persecuted poet and

grounded solely on internal textual evidence from the Libro, in re-
cent times even a scholar as adept as Georges Martin has argued
that “Juan Ruiz”’s imprisonment was, in fact, an historical one
stemming not from some literary or ecclesiastical indiscretion but
from a political one, namely a suspected opposition to Alfonso XI’s
questionable relationship with Leonor de Guzmán and the compli-
cations it posed for Castilian dynastic succession. In a more than
hypothetically precarious study centered on the representation of
monarchs in the Libro’s fables and exempla, Martin concludes that
“más bien que en la conducta amorosa del arcipreste de Hita, de la
que no sabemos nada, quizá tengamos que ver en este importantí-
simo conflicto con incidencias dinásticas virtualmente devastado-

4
Although the historical evidence is negligible, in general critics agree that car-
men is a reference to the Ars amatoria, Ovid’s most provocatively erotic work,
which allegedly greatly displeased Augustus and provoked the poet’s banishment
from Rome. The exact nature of the error remains obscure, although not free from
fanciful speculation. For a detailed overview of the medieval perspectives on Ovid’s
exile, see Ghisalberti (1946).

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
170 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

ras –o, si se quiere, en el “loco amor” del rey–y en el partido que

(supongo y sugiero) fue el escogido por Juan Ruiz la causa del en-
carcelamiento del autor del Libro de Buen Amor” (2007, 25).5 The
obscure causes of the Archpriest-poet “Juan Ruiz”’s hypothetical
“imprisonment” are thus reported as fact and remain as fancifully
productive today as they were in the Middle Ages. They are as fer-
tile as those which still give rise to the endless conjecture surround-
ing the motives for Ovid’s banishment from Rome.
Medieval texts which mention Ovid’s exile–and they are le-
gion–offer no credible rationale for his banishment since, like the
vitas of the troubadours and the information regarding the author
of the Libro, their assertions are generally derived from information
extracted from his works and pseudo-works. As a result, J. J. Hart-
mann early in the twentieth century proposed that the historical
Ovid was never really exiled from Rome, and that the story of his
banishment was a clever literary pose, a bit of imaginative legend-
making meant to masquerade as truth, rouse curiosity and add hu-
man interest to his work (see Thibault, 1964; and Fitton Brown,
1985). This is arguably the same situation with “Juan Ruiz,” the
narrator of the Libro, based on an implicit, albeit probably deliber-
ate, association with Ovid in the medieval imagination.
Aside from the physical attributes of both poets and the ru-
mored circumstances of their ill-treatment at the hands of the pow-
erful, the works of Ovid and Juan Ruiz share a common learned
categorization: as in the case of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, the Libro in
the Middle Ages was assigned a moralizing, though in no way ex-
plicitly Christian, purpose (See Dagenais, 1994). The works of Ovid
and Juan Ruiz could thus both be interpreted as those of an auctor
who could advocate either chaste or carnal love, once again bring-
ing them into association. And like Ovid, the Libro was not merely
a school text but also one that, like Ovid’s own works, embraced a
series of intertextual literary commentaries in the very fabric of its
composition. Through caricature and parody, the Libro illustrated,
explained, described, and critically evaluated certain vernacular po-
etic texts and techniques rather than just prescribe them. As demon-

5
The height of fantasies regarding “Juan Ruiz”’s imprisonment and persecu-
tion, however, was reached in a recent article (Calvo, 2011) which provides the ac-
tual street address in contemporary Toledo where the Libro is said to have been
written and where “Juan Ruiz” had been incarcerated: Callejón del Vicario, 3.

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 171

strated in Walsh’s study of the Libro’s lost context and lost parody
(1979-80), the book functioned as a running verse commentary on
specific earlier works and textual traditions, especially of the very
tradition from which it sprang–the mester de clerecía–that would
have been transparent to, and easily grasped by, contemporary cler-
ical readers. The legendary imprisonment of “Juan Ruiz” could
thus be taken as an echo, or an imaginative reduplication and imita-
tion in the vernacular, of Ovid’s relegamento to Tomis in the context
of a vernacular avatar of the Roman poet’s Ars Amatoria.
“Juan Ruiz” and Ovid share similar literary reputations: each is
viewed as amator and praeceptor, lover and master, both poetic ma-
nipulations of a point of view, fictions in a stage set whose percep-
tion of love is stereotyped as a means to expatiate on the subject,
teach about it, and, most importantly, write about it. The amator
persona in both engages in a game of desire and sexual pursuit
played out in poetry without much thought for little else than cou-
pling. The praeceptor in each simultaneously teaches the rules of the
game of love, how to write about them, and at the same time warns
against its consequences, presenting himself as the main admonito-
ry example of them. This dichotomy of self–of amator and praecep-
tor–is central to the conception and portrayal of both “Ovid” and
“Juan Ruiz” and constitutes the reason why medieval readers were
probably initially drawn to them, be it through the medium of Latin
or Castilian. Both were perceived as teachers of love and poetry in
the medieval mind.
Ovid in the Middle Ages was like Juan Ruiz an auctor that is
seen as perpetually falling afoul of power and authority. As auctores
both are more than authors in the modern sense of the word: each
thought to be “a man of gret auctorite”, to use Chaucer’s phrase to
describe Ovid: learned in moral philosophy and natural science as
well as poetry, and as unchallenged sources on love and its vagaries.
Carmen continues to be coupled with error throughout both their
medieval receptions; however culturally central they become, they
each were portrayed as never being fully exonerated from some pri-
or trespass. Ovid from the reason for his intriguing Augustan exile,
and Juan Ruiz from his equally unexplained punishment at the
hands of Cardinal Gil de Albornoz. Both, it is tantalizingly suggest-
ed have committed some sort of momentous wrongdoing of a possi-
bly sexual, social, political or doctrinal nature. As poets, they are
each wrapped in an aura of profligacy and bad ways, they are seen

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
172 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

as negligent, impious, licentious, and dissolute, yet very amusing. It

is in this persona of the libertine auctor in conflict with auctoritas,
just as much as (and indeed inseparable from) their expertise on
poetry and love, that both the literary “Juan Ruiz” and “Ovid”
came to be imagined and valued by poets and as poets in the Mid-
dle Ages. As Jeremy Dimmick notes in regard to Ovid, it is in the
“powerfully ambivalent role of the auctor at odds with auctoritas,
just as much as (and indeed inseparable from) his expertise on
mythology and sexuality, that [Ovid] is most precious to the poets”
(2002, 264). The same, I would argue, applied to the alluring, trans-
gressive narrator of the Libro del Arcipreste.
Furthermore, from within their respective fictions, it is evident
that the claim of exile in the one and incarceration in the other led
to profound changes in their poetic personas and in their poetry. In
Ovid, the change is marked by the introduction of a personified
book that is both addressed and speaks with its own voice in the
Tristia (I, 1-12, III, 1-56). Its appearance testifies to the transforma-
tion that has taken place in the poet: unpolished, ungroomed, and
unenvied, Ovid’s anthropomorphized book wears the attire of an
exile to reflect both its contents and the diminished position of its
author. In the next lines, as the book takes on more and more the
personality of its author, the point that it becomes difficult to dis-
tinguish the author from the poem, the tear stains on the book’s
leaves not only enhance the mournful tone of the Tristia, but invoke
the physical presence of the author in the work. Halfway through
the poem, Ovid in his grief expresses his longing for self-transfor-
mation when he exclaims, “O gods, grant that I might now be my
book!” (di facerent, possem nunc meus esse liber!, I, 1, 58), doubt-
less a clever allusion to the Metamorphoses, and a figure which
might well account for the protean persona who narrates the Libro.
To be sure, in the proem of Tristia 3, Ovid’s book acquires a voice
all its own. Personified, it speaks to its readers as it takes them on a
tour of the city of Rome:

“Missus in hanc venio timide liber exulis urbem :

da placidam fesso, lector amice, manum ;
neve reformida, ne sim tibi forte pudori :
nullus in hac charta versus amare docet.
5 haec domini fortuna mei est, ut debeat illam

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 173

infelix nullis dissimulare iocis.

id quoque, quod viridi quondam male lusit in aevo,
heu nimium sero damnat et odit opus !
inspice quid portem : nihil hie nisi triste videbis,
10 carmine temporibus conveniente suis.
clauda quod alter no subsidunt carmina versu,
vel pedis hoc ratio, vel via longa facit ;
quod neque sum cedro flavus l nee pumice levis,
erubui domino cultior esse meo ;
15 littera suffusas quod habet maculosa lituras,
laesit opus lacrimis ipse poeta suum.
siqua videbuntur casu non dicta Latine,
in qua scribebat, barbara terra fuit.
dicite, lectores, si non grave, qua sit eundum,
20 quasque petam sedes hospes in urbe liber” (1924, 100)
[“Though sent to this city I come in fear, an exile’s book. Stretch
forth a kindly hand to me in my weariness, friendly reader, and
fear not that I may perchance bring shame upon you; not a line on
this paper teaches love. Such is my master’s fate that the wretched
man ought not to conceal it with any jests. Even that work which
once was his ill-starred amusement in the green of youth, too late,
alas! he condemns and hates. Examine what I bring: you will see
nothing here except sadness, and the verse befits its own state. If
the lame couplets halt in alternate verses, ‘tis due to the metre’s
nature or to the length of the journey; if I am not golden with oil
of cedar nor smoothed with the pumice, ‘tis because I blushed to
be better dressed than my master; if the letters are spotted and
blurred with erasures, ‘tis because the poet with tears has injured
his own work. If any expressions perchance shall seem not Latin,
the land wherein he wrote was a barbarian land. Tell me, readers,
if it is not a trouble, whither I ought to go, what abode I, a book
from foreign lands, should seek in the city.”]

Through this metafictional gesture, Ovid’s Tristia speaks to the

reader in that first person about the quality and nature of its own
poetic itinerary and invention. Indeed, the sustained references to
the reigning trope of the Tristia,–the prosopopoeia of the book–re-
inforces Ovid’s suggestion in lines I, 21-22 that reading will reward
the one who seeks more than just the surface meaning of the text.
Addressing the book, the poet says:

atque ita tu tacitus (quaerenti plura legendum)

ne, quae non opus est, forte loquare, cave (1924, 3)

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
174 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

[he who asks more must read you and take care that you chance
not to say what you should not].

The Tristia in this way resembles the Libro del Arcipreste in that
it goes significantly beyond the simple embodiment of the book to
warn the reader of the perils of reading it. Like the Libro del Ar-
cipreste, the book speaks directly addressing the reader, marking
the point where the entire poem becomes a monologue spoken by
the book, filled with admonitions like the notable parenthesis we
have just seen, “quaerenti plura legendum” (I, 21) [reading must be
done by the one who seeks more], an exhortation to go beyond the
words on the page, to read carefully, not unlike the Libro’s own
first-person admonition to exercise care and deliberation in its own
perusal: “De todos los instrumentos yo, libro, só pariente:/bien o
mal, qual puntares, tal diré ciertamente/ qual tú dezir quisieres,/ ý
faz punto ý tente” (70a-d). After all, what more can a book reveal
by itself other than the graphic signs that compose it? Even as per-
sonified books acting as surrogates for their authors, books can on-
ly voice the words that lie on the surface of their pages. It is the
reader who must look deeper to understand them. In both the Li-
bro and Ovid’s Tristia, personified books stress the centrality of the
careful reader, the one who seeks more, in order to truly under-
stand them. Both underscore the need to ponder the text and seek
its greater meaning (on Ovid’s preoccupation with reading and re-
ception, see Gibson, 1999). In both Juan Ruiz and Ovid, and as al-
ways with any poetry, but especially Ovid’s and the Libro’s, the ad-
monition to read wisely and reflect in order to uncover more
beneath the surface, even when–or perhaps especially when–the
surface of poetry appears to include apologies from the authors for
their errors and the quality of their work. The sudden change of
voice and slippage in point of view at cuaderna 70, where the Libro
del Arcipreste acquires an intonation all its own, asserting its pres-
ence and speaking powerfully about the need for understanding
and the choices of interpretation, doubtless marks one of the note-
worthy intertextual traces of Ovid’s talking book as portrayed in
the Tristia. The animate, speaking text, a veritable rarity in the Mid-
dle Ages (see Molho 1986), was surely invoked in the Libro to call
noticeable attention to the hermeneutical difficulties implicit in its
use, not unlike the ones associated with the reading and interpreta-
tion of Ovidian texts, which might be taken to be either sacred or

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 175

profane. Self-conscious metafictional warnings by talking books

concerning the difficulties implicit in their own interpretation,
framed by the motif of Carmen et error, shape the composition and
reception of both Ovid and “Juan Ruiz”.
Behind a thin tissue of a substantial network of intertextual cor-
respondences and a number of allusions, the Libro begins to emerge
as a clear Ovidian palimpsest. Given the points of similarity exam-
ined, it might even be argued that it was purposefully fashioned to
look like a vernacular Ovid, attributed to a wayward author, and
meant to be compared to Ovid in terms that were more than those
of a simple resource for learning about reading, composition and
love. Indeed, the similarities may have arisen from a conscious effort
to promote the use of the Libro and have it become a standard
propaedeutic text of the vernacular in the studium generale of Tole-
do in the 1320s-1330s, where many didactic texts written in Casti-
lian like the Castigos de Sancho IV, the Lucidario, and the Libro del
caballero Zifar circulated freely, and where the use of the vernacular
was more evident by the day. The Libro, in the end, like Ovid is
much more than a simple praeceptor grammaticae, and even more
properly speaking a praeceptor verborum, or praeceptor amoris. It
may have been imagined, like the Latin works of “Ovid,” to have
been all these things and to have emerged as well in eget doctoris
calamo, or from the hand of a legendary master, who was more myth
than historical reality in the enterprise of teaching and propagating
the Castilian language during the late Middle Ages. Both Juan Ruiz
and Ovid were regarded as magistri amoris and magistri carminum.
One, it would certainly appear, as the vernacular avatar of the other.
As such, “Juan Ruiz” and “Ovid” were probably joined in this fash-
ion in the late medieval Iberian literary imagination, one belonging
to and representing the realm of Latin literacy and the other the
emerging sphere of vernacular Castilian letters.
It is my contention, then, that in both the medieval fictional
Ovid and the protagonist-narrator Juan Ruiz we are meant to iden-
tify the speakers of the poems with the writer, making it seem that
when we think of both of them that they are somehow complicit
one with the other. The personal fallacy that surrounds both the Li-
bro and what circulated as Ovid’s works in the late Middle Ages
was intended to make the lives and individual characteristics of
both poets seem historical, when in fact it was the central compo-
nent of a fictional profile of both. In this way, based on their knowl-

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
176 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

edge of “Ovid” learned medieval readers would have been led to

see “Juan Ruiz” as his vernacular personification, imaginatively
linking the both of them and ultimately making Ovid a foundation-
al element in the construction of “Juan Ruiz” the poet, and vice ver-
sa. Any sharp distinction between the two would be erased and
they would be perceived as roughly two sides of the same literary
coin. In this way, they both appear to belong to the same cultural
tradition, but use different languages to express and expound upon
it. Any educated Castilian reader of Juan Ruiz in the late Middle
Ages would have been compelled to conjure the presence of Ovid
and, mutatis mutandis, Juan Ruiz.
But there is more than simple physical and biographical likeness
between the fabled “Ovid” and the legendary “Juan Ruiz.” There
appears to be shared purpose in the circulation and use of their
works. Numerous scholars beginning with the Marqués de Pidal in
the middle of the nineteenth century have confirmed that the Libro
del Arcipreste was very well known, read, cited, copied, and imitat-
ed by authors dating back to at least the last quarter of the four-
teenth century. In his “La difusión y recepción del Libro de buen
amor” (2004), Alan Deyermond neatly catalogued and listed all the
known references to the Libro up through Tomás Antonio Sánchez
at the end of the eighteenth century (to the year 1790). After re-
viewing the evidence for the Libro’s widespread dissemination,
Deyermond proposed that there might even actually have been a
lost incunabulum of it based on Sánchez’s note that Gabriel de San-
cha had informed him he had seen an early printed copy at a Lon-
don book shop in 1786 (137). The Libro was thus very well-known,
circulated widely in the late Middle Ages and, according to some of
the attestations listed by Deyermond, could even be cited from
memory on into early modernity.
In conjunction with Deyermond’s findings, Charles Faulhaber
has shown how the Libro materialized in an Aragonese student an-
thology compiled between 1462-1508 in which one of two citations
from it (cuaderna 553) is glossed as a vernacular paragon of distinc-
tionibus pausis, or the way scansion may be used to determine
meaning or punctuation. The extract reads “Nota bene in romantio
optimum exemplum de distinctionibus pausis Archipresbiteri
hitensis,” a commentary Dagenais calls “the most minute bit of me-
dieval criticism on the Libro we have.” (1994: 183). What can be
deduced from this example, as Dagenais also notes, “is a rare (per-

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 177

haps unique) view of a late-medieval reader attempting to subject

vernacular verse to the same rules of punctuation to which a bibli-
cal text and Latin prose have been subjected” (1994,184). Dage-
nais’ sharp observations, however, stop short of the even larger sig-
nificance of the gloss. If carefully considered, the way the Libro is
used here is much more than as an example of a simple heuristic
strategy and should also elicit speculation as to how and why one
might make such an observation regarding a vernacular work. The
brief gloss in question appears pointedly in a manuscript gathering
devoted principally to Latin works on poetry and rhetoric (Geof-
frey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova, an anonymous ars preadicandi, and
Laurentius de Aquilegia’s Ars Dictaminis Abreviata, among them),
indicating its compiler’s mastery of Latin and predominant interest
in these subjects. Although Faulhaber believes that these citations
from the Libro look to it as a “respository of sententia” and not as a
source of “literary technique” or authority (1974, 33), one needs to
ask if they do not actually reflect a deeper knowledge and under-
standing of one of the more important lessons that the Libro im-
parts, namely, its insistence on the role of punctuation and scansion
in the determination of meaning, particularly its very own meaning?
In short, could the exercise undertaken by the Aragonese scholar
who owned the miscellany, in addition to citing the two cuadernas
from the Libro, be recalling the latter within the context of the
counsel offered in stanzas 69-70, where the book voices the impor-
tance of scansion and punctuation in extracting any form of under-
standing from it? (“las coplas con los puntos load o denostat . . . bi-
en o mal, qual puntares, tal diré ciertamente, qual tú dezir quisieres,
ý faz punto, ý tente;/si me puntar sopieres, sienpre me avrás en
mente.” 69d, 70b-d). Given the rhetorical and theoretical cast of
the manuscript in which these citations from the Libro appear, it
seems to make sense to approach them as attempts by someone
schooled in Latin rhetoric and poetics to apply lessons from the lat-
ter to the reading and the interpretation of the Libro, and vice ver-
sa, following the Libro’s own counsel to read and punctuate judi-
ciously, thus placing the Libro’s authority at the same level as the
Latin works but in a vernacular context.
There is evidence to conclude that the Libro was probably used
in the classroom to heighten an appreciation of the need for careful
composition and thoughtful interpretation in all forms of textual
practice–in science, philosophy, theology, law, and poetics–and to

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
178 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

encourage readers to seek patterns of signification beneath the sym-

bolic configurations of the text or the surfaces of apparent rational
argumentation. The well-known reference to the Libro followed by a
gloss of three lines from it in another manuscript belonging to the
same textual community as MS S (Salamanca MS 2497, olim 273, at
folios 140v-141r, the final folios from a Portuguese chronicle of the
Alfonsine tradition that belonged originally to the Colegio Mayor de
Santiago el Zebedeo, or de Cuenca, at the University), certainly
seems to confirm this since its stated invitation to “begin” the Libro
with an examination of an exemplum that will be told (“agora
començemos el libro del arcipreste: toma aqueste dexenpro que vos
dixere,” fol 140v) appears to be more the third person invitation or
instruction of a magister to “open” it and commence the Libro’s
study and commentary rather than a jongleur’s repertoire announc-
ing an imminent performance (see Menéndez Pidal 1957, 270-71,
302-07, 462-67) or notes from a medieval preacher’s prompt-book
(Deyermond, 1974). The same may be said for the reference to the
humorous exclamation “Agora quiero dar un salto/ cual nunca dio
cavalo rrucio nin castano” found in the same MS (fol. 141r), which
no doubt constitutes an amusing metaphorical phrase used to mark
an abrupt change of subject matter similar to the earlier use of “ago-
ra vos quiero contar,” or “agora començemos el libro del ar-
cipreste,” employed to designate a changeover to new, radically dif-
ferent material, rather than to announce some somersault, acrobatic
tumble, sermon or address. These references, directed at an all-male
audience (the text begins with the invocation, “Don Sancho por Yh-
esús” fol. 140v, followed by forms of direct address like “sabed fidal-
gos,” fols. 141r), probably indicate a far less exotic provenance than
an imagined Middle Ages teeming with preachers, minstrels, and
saltimbanques. They likely come from some wretched student’s or
professor’s notes which served to prompt, introduce, or indicate, the
next exercise in a day’s lesson or lecture. At the same time, although
several of the lines cited from the Libro refer to specific strophes in
it, much of the other material subsequently attributed to the Libro in
the citations of MS 2497does not, yet it seeks to give the impression
that it does. Rather than comprise a simple misattribution, this al-
most certainly indicates that the Libro was so esteemed in this
learned setting that certain types of maxims and proverbs could be
authoritatively credited to it in much in the same way that themati-
cally similar material could be casually attributed to Cato, Cicero, or

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 179

Ovid in other medieval works, regardless of their true authorship or

origin. We know also from other, later evidence that throughout the
second half of the fourteenth and well into fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries the Libro, much like Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, did indeed serve
as a school text, and doubtless even as a reference book or foil for
constructing arguments regarding love. Pedro Cátedra (1989, 41-56,
70-2) has demonstrated how it acts as a touchstone in the debates on
love and nature at the University of Salamanca, and how authors as
eminent as Alfonso de Madrigal, El Tostado, could freely exploit it in
their writings like the Breviloquio de amor y amiçiçia.
Although examples like these reinforce the evidence for an al-
most Ovidian diffusion and knowledge of the Libro in Castilian aca-
demic circles over time, beginning in the second half of the four-
teenth century the broad-ranging circulation of the work is quite
simply stunning (no other vernacular work from the Castilian Mid-
dle Ages is quoted or alluded to as often as it). Yet one sovereign
question remains regarding all the evidence: Why is this so, and how
can this be? Just how and why did so many authors, and not just ec-
clesiastics but lay people, poets, scholars, and intellectuals, come to
know it? Why are there so many references to it and why have so
many MSS and fragments of it survived? Why is it quoted and re-
membered so often? How, in short, did the Libro come to circulate
and be known so widely across such a broad spectrum of readers
and writers of Castilian for at least two and a half centuries after its
composition? The answer, I think, is plain: In reviewing a manu-
script from before 1491 that belonged to a Bachelor of Theology,
one Fray Lupus, which contains a collection of Latin works remark-
ably similar to the sources of the Libro (BNM 4245), Dagenais re-
marks upon “the striking coincidence of materials found in this
scriptum and the collective scripta of the Libro,” which to Dagenais
suggests “another way in which fifteenth-century readers may have
approached the Libro: as a student miscellany, as textbook, perhaps
even as trot” (1994, 207). To be sure, I believe that given the evi-
dence for its far-reaching influence, the Libro was probably not just
looked to by some as a possible textbook but actually used by many
mainly in this fashion. All the evidence suggests that, in order to be
so well-known, it was widely disseminated and taught in the schools,
used to instruct in reading, writing, composition and comprehen-
sion, and that by the beginning of the fifteenth century it had quite
simply become a vernacular classic, a vademecum for mastering the

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
180 READING, PERFORMING, AND IMAGINING

rhetorical arts in Castilian. In short, the book had developed into a

vernacular counterpart to Ovid. As opposed to a propaedeutic of
Latin, the Libro had turned into a key source for teaching reading
and composition in the newly emergent common language of
Castile. Taken as a whole, the evidence suggests that the Libro was
employed as sort of a vernacular Ovid in the teaching of reading,
writing, ethics, and poetics in Castilian, and that it had quite simply
achieved the status of a model for the learned use of the vernacular,
a competitor to Ovid in the language of the everyday. By medieval
standards the number of manuscripts, citations, and glosses of the
Libro multiplied vertiginously in the centuries immediately after its
composition (see Jurado, 1993; Dagenais, 1994; and Vàrvaro, 2004).
Since shortly before the middle of the thirteenth century during the
reign of Fernando III, when Castilian was first regularly used in the
royal chancery, and by the time the Libro was composed in the
1320s, the vernacular had become increasingly used for everything,
especially in and around Toledo where it continued to bridge cultur-
al and linguistic gaps (There is a direct citation of the initial prayer
from it in an aljamiado miscellany that belonged to an alfaquí from
Ocaña dated ca. 1500. See Martínez Ruiz 1976). It is thus easy to
imagine how the Libro could be so easily remembered by so many if
it had been used as a primer in the study of Castilian, and to pro-
mote and perfect the vernacular as a written language via a new
“classical” text in the language people spoke daily on the streets of
Castile. Hence, I think, the reason for its astonishing diffusion and
the broad knowledge people came to possess of it.
In sum, broadly speaking the Libro del Arcipreste was not only
allied with Ovid and his works in the medieval imagination but
doubtless also functioned much like an Ovidian school text with
specific didactic ends and uses, filled with humor, presented as the
autobiography of a fallen poet-priest, nuestro Ovidio, as it were, yet
one destined to be employed in the classroom not only for lessons
in vernacular grammar, rhetoric and the possibilities of poetry, but
for teaching responsible reading, commentary, and, for those who
sought it, the art of love. It almost certainly served as an academic
example of entertaining yet instructive material (“que los cuerpos
alegre e a las almas preste,” 13d), which was nevertheless deliber-
ately filled with treacherous arguments and sophistical reasoning in-
tended to challenge students and sharpen their intellectual discrimi-
nation and interpretive acumen (See Chapter 4). Held in the Library

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 QUID EST? QUIS EST ENIM? 181

of the Colegio de San Bartolomé at Salamanca since at least the

1440s, MS S certainly reflects this proximity to the classroom, in
which the reception of texts was never a passive process. Rather, it
was an environment that demanded dialog, analysis and interpreta-
tion, and where pupils learned grammar, reading, and composition
not only from treatises like those of Donatus and Priscian, but also,
from reading and actively explicating all manner of texts on a daily
basis. It was a world where, much like today, lectio was considered
useless without enarratio, and where the exposition of a given pas-
sage begins with the littera, or the grammatical explanation, and
then moves on to the sensus, or the signification of the words in
their context, and concludes with the sententia, or the larger under-
standing of the thought behind the words. The path that takes us to
this conclusion involves, of course, the rise of the vernacular in
Castile beginning with Fernando II and Alfonso X in the thirteenth
century, continuing on through the efforts of Sancho IV, molinismo
in the fourteenth, and then later the Trastámaran advocacy of its
use as a literary and cultural expression of the state by the new dy-
nasty in its efforts to gain legitimacy (see Gimeno Casalduero,
1972). All of which culminated with the stronger daily presence,
wider acceptability, greater utility, and authority of Castilian at
Toledo and Salamanca beginning in the fifteenth century. From the
initial reference to the path of knowledge in the accessus, and its al-
lusion to the lective ductus at the core of the medieval hermeneuti-
cal tradition as the interpretive key to the work, down to the repre-
sentation of the many geographical journeys, itineraries and the
paths that criss-cross the narrative, it is possible to discern how the
Libro constituted and presented itself as an amusing way to learn
close reading from brilliant examples of vernacular composition
and find in them, beyond their surface appearance, deeper meaning
and deeper understanding.
The evidence suggests that the Libro took on a broadly Ovidian
cast as it subtly set itself against the example of Ovid’s poetics, just
as it fashioned itself as a vademecum of love and poetry. In this way,
it locates itself in the Ovidian tradition, simultaneously associating,
distancing, and comparing itself as a vernacular paragon of its clas-
sical predecessor.

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 This page intentionally left blank

This content downloaded from

139.80.135.89 on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 07:26:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms