Two Spanish Masterpieces

A Celebration of the Life and Work of

María Rosa Lida de Malkiel

Edited by
Pablo Ancos and Ivy A. Corfis

New York, 2013

 Editorial Board

Juan Casas Rigall Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

Juan-Carlos Conde Magdalen College, University of Oxford
Ivy A. Corfis University of Wisconsin–Madison
Charles B. Faulhaber University of California–Berkeley
Francisco Gago Jover College of The Holy Cross
David Mackenzie University College Cork
Michael Solomon University of Pennsylvania

Text copyright © 2013 by

Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies

Spanish Series 154

ISBN 978-1-56954-150-0

 
 Performance and Didacticism: Doña Garoça in Gayoso

Denise K. Filios
University of Iowa

Performance theory has proved to be a highly productive approach

to the Libro de buen amor, reinvigorating debates over such contentious
issues as the Libro’s ideology and structure, its didacticism, the
influence of Arabic and Jewish culture, and the cultural work performed
by this fascinating and elusive text.1 Vincent Barletta has suggested that
performance studies of the Libro could be pushed yet further by
considering the ritual nature of the text itself, that is, how some episodes
may themselves be ritual texts to be performed on certain moments in
the liturgical and natural calendar in order to enable human agency to
act on the flow of time. He focuses his study on the Battle of Carnal and
Quaresma. In this article I propose to examine the erotic episode that
immediately follows the resolution of the Battle, the episode of Doña
Garoça (stanzas 1315–507), as represented in the Gayoso manuscript.
As I have argued elsewhere, of the three principal surviving manuscripts
of the Libro, Toledo (ca. 1368), Gayoso (1389), and Salamanca (1415),
I consider Gayoso the version that most reflects performance practices
due to its layout, which I discuss further below. In addition, Gayoso’s
omission of stanzas 1318–31, found only in Salamanca, profoundly
affects the narrative in highly suggestive ways. While Salamanca tends
to be the preferred base text for modern editions due to its more
complete state,2 I argue that Gayoso is worthy of study since its version
of the Libro highlights the multiple layers of performance in the Garoça
episode, including how the manuscript acts on the reader, demanding a
response to the text it presents.
The Garoça episode as represented in Gayoso offers a particularly
rich text to explore these issues due to its ritual nature, its inclusion of
received didactic materials re-contextualized by two female characters,
and the challenges represented by the narrator-protagonist’s
contradictory comments about Garoça, or rather, nuns in general. I

1
Studies of performance in the Libro include classic studies by Menéndez Pidal, Lida
de Malkiel, Castro, Kinkade, Walsh, and Willis, in his bilingual edition of the Libro;
late-20th-century studies by Brownlee, Brown, Burke, Gerli, Vasvári, and Kirby; and
recent studies by Haywood, Hamilton, Lawrance, and Monroe, in addition to those
cited below.
2
See Blecua’s edition of the Libro (xlix–xcvii, cix–cx) for a thorough discussion of the
three manuscripts and a table of correspondences among them. For a description of the
Gayoso manuscript, see Criado de Val and Naylor’s edition (xv–xx).
142

argue that the Doña Garoça episode as transmitted in Gayoso dramatizes

performance and its effects on characters, both fictive and metafictive,
including the audience/reader. It does so by repeatedly staging
interpellation and various characters’ responses to being interpellated.
These responses model strategies the reader may employ in turn, in
response to the manuscript’s interpellation. Following Catherine
Brown’s argument that the contradictory text of the Libro performs the
teaching process (140–44), I suggest that the text interpellates the reader
as student, placing him/her in a vulnerable position in which no one
answer could possibly be adequate, feeding the endless production of
scholarly studies of this intriguing and desire-producing text.
The sequence of interpellation in the Garoça episode makes it
particularly productive for the analysis of interpellation’s force within
the written text of the Libro and its performance.3 The Açipreste,
Trotaconventos, and Garoça are each sequentially interpellated and
interpellate one another in turn. By “interpellation,” I mean the act of
being called to or upon by an agent, be it animate or inanimate, in a way
that demands recognition and imposes a certain subject position upon
the interpellatee: “If we are interpellated then we are being made or
remade as particular subject-positions, made to constitute our objects in
particular ways. In particular, we are being made to constitute our
objects in ways that are obvious, recognized, and made even before we
come to see them and think about them” (Law 16, emphasis in original).
Like any speech act, interpellation can be misconstrued by naïve
readers, like the Açipreste, who sees himself interpellated by the
spectacles of conventional heterosexual masculinity enacted before him
in the marriage ceremonies that he observes at the opening of the
Garoça episode, stanza 1315. Interpellation may always exert a coercive
force on the interpellatee, imposing a limited subject position; but
interpellation also may be aspirational, offering possibilities that the
object had not previously considered nor been offered. The Açipreste
responds to interpellation by identifying with the previously unmarried
men he now sees happily accompanied by women; he calls upon
Trotaconventos to help him find an object of desire, and she negotiates
her charge, redirecting the Açipreste’s desire toward a nun.
Trotaconventos then visits Garoça and exerts her extensive rhetorical
skills on the nun, who responds by repeatedly rejecting her proposals
until, abruptly, she asks Trotaconventos for a description of the man,
and then consents to meet him. Garoça’s sudden change in stance points
toward the coercive force of interpellation, even as the ambiguous
3
My discussion of interpellation primarily builds on Butler.
 143

nature of her amorous relationship with the Açipreste suggests that she
may continue to perform virtuous chastity despite officially accepting
him as her lover.
The Garoça episode as represented in Gayoso includes features that
make that version particularly apt for the analysis of performance and
didacticism. Gayoso reflects oral performance practices in its mise en
page and content. As Paul Saenger has shown, word division, spacing,
punctuation, and standardized letter forms enable silent reading.4 The
layout of the Salamanca and Toledo manuscripts facilitates silent
reading by marking stanza divisions spatially and using a calderón to
indicate the first line of each stanza. By contrast, the Gayoso manuscript
impedes silent reading because it does not mark stanza divisions with
blank spaces on the page. In the cuaderna vía portions, Gayoso mostly
maintains verse division (a verse is written as a single line); however, in
the lyrics, up to four verses (as written in the Salamanca manuscript) are
placed in a single line. These features virtually force the user to read
aloud in order to decipher the text. I suggest that by acting in this way,
Gayoso interpellates its audience, exerting a coercive force and limiting
the possible responses to the written text. Gayoso further guides its
readers by including 23 capitals marking certain parts of the text, so a
reader familiar with the manuscript could easily locate particular
passages. More accurately, the Gayoso scribe(s) left spaces for 23
capitals, few of which were completed. The spaces in the manuscript
function to highlight some sections over others. Those materials, as
John Dagenais notes, are primarily exempla, a fact also noted in the
marginalia, as ensiemplo often is written beside the space where a
capital would have been inserted had the manuscript been completed as
apparently originally planned (Dagenais 160; Filios).
Gayoso includes more capitals in the Doña Garoça section of the
manuscript than in any other. In its current, fragmentary, and misbound
state, six capitals are found within five folios, on folios 74r, 74v, 75v,
76v, 77v, and 78v. An additional capital is found on folio 68r, which
forms part of the Garoça episode, although it is now bound out of
place.5 Probably an additional two folios are missing from this episode.
Given that the two dialogues between Garoça and Trotaconventos as
found in Salamanca include ten exempla, the Garoça episode as
4
See also Clemens and Graham 82–93, Busby, and Mundal for discussions of how
textual layout, punctuation, and letter forms affect reading practices.
5
Notably, folio 68r does not contain the word ensiemplo in the margin beside the
space for the capital. This folio contains the only exempla in the Garoça episode that is
not marked with the word ensiemplo, suggesting that the MS was misbound before the
marginalia were entered.
144

represented in Gayoso may have originally included ten capitals. By

contrast, in the Endrina episode, Gayoso contains only three capitals,
dispersed among 17 folios, from folios 26v to 43r. The only other
section of Gayoso that contains a comparable cluster of capitals is the
episode in the sierra, which contains four capitals on four folios. In
short, thanks to the cluster of capitals, the Doña Garoça episode stands
out more than any other in the Gayoso manuscript, marked as
containing materials that the producers wished to highlight.
The fact that these capitals mark exemplary tales raises the question
of genre. Like many Libro episodes, that of Doña Garoça overtly
combines genres, challenging the audience to apply appropriate
expectations to enable interpretation. In this episode, the primary genres
are clerical and juglaresque, i.e., the sermon and the entertaining story-
telling event. These two genres invoke very different audience
expectations for didacticism and truthfulness. Of course, sermons often
include exemplary tales that convey figural truth as a didactic strategy;
however, the explicit topic of the Garoça episode, the Açipreste’s search
for a lady-love, would hardly be an appropriate theme for a sermon.
Nonetheless, the several explicitly moralistic comments made by the
narrator, Garoça, and Trotaconventos, combined with the use of
exemplary tales in the debate between the two female characters,
enhance the homiletic quality of this episode.
Yet another complexity of the Garoça episode as represented in
Gayoso heightens the issue of genre. Following Barletta’s argument that
the Battle between Carnal and Quaresma constitutes a carnival ritual, I
would suggest that the Garoça episode similarly enacts a seasonal ritual.
The episode as found in Gayoso begins as follows:

Dia de Casimodo, iglesias e altares

vi llenas de alegrias, de bodas e de cantares:
todos avien grant fiesta, e fazen grandes cantares;
andan de boda en boda, clerigos e juglares.

Los que ante eran solos e son ya casados,

veia los de dueñas estar aconpañados;
puñe como oviese de tales gasajados,
que el omne que es solo tiene muchos cuidados.
(G fol. 72v, stanzas 1315–16; Ruiz, eds. Criado de
Val and Naylor 420–21)6

6
All textual citations from the Gayoso manuscript are based on the facsimile and
Criado de Val and Naylor’s edition, although at times my reading differs from theirs. I
regularize spelling and punctuation (except accents) in order to facilitate reading.
 145

Quasimodo Sunday, the first Sunday following Easter, is the day the
medieval Church began to perform marriage rituals again following
their suspension during the Lenten season (Burke 207). The use of the
present tense in “Los que ante eran solos e son ya casados,” (stanza
1316a, emphasis mine) unlike “eran casados” in Salamanca (Ruiz, ed.
Blecua 332; stanza 1316a), situates the narrated action in the present.
This use of the present tense could indicate that the Garoça episode is a
ritual performance to be enacted upon Quasimodo Sunday, as Barletta
(417–18) suggests is the case with the use of the present tense in the
Battle of Carnal and Quaresma. Certainly the Garoça episode reflects
the human experience of cyclical time, the end of the Lenten fast and the
arrival of the festive season marked by marriage and public celebrations
of human fertility. The resumption of wedding ceremonies illustrates the
Church’s function to both police and license lay sexuality, constructing
it as heterosexual, monogamous, socially useful, and normative,
prohibiting marriage during the Lenten season but then providing a
public stage upon which to enact marriage, starting on Quasimodo
Sunday.
On that day, the narrator-protagonist, a clerical juglar, goes from
church to church performing at weddings and gazing with envy at those
previously single men who now are married and accompanied by ladies.
He responds to this spectacle by identifying with these laymen and
decides that he too wants to marry. The ambiguity of the phrase “tales
gasajados” (verse 1316c), combined with his Everyman stance in verse
1316d, certainly allows that interpretation. The fact that the Açipreste’s
gaze focuses on the formerly single men more than on their female
companions, who are ostensibly his object of desire, underlines the
mimetic nature of his desire. By “mimetic,” I mean desire that imitates
or mirrors another person’s desire and which, as René Girard shows in
his discussion of triangular desire (1–52), reflects more desire for the
male rival than for the female who is putatively the object of desire. In
general, in the Libro, desire is mimetic, not so much in the choice of
object, who almost always is chosen by a third party like
Trotaconventos; instead, the Açipreste wishes to imitate other men,
raising questions about his model of clerical sexuality.
In her study of clerical discipline in 14th-century Catalunya,
Michelle Armstrong-Partida (“Misbehaving Clerics”) suggests that
secular clergy followed lay models of masculinity, including
establishing stable, long-term families through marriage or concubinage
146

and engaging in displays of violence.7 While the frequency of priestly

long-term concubinage relationships is very difficult to determine based
on the available evidence, historians have suggested that such
relationships were quite familiar to medieval parishioners. Pere Benito i
Monclús in his study of Barcelona’s diocesan visitation records for the
Maresme region from 1305 to 1326 notes that every parish visited
housed at least one concubinatory cleric (166–69). In María Teresa
García Egea’s edition of early-14th-century episcopal visitations in the
diocese of Tortosa, she concludes that 35 percent of the villages visited
had a clerical family in residence (54–57). This evidence suggests that
the Açipreste’s desire to marry may not have been at all extraordinary,
nor surprised the audience of the Libro. Nonetheless, in the context of
the Libro as a didactic work designed to force its reader to make moral
judgments (Brown 140–44), the Açipreste’s identification with married
men shows him to be a naïve reader who responds to interpellation by
embracing the possibility of marriage, without regard to his condition as
a sworn celibate, and denies his difference from laymen who are
encouraged to marry.
The Gayoso representation of events continues with the following
two stanzas:

Fiz llamar Trotaconventos, la mi vieja sabida;

presta e plazentera, de grado fue venida;
roguele que me catase alguna tal guarda,
que solo e sin compaña era penada vida.

Ella me dixo: “Amigo, oit un poquillejo:

amat alguna monja, creetme de consejo,
non se casara luego nin salira a conçejo,
andareis en amor de grant dura sobejo.”
(G fol. 72v, stanzas 1317, 1332; Ruiz, eds. Criado de
Val and Naylor 421, 425)

The narrator-protagonist summons his go-between and contracts her

services, and she immediately suggests he consider a nun for his object
of desire since she won’t get married nor reveal their affair. That is, she
responds to his interpellation of her, but she negotiates the terms of his
charge to her, asserting herself and acting on the Açipreste’s desire.
While erotic desire in the Libro is mimetic, the choice of object is
usually determined by the intervention of an authority figure. Don Amor

7
Armstrong-Partida, “Misbehaving Clerics” 95–97, 129–83; see also her “Priestly
Marriage,” as well as Linehan and Zahareas.
 147

directs the Açipreste to desire only those few women who conform to
the portrait of the dueña he verbally paints, limiting the choice of object
and policing the Açipreste’s sexuality, directing him toward female
objects. Trotaconventos acts similarly in this episode; however, her
doing so signifies differently in Gayoso. Stanzas 1318–31, which
narrate two failed seduction attempts by Trotaconventos, are found in
Salamanca; however, they are not included in Gayoso, and this omission
deeply affects the episode as a whole. In Gayoso, the fact that
Trotaconventos immediately suggests a nun seems coercive, given the
narrator’s desire to marry and publicly celebrate his union as do other
men, and the rationale for her advice cannot be based upon her having
just failed to procure two non-nuns as in Salamanca. Trotaconventos’
advice polices and disciplines the Açipreste’s unruly desires while
simultaneously licensing his desire for an appropriate object, acting
against his identification with married laymen. Unlike the naïve
Açipreste who eagerly embraces interpellation, Trotaconventos shows
herself to be a wily reader who positions herself in a way that allows her
the space to serve her own interests and to establish authority over the
man who had interpellated her.
To persuade the Açipreste to accept her proposal, Trotaconventos
details the joys of life with a nun, referring to her own happy ten-year
experience living with and serving nuns. She highlights the pleasures
they offer with their letüarios, which may be metaphors for erotic
pleasures but are literally pleasant medicinal drinks, suggesting that
nuns are healthy objects of desire. Her list of the pleasures offered by
nuns extends to nine stanzas, 1334–42, and contains many double-
entendres:

Sabet que todo açucar alli anda bollando,

polvo, torron e candi e mucho del rosado,
açucar de confites e mucho del violado,
de muchas otras guisas que ya he olvidado.
(G fol. 73r, stanza 1337; Ruiz, eds. Criado de Val
and Naylor 427)

The images of boiling sugars, abundant sweets, and the word-play of

violado, as well as her convenient silence that allows the audience to
imagine the delights she does not mention, illustrate the erotic
possibilities of this passage. Trotaconventos’ speech allows her to
express her own desire for nuns, representing her past pleasures to the
narrator-protagonist as a model for his future pleasures while offering to
serve as his agent in this particular transaction. Her luxurious speech
148

implies that she indulged in same-sex pleasures of various types while

living with and serving nuns, suggesting that her advice to the Açipreste
may be a pretext to permit her to renew her relationship with Doña
Garoça. She plays on his mimetic desires by making herself his rival
while pretending to serve his interests in this affair; that is, her
suggestion makes the Açipreste’s desire doubly mimetic, imitating both
that of married laymen and that of Trotaconventos. Her response to his
interpellation constitutes an interplay between expressing non-
normative desires and disciplining desire, directing the Açipreste’s
desire toward an object that also serves Trotaconventos’ interests, both
economic and erotic. Her proposal would also ensure her continued
employment as mediator between the Açipreste and his cloistered object
of desire and enable her to exercise power over two religious
professionals, enhancing her authority and enabling her to enact her
name.
Having persuaded the Açipreste to consider a nun, Trotaconventos
then interpellates Doña Garoça as a desiring subject and directs her
desire toward the Açipreste. Garoça’s response illustrates her wisdom
and virtue, as the narrator comments; she, like Trotaconventos,
negotiates the subject position made available to her through
interpellation. She adopts an aggressive stance toward Trotaconventos
and recites received didactic materials, exemplary tales that she
appropriates and explicates as applying to the case at hand. Her doing so
introduces a homiletic genre into the narrator-protagonist’s tale of his
erotic adventure, potentially shifting the tone toward a more moralistic
stance. However, the amoral Trotaconventos is equal to Garoça, and
ably counters her tale for tale. Their selection of materials from their
tale repertoire, which must have been extensive, shows their use of
received wisdom materials to address immediate, individualized needs.
They become dueling storytellers who use their performances to
establish a verbal hierarchy between themselves and in the process
illustrate a variety of strategies for negotiating interpellation that the
reader can use in turn to negotiate his/her interpellation by the text.8
Garoça and Trotaconventos are diegetic narrators whose
conversation the intradiagetic narrator-protagonist pretends to reproduce
verbatim, addressing himself to an extradiegetic audience. That is, the
two female characters exist only at the fictive level, while the Açipreste,
narrating his own story, positions himself between the fictive and
metafictive levels (Genette 248). These various layers tend to collapse

8
Haywood suggests the debate is a ritual in which Garoça protests before her
inevitable compliance (111).
 149

as the voices of the various characters merge. For example,

Trotaconventos seems to speak with the voice of the narrator-
protagonist in her explanation of her tale of the rooster:

Muchos leen el libro e tienen lo en poder

que non saben que leen nin lo saben entender,
tienen algunos cosa preçiada e de querer,
que non le ponen onra, la que devien aver.
(G fol. 77r, stanza 1390; Ruiz, eds. Criado de Val
and Naylor 454)

This fusion of voices collapses the fictive frames between the female
characters and the absent narrator-protagonist. In performance, this
fusion reflects the suggestive overlap between performer and the
multiple characters he or she represents, as layers of identity converge
in this passage (Morros Mestres; Brown 130). These collapses or
fusions call attention to the constructed nature of narrative itself, its
pseudo-representational nature, and the gap between truth and its
expression. The fictive characters, when “brought to life” in
performance, acquire realism. While they remain distinct from “real”
people, they become both familiar and distant, hence useful models for
projection, identification, misidentification, and analysis.
In the Garoça episode, the various diegetic characters’ response to
interpellation offers examples for the extradiegetic reader, who
simultaneously responds to the text’s interpellation, negotiating his/her
subject position vis-à-vis the text, whether in written or oral form. The
rather surprising resolution of the Garoça–Trotaconventos debate raises
questions as to the possibility of resisting the coercive force of
interpellation and the efficacy of didactic storytelling. Garoça seems to
outperform Trotaconventos in her appropriate use of exemplary tales to
illuminate the moral and social forces that compel her to resist the go-
between’s proposal. All of Trotaconventos’ narratives are ironic, off-
target, or otherwise ineffective, like her commentary on her tale of the
ass and the lapdog:

Quando coida el nesçio que dizen bien derecho,

e coida fazer serviçio e plazer con su fecho,
dize mal e locura e faz pesar e despecho;
callar a las vegadas faze mucho provecho.
(G fol. 78r, stanza 1408; Ruiz, eds. Criado de Val
and Naylor 463)
150

Not only does this tale seem to demonstrate that each individual must
behave in accordance with his/her estate, advice that would encourage
the nun to reject the Açipreste, but Trotaconventos’ commentary seems
to criticize herself for offering bad advice. On the other hand, Garoça’s
stories are apt, well-interpreted, and, in the case of her final tale of the
devil and the thief, unanswerable. The fact that she then abruptly
changes her stance and agrees to meet the Açipreste, Marina Scordilis
Brownlee suggests, shows that exemplary discourse does not guarantee
the exemplary morality of the tale-teller (94–96).
Garoça’s change in position may reflect Trotaconventos’ adoption
of different rhetorical strategies. She abandons figural speech and tale-
telling and instead directly discusses the conditions under which Garoça
and the Açipreste could meet:

“Señora,” dize la vieja, “muchas fablas sabedes,

mas yo non vos consejo eso que vos creedes,
sinon tan solamente vos que lo fabledes;
abenit vos entramos desque en uno estedes.”

“Fariedes,” dixo la dueña, “segunt que te yo digo,

que fizo el diablo al ladron su amigo,
dexar me ias con el sola e çerrarias el postigo,
seria escarnida, el fincando conmigo.”

Diz la vieja: “Señora, ¡que coraçon tan duro!

De eso que vos resçelades, yo vos aseguro,
et de vos que non me parta en vuestras manos juro,
si de vos me partiere a mi caya el perjuro.”
(G fols. 79v–80r, stanzas 1480–82; Ruiz, eds. Criado
de Val and Naylor 492–93)

Trotaconventos claims that she is merely proposing that Garoça speak

with the Açipreste, and that they two can then negotiate their
relationship. Garoça again accuses her of treachery, referring to her tale
of the devil and the thief, and specifically that Trotaconventos would
abandon her, leaving her alone with the Açipreste and destroying her
honor. Trotaconventos swears that she would not do that to Garoça, and
if she did, that she would take the blame upon herself.
While this reassurance may not seem sufficient, given
Trotaconventos’ status as a manipulative and wily alcahueta, it is at this
point that Garoça abruptly changes her stance:

La dueña dize: “Vieja, non lo manda el fuero

 151

que la muger comiençe fablar amor primero,

cunple otear firme que es çierto mensajero.”
“Señora,” dize [la vieja], “el ave muda non faze aguero.”

Dixo Doña Garoça: “Que ayas buena ventura,

que de ese açipreste me digas su figura,
bien atal qual sea, dime la su fechura,
non respondas escarnio do te preguntan cordura.”
(G fol. 80r, stanzas 1483–84; Ruiz, eds. Criado de
Val and Naylor 493–94)

From rigorously resisting Trotaconventos’ proposal on the grounds of

moral and religious concerns, Garoça suddenly refers to a very different
system of behavior, that of love conduct, showing herself both familiar
with that ethos and also concerned about observing appropriate gender
roles, in accordance with normative dictates. Here, she ceases speaking
like a nun, responding instead as the dueña that the narrator repeatedly
calls her. Gayoso seems to use monja and dueña interchangeably in the
Garoça episode. Occasionally where Salamanca has monja Gayoso has
dueña and vice-versa, in stanzas 1396b, 1399ac; the exception is
1443cd, “pecar en tal manera non conviene a monja / religiosa non casta
es podrida toronja” (G fol. 68r; Ruiz, eds. Criado de Val and Naylor
475), an exception justified both by the rhyme scheme and the repeated
emphasis on Garoça’s identity as a nun. In a very different yet relevant
context, Gayoso also uses dueña where Salamanca has monja:

Mio señor el amor, si el a mi creyera,

el conbite de las dueñas, aqueste resçibiera,
todo viçio del mundo, todo plazer oviera,
si a dormitorio entrara, nunca se arrepentiera.
(G fol. 67r, stanzas 1258; Ruiz, eds. Criado de Val
and Naylor 393; emphasis mine)

This comment by the narrator-protagonist on the debate over who would

get the honor of lodging Don Amor on Easter Sunday depicts nuns as
dueñas, as appropriate objects of desire; his comments here anticipate
those of Trotaconventos in her depiction of the pleasures available to
those who serve nuns.
Garoça’s language in stanza 1483 embraces her status as dueña as
she ceases to resist interpellation as a desirable object and desiring
subject; instead, she focuses on negotiating the terms of her meeting
with the Açipreste, and asks Trotaconventos to describe him to her
accurately. Garoça still exhibits distrust by warning Trotaconventos not
152

to mock her, but this request puts Trotaconventos in a position to

exercise overt power over both Garoça and the Açipreste, as she is given
a stage upon which to display her verbal mastery while defining the
form and character of her employer.
Trotaconventos’ verbal portrait of the Açipreste has been much
studied (Dunn, Domènech). Here it is enough to emphasize the
grotesque contrasts between his large body, head, nose, lips, shoulders,
wrists, arms, and legs in comparison with his small eyes and feet. While
his long nose may hint at his sexual endowment, his small feet suggest
inadequacy in that department; his peacock-like strut further ridicules
him, suggesting, as Peter Dunn notes, that he is not the lady-killer he
pretends to be. While Dunn suggests that Garoça agrees to meet the
Açipreste knowing that he presents no threat to her virtue, Gregory
Hutcheson argues that this portrait creates space for the expression of
female sexual desire; Garoça’s gaze lingers on his various features, as
verbalized by Trotaconventos. I would point to the coercive force of
interpellation, as this portrait constructs both the Açipreste and Garoça
as desiring and desirable subjects:

A la dueña mi vieja tan bien que la enduxo,

“Señora, diz la fabla del que de la feria fuxo,
la mierca de tu huço Dios es que te la aduxo;
¡amat, dueñas, amalde tal omne qual debuxo!

Sodes monjas guardadas, deseosas, loçanas,

los clerigos guardados desean las hufanas,
todos nadar desean, los peçes e las ranas,
a pan de quinçe dias, fanbre de tres semanas.”
(G fol. 80v, stanzas 1490–91; Ruiz, eds. Criado de
Val and Naylor 497)

The coercive force of Trotaconventos’ language is clear, as she

“clinches the deal” by ordering Garoça and all the dueñas in the
audience to love the man she has verbally depicted for them. The voices
of Trotaconventos, the narrator-protagonist, and the performer/author
fuse in the use of the first-person singular present tense at the end of
1490d, collapsing the fictive and temporal frames as at the beginning of
the Garoça episode, and increasing yet more the interpellative force of
that mandate. Garoça’s desires are policed and coerced by
Trotaconventos, just as she had earlier policed and coerced those of the
Açipreste, and perhaps for the same reason, to enable herself to enjoy
the company of Garoça.
 153

The last words uttered by Garoça in the Libro show her consenting
to Trotaconventos’ proposal, while still expressing distrust:

La dueña diz: “Vieja, ¡guardame Dios de tus mañas!

Ve, dile que cras venga, ante buenas conpañas,
fablar me buenas fablas, non burla nin picanas,
e dil que non me diga de aquestas tus fazanas.”
(G fols. 80v–81r, stanza 1493; Ruiz, eds. Criado de
Val and Naylor 498)

By accepting Trotaconventos’ proposal, Garoça may embrace her

interpellation as a desiring and desirable subject, but she also loses her
subjectivity within the text, as the narrator-protagonist resumes center
stage and narrates the rest of the episode. He does allow Trotaconventos
to speak in stanzas 1494–96, but in the eleven stanzas remaining in this
account, 1497–507, he never cedes the narrative voice nor cites
Garoça’s words to him, even indirectly. He expresses his reaction upon
seeing her at mass:

En el nombre de Dios fui a misa de mañana,

vi estar la monja en oraçion loçana,
alto cuelo de garça, color fresco de grana,
desaguisado fizo quien que le mando vestir lana.

¡Valme Santa Maria! ¡Mis manos aprieto!

¿Quien dio a blanca rosa abito e velo prieto?
Mas valdrie a la fermosa tener fijos e nieto,
que tal velo prieto nin abitos çiento.

Pero sea errança contra mio Señor

en pecado de monja omne †doñeador†,
¡ay Dios!, ¡e yo lo fuese †aqueste† pecador,
que feziese penitençia deste fecho error!
(G fols. 81r–81v, stanzas 1499–501; Ruiz, eds.
Criado de Val and Naylor 501–02)9

He recognizes her nun identity even as he calls her blanca rosa and
fermosa, and his desire seems heightened by the sinfulness of carnal
union with a nun. Garoça is the silent, eroticized object of his gaze, fully
reduced to grammatical passivity as the indirect object of veiling in
1499d and 1500b. The narrator further depicts her as an object of
exchange between the man who ordered her to take the veil, himself,
9
The dagger symbol [†] indicates doubtful readings due to damage to the folio.
154

and God, replicating his earlier gaze on the newly married men
accompanied by ladies; here, his imagination supplies those absent or
invisible male agents with whom he engages in rivalry over possession
of the beautiful nun.
Nonetheless, the narrator-protagonist represents their desire as
mutual:

Oteome de unos ojos que paresçian candela,

yo sospire con ellos, diz mi coraçon, “Hela.”
Fui me para la dueña, fablo me e fablela,
enamorome la monja e yo enamorela.
(G fol. 81v, stanza 1502; Ruiz, eds. Criado de Val
and Naylor 503)

As James Burke (165–66) notes, the narrator-protagonist represents

himself as penetrated by Garoça’s gaze, stabbed in his heart by desire,
and their interaction, briefly narrated, is equal, as they each speak, are
spoken to, and fall in love, one with the other.
Coerced desire still is desire, as is mimetic desire. Nonetheless, if
we read desire and sexuality as expressions of individualism or of the
autonomous agent, the mimetic and coerced nature of desire in the Libro
must give us pause. Garoça and the Açipreste obediently fall in love and
experience pleasure with each other, but their doing so mirrors
Trotaconventos’ generalizing portrayal of clerics and nuns in stanza
1491 as well as her description of the desires and pleasures she herself
experienced while living with nuns. This union illustrates the social
construction of desire, as the lovers follow the dictates of
Trotaconventos, who thereby demonstrates her dominance and authority
over her clients. The Libro’s representation of desire is not necessarily
liberating for lovers. Instead, love is a performance that enables the
renegotiation of gender and differential power roles within the triangular
relationship between Trotaconventos, Doña Garoça, and the Açipreste.
Moreover, the apparently chaste nature of their relationship sparks
the narrator-protagonist’s outburst against nuns as lovers:

Resçibio me la dueña por su buen servidor.

Sienpre le fui mandado e leal amador,
mucho de bien me fizo con Dios en limpio amor;
en quanto ella fue biva, Dios fue mi guiador.

Con mucha oraçion a Dios por mi rogava,

con la su abstinençia mucho me ayudava,
la su vida muy linpia en Dios se deleitava,
 155

en lucura del mundo nunca se trabajava.

Pero de tales amores son las relijosas,

para rogar a Dios con obras piadosas,
que para amor del mundo, mucho son peligrosas,
e son las escuseras, peresçosas, mitrosas.
(G fol. 81v, stanzas 1503–05; Ruiz, eds. Criado de
Val and Naylor 503–04)

Raymond S. Willis argues in his edition of the Libro that the dichotomy
buen amor–loco amor del mundo is absent from Gayoso, that dichotomy
being a product of the prose sermon found only in the Salamanca
manuscript (xvii–lii). Clearly this passage opposes limpio amor [de
Dios] and locura del mundo/amor del mundo. The narrator’s tone is
ironic, ranging from begrudging gratitude for the supposed good Garoça
did him with her pious behaviors to a spiteful attack on nuns that
accuses them of being false teases who never fulfill their lover’s carnal
desires. This irony produces a dissonance that may shock the
reader/audience and powerfully remind them of his unreliability; they
may also find themselves in a very uncomfortable position, unsure
whether to laugh at this aggressive joke made at the expense of a
woman now dead.10
The narrator concludes the episode quickly with a more overtly
sober tone:

Atal fue la mi ventura que dos meses pasados,

murio la buena dueña e ove nuevos cuidados,
a morir an los omnes que fueron e son nasçidos,
Dios perdone la su alma, e los nuestros pecados.

Con el mucho quebranto fize aquesta enducha,

con pesar e tristeza non fue tal sotil fecha,
entienda la todo omne e quien buen amor pecha
que yerro e mal fecho emienda non despecha.
(G fols. 81v–82v, stanzas 1506–07; Ruiz, eds.
Criado de Val and Naylor 505)

He presents her death as doing violence to himself, causing him cares

and forcing him to pray for her as she had earlier prayed for him. Just as
this episode began with the Açipreste finding himself interpellated by
the spectacle of weddings on Quasimodo Sunday, it closes with him

10
See also Brownlee’s discussion of this dissonance (80–83).
156

being interpellated by Garoça’s death, an event that so undoes him that

he cannot even compose a decent poem on the occasion. The end of this
affair leaves the narrator-protagonist in a pitiable condition, having
failed as a lover and as a poet. His only consolation lies in his ability to
perform his sacerdotal role, making this sad event an example to others
with whom he also seeks to ally himself as one undone by love. This
double movement allows the narrator-protagonist to negotiate this
interpellation, partially resisting its coercive force by asserting his
previously established identity as an amorous Archpriest-poet, and more
generally, as an Everyman-lover eternally frustrated by his inability to
achieve his desires.
This somber end infused with didactic commonplaces once again
raises the question of genre, as our clerical juglar addresses his audience
directly, reciting perhaps an entertaining story that mocks clerical
incontinence, perhaps a sermon that opens up the possibility of sin
merely in order to eliminate that very possibility. This ambiguity also
points toward the performative nature of the Gayoso manuscript, itself
the product of a scribal performance that marks the Garoça episode as
being particularly worthy of interest in the mise en page and heightens
the ritualistic nature of this episode by deploying present-tense verbs
where Salamanca uses the past tense, in 1360a and 1506c. This use of
the present tense violates the fictive frame by asserting the presentness
of the events narrated, be they eternally present as common human
experiences or be they present through the act of reading and recitation
unfolding in present time, in the experience of the audience. Just as the
narrator-protagonist felt himself acted upon by the events he witnessed,
i.e., Quasimodo Sunday weddings and the death of Garoça, the reader
who engages this text cannot resist the call to respond in some way to
this fascinating and elusive text.
The multiple contradictions and contrary strategies employed by the
various narrative voices at the diegetic level force the extradiegetic
audience to negotiate their subject position vis-à-vis this challenging
text. Scholarly readers respond by producing ever more complex and
nuanced readings to demonstrate their status as experienced textual
interpreters who recognize the traps laid for them by the wily narrator,
author(s), and scribe(s). By doing so, we embrace the text’s
interpellation, accepting our status as limited subjects who must act on
the text in turn, in order to assert our agency while also remaining
faithful to the received text. Brown (140–44) argues that the Libro
performs the pedagogical process, positioning all readers as students
whose analytical abilities are honed through grappling with this text that
is impossible to pin down fully. The text’s didacticism is not simply
 157

moral, religious, or poetic; it is at times a violent confrontation of

irresolvable ambiguities designed to frustrate and intrigue the most
experienced Hispano-medievalists. The Garoça episode as represented
in Gayoso offers a particularly rewarding opportunity for exploring how
the multiple layers of performance continue to act on readers today.
158

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