A further vernacular source for the "Libro de buen amor"

Abstract

The Archpriest of Hita's familiarity with, and his frequent dependence on, learned non-hispanic material has long been known to students of the Libro de buen amor, and was thoroughly and accurately documented by Felix Lecoy. It is, in the nature of things, less easy to document with any precision his debt to the popular and semi-popular traditions of the Peninsula, but this debt is explicitly acknowledged by the poet himself (see, for example, 114a and, much more comprehensively,1513–14), and its extent has been well indicated by Menendez Pidal. On the other hand, it seems to be unquestioningly accepted that the LBA has only one learned source in Spanish, the Libro de Alexandre. This is the only Spanish source referred to by Lecoy, and his implicit limitation is endorsed in the recent editions by Chiarini and Corominas. Nevertheless, it seems prima facie a little surprising that a man of such wide and diverse literary interests as the Archpriest should have limited himself in this way.