Conde Lucanor Research Articles

Nigromancia ilusoria y ruptura del secreto en el Exemplo XI del Libro del Conde Lucanor

Abstract This article studies the role played by illusory magic (praestigium), its techniques, the function of secrecy as a necessary condition for it, and its relationship with demonic practices in the Exemplo XI of Don Juan Manuel’s Libro del Conde Lucanor (around 1335). I propose that the function that this particular kind of magic performs constitutes a device to criticize the deep moral crisis that the Church experienced in the fourteenth century as well as the conflict existing between secular power and ecclesiastical authorities for the administration of knowledge.

A Tree of Lies: Approaches to Mendacity in Part One of the Conde Lucanor ( Exemplo 26 and Other Tales)

Abstract: This article first considers precedents and contexts for understanding tale 26 in Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor , "De lo que contesçió al árvol de la mentira," including one that has gone unnoticed by critics: the figure of a tree of lies in John of Capua's thirteenth-century Directorium humanae vitae . It then shows how Patronio's general view of mendacity in Part One of the collection, as exemplified by tale 26, can be compared to the account of and prohibition against lying found in works by Augustine that informed Thomas Aquinas's treatment of mendacity in the Summa Theologica . I go on to demonstrate how a number of other tales in the Conde Lucanor advocate an alternative, more permissible approach to telling untruths that was to some extent anticipated in writings of the early Church, and that corresponds with politicized, utilitarian views emerging later in the Middle Ages, as seen in John of Salisbury's Policratus .

Los personajes alegóricos en el ejemplo 26 del Conde Lucanor de don Juan Manuel (y otros ejemplos afines) a la luz del pensamiento neoplatónico y agustiniano

The twenty-sixth tale from the Conde Lucanor by don Juan Manuel deals in an original way, with the subject of lie and truth since, in the story, the two notions are allegorical figures who share a tree. One day, the wind picks up and causes it fall, the death of Lie and the triumph of Truth. After being interested in the fleeting victory of Lie and its causes, we show, thanks to the study of the relationship between the two allegorical figures and putting the analyzed data into perspective with Augustinian conception, that the mendacium and the veritas are not totally antithetical notions. Finally, we focus on the final triumph of Truth, on the other Hispanic versions of the exemplum, and on its moral, which we explain relying on the Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought around the sensible world and the intelligible world.

Literature Is Us and We Are Literature: Global and Universal Perspective

This paper takes into view literature on a global scale and from throughout time to investigate what we can say about its general and specific relevance for human society. The issue raised here pertains not only to the relevance of literature per se, but specifically to the question of how it relates to us as human beings, defining us in endless ways. In order to illustrate the central points addressed in this paper, numerous examples from the Middle Ages to the modern world are drawn from, such as Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190), Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (1335), Bertolt Brecht’s ballads, and Robert Frost’s modern poetry. The conclusion emphasizes that the critical function of literature in all human societies cannot be overestimated. At the risk of preaching to the converted, here we are confronted with the ultimate challenge in the Humanities once again. Insofar as literature has always mirrored, or engaged with, the fundamental issues in human life, we can establish its function as life-determining in philosophical, religious, political, ethical, or moral terms.

Illusory Space in Exemplo 11 of Conde Lucanor

Magic and necromancy play an essential dramatic role in exemplo 11 of Don Juan Manuel’s celebrated Conde Lucanor. Within magic, scholars have mostly focused on the role that tiempo mágico or magical time plays in the dramatic economy of the story, overlooking the equally important aspect of space within the magical illusion. The representation of space is vague, imprecise, and often contradictory. This study looks at the spaces that divide the real world from the illusory world, arguing that the underground spaces, which Manueline scholarship has accepted as factual, exist only in the Dean of Santiago’s imagination. The magical subterranean loci, this paper concludes, are employed to evoke the local myths of Hercules’s cave and the traditional stories about a family of Ylláns who allegedly practiced necromancy in Toledo, not to represent them as real.

Magically Measuring Morals with Food: Two Vernacular Medieval Iberian Exempla

This article explores the use of food as an essential fictional trigger of time-bending enchantments in two Iberian exempla from frametale narratives—Don Juan Manuel's Castilian fourteenth-century El Conde Lucanor and Isaac Ibn Sahula's Hebrew thirteenth-century Mešal Haqadmonī (a possible source for Don Juan Manuel).. In both "Exenplo XI" and "The Crow's Story" a knowledgeable student seeks out a teacher adept in the magical arts. The students are hospitably greeted by their prospective teachers and either offered or promised a certain food item—roasted partridges or wine—before they descend into a subterranean space unknowingly entering an illusionary reality meant to test their moral fiber. This article compares the use of food in the two stories and illuminates the particularity of the differences connected to the cultural complex of partridges.

Blanco White’s Translations from El conde Lucanor: Two Medieval Spanish Tales in Romantic Britain

This paper analyses Joseph Blanco White’s English translations of tales XI and XLIV of Don Juan Manuel’s El conde Lucanor (c. 1331-1335), which were published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1824. In these fairly free translations, Blanco rewrites and recontextualises the tales by updating and adapting them to the knowledge and expectations of the target readership. His translation decisions, paratexts and the articles on El conde Lucanor that he also published in Variedades; o Mensajero de Londres in 1824 shed light on his ideas on Spanish literature and national identity as well as on his role as commentator and disseminator of Spanish culture in Britain. His translations construct a particular representation of Spain where he underlines those aspects that he believes to be genuinely Spanish, while also including some stereotypical elements of the Romantic image of Spain in Britain.

Golfines and Tabardíes in Exemplo 20 of El conde Lucanor : Don Juan Manuel's View of Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Castilian Monetary Policy

Abstract: Juan Manuel's Exemplo 20 from El Conde Lucanor tells the story of a king whose foolhardiness allows a swindler to steal his money. The moral of the tale is not to risk one's wealth on a poor man. The swindler, called a golfín , although claiming to be poor, invests one hundred doubloons and dresses in fancy robes. The king is publically shamed for his poor judgement. This article examines possible connections between the tale and the historical context, including the possibility that the character of the king is modeled on Alfonso X, that the tabardíe refer to maravedíes , the principal monetary unit of fourteenth-century Castile, and that the golfín was a member of the Italian clan that defrauded Alfonso X of his imperial dream.

It’s a Man’s World: Women and Movement in Juan Manuel’s Works

In medieval Iberian literature, movement and travel are linked to various forms of power, including social mobility and self-determination, but women’s access to travel is severely restricted. This is reflected in Juan Manuel’s works, but his literary depictions of women and movement vary across genres. The exemplary El conde Lucanor follows a strict gender paradigm in which mobile women are punished, while the historical Libro de las tres razones shows how women use travel and movement to obtain power. This article illustrates how Juan Manuel's experiments with historiography break with gender paradigms to generate new models of exemplary medieval women.

Julian of Toledo and Don Yllán de Toledo:

Abstract Exemplum XI of Don Juan Manuel’s Libro del Conde Lucanor (“De lo que contesçió a un deán de Sanctiago con don Yllán, el grand maestro de Toledo”, ca. 1331‒1335) relates the encounter of Don Yllán de Toledo, a learnèd necromancer, and the ambitious Dean of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Exemplum XI is one of the best known and most celebrated stories in the book for its seemingly preternatural turn in the plot’s action and the characters’ visit to the Other World. The article seeks to identify Don Yllán with Archbishop Julian of Toledo (642‒690), author of the Prognosticon futuri saeculi (687), an important theological tract that circulated widely during the Middle Ages and that served as the basis for the doctrine of Purgatory. The Prognosticon contains illustrative anecdotes of dialogs with the dead and journeys to and from the Other World. As such, it endowed Julian with the legendary reputation of necromancer and probably served as inspiration for Don Juan Manuel’s Exemplum XI of El Conde Lucanor.

La deuda de H. C. Andersen. Lazos entre “El traje nuevo del emperador” (1837) y El conde Lucanor (1330-1335)

The Emperor's New Clothes (1837) by Hans Christian Andersen, has a great similarity to one of the narratives of the Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel, author of El conde Lucanor, written between 1330 and 1335. Several scholars have described the similarities, but none has pointed out a clear textual relationship. It has been said that the Danish text borrows inspiration from the Hispanic narrative, but this explanation is vague for literary theory. This study examines the link between the two stories by making use of the theory of transtextuality by Gerard Genette.

Meaning and Reading in the Proverbs of El Conde Lucanor

We are adept readers of the fifty some exiemplos of Don Juan Manuel's fourteenth-century El Conde Lucanor; these exempla and the prologue that precedes them constitute a classic of medieval Spanish literature. This article analyzes the proverb books in this work, Books II-IV, to argue that the lack of studies on these sections amounts to a reading problem—or, more precisely, a failure to conceive of reading and the way meaning is produced and conveyed to readers in an appropriately ample sense. I begin with the familiar corteza y meollo hermeneutic to examine not what the proverbs mean but how they mean and through what processes they convey meaning. These processes include an uncovering, two-part hermeneutic: conveying meaning as though by accident or revelation; and through sonority, or by means of confusion via the combination of literal instances and metaphoric interpretation in which the metaphoric is the easier meaning to comprehend. Medieval readers may have read with a single goal, such as finding the author's intended meaning, engaging in the author's intended reading process, or locating what was most personally useful in that reading. However, a reader's purpose may instead have been dual, multiple, or undetermined; indeed, experiencing meaning in reading may have even meant going nowhere or failing to take away any content in particular.

La dialéctica de los cuerpos abyectos: Mujer y demonio en el El Conde Lucanor y el Arcipreste de Talavera

El Conde Lucanor y el Arcipreste de Talavera forman parte de la tradición didáctica medieval que recoge la construcción misógina de la mujer como fuente del mal. El uso de la retórica de lo abyecto, aplicado en estos textos a la descripción del cuerpo femenino, permite que el lector masculino de una sociedad heteronormada sienta repulsión ante su objeto de deseo: la mujer. El presente estudio propone que la construcción abyecta del cuerpo femenino en estos textos tiene una finalidad moralizante: señalar los tipos de mujeres “peligrosas” que deben ser reeducadas o eliminadas para garantizar la estabilidad del sistema cristiano/patriarcal. La retórica de los autores incita a los varones a alejarse de las mujeres autónomas y/o disidentes tales como: la esposa desobediente, la dama hermosa que se adorna con lujo, y las parteras y sanadoras, resemantizadas estas últimas en alcahuetas y hechiceras. La demonización del cuerpo femenino a través de la dialéctica de la abyección no sólo invierte el deseo del varón por repulsión, sino que justifica las múltiples violencias ejercidas por el patriarcado sobre las mujeres.

Algunos moros muy sabidores: Virtuous Muslim Kings in Examples 30 and 41 of El conde Lucanor

This article analyses the representation of Muslim kings in Examples 30 (King al-Muʿtamid of Seville) and 41 (Umayyad Caliph al-Ḥakam al-Mustanṣir) of El conde Lucanor by Juan Manuel, sustaining that they offer models of positive leaders whose virtues and morals help the author construct an idealized model of kingship. Central to the study is an examination of how Juan Manuel adapts Andalusī historical chronicles and folkloric traditions in the examples in order to offer his readers exemplary, although hyperbolic, models of how a good king should behave towards his subjects. Ultimately, it is argued, this exercise of cultural translatio, from al-Andalus to Castile, serves a political purpose: to criticize the inefficient politics and behaviour of a bad king, Alfonso XI of Castile.

Material Afterlives of the Conde Lucanor: Asynchrony in BNE, MS 17788

In 1860, the Spanish scholar Pascual de Gayangos published an anthology containing a new edition of the Conde Lucanor, the celebrated medieval frametale collection by Castilian author Juan Manuel. In preparation, Gayangos commissioned a transcription of the 1642 print edition of the Conde Lucanor, itself a reprint of the 1575 edition prepared by the Spanish humanist Gonzalo Argote de Molina. This transcription, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 17788, has received little critical attention due to its modernity and intermediary status. However, its textual and material histories illuminate the asynchrony of Gayangos’s editing practices, which combine cutting-edge philological methods with an amateur attempt to re-create the medieval past.

Nuevas y viejas reflexiones literarias en el ‘Discurso sobre la Poesía Castellana’ (1575) de Gonzalo Argote de Molina

ABSTRACTIn 1575, Gonzalo Argote de Molina published in Seville an edition of El conde Lucanor in which he includes as a colophon an interesting reflection on contemporary Castilian poetics, entitled ‘Discurso sobre la Poesía Castellana’. This short poetic treatise acquires a certain value by virtue of its publication precisely at the stage of Spanish poetics when the clash between the new Petrarchan literary trends and the old Castilian tradition was turning in favour of the Italians. A large part of this dispute between ‘castellanizantes’ and ‘italianizantes’ materialized in the use of metrics. In this duel, Argote de Molina still opts decisively for the traditional Castilian mode, although it was already more than three decades since the publication of works by Garcilaso de la Vega or Juan Boscán, which can be seen as leading examples of the new trends. The appearance of this discourse helps us to confirm the continuing attachment in Spain to the ‘vulgar cuenta’ as opposed to the ‘Italian way’. This work tries to revise the old poetic patterns, showing few new poetic nuances.

“Esta fabla compuesta, de Isopete sacada.” Estudios sobre la fábula en la literatura española del siglo XIV ed. by María Luzdivina Cuesta Torre

Reviewed by: “Esta fabla compuesta, de Isopete sacada.” Estudios sobre la fábula en la literatura española del siglo XIV ed. by María Luzdivina Cuesta Torre Mary-Anne Vetterling Cuesta Torre, María Luzdivina, editor. “Esta fabla compuesta, de Isopete sacada.” Estudios sobre la fábula en la literatura española del siglo XIV. Peter Lang, 2017. ISBN: 978-3-0343-2760-2. This book consists of a brief introduction and six articles by leading scholars of Medieval Spanish literature and is but one facet of the research project FF12012-32265 (http://fele.unileon.es), funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad in Spain. It is well organized and includes an exhaustive bibliography, author biographies, and summaries of the articles in Spanish, German, French, and English. María Luzdivina Cuesta Torre’s introduction contains a brief overview of the history of the fable, its many traditions (both Eastern and Western), with an explanation of how fables became included in Spanish vernacular literature, especially that of the fourteenth century. The first article in this collection is by Cuesta Torre on the fables and prologue in the Libro del caballero Zifar, examined in their historical and political contexts. The fables of the “Ass and the Lapdog,” “The Wolf and the Ram,” “The Lark and the Hunter,” “The Wolf and the Leeches,” and the tale of “The Water, Wind and Truth” are analyzed in great detail, especially in the context of the lives of Gonzalo Pétrez (also known as Gonzalo García Gudiel), Ferrand Martínez, Gonzalo Díaz Palomeque, and Queen María de Molina. Cuesta Torre goes into the very complex history of early fourteenth-century Spain in the Diocese of Toledo at great length (this article comprises more than a third of the entire book) and it demonstrates how that history is included not only in the aforementioned stories, but also reflected in the actions of several of the main characters of the Zifar. She gives a convincing defense of the hypothesis that Jofré de Loyasa is the author of the Zifar and that the book’s publication date was between 1301 and 1307. [End Page 114] Hugo Bizzarri focuses on the eleven fables and animal tales in El conde Lucanor, preceded by an overview of the anthropocentric role of the animal world in Juan Manuel’s other writings. The fables and tales analyzed are: “The Fox and the Crow,” “The Swallow and the Flax,” “The Fox and the Rooster,” “The Swallow and the Sparrow,” “The Enemy Horses and the Lion,” “The Weeping Man and the Partridges,” “The Crows and the Owls,” “The Ox (or Lion) and the Bull,” “The Industrious Ants,” and “The Fox that Played Dead.” After a brief summary of each story (some of which are from the European tradition, others from the Arabic), Bizzarri notes that their purpose is political, grounded in everyday behavior, which overshadows the more typical moral focus of fables. The eleventh fable, “The Falcon and the Eagle” is mentioned, but not analyzed. Armando López Castro writes about the poetics of four of the twenty-five fables in the Libro de buen amor in his essay on lions in the Libro. Fables analyzed are “The Wolf, the Fox and the Sick Lion,” “The Lion and the Horse,” “The Lion who Killed Himself with Rage,” and “The Lion and the Mouse,” with a passing reference to the “Rooster and Sapphire.” In these lion fables López Castro sees three common threads: dialogue among the animal characters, the use of inversion and tension between opposites, and the act of the weaker animal being able to conquer the stronger one by means of wit and deceit. These elements help make these fictional tales more believable to Ruiz’s audience. Bernard Darbord begins his essay with a fascinating analysis of how the names of animals can vary from language to language. He then focuses on two fables about bufos in the Libro de los gatos. Among other texts, he examines the fable of the “Galápago and the Bufo” in light of its Latin source, the Fabulae of Odo of Cheriton, and concludes that galápago can mean either a plow...

Contaminaciones de autor en la canción de Quevedo “Pues quita Primavera al año el ceño”

El presente artículo pasa revista al concepto de “contaminación”, uno de los caballos de batalla de la crítica textual; la ejemplifica a partir del exemplo XXXVI del Conde Lucanor y de la canción de Quevedo “Pues quita Primavera al año el ceño”, que el autor del Buscón retocó hasta en seis ocasiones.

Edición crítica y estudio de la <em>Comedia de Miseno</em>

Critical edition and study of the Comedia de Miseno, an unpublished play from the end of the 16th century by Loyola, an almost unknown author. The work, which is based on an ejemplo from El conde Lucanor, was very successful, and was imitated by none other than Lope de Vega. This edition includes footnotes and a critical apparatus.

Teaching Authorial Style and Literary Technique: Exemplo XI of El Conde Lucanor

This current study proposes a comparative method of teaching authorial style, using four versions of Exemplo XI, an often-anthologized tale about the mago of Toledo, Don Illan, from the Conde Lucanor, a series of interlinked tales by the early fourteenth-century author Don Juan Manuel. Teaching a medieval text in its original form alongside modernized and adapted versions allows students to observe the rich cultural context of the original and comprehend varied literary techniques available to authors to convey their message (see Berg and Martin-Berg). By comparing the tale in four forms: Old Spanish, Modern Spanish, English translation, and the adaptation by Jorge Luis Borges, students notice that grammar and vocabulary changes along with alterations in the focus of the story affect the presentation of the main figure of the story, thus changing the possible interpretations by the reader. While Juan Manuel’s text emphasizes a message of acting with integrity, the Borges adaptation focuses on the sinister side of magic. In order to help students grasp the unfamiliar language of the medieval period, the article also provides a brief discussion of the text’s linguistic features likely to cause confusion for a student previously unfamiliar with Old Spanish.