'Ovidian Root' of the Libro De Buen Amor

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, especially in the protagonist’s dialogue with Don Amor (181–575) and Donã 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 Donã 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’ (Garcıá 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, troubadour 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 Guilleń 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 Garcıá 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 receptions we mean the ways in which Greek and Roman material has been transmitted, translated, excerpted, interpreted, rewritten, re-imaged and represented. These are complex 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).

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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, however, 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 mediations 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. De l’autre, a` en juger par les manuscrits conserve´s et les mentions dans les inventaires des bibliothe`ques, il semble que la diffusion de ses oeuvres ait e´te´ relativement modeste, surtour en com- paraison avec celle qu’on connue d’autres poe`tes classiques’ (1987: 88). 6 The expansion of cathedral schools (as opposed to monastic schools) and the greater weight of dialectic in the scholasticism practiced in such schools would result in a decline in prominence of Ovidian texts from the thirteenth century on (Curtius 1999: 81).

314 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE manuscripts, we can infer that Ovidian texts were gathered together in a very fragmented manner, often in anthologies of sayings and maxims that were considered important to know, separated from the rest of the work in which they appeared, or even translated into Spanish (Schevill 1913: 26).7 For example, Marı´a Pilar Cuartero (2002) has analysed how some of the maxims that Juan Ruiz took from Ovid could have come from the Compendium moralium notabilium, an anthology of maxims by Geremia da Montagnone.

The gathering of miscellaneous materials into codices began during the eighth Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 century but had become widespread by the fourteenth century: the canonical genres of medieval literature had become consolidated or formed mainly over the course of the 12th century. By around 1300, the manuscripts that contained such genres had effectively become something of a funerary monument to them, the same way the Ple´iade would be to us now. Epic poems, troubadour lyrics, the roman, the cuadernavı´a, the rhythmic couplet of the short story and so on all seemed to have been used liberally, and collecting them was a way of recognising them as having reached the end of their creative period (Rico 1997: 161).

Thus, for example, of the medieval manuscripts of Ovid’s corpus eroticum located in Spanish libraries by Arcaz Pozo (1996, 2002), none conserve all of the complete works and only one of the manuscripts, the 102-11 manuscript of the Cabildo de Toledo Library, predates the Libro de Buen Amor (dating back, speciﬁcally, to the thirteenth century). To this should be added the erroneous attribution of many works that were claimed to have been penned by Ovid, especially in the fourteenth century, ‘the Golden Age of the Apocryphal Ovids’ (Rico 1967: 307). As an example of this mixture of apocryphal texts and portions of Ovid’s authentic corpus, Rico presents codex V.III.10 from El Escorial, which ‘catalogues 21 ‘‘libri compilati per Ouidium’’. Of these, only four are authentic’ (1967: 307). This tradition of using apocryphal material particularly affected the so-called Latin elegiac comedies, ‘a type of scholarly exercise of Latin ostentation and classical knowledge in which, in the form of a dialogue, ribald and entertaining anecdotes were dramatized, imitating the comedies of Terence’ (Valverde and de Riquer 2008: 165). From this genre, which enjoyed a certain degree of success in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some twenty anonymous pieces written in elegiac couplets by learned scholars from the Loire Valley (Kretschmer 2013: 273) that usually directly cited Ovid as their author have come down to us.8 Although several of these formed

7 Ralph J. Hexter enumerates the most frequent textual forms in which Ovidian material is found in medieval manuscripts: citations, comments and interpolations in various texts, pseudepigrapha and library catalogues (1986: 3-4). 8 Recently, Richard Burkard has attempted to demonstrate that pseudo-Ovidian medieval pieces are the main sources that allow us to explain the Ovidian traces of the Libro — directly, the pseudo-Ars amatoria and the Pamphilus, and, more indirectly, the De vetula

315 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER the source of materials for the Libro de Buen Amor (Morros 2002), we will concen- trate on two main direct sources: the Pamphilus de amore, protagonized by one Naso, which refers to Ovid, and the De vetula,9 which contains an accessus in which Ovid defends his authorship and intention in the ﬁrst person, and which can be added to the dense tradition which, as Ghisalberti concluded, would progressively convert the accessus from a scholarly exercise in the introduction of a work into biographical texts on Ovid, which became popular between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries 1946 10 10 ( : ). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 In this accessus, following the model of the ﬁrst elegy of the Tristia, an Ovid, in exile in Tomis, proposes that the De vetula should be read as his own intellectual testament and asks that, once dead, the book should accompany his remains to Rome. In this testament, the supposed Ovid disowns the love poems of his youth, which is the apparent cause of his ostracism, and seeks reconciliation — political and, especially, moral — with the authorities in Rome, suggesting an apparent conversion to the Christian faith, which he later illustrates through the amorous conversion narrated by the three books that form the work: ‘this is Ovid’s own metamorphosis, a sort of memoir narrating the moral journey from the Ars amatoria to Remedia amoris, and the transformation of Ouidius praeceptor amoris into Ouidius ethicus and Ouidius christianus’ (Kretschmer 2013: 279). This morality, falsely attributed to Ovid, provides clues to the type of Christianized reading that was projected onto his works when he gained the status of auctor and to what extent, as happened

and the De amore of Andreas Capellanus—, something that the traditional readings of Lecoy (1938) and Schevill (1913) refute. Nevertheless, Burkard’s proposal (1999: 42–43) has been subsequently criticised (Drayson 2001 and Rouhi 2002, among others). 9 Recently, the importance of elegiac comedies as sources of most of the passages and characters in the Libro de Buen Amor has been highlighted — in addition to the two mentioned, the De nuntio sagaci, Ovidio puellarum and De tribus puellis should be added. Comedies such as the Pamphilus needed to be successful in order for them to be habitually translated or expanded upon as a scholarly exercise. F. Accorsi (2007) has meticulously analysed the diversity of the manuscript versions of the Pamphilus that Juan Ruiz may have known. For an up-to-date, detailed inventory of the interpolations of the Latin elegiac comedies in the Libro, we recommend the studies of B. Morros (2002). 10 Such texts were based on a scholastic structure of the commentary of a text, which involved describing the material of the work, the author’s intention, the moral interest and its possible afﬁliation with a particular philosophical school (Ghisalberti 1946: 10). This structure was established in the twelfth century by Arnulf of Orle´ans in a biographical preface to his glosses of the Metamorphoses, and the author of the accessus to the De vetula also followed it closely. It should be remembered that, unlike other auctoritates, medieval readers did not have to hand any biography of Ovid from the classical tradition. Therefore, the biographical accounts that appeared in the twelfth century are based on Ovid’s own work or on other even more debatable sources — for a precise study of the biographical details of Ovid that were used to speculate about these vitae, see Ghisalberti (1946: 26–44).

316 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE with other Pagan authors, their reading demanded a moral justiﬁcation that would guide it.11 As we can see, the Ovid that Juan Ruiz may have known and used in the fourteenth century is not the original Ovid, nor even any Ovid, but the Ovid modelled by the discursive practices that resulted in certain texts and certain authors being reproduced — in a very particular manner — while others were not. As Garcı´a Jurado suggests (2015: 96ss), the vicissitudes of the transmission and enunciation of

texts are rarely random: in most cases, they depend on the discursive practices of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 power and prestige, which end up deﬁning, for example, which concepts of literature or of morality meant that Ovid could be transmitted, and what price he would pay to continue being read and reproduced.12 The medieval Ovid is a distorted Ovid — he was attributed a morality he did not advocate, when not diced up and decon- textualized—, but only by accepting this distortion could Ovid come to occupy a prominent place by the end of the twelfth century. For example, the corpus was often read allegorically, in accordance with a biographical scheme that allowed it to be attributed a path of moral redemption and so be considered acceptable for Christian rigorism, especially in the monastic world. From this perspective, the corpus describes a type of ‘penitential narrative’ (Dimmick 2002: 270), according to which such works contain the cause of his later exile — from the famous ‘carmen et error’ of the Tristia (T. II 207), and identifying this ‘carmen’ with the Ars amatoria —, as a means of justifying the use of such works: ‘the commonest way of rationalizing the place of the Ars in the canon was to point out that Ovid himself paid dearly for it’ (2002: 270).13 Without this ‘Golden Age of Allegory’ (Born 1934: 365), which appears from the twelfth century on, Ovid would probably not have reached the level of dissemination he enjoyed. Unlike other classical authors, the medieval tradition did not have to provide additional references of the life of Ovid other than those found in his work.

11 It should be borne in mind that Christian morality did not sit comfortably with the playful, sensual, and irreverent tone of Ovid’s amatory counsel: ‘faced with this mundane acceptance of the poet, there is no lack of anti-Ovid reaction in certain sectors of the Church, especially the monastic’ (Gonza´lez Iglesias 1997: 91). Moreover, Curtius states: ‘The Fasti and Epistulae ex Ponto of Ovid are ‘‘tolerated’’. However, his amatory poems and the Metamorphoses are rejected’ (1989: 80). 12 Foucault limits the discursive practices to ‘a set of anonymous historical rules, always determined in time and space, that have deﬁned a given era and, for a given social, economic, geographical or linguistic area, the conditions of exercise of the enunciative function’ (2008: 154). In our case, this function refers to the enunciation of the literary discourse. 13 Rico insists on stressing this way of reading it: ‘Ars amandi, Remedia amoris and Amores in general had a common tradition, independent of other Ovidian poems. Manuscript G.III.26 of El Escorial shows us the most usual order of reading: the boldness of the Ars is softened by the immediate Remedia texts, and in the Amores an illustration of previous teachers could be seen’ (1967: 303).

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The allegorical biographies therefore allowed more diverse interpretations to be projected onto his name, his life and, ultimately, his texts. In these vitae, Ovid was alternatively a magician, a merchant, a monk, a prophet or a saint (Born 1934: 364). From such a reading context, in the era of the Libro, such works emerged as the Ovid moralise´ (1316–1328), which enjoyed rapid success throughout Europe and which rewrote the main mythological accounts of the Metamorphoses in French octosyllables, accompanying them with Christianising glosses — when not from 14

readings compared to biblical passages. From such a reading, the presence of an Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 accessus such as that of the De vetula is more plausible: one way of deﬁnitively justifying its authority was to ascribe it as a true Christian poem that Ovid never wrote (Dimmick 2002: 275). In order to answer the question, ‘Which Ovid did Juan Ruiz appropriate?’, the fragmented Ovid, the incomplete Ovid, the allegorical Ovid or the moralized Ovid we have presented so far interest us above all since they point to the tension with which the corpus eroticum acquired its status as a text of authority — in other words, how the Ovidian corpus became a reference but at the cost of its fragmentation and forced readings. Dimmick summarized it concisely thus: ‘Ovid in the Middle Ages is an auctor perpetually falling foul of authority’ (2002: 264).15 Ovid ceases to be an author studied in rhetoric classes and lives his Golden Age thanks mainly to the readings that superimposed on this text a moral content acceptable to Christian rigorism: ‘an oeuvre which is marked by inherent instability of meaning was interpreted and augmented by medieval scholars and writers in ways which often accen- tuated that instability’ (Minnis 2001: 12). Here we have an initial clue to the role that the use of Ovid could play in a text of that era. The growing interest in Ovid’s amatory poetry coincides with the trans- ference of education in monasteries to cathedral schools and universities, aimed at a more urban secular clergy (Reynolds and Wilson 1995: 109). Possibly for this reason, as claimed by Schevill in 1913, the increase in these texts from the twelfth century onwards is due mainly to writers and poets who proposed a certain type of literary or religious heterodoxy, such as the Goliards.16 Therefore, it is not only a question of

14 Examples of Christianised commentary include verses 71–340 of the Ovide moralise´ (‘Ovid, Met. I, 1-86 ‘Mundo Origo’. This story is interspersed with remarks about the erroneous way in which some of Ovid’s ideas were occasionally interpreted, comparisons between the ‘deis’ of Ovid and the Holy Trinity and finally, certain glosses’). Examples of parallel reading include verses 2139–59 (‘L’histoire de Deucalion expliqueé par celle de Noe´ et de sa famille’). 15 Indeed, not only in the Middle Ages: two centuries later (in 1583), for example, a Spanish translation of the Ars amatoria would be banned by Quiroga’s inquisitorial Catalogus (Lida de Malkiel 1975: 380). 16 For his eloquence, we reproduce R. Schevill’s quote: ‘In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries extensive acquaintance with the amatory works of Ovid is naturally to be sought first among those poets on whom the interdict against Ovid, promulgated especially by the religious orders, had no hold. These would embrace that whole galaxy of

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Ovid being scarcely known but that he often served to question or place in jeopardy the idea and function of authority.17 We can reflect on whether such a use was foretold in Ovid’s original text. However, we would then be suggesting that any text from the past is self-sufficient and can definitively contain the keys to its interpretation. Faced with this notion of tradition as the quotation or assimilation of one author by another, we propose a concept of reception as a means of establishing relationships between texts and contexts that are occasionally openly conflictive due to the different eras, aesthetics Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 and literary systems to which the related texts refer. In this way, meaning is created from the relationship and this relationship modifies the meaning of the related elements. Therefore, in the same way that Juan Ruiz only had access to the Ovid whom his cultural system provided, neither can we extract ourselves from all the mediations that a particular Ovid or a particular Libro de Buen Amor provide us when we try to recover his original scope. However, this should not stop us from examin- ing this scope.

From one Ovid to another Ovid’s corpus eroticum is the product of the maturity of Latin elegy, a genre that experienced a quick rise and fall and that, in the time of Ovid, had already undergone considerable development, launched by the neoterics and continued by Propertius and Tibullus. It therefore incorporated a series of generic codes — theme, verse, metre — perfectly established in the context of accultured poetry, to which Ovid added his knowledge of rhetorical affectation. Ovid also added an intensiﬁcation of the references to the cultural code itself — myths, examples, historical characters — that the Middle Ages only conserves as a catalogue of themes and motifs: ‘myth, irony, similes [of the Ars] constitute cultural and discursive supracodes, decipher- able in appearance to all but only fully accessible to a minority. Are they a means of avoiding repression? Yes. But they also show a desire to play’ (Gonza´lez Iglesias 1997: 72).18

wandering minstrels, the Troubadours and the Minnesaenger, and also the Trouve`res of the north; and no doubt influence was exerted upon all these in their turn by the homeless friars, by antipapal priests, theologians and clerks who recognized no superior nor rules, and who were well versed in much of the pagan literature of which the best churchmen disapproved’ (1913: 23). 17 In his brilliant description of the immediate reception of the Libro de Buen Amor, Gerli notes that Juan Ruiz inherits Ovid’s refractory nature, in opposition to the auctoritas that Dimmick defends (2002): ‘as poets, they are each wrapped in an aura of profligacy and bad ways, they are seen as negligent, impious, licentious, and dissolute, yet very amusing. It is in this persona of the libertine auctor in conflict with auctoritas, just as much as their expertise on poetry and love, that both the literary ‘‘Juan Ruiz’’ and ‘‘Ovid’’ came to be imagined and valued by poets and as poets in the Middle Ages’ (Gerli 2016: 171–72). 18 Paul Veyne also refers to this when he addresses the playful tone with which the elegy deals with certain materials. This tone stylises the genre and distances it from any

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Ovid accentuates the formal mechanisms of the genre and its literary procedures when faced with an elegy in its late stage, whose perfection he extolled (Labate 1984: 43) and strengthens those aspects that focus more on ingenuity and deceit: ‘Without a doubt, Ovid gave more elegance to an increasingly widespread libertinism in Roman society. The audacity of certain descriptions or prescriptions are perhaps less immoral and less dangerous than the spirit with which he taught an art of love that is often an art of deceit, and the masculine and feminine shrewdness of a strategy

in which the game counts for more than the prize and sensuality more than sincerity’ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 (Saint-Denis 1958: 200).19 This is, perhaps, why there are those that have placed Ovid within a type of Augustan rococo (Luck 1993: 147). It is interesting to observe this uncomfortable — and sometimes paradoxical — relationship between the stylization of the elegy in Ovid and its proximity to the moral complexity of the society of his time, especially Roman urban society. As Labate suggests, the elegy is inscribed in the urban world from the beginning: ‘The elegy was born in Rome, successor to the poetae noui and closely linked to the city: situations, daily customs, behaviours, ideological unity, tastes, culture. The citizen was the centre around which the life of love revolved: refined, elegant courtiers who knew of music, dance, literature. The city provided a place for lovers to meet: banquets, the theatre, shows, promenades; [...]’ (1984: 37–38). However, the first elegiac poets, influenced by the agrarian mythology proposed by the first imperial era, represent a Rome that refers to the pastoral idealization of its origins. Faced with this rejection of reality and the flight towards a mythical representation (1984: 42), Ovid proposes a paradoxical return to the contradictions of the urban reality through a more stylized poetry: ‘With Ovid, the paradox could be said to be reversed: poetry itself becomes anti-realistic, it challenges the tyranny of life on literature. However, within this paradox, the elegiac poet finds the instrument to create poetry capable of maintaining a relationship that is more coherent with reality, of faithfully interpret- ing the variety of social, cultural and ideological areas in which it is articulated. Therefore, the Ovidian experience could be presented as the perfecting of the elegiac genre’ (1984: 43). This link between reality and form of literary representation demonstrates an effect, meaning and form of reading the text connoted by his literary system and cultural context — a connotation that disappears when the context and the system that sustains them disappear. Moreover, the corpus eroticum addresses an issue, that, in terms of the classical tradition, is still a minor issue — ‘it is not a work that has to be read by a great prince’, he confesses in the Tristia (II 242). Nevertheless, we have seen how highly intriguing it is to read Ovid’s apparent levity as a privileged

possible referential or autobiographical reading of the narrated episodes: ‘the Roman elegy resembles a montage of quotes and cries from the heart; these changes in tone, too controlled, make no attempt to pass themselves off as lyrical effusions; the poet seeks above all variety’ (1991: 10). 19 All quotes were translated by the authors of this article, unless stated otherwise.

320 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE discourse from which to reveal the moral contradictions of Roman society: ‘Ovid’s poetry was composed to entertain a sophisticated audience of young Roman aristo- crats, who would ﬁnd in the Ars amatoria at once sexual comedy, seduction tech- niques, and worldly cynicism (an unstable mixture of the serious and the scurrilous, the elevated and the obscene’ (Minnis 2001: 11). In their mixture of reﬁnement and irreverence, of thoroughness and celebration, the Amores and the Ars amatoria are presented as an intense, interested social portrayal that goes beyond the mere suc- 1999 88

cession of playful episodes about courtship (Grimal : ). And this is the core of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 Ovid’s amatory work; far from being about love as an idea, concept or feeling, it is about courtship as a technical and cultural code, one that reveals a series of gestures, customs and indiscernible discourses regarding Roman urbanitas. This character, coupled with Ovid’s later exile, allows his texts to be read from the perspective of a literary and political questioning: the elegy, which refers to the present, to youth and to a multifaceted reality, as a model of prestige, is in opposition to the Virgilian epic, which focuses on the past, old age and an idealized representation of history (Gonza´lez Iglesias 1997: 73). Ironically, this hierarchical distinction between genres appears to point to the reiterated recusationes that Ovid incorporates, for example, in the ﬁrst poems in each of the three books comprising his Amores, alluding to the deferral of his dedication to epic or tragedy. Faced with the rhetorical afﬁliation to the prevailing system of genres and the ideological veneration of Augustus, ‘[t]he structuring of the love elegy in a coherent literary form to the world of the city seems to violently collide with the cultural project of Augustan restoration’ (Labate 1984: 43). Ovid’s elegy becomes more stylized in order to make itself, paradoxically, more real (Luck 1993: 161).

Why did Juan Ruiz use Ovid? If, as we have seen, Ovid is an author whose rhetorical mastery lies in the domain of cultural references and of literary genre, and the corpus eroticum reveals itself as a celebration of the complex Roman urbanitas, how should we view the relevance of Ovid in the fourteenth century, when his cultural system, his literary genre and the public that shared the Roman urbanitas had disappeared many centuries before?20 It remains for us, then, to consider how the Libro de Buen Amor adapts the use of Ovidian texts. In other words, how this reception materializes and what the function of such imitation is. In order to conduct this examination, we analyse three texts from the Libro that correspond to the recommendations given by Don Amor to the Archpriest to help the latter remedy his amorous failures. In these texts, we ﬁnd advice about love that

20 If we focus on the example of the persistence of Latin elegy as a literary genre in the context of Juan Ruiz, the existence of a literary genre as such can be barely perceived: the manuscripts of authors such as Catullus, Propertius or Tibullus are rarities prior to the 14th century, and in this same century they only began to be known within the ambit of certain Italian humanists.

321 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER appears in both the Ars amatoria and the Libro and whose content is clearly similar but is shaped using tones and references of a very different nature: Ovid gives examples through the learned code of mythology, while Juan Ruiz does so through proverbs and exempla from numerous traditions — from fabliaux to compendia of sayings and proverbs in stories of Oriental origin. Both use the same content and the same means of providing examples but, while one uses a learned tradition, the other uses a mixture of popular tones and registers.

The ﬁrst example shows how Juan Ruiz starts from the reformulation of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 Ovidian counsel to then incorporate it into the jocular and exuberant style of the Libro de Buen Amor:

Sing, if you have a voice; 515. Si sabes estrumentes bien tan˜er e templar, si sabes e¨ avienes en if your arms are lithe, fermoso cantar, a las vegadas, poco, en onesto lugar, do la mujer teöya, dance; please by whatever non dexes de provar. gifts you can. 516.Sı¨ una cosa sola a la mujer non muda, muchas cosas juntadas fazerte¨ The Art of Love I, han gran ayuda; desque lo oye la duenã mucho¨ en ello cuída; non puede 595-59621 ser que a tiempo a bien no te recuda. 517. Con una flaca cuerda non alçara´sgrand tranca, nin por un solo ‘¡harre!’ non corre bestia manca:a la penã pesada non mueve una palan- ca,con cunõs e almadanas poco a poco se arranca.

In referring to similar advice, we observe an indication of the Ovidian source used by Juan Ruiz — probably not Ovid’s original text, as critics maintain, but an adap- tation of certain Latin pseudo-Ovidia from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or a compendium, despite the anaphora that both texts share in the first two verses.22 However, the inclusion of Ovidian advice is only the beginning of its amplification in couplet 516, which is resolved with ‘another series of proverbs and sayings’ (Corominas 1973: 214) in the following verse. This is how Ovid appears, then. However, he proves to be the catalyst for the playful luxuriance of a Libro de Buen Amor that ‘largely owes to the cazurrıá of Castilian minstrels its distinctive qualities, its jovial confidence, its sceptical and malicious humour, this enjoyable confusion, which we should see as belonging to the minstrel cazurro of the 15th century’ (Meneńdez Pidal 1957: 204). Juan Ruiz, therefore, forms part of a literary system very distinct to that of Ovid, with a model of transmission that incorporates numerous communicative contexts — including the representational orality of the minstrel — and a varied public that moves freely between the learned and popular worlds. Given this variety of situations, there is a degree of consensus regarding the miscellaneous structure of the Libro, which should be seen as a compilation of texts and exercises that its author wrote throughout his lifetime.

21 Ovid (1985:, 232). 22 Burkard maintains that the main source of this fragment is the Pseudo-Ars (v. 31-34). However, a textual comparison does not appear to produce conclusive results (1999: 77).

322 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE

While Ovid’s concise style leads him to advance rapidly, from the fourth verse, to observation of the effectiveness of feigned drunkenness, Juan Ruiz stops to scrutin- ize the linguistic possibilities of the previous advice. The Archpriest, however, does not waste the opportunity to refer to the role of wine and drunkenness in the courtship of a lady — to which he dedicates a lengthy discussion (528-549)— with a warning summarized in the following verse:

548. Es el vino muy bueno en su mesma natura, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 Muchas bondades tiene si s’ toma con mesura; Al que de ma´s lo beve sa´calo de cordura: Toda maldat del mundo faze e toda locura;

This change in approach to advice on wine from Ovid to Juan Ruiz can be considered to have many different causes. However, within the medieval text, the reference to moderation is signiﬁcant (548b) and constantly appears in the recommendations of Don Amor. According to Jacques Joset, moderation appears in the Libro de Buen Amor as an already secularized biblical virtue, as a remedy ‘against that unstable world portrayed by the Archpriest, a world of original sin and the old world of decadent feudalism’ (2003). This connection between moderation and the medieval religious code reveals a distinct relationship between the texts of Juan Ruiz and Ovid with their respective moral frames. This can also be seen in the approach to Don Amor, as revealed by the start of his dialogue — or, rather, quarrel — with the Archpriest. Thus, before he presents his lessons, the Archpriest attacks the deceitful, licentious character of Don Amor — along with various discourses on the capital sins and the fables associated with sins. By the time he reaches this dialogue, the Archpriest, as the protagonist of his book, has become wary due to the failure of his ﬁrst three adventures. Indeed, his status as an apprentice also represents a divergence away from the presentation of the Ovidian I as magister amoris. It could be said that, from this I that dominates the code of love, Ovid makes the moral malleability of the Roman urbanitas productive while the Archpriest puts the normative, restrictive moral paradigm under tension from a satirical, ironic standpoint.23

23 Hence the difficulty for critics to distinguish between the moral discourse propounded by the Libro de Buen Amor and the debates surrounding the central role of irony, the defence of morality linked to the prologue in the prose that Juan Ruiz added in the 1343 edition or the mixture of tones and ambiguities throughout the different literary materials brought together in the Libro. The very use of buen amor in the fourteenth century is neither unambiguous nor definitive. De Ferraresi points out how, following the identification of buen amor with the troubadour fin’amors in the twelfth century, there is a certain distan- cing that increases the ambiguous nature of the former. In the era of the Archpriest, buen amor excludes lust but combines the love for God with the love for material goods, the love between man and woman and the love for one’s children (1976: 164), and it is, therefore, fair to identify it partly with loco amor. Moreover, as the Libro itself attests,

323 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER

The second example provides many instances of the different relationships that the texts weave with their respective moral contexts and the change in cultural references of both texts. Accordingly, we have chosen those analogies and examples that recommend being insistent with a loved one in order to win the coveted prize:

What is harder than rock, what 526. Muy blanda e¨s el agua e da en puedra muy dura: softer than water? Yet soft water muchas vegadas dando fazegrand cavadura; por hollows out hard rock. Only granduso¨ el rudo sabe grande letura; mujer mucho persevere; you will overcome seguida olvida la cordura. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 Penelope herself; late, as you see, did Pergamus fall, yet fall it did. The Art of Love I, 475-47824

In this example, we ﬁnd an almost literal translation of an Ovidian couplet in verses 526ab of the Libro — although it is debatable as to whether these proceed directly from Ovid himself or are contaminated through a Gnostic proverb (Corominas 1973; Cuartero 2002). However, Ovid’s subsequent reference to Penelope and Pergamus in Homeric texts is replaced by a scholastic aphorism — por gran uso¨ el rudosabe gran letura — that appears to parody the lasciviousness evoked in the previous verses, followed by a return to the theme of courtship, ‘thus showing us what had been his primary inspiration’ (Corominas 1973: 216). While in the Ars amatoria the anchoring in Greco-Latin tradition is a code shared with the public, in the Libro the reference to scholasticism serves to situate a moral framework to which the text conﬂictually relates itself through the other verses of the stanza. Something similar occurs in the third example, which advises on the necessary discretion of the lover:

The barbarous Phasian by means of her own children avenged 564. De una cosa te guarda quando amares alguna: the crime of her spouse and wedlock’s broken law. Another non te sepa que¨ amas otra mujer ninguna, terrible parent is this swallow that you behold: look, her breast si non, todo tu afa´n es sombra de la luna, is stained with blood. This it is loosens loves that are well e¨ es como quien siembra en rı´o o en laguna. compact and strong; these are sins to be feared by cautious husbands. Yet my ruling does not condemn you to one woman alone: heaven forfend! Even a young bride can hardly secure this. Have your sport, but let modest deception veil the fault. The Art of Love II, 381-38925

buen amor is frequently associated with deceit and the transformation brought about by falling in love (1976: 166). Joset traces the layers of meanings of the buen amor to the buena voluntad in Agustin through the emergence of its use in courtly love and the Goliards: ‘the Archpriest wanted to play all of them with the weapons of malice, irony and the verbal genius of ambiguity’ (2003). 24 Ovid (J. H. Mozley, The Loeb Classical Library, 1985). 25 Ibid.

324 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE

Ovid’s reference to Medea evolves, in the Libro de Buen Amor, into a mixture of classical proverb and saying (564cd), whose possible transmission is traced by Cuartero (2002) in the anthologies and compendia of maxims that Juan Ruiz could have used, such as the Disticha Catonis (568c, among others) or Geremia da Montagnone’s Compendium moralium notabilium.This is just one of the many clues to the study of proverbs in the Libro, in which maxims, sayings and proverbs are not distinguished from each other in the final result. Apart from the textual sources from which they came, such references establish the cultural framework of recognition Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 between the author and the public that finally distances itself from the framework that the Ovidian textual effect could support in his literary system. Accordingly, a close reading of the reception of the Ovidian text in the Libro de Buen Amor reveals an appropriation of the Latin author by Juan Ruiz. Bearing in mind that every appropriation entails a re-writing and, above all, implies an object- ive, we need to ask ourselves what the function of such an imitation is. In Ovid, Juan Ruiz sees an author who allows him to emphasize the playful and ambiguous nature of the text, deepening its connection with Goliardic poetry (Lecoy 1938; Meneńdez Pelayo 1944; Rico 1967). We have already argued that part of Ovid’s prestige from the twelfth century on, to which the corpus eroticum refers, lies in his appropriation by writers and poets who, like the Goliards, present a type of literary or religious heterodoxy. Indeed, the elegiac comedies, a genre that provided the Archpriest with some of his most abundant sources, are usually presented as ‘satirical tales or fables contain- ing moral or political criticism. Invectives against clerics, monks, rulers, teachers and so forth hide behind titles such as De lupo, De prediculo, De uentre and so forth, while the Ovidian mask and thematic concealment protect the author against open conflicts’ (Kretschmer 2013: 273). Ultimately, Juan Ruiz’s literary system provided him with an Ovid who possesses authority and is known. This helps the public recognize the loans used by the Archpriest but, in turn, presents conflicts and moral inconsistencies. Moreover, Ovid transfers to Juan Ruiz his proximity to the materi- ality and concretion of the represented world; meeting-places, types of characters, gestures and customs, taboos and codes refer in both authors to a type of corollary of social scenes through courtship. Therefore, although they each refer to different social contexts, both make a similar gesture in the representation of their respective worlds.26 We should also mention the way in which the Ovidian roots help to highlight the fundamental ambiguity of every sign that extends throughout most of the Libro de Buen Amor — ‘dual writing’, as GarcıáU´ nica terms it (2007) —, and that leads to a

26 It is not, as Margaret Parker, after Fra¨nkel (1969), suggests (1991), that both inhabit a comparable moment of transition that leads them to propose convergent textual re- sponses, since such an approach would establish an unusual determinism between historical structures and their literary representation. What can be compared between the two authors is, rather, a literary gesture of negotiation with a moral framework.

325 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER hermeneutical conﬂict: despite the fact that codes are shared, the meanings diverge — we only have to recall the text’s parodic games and the mixture of slang, saying, maxims, linguistic registers, and even languages. The rhetorical duality with which the Libro plays with the meaning of words links up with Ovid as a medieval maestro of rhetoric, especially in his command of ambiguity. Examples of this dual rhetoric can be found throughout Ovid’s work: the inverted couplets in the Amores; the contradictory advice about love so characteristic of the variatio of the love elegy;

and so on. Hence, also, the importance that the Libro as a whole attaches to the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 mastery of the art of the word, which allows for masking and unveiling at the same time: ‘Las del buen Amor son razones encobiertas:/trabaja do´ fallares las sus senãles ciertas’ (68ab).27 In this context, the reference to Ovid, an Ovid not literal but diffuse and mixed with other sources, functions as an intensifier of the ambiguity that dominates the style, literary ascription, and moral message of the Libro de Buen Amor. However, as Gerli has shown, the hermeneutics of the sign that informs the Libro connects with a long and deep Augustinian current, one that starts with the De doctrina Christiana and the De magistro, and which locates the truth sought in all interpretive quests within the reader (lex intima) and not in the signifying capacity of the isolated sign: ‘individuals cannot be taught truth, only led to find it within themselves by exercising their intellect and memory to discover it, a conclusion which is echoed in the theme of the accessus-prologue of the Libro’(2016: 62–63). This interpretive key displaces the ambiguity of the Ovidian ascription to a second- ary place and assigns it a new function, as if it were transposed or dislocated by being superimposed by an unforeseen code. Thus, as we can see, beyond recognition of the Ovidian allusion and citation in certain passages of the Libro, that Ovid plays an active role in Juan Ruiz’s text, negotiating the differences that separate the two texts. Unlike Ovid, more playful, elegant, sensual and irreverent, Juan Ruiz is more abrupt, dramatic, excessive, and gestural. Unlike Ovid, who formed part of the learned literary sphere, Juan Ruiz makes as his own the verse characteristic of the mester de clerecıá — the cuadernavıá, although with frequent metric variants and a near infinite repertoire of rhymes — when this had already fallen into decline, using it to provide materials for the popular minstrel tradition. Unlike Ovid, who created his books from brief scenes of appreciable rhetorical concision, Juan Ruiz opts for long narrative units, extend- ing the versions taken from the sources he imitates — his translation of the Pamphilus, for example, transformed the original 780 verses into no fewer than

27 A recurring appeal to the responsibility of the reader to detect the plurality of meanings in the Libro, which may recall Ovid’s justiﬁcation of the Ars amatoria in the Tristia: ‘In the same way, it is clear that my poem, when read with good intention, can deceive nobody’ (T. II 275-276).

326 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE

1,528. Thus, the reception of Ovid by Juan Ruiz, far from being a friendly integration, in a way presents itself as a resistance to Ovid.28

Conclusion: reception as resistance The Belgian literary scholar Raymond Trousson, in a course devoted to his studies of the persistence of certain themes in western literature and the reception of the classical tradition, proposed that, once quotes and themes have been identified, why and how they appear should then be explained: ‘it is not what is said but that with Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 which it is said’ (Guilleń 1985: 235). In a way, Trousson invites us to suspect that the literal recognition of the classical sources and themes in texts outside their context is not simply a repetition of such themes and sources. For his part, Rene´ Wellek, in his celebrated lecture of 1958, ‘The Crisis of Comparative Literature’, also points out the need to go beyond the study of the genetic influence of one author or text on another, and invites us to consider the fundamental lack of transparency that every quotation includes, restoring to both source and quotation their respective historicity.29 Accordingly, then, we have addressed the influence of Ovid on the Libro del Buen Amor, evincing the diversity of its respective historical texts and thereby highlight- ing how the collision and resistance between the two, and not just the assimilation or transposition of fragments, makes the appearance of a particular Ovid possible. Comparative literature achieves a certain objectivity, suggests Wellek, only when it assumes a certain historical relativism. In the Libro, Ovid is used to refer to a repertoire of tones and themes recognizable by the reading public of the fourteenth century, and also to examine in greater depth the playful, heterodox and ambiguous nature of the Archpriest’s literary aesthetics. Ultimately, if Juan Ruiz’s Ovid is a disembodied Ovid distanced from his context, it is necessary to recover the effects of Ovid’s original text in order to compare them with the effects of the imitation of such texts fourteen centuries later. The appropriation of Ovid appears, therefore, as a resistance to Ovid in that, as we have seen, its integration into the Archpriest’s text implies a distortion of the Ovidian text in terms of cultural references, poetic genre and even the effects of the text integrated into his system of literary coordinates. Reception as resistance appears here as not only appropriation and re-writing of a

28 In light of all the information gathered up to now, it seems to us difﬁcult to establish the parallels and divergences that, according to Margaret Parker (1991), exist between the literary presuppositions (aesthetic, historic, generic) of Ovid and Juan Ruiz. 29 As the Argentine professor Nora Catelli recalls, ‘there is no reading that is not a location or date’ (2015). Therefore, a change of location and moment also changes the perspective of the reading. As Salvatore Settis suggests in The Future of the Classical, we therefore need to be surprised when faced with the traces of the classical, to be suspicious of its familiarity and to recover the contradictions of its historicity: in other words, to convert it into ‘another place’ (2006: 118) that is much more productive for its validity and con- temporaneity than its treatment as a monument without history.

327 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER text, but also as intervention on the textual effect caused by the use of Ovid as a convention in fourteenth-century Spanish. This is why the analysis of reception begins by explaining the differences in literary presuppositions in both texts, but is not exhausted by this explanation, and must also include the aesthetic functioning of Ruiz’s text. In this case, reception functions as a use and rejection of Ovid as textual effect: the use of Ovid functions in the Libro as a way of gaining access to a ﬁguration of the amorous tradition and a problematic relation with authority; moreover, Juan

Ruiz’s text re-orders the semiotic and aesthetic materials in such a way that they Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 point to a fundamental tension with the function that the literary system proclaims as figuration in Ovid. It is not simply a slip, based on the versatility of the Latin writer, or a parody, that is, some type of intertextual relation; rather, it is a collision between uses, effects, and conventions.30 In this regard, the incorporation within a modern critique of the notion of the ‘Ovidian root’ points to the plurality of interpolations of the texts used by the Archpriest but also to its insufficiency. In this article, we have wished to go one step further and change the perspective of the traditional question, ‘What is the influence of Ovid on the Libro de Buen Amor?’ to: ‘Is it possible to consider a relationship between the texts separated by fourteen centuries that does not refer to a distortion and resistance between the two?’ and, in doing so, passing from a view of Ovid as a source or repertoire to the use of Ovid as a convention, and from the unitary Ovid to the dispersion of texts and fragments, original and apocryphal, which constructs the figuration of the Latin author from his transmission during the Middle Ages.31 Thus, the diversity of styles, intentions, genres and contexts, far

30 In all reception as resistance there is an affirmative gesture and another of opposition. As Gerli points out, the Libro often makes this dual gesture through parody and polyglossia: ‘Although the Canonical Hours, the Bible, Aristotle, astrology, the Averroists, and the most expert handling of rhetoric are unimpeachably present in the Libro del Arcipreste, they are pushed over the edge by a wit that no longer fully accepts the inviolate authority of any of them, yet one which wants the reader both to recognize their original value as well as their potential for gross misunderstanding, when met head-on by the possibilities of the vernacular’ (2016: 158). However, in the case of a root like the Ovidian, conven- tionalized as the dissemination of literary functions, we cannot speak of parody because a clearly bivocal approach does not exist; rather, the interaction between codes leads to the functionalization of convention based on the textual effect. 31 As noted earlier, Guilleń(1979) opposes the notion of convention as collective habit with that of influence, which has an individual effect. The author also differentiates convention as productive in the present of the literary system as the sedimentation of uses in the past. This idea of convention is more productive for considering the inconsistent, distorted and ambiguous presence of Ovid in the Libro tan that of the ‘literary model’ or ‘Ovidian tradition’ as suggested by Parker (1991) and adopted by Gerli (2016). Both authors claim that the presence of Ovid in the Libro goes beyond the mere appearance of the Latin writer’s corpus and even that of the pseudo-Ovidia, and which should be associated more with the use of Ovid as the figuration of a literary model. However, this

328 RECEPTION AS RESISTANCE from being seen as an obstacle, seems an inevitable and fruitful phenomenon for his survival. Eric Auerbach had already pointed in this direction when, in 1951, in ‘Philology of Weltliteratur’, he noted that the core of comparative literature consisted of the paradoxical process of equalizing and separating the texts being compared, and that such a process should reveal the ‘cross-fertilization of diversity’ (2005: 117). Thus, for example, the moral context in which both authors are set is not comparable: the

urbanitas of imperial Rome is governed by certain codes of conduct that are radically Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/crj/article/10/3/312/5009395 by guest on 28 September 2021 different from fourteenth century Castilian Christianity. Therefore, the texts represent these moral codes and their possibilities through highly diverse literary strategies — tones, characters, genres. And yet, in this diversity, Ovid is important to the Archpriest. As we have seen, Ovid serves the Archpriest by suggesting a comparable gesture of celebration and moral ambiguity vis-a´-vis the context. Leaving aside the inevitable differences between the two works, therefore, the reception of Ovid in the Libro de Buen Amor seems to suggest a meaningful relationship. In some way, this process allows us to become aware that there is no such thing as passive imitation: every reception implies an intervention, a re-reading that pursues an effect and responds to a convention that is generally situated outside the specific text — in the literary system — but which only the specific text allows to be established. The literary scholar Claudio Guilleń summed it up perfectly: ‘the one- off or isolated influence only gains meaning in relation to the system in which it is set’ (1979: 89). The Ovid of the Archpriest is not the Ovid of the time of Augustus, since the literary system of the fourteenth century confers on him a position and function different to those he was accorded in the first century. However, such displaced use and presence makes his reincarnation as a classical author possible.

References F. Accorsi, ‘El Pamphilus de Juan Ruiz’, in L. Haywood and F. Toro, et al. (eds), Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, y el Libro de Buen Amor. II Congreso Internacional. Congreso homenaje a Alan Deyermond (Alcala´ la Real, 2–7 May 2007) (Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2012) http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmc000r1 [accessed April 2018]. J. L. Arcaz Pozo, ‘Presencia manuscrita de las obras amatorias de Ovidio en Espanã’, in J. J. Arcaz Pozo, et al. (eds), La obra amatoria de Ovidio (Madrid: Ediciones Cla´sicas, 1996), pp. 41–62. ——, ‘Las obras amatorias de Ovidio en los manuscritos de Espanã’, PhD Thesis, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, 2002. E. Auerbach, ‘Filologia De La Weltliteratur’, L’Espill 21 (2005), pp. 117–26. L. Born, ‘Ovid and Allegory’, Speculum 9, no. 4 (1934), pp. 362–79. R. Burkard, The Archpriest of Hita and the Imitators of Ovid: A Study in the Ovidian Background of the ‘Libro De Buen Amor’ (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1999). N. Catelli, ‘Academias: los equı´vocos del comparatismo en el mundo (hispańico)’, Chuy. Revista de Estudios Literarios Latinoamericanos 2.2 (2015), pp. 34–44. http://revistachuy.com.ar/wp-content/ uploads/RevistaChuy_2_2_Catelli_Academias.pdf [accessed April 2018].

afﬁrmation appears aimed at suggesting a conscious use of a continuous, homogenous use in the Libro, while Juan Ruiz used and mobilized conventions much more plural in origin, among which Ovid as convention appears as a dissemination of available functions.

329 VI´ CTOR ESCUDERO AND NU´ RIA GO´ MEZ LLAUGER

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