A masterpiece in the tradition of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, Juan Ruiz's fourteenth-century Spanish narrative poem combines the comic and the serious, the bawdy and the practical, the satiric and the tender, the devout and the blasphemous. In a first prose translation, Professors Mignani and Di Cesare succeed in conveying the vitality and sly humor of the original. The poem consists of a loosely unified series of fourteen amorous adventures of the Archpriest of Hita, interlaced with debates, fabliaux, fables, and exempla. Ruiz suggests that while man ought to seek buen amor (true love, or love of God), he is prone to loco amor, or worldly love. The Book proposes to show human folly so that men may be forewarned of the bad and choose the good. The episodes related in the stanzas and in songs in various lyrical styles parody such conventions as courtly love, epic battle, or church ritual. Ruiz was clearly fascinated by the concrete, as well as the allegorical, for his episodes have dates and actual settings, and popular speech is incorporated into his verses. In their introduction, the translators survey the major scholarly studies of the poem and offer their own critical reading of it. Their annotated bibliography and notes to the translation will be useful to students as well as scholars.

Severin), and the application to the Libro of modern critical approaches, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, folklore studies, chaos theory, and reader-reception theory (Elizabeth Drayson, Laurence de Looze, Louise O. Vasvari)."--BOOK JACKET.

"The New Companion to the Libro de buen amor provides a platform for exploring current, innovative approaches to this classic poem. It is designed for specialists and non-specialists from a variety of fields, who are interested in investigating different aspects of Juan Ruiz's poem and developing fruitful new paths for future research. Chapters in the volume show how the book engages with Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures, and delve into its legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part One sheds light on intersecting cultural milieux, from the Christian court of Castile, to the experience of Jewish and Muslim communities. Part Two illustrates how the poem's meaning through time can be elucidated using an array of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches. Contributors are Nora C. Benedict, Erik Ekman, Denise K. Filios, Ryan D. Giles, Michelle Hamilton, Carlos Heusch, José Manuel Hidalgo, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Veronica Menaldi, Simone Pinet, Michael R. Solomon"--

Analyzes the way in which Austen blends ironic criticism with moral affirmation through her complex and little-understood management of the narrative point of view.

One of the great ironic moral comedies of the late Middle Ages, Libro de Buen Amor holds a place in Spanish literature comparable with that of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the English tradition. This edition presents, on facing pages, the Salamanca Old Spanish text (dated 1343) and the first English-language verse translation since 1933. The fictional autobiography of the picaro Archpriest of Hita, Juan Ruiz, is a treasury of fables and fabliaux, mock heroic allegory, joyous parodies of churchly and legal ritual--all digressions to the hilarious tale of the persistent but abortive adventures of the author as lover. Lord Love and Lady Venus advise with their Ovidian Arts of Love. The Archpriest himself consistently maintains that his "models for sinning" will be read virtuously by the virtuous though salaciously by the wicked--in this moral ambiguity resembling Boccaccio of the Decameron and Chaucer of the bawdier tales. Although the Salamanca text is used, as the most complete extant version of Ruiz's work, gaps are filled from the Gayoso manuscript, and variant readings are given from this and the Toledo fragment. Textual spellings are changed to conform with modern Spanish usage, but without sacrificing the phonological characteristics of Old Spanish. The translation (which starts from a draft by the late Hubert Creekmore) attempts to approximate the techniques of the medieval poet. Within the demanding limits of a verse form faithful to the original, the translation uses devices of medieval rhetoric, particularly wordplay. A Reader's Guide follows the text and translation, as a means of avoiding the distraction of line-by-line annotation, and an annotated bibliography leads to major critical themes and controversies still surrounding Ruiz. The introduction describes the poet's virtuoso display of poetic forms, which relate this intensely Spanish work to the literature of medieval Europe, and appraises the poet's consciousness as one relevant to modern social tensions.

Together, these authors propose a new way of reaching the spiritual boundary symbolized by the love of god. Both stories are about choosing a righteous path that will take you to life's ultimate goal, whether it is the Arcipreste's buen amor (good love) or Parzival's holy grail. However, the protagonists constantly choose to go in the wrong direction in order to show us which path not to choose. Chapters: Sic et Non; A book for women; Love's Voice; Rubies; Failing Crusades; Sexual Crusade; Stones of Paradise.

An exhaustive alphabetical list of all the principal words that were used in Libro de Buen Amor.