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