Classical Receptions Journal Vol 10. Iss. 3 (2018) pp. 312–331 Reception as resistance: reflections on the ‘Ovidian root’ of the Libro de Buen Amor Vı´ctor Escudero and Nu´ria Go´mez Llauger Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 Far from being transparent and neutral, the reception of Ovid’s corpus eroticum in the LibrodeBuenAmorreveals, on the one hand, resistance to the Latin text as a result of the different literary systems in which both authors are set and the vicissitudes of the transmission of Ovid, not only as a text but as a convention and an authority and, on the other, that this same reception seems to be an appropriation of the Ovidian tradition by Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, who uses and incorporates it into his own literary and aesthetic project. To reflect on such discrepancies, we need to demonstrate a fundamental aspect of comparative literature: the conditions of production and enunciation of the literary discourse. In other words, the relationship between a text and the literary and cultural system which provides the codes and literary conventions that make an influence or specific trace meaningful. Accordingly, this article presents thereceptionofOvidalsoasaformofresistancetoOvid. The presence of Ovid and his corpus eroticum in the Archpriest of Hita’s Libro de Buen Amor has been extensively established and debated.1 When we ask, where is Ovid in the Libro?, we can answer initially in three ways: (1) Ovid is explicitly named (429a, 429d, 446c, 612a, 891d); (2) he also appears when the Archpriest takes the reference from the corpus eroticum, through either mention or literary citation, es- pecially in the protagonist’s dialogue with Don Amor (181–575) and Don˜a Venus (576–652), and in the pseudo-Ovidian references that flourished from the twelfth century onwards, which had a particular bearing on the account of Don˜a Endrina (653–944) and on the figuration of the procuress; and, finally, (3) it could be said that Ovid appears in diffuse form — neither explicitly nor directly — in the overall structure of the Libro, which has been described as ‘un art d’amour sur un plan tre`s Correspondence: Barcelona University, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585 08007 Barcelona, Spain. Email: [email protected] Abat Oliba CEU University, Carrer de Bellesguard 08022, Barcelona, Spain. Email: [email protected] This article has its origins in previous work conducted under the framework of ‘Literaturas cla´sicas y literaturas hispa´nicas en la Baja Edad Media y el Renacimiento’ (FFI2013-43663P), lead by Dr. Jordi Redondo of the Universitat de Vale`ncia. 1 Citations and text references from the Libro de Buen Amor will be directly indicated by the corresponding stanza and verse numbers, based on the version by J. Corominas (Ruiz 1973). ß The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/crj/cly008 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE libre’ (Lecoy 1938: 289). This three-fold presence of Ovid in the text (direct, in- direct, and diffuse) forms what modern critics have referred to as the Ovidian root of Juan Ruiz’s text.2 These, along with the Libro’s troubadour and minstrel root, are built on the three fundamental traditions from which the literary materials Juan Ruiz combines are taken. Ovid, then, appears to be not only a source but also, and above all, a repertoire-turned-convention. Thus, although the first inevitable step is meticulous scrutiny, looking for the presence of one author in the works of another, of the Ovidian corpus eroticum in the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 Libro, we should next ask ourselves: Which Ovid, or Ovids, did the Archpriest of Hita appropriate, and from what literary or intellectual standpoint? Why was Ovid used? And, even, what effect does using Ovid have on the Spanish context and literature of the early fourteenth century? By attempting to answer these questions, we confirm that the presence of Ovid detected in the Libro de Buen Amor has an aesthetic and historical function that arises from the integration of the fourteenth- century literary paradigm as a system of conventions into the aesthetic framework set out by the Libro.3 From this perspective, reception is no longer the conciliatory accommodation of the source text but, rather, the act of re-writing and resistance between texts. That is to say, the reception operates in a two-fold way, at once affirming a textual effect based on the function that the Ovidian convention per- forms in the Spanish fourteenth-century literary systems and noting the precarious nature of this use in a literary system that undermines the bases of the Latin author’s aesthetic. Thus, ‘the relationship, and not the information, becomes the true object of study’ (Garcı´a Jurado 2015: 16).4 2 Critics have recently come to agree that the variety of materials of from literary tradition used by in the Libro de Buen Amor can be structured into three parts: minstrel, trouba- dour and Ovidian. Given the variety of the materials comprising each of these sections, critics have opted to use the expressions ‘minstrel root’, ‘troubadour root’ and ‘Ovidian root’ when referring to these materials. 3 Claudio Guille´n proposes a distinction between influence and convention that will help us in our interpretation: ‘when influences spread and merge, when they constitute common premises or uses — the collective air that writers of a certain era breathe—, they thus resemble what we refer to as conventions’ (1979: 91). 4 Garcı´a Jurado (2015), who studies the historiography of classical tradition since it was established as a subject of study — around 1872—, has analysed the revision of the concept of classical reception in the most recent texts in British academia. In Wiley- Blackwell’s A Companion to Classical Receptions, for example, the editors state: ‘by recep- tions we mean the ways in which Greek and Roman material has been transmitted, translated, excerpted, interpreted, rewritten, re-imaged and represented. These are com- plex activities in which each reception event is also part of a wider process. Interactions with a succession of contexts, both classically and non-classically orientated, combine to produce a map that is sometimes unexpectedly bumpy with its high and lows, emer- gences and suppressions and, sometimes, metamorphoses. So the title of this volume refers to receptions in the plural’ (Hardwick and Stray 2008: 1). 313 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER Transmission as distortion: which Ovid did Juan Ruiz appropriate? Addressing this question entails clarifying how the transmission of Ovid from the first to the fourteenth century forms the Ovid used by Juan Ruiz. Above all, how- ever, it entails reconstructing the meaning towards which Ovid is read in the literary system of Juan Ruiz. Thus, in every study on classical reception, it is important to review the presuppositions that have an influence on modulating the legacy of an author, a text or a subject, not only to confirm them but to also observe how these mediations appear to be protected by relationships of power and prestige: of cultural Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 prestige, of the power of transmission or of the power to establish a particular reading of an author. The transmission of Ovid involved a long sequence of medi- ations and therefore provided Juan Ruiz with an inevitably distorted Ovid. To begin with, it has become commonplace to state that, in the twelfth and thirteenth century, educated Europe emphasized the status of Ovid as auctor, and the period is even referred to as the Aetas Ouidiana (Traube 1911: 113): without going further, in the twelfth century Ovidian manuscripts increased five-fold rela- tive to those accumulated over the previous centuries.5 Indeed, Curtius indicates that, as early as the eleventh century, the French author Aymerich includes him, in his classification of authors based on metals, among his aurei auctores (1999: 655). Ovid frequently appears in the lists of prescriptive authors of monastic schools, which mix classical and Christian authors, especially in grammar and rhetoric classes since, following the grammar instructions of Aelius Donatus, they adopted Ovid as a textual model, which allowed rhetoric to be associated with the prestige of Roman poetry, converting it into the subject of translation and paraphrase exercises (1999: 103).6 However, on profiling the type of textual transmission and reading made of these texts, we observe that the situation of Ovid is rather more complex. From conserved 5 Despite the fact that such a name has become the locus for critics to generalize the influence of Ovid in every literary sphere, Traube himself explains his scope in the original text, and maintains that this influence had its main impact on the learned poets situated in the Loire Valley and Central France (Hexter 1986: 2). It is no coinci- dence that it is precisely this region in which Latin elegies appeared that, like the Pamphilus or the De vetula, would later be attributed to Ovid. B. M. Olsen, after the quantification of references and mentions of Ovid in the European twelfth century, places the Aetas Ouidiana later, at the end of the century; ‘la fortune du poe`te de Sulmone, pendant le premier sie`cle de l’aetas ovidiana, n’est donc pas sans poser des proble`mes embarrassants. D’une part, il et incontestable qu’il a eu un grand impact sur les poe`tes, qui le citent et qui trouvent en lui une source d’inspiration.