Reading, Performing and Imagining the ‘Libro del Arcipreste’ by E. Michael Gerli

Abstract

MLR, .,   would voice a similar ambition by claiming that ‘one of the greatest ornaments to a gentleman or his family is a fine library’ (omas Coke of Holkham Hall to Sir John Newton,  January , cited in D. P. Mortlock, Holkham Library: A History and Description (London: Roxburghe Club, ), p. ). U    S C C Reading, Performing and Imagining the ‘Libro del Arcipreste’. By E. M G. (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, ) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. .  pp. $;£.. ISBN –––. E. Michael Gerli, a distinguished medievalist, presents the fruits of his lifelong reflections on the Libro del Arcipreste. Perhaps the most startling chapter for students of fourteenth-century literature is the final one (‘Mischief, Mayhem, and Uxoricide’) with its story of Dr Elisha Kent Kane (–)—notorious in his day—and how it coloured the Libro’s reception by an American public. Gerli notes that it is impossible to say whether Kane, like Juan Ruiz, was saint or sinner. Kane, eventually acquitted of murder by the courts, was the first and most insightful of the Libro’s North American critics, according to Gerli, challenging the view that the book is an autobiography and highlighting the erudite allusions embedded in some of its most guileless passages. Kane’s was the first English translation of the Libro and Gerli praises its virtuosity; he includes some of the illustrations Kane drew for his translation (figures –, p. ). is startling chapter is worth reading for its overview of s scholarship. Gerli begins with evaluating the Libro’s readership, using reception theory which leads him to emphasize how the ‘polysemy’ of the book is predictable. He establishes a link to Saint Augustine’s hermeneutics and exegesis, particularly De doctrina Christiana , tracing ‘the Libro’s ideological ancestry and its attention to will, memory, intellect, and the ambiguities of discourse’ (p. ). Gerli revisits a subject he has looked at in the past: the staging of debates between Greeks and Romans. e Libro is connected to a three-stage approach to reading, relying on the faculties of memory, intellect, and will, as in Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Furthermore, language’s slipperiness allows Gerli to position the Libro’s opening and its celebration of the Incarnate Word, counterpoint to the Fall (p. ). One of the most fascinating chapters for medievalists working on the Cancioneros is ‘Quid est? quis est enim? Juan Ruiz as Ovid’, in which Gerli examines Cancionero echoes of the Libro. Gerli acknowledges that the Libro was so well known that it could be recited by heart and notes how later poets regard it as a model of poetic art. Its wit, cra, and subtle conceit were valued by cancionero poets, particularly those of the Cancionero de Baena (p. ). Gerli notes that their debt to the Libro is by no means a new line of enquiry. However, he considers them not as mere citation but as evidence of the poets as readers (p. ), an insight he  Reviews was instrumental in establishing over three decades ago. Gerli here demonstrates the influence of the Libro on the serranas in the Cancionero de Estúñiga, arguing that Carvajal’s poems represent a burlesque travesty (p. ). He sees rewriting, glossing, and reinterpretation as central to understanding how later generations of poets read the Libro (p. ). Again, this chapter is about more than the Libro as it makes the question of interpretation by the readers valid for all literature. e Libro’s illustrative legacy is another of its echoes through the ages captured by Gerli in ‘Envisioning the Libro del Arcipreste in the Cancionero de Palacio’. He traces its visuality and how that affects medieval artistic imagination in Cancionero de Palacio with its marginalia and illustrated invenciones. Again, the illustrations tell a story about medieval readers, with ramifications beyond the corpus of this chapter. e Libro as a performative text is another study with general application. Gerli acknowledges that performance of written texts was the norm in the period and notes its reference to sounds, instruments, and invocations to the auditory. e Libro’s orality has been studied by a few scholars, although the nature of the text’s audience...