Alvar Gomez de Castro's Verses from the Libro de buen amor

Abstract

A LVAR G6mez de Castro (1515-80) was a foremost Spanish humanist of the Renaissance. Educated at Salamanca, he was a teacher in various schools in Spain before ending up as professor of Greek, Latin and Rhetoric in the University of Toledo. Besides his published works in Latin and Spanish, he left behind him a mass of miscellaneous material in manuscript form which has never been published and which now reposes in the National Library at Madrid. One volume of this miscellanea which I recently examined is an almost indescribable hodge-podge of notes, letters, poems in Spanish, Latin and Greek (some of his own, some extracts from ancient and modern authors), snatches of romances, inscriptions, comments on books ancient and modern, etc. One would judge from this volume that G6mez de Castro was a man of very broad and diversified interests. About forty years ago, F. J. Sanchez Cant6n while searching through the old archives in quest of archaeological and artistic material turned up in this volume some thirty verses of poetry which proved to be from Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor.1 Now one of the difficulties in establishing a good text of the Archpriest's work is the dearth of manuscript material, and these verses have never received the study they deserve concerning their relation to the extant manuscripts and their worth in correcting their readings. These verses appear on a single sheet of paper, recto and verso, with no name of author, no explanation for copying them, and with no relation to the pages which precede and follow. On the blank lower half of the verso there are some words in Latin having no connection with the verses of Juan Ruiz. These thirty lines of verse contain seven which appear in no known manuscript of the Libro. Furthermore the remaining twenty-three are not in the same order as they appear in the manuscripts of Salamanca and Gayoso (the Toledo manuscript lacks the folios containing these verses). Their order, following Ducamin's2 numbering, is as follows: