Learned narrative poetry

The mester de clerecía (“craft of the clergy”) was a new poetic mode, indebted to France and the
monasteries and presupposing literate readers. It adapted the French alexandrine in the “fourfold
way”—i.e., 14-syllable lines used in four-line monorhyme stanzas—and treated religious, didactic, or
pseudohistorical matter. During the 13th century, Gonzalo de Berceo, Spain’s earliest poet known by
name, wrote rhymed vernacular chronicles of saints’ lives, the miracles of the Virgin, and other
devotional themes with ingenuous candour, accumulating picturesque and affectionately observed
popular detail.

The 14th century

Following the period of translation and compilation came brilliant original creations, represented in
prose by Alfonso’s nephew Juan Manuel and in poetry by Juan Ruiz (also called Archpriest of Hita). Juan
Manuel’s eclectic Libro de los enxiemplos del conde Lucanor et de Patronio (Eng. trans. The Book of
Count Lucanor and Patronio)—which consists of 51 moral tales variously didactic, amusing, and practical
—drew partly on Arabic, Oriental, and popular Spanish sources. It was Spain’s first collection of prose
fiction rendered in the vernacular. Juan Manuel’s seven surviving books treat such subjects as hunting,
chivalry, heraldry, genealogy, education, and Christianity. The frame story that links Count Lucanor’s tales
anticipates novelistic structure: the young count repeatedly seeks advice from his tutor Patronio, who
responds with exemplary tales.

Chivalric romances of the Arthurian or Breton cycle, which had been circulating in translation, partially
inspired Spain’s first romance of chivalry and first novel, El caballero Cifar (c. 1305; “The Knight Cifar”),
based on St. Eustace, the Roman general miraculously converted to Christianity. Amadís de Gaula—the
oldest known version of which, dating from 1508, was written in Spanish by Garci Rodríguez (or Ordóñez)
de Montalvo, although it may have begun circulation in the early 14th century—is another chivalric
romance related to Arthurian sources. It enthralled the popular imagination through the 16th century
with its sentimental idealism, lyrical atmosphere, and supernatural adventure.

Juan Ruiz, an intensely alert, individual early poet, composed the Libro de buen amor (1330, expanded
1343; “Book of Good Love”), which combined disparate elements—Ovid, Aesop, the Roman Catholic
liturgy, and the 12th-century Latin Pamphilus de amore, an anonymous elegiac comedy. The result
mingled eroticism with devotion and invited readers to interpret often-equivocal teachings. Ruiz’s
Trotaconventos became Spanish literature’s first great fictional character. Ruiz handled alexandrine
metre with new vigour and plasticity, interspersing religious, pastoral-farcical, amorous, and satirical
lyrics of great metrical variety.
More-exotic elements appeared in the Proverbios morales (c. 1355) of Santob de Carrión de los Condes
and in an Aragonese version of the biblical story of Joseph, which was based on the Qurʾān and written
in Arabic characters. Drawing on the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the Hebrew poet and philosopher
Ibn Gabirol, Santob’s Proverbios introduced Hebrew poetry’s grave sententiousness and aphoristic
concision.

Pedro López de Ayala dominated poetry and prose during the later 1300s with his Rimado de palacio
(“Poem of Palace Life”), the last major relic of the “fourfold-way” verse form, and with family chronicles
of 14th-century Castilian monarchs Peter, Henry II, John I, and Henry III, which stimulated production of
personal, contemporary history. An early humanist, Ayala translated and imitated Livy, Boccaccio,
Boethius, St. Gregory, and St. Isidore.

A subgenre vigorously cultivated was the misogynistic treatise warning against women’s wiles. Rooted in
works that condemned Eve for the Fall of Man, they include such works as Disciplina clericalis (The
Scholar’s Guide), written in the late 11th or early 12th century by Pedro Alfonso (Petrus Alfonsi); El
Corbacho, also known as El Arcipreste de Talavera (c. 1438; Eng. trans. Little Sermons on Sin), by Alfonso
Martínez de Toledo; and Repetición de amores (c. 1497; “Repetitious Loves”; Eng. trans. An Anti-feminist
Treatise of Fifteenth Century Spain) by Luis Ramírez de Lucena. Numerous examples from medieval
Spanish literature and folklore echoed the same themes (e.g., Juan Manuel’s Count Lucanor and Juan
Ruiz’s Book of Good Love).