Cantigas d ' escarnho and serranillas : The Allegory of Careless Love
1991; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1475382912000368247
ISSN1469-3550
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: ALLEGORYCANTIGAS D’ESCARNHO/CANTIGAS DE ESCARNIOLIBRO DE BUEN AMOR [J. RUIZ]LOVE [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]*PORTUGAL — LITERATURE — MEDIEVAL PERIOD — DRAMA/THEATRE & POETRYRUIZ, JUAN [ARCIPRESTE DE HITA] (1283?–1350?)SERRANILLAS Notes 1. Spanish Literary Historiography: Three Forms of Distortion (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter, 1967), 20. 2. This type of literature is dangerous, for it threatens scholarly objectivity and, by its very timelessness, takes away the comfortable lens of history. 3. Pierre Bec, Burlesque et obscénité chez les troubadours (Paris: Stock, 1984), 173–75. Bec gives the following translation of the text on the right: ‘Quand le pet du cul vente / D'oú ma Dame chie et vesse, / Il semble que je sente / Une puanteur de pisse / D'une horrible saignante / Qui toujours de moi se raille, / Qui est plus riche en pets / Que de maravedis, / Et quand elle est couchée sur sa pisse, / Elle put plus que toute autre serpente’ (175). It is interesting to note that the first line represents an emendatio ope ‘ingeniï by Bec (and other editors) from ‘pel de cul’ to ‘petz de cul’. The rules for editing serious texts apply to obscene texts as well: ‘Nous acceptons … l’émendation proposée de petz, en relation sémantique avec le verbe ventar, et le vers 7’ (175, n. to 1. 1). 4. Bernardus Gordonius, Lilium Medicinae (1300), ed. of 1495, after Dennis P. Seniff, ‘Bernardo Gordonio's Libro de medicina: A Possible Source of Celestina?’, Celestinesca, X, (1986), 13–18 (at p. 16). On Gordonius, see Luke E. Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon: Professor and Practitioner, Studies and Texts 51 (Toronto: Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980). There is a growing bibliography on amor hereos. John Livingston Lowes, ‘ “The Loveres Maladye of Hereos” ‘, MP, XI [1913–14], 491–546, is generally considered the seminal modern contribution, but see the earlier article by Hjalmar Crohns: ‘Zur Geschichte der Liebe als “Krankheit” ‘, AKG, III (1905), 66–86. The first Hispanist to deal with the topic in medieval Castilian letters, so far as I know, was F. A. de Armas (‘La Celestina: An Example of Love Melancholy’, RR, LXVI [1975], 288–95). For Golden-Age Castile see John Thomas Cull, Love Melancholy in the Spanish Pastoral Novel (Diss., U of Illinois-Urbana, 1984); John Dagenais, ‘El amor y el proceso creador en Lope de Vega’, Anuario de Letras, XXI (1983), 223–-36; and Daniel L. Heiple, ‘The “Accidens Amoris” in Lyric Poetry’, Neophilologus, LXVII (1983), 55–64. Mary Frances Wack has recently devoted several useful studies to the topic. See n. 7. 5. In its acknowledgement that there are some people who take delight in hearing filthy and illicit things, Gordonius’ text also gives us the beginnings of what Glending Olson has called the ‘recreational justification’ for literature (Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U.P., 1982], especially 90–127). If Avicenna is correct, obscene literature may provide delectatio as well as utilitas. 6. Bec (175, n. to 1. 5) proposes another emendation—'d'una velha sagnenta’—which brings us still closer to Gordonius’ text. 7. On the relation between these medical texts and the ‘real world’ see Mary Frances Wack, ‘The Liber de heros morbo of Johannes Afflacius and its Implications for Medieval Love Conventions’, Speculum, LXII (1987), 324–44. Although most students of amor hereos in literature have tended to take the medical texts as merely an extension of themes found in the love literature of the Middle Ages (a view certainly encouraged by Gordonius’ frequent citation of Ovid), Wack argues that amor hereos was perceived as a genuine disease which physicians interested in the health of their patients sought to cure. ‘When these “symptoms” [of love madness] then appeared in literary texts, a work such as the Liber de heros morbo may have enabled audiences to construe the ambiguous play of literary conventions … in light of technical and pragmatic knowledge. Literary love conventions need not have remained a self-enclosed, self-referential aesthetic game once medical diagnoses had revealed their applicability to the real world of passion and death’ (343). 8. For the Libro de miseria d’omne, see the edition by Jane E. Connolly, Translation and Poetization in the Quaderna Vía: Study and Edition of the Libro de Miseria d’Omne (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1987), discussed below. There are many such passages in Llull's works. Perhaps the most well-known (because it later became a part of Llull's own legendary biography) is the story of the lustful bishop who is cured when the woman whom he is pursuing reveals to him her ‘camisa, que era sutza de sutzetat vergonyosa a nomenar’ (Ramon Llull, Obres essencials, 2 vols. [Barcelona: Editorial Selecta, 1957–1960], 1.427 [Libre de meravelles Book VIII, Chapter 71].One of my favourite examples of the use of the foulness of the beloved's body as a means of dissuasion from earthly passion appears in Juan Luis Vives’ treatise De lnstitutione Foeminae Christianae (1523) (see Opera, 2 vols. [Basel, 1555]). Vives recommends to all young women the example of a Barcelona woman who adopts a gentle but effective version of the doctor's final cure for the disease of love: ‘Fuit Barcini [femina], quae ut amatorem suum perditurn ad mentem reuocaret, brassicas putres sub axillis aliquandiu tenuit. Edit item brassicas crudas, et propius ad amatorem accedens, tanquam secretum colloquium expetens, teterrimo illo foetore in perpetuum ab se ilium absterruit, ac fugauit’ (Vives, Opera 2,688). Such techniques, of course, had long before formed the basis of Ovid's Remedia amoris. 9. J. Boutière, A. H. Schutz et al., Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XHIe et XlVe siècles, 2nd ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1973), 29. 10. J. Boutière, A. H. Schutz et al., Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XHIe et XlVe siècles, 2nd ed. (Paris: Nizet, 1973), p. 29, n. 1. See Judson B. Allen, ‘Commentary as Criticism: Formal Cause, Discursive Form, and the Late Medieval Accessus’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Lovaniensis: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Louvain 23–28 August 1971), ed. J. Ijsewijn and E. Kessler (Munich: Fink, 1973), 29–48 (36–37), for interesting comments on the ‘literalism’ of certain medieval readings and how they eventually produce new texts. 11. Throughout this study I use the term ‘allegory’ in the basic Isidorean sense: ‘Allegoria est alieniloquium. Aliud enim sonat, et aliud intellegitur.… Huius tropi plures sunt species, ex quibus eminent septem: ironia, antiphrasis, aenigma, charientismos, paroemia, sarcasmos, astysmos’ (Isidore of Seville, Etimologías, ed. José Orozco Reta, 2 vols. [Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1982], 1,37.22). This general meaning should not be confused with the more limited role of ‘quid credas’ which the term ‘allegory’ took in traditional biblical exegesis. 12. Indeed we must take Boutière/Schutz to task again, for it is clear that the bawdy tale of Bernart's voyeurism refers to the entire first stanza, not just to the first three lines: ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover / de joi sas alas contra.1 rai, / que s'oblid'e.s laissa chazer / per la doussor c'al cor li vai, / ai! tan grans enveya m'en ve / de cui qu'eu veya jauzion, / meravilhas ai, car desse / lo cor de dezirer no.m fon’ (Martín de Riquer, Los trovadores, 3 vols. [Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975], 1,384–85). 13. For a larger view of this process see Elizabeth Wilson Poe, From Poetry to Prose in Old Provençal: The Emergence of the Vidas, the Razos, and the Razos de trobar (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 1984). 14. Cited in Lexicon Latinitatis Medii Aevi, ed. Albert Blaise (Turnholt: Typographi Brepols, 1975), under ‘aequivocatio’. The Galician-Portuguese arte de trobar also allows me to continue my argument that escarnho, even in its more obscene examples, was somehow thought to be useful. In contrasting the cantigas de joguete d’arteiro and the risadilha with the cantigas de escarnho and the cantigas de mal dezir, the author says that the former contain ‘no wisdom or any other good’. This seems to me to imply that the latter two types of cantiga are themselves seen as containing some wisdom and good. 15. The ‘tent’ does have a long history of erotic significance in Hispanic poetry. Ibn Quzman (d. 1160) uses the image quite explicitly in a zajal not at all far removed in spirit from the poem we are discussing: ‘Hardly had I beheld that leg / And those two lively, lively eyes / When my penis arose in my trousers like a pavilion, / And made a tent out of my clothes’ (James T. Monroe, Hispano-Arabic Poetry: A Student Anthology [Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1974], no. 26, ll. 43–46 [266]). I wish to thank Gail Dagenais for bringing this passage to my attention. 16. 1 cite the translation by D. W. Robertson, Jr., On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 84. 17. The opposite situation is also accounted for by Augustine: ‘… a further warning must be added lest we wish to take literal expressions as though they were figurative. Therefore a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established. And generally this method consists in this: that whatever appears in the divine Word that does not literally pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative’ (OCD 3.14, ed. cit., 87–88). The limits to which this principle could be pushed are seen in allegorizations of David's adultery with Bathsheba and his role in the death of Uriah, her husband. Pseudo-Bede (early twelfth century) declared David to be a figure of Christ, Bathsheba stood for the Church, and Uriah represented the devil (presumably he would try to come between Christ and His Church). Honorius of Autun amplified this figurai reading by suggesting that Bathsheba's bathing (which led to David's crime) figured the baptism undergone by the faithful to cleanse them for their union with Christ. See A. J. Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar Press, 1984), 105. 18. I use Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam Nova Editio, eds. Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado, 5th ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1977). 19. I use Biblia Latina, cum Glossa Ordinaria Walafridi Strabonis et Interlineari Anselmi Laudunensis, 4 vols. (Strassburg, 1481), III:g3v. 20. I use Biblia Latina cum Postulis Hugonis de S. Charo, 7 vols. (Basel, 1498–1504), IV:H3r. I do not indicate abbreviations, transcribe the Tyronian et sign as ‘et’, and resolve ‘e with a cedilla’ in medieval fashion as ‘e’. 21. Hugh's mystical interpretation appears to be quite applicable to the errant prelate of the Galician-Portuguese poem, and we note with interest that the exodus of the Meestre's sons appears in the razo, not in the poem itself. The razo, then, curiously, adds a detail which brings the devastation of the Meestre's tent into closer parallel with the biblical verse and its moral significance for prelates. The addition of this detail suggests strongly that Jeremiah's escarnbo of Israel and medieval interpretation of it are yet one more referent in this already many-layered cantiga d’escarnho.Allegories of tents were extremely popular in medieval Castile. Those secular allegories found in the Libro de Alexandre (2375–24310) and the Libro de buen amor (1265–1301) no doubt drew part of their inspiration from the allegorical exposition of the tabernacle of Exodus 35–40. See, as a good illustration of the genre, the various Christian interpretations given in Alfonso's General estoria, primera parte, ed. Antonio G. Solalinde (Madrid: Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas, 1930), 1:484–88. Burgo de Osma, Ms. 82, contains, in addition to Peter of Poitiers’ Psalm commentary (Fridericus Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii Aevi, 11 vols. [Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1940–1980], no. 6783) which begins ‘Facies mihi temptorium in introitu tabernaculi’ (fol. 3r), a short treatise, written in what is probably a fourteenth-century Spanish hand entitled Collectio legum mosaycarum. This treatise (which I have not yet identified) also includes a brief exposition of the significance of the various parts of the tabernacle (2v). This manuscript is probably the one mentioned in the early fourteenth-century inventory of the cathedral library: ‘Item otra summa teologie que incipit’ ‘facies mihi temptorium’ (Timoteo Rojo Orcajo, ‘Catálogo descriptivo de los códices que se conservan en la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Burgo de Osma’, BRAH, XCIV [1929], 655–792; XCV [1929], 152–314 [at XCIV, 662]). That Peter of Poitiers uses the image of the tent as entrance to the tabernacle to write the prologue to his Psalm commentary may shed some light on Juan Ruiz's use of the term ‘prólogo’ in his own reference to Don Amor's tent: ‘non quiero de la tienda más prólogo fazer’ (1301d). 22. The bibliography of studies on the Archpriest's serranillas is too vast to cite here. In addition to the works I cite below, see Marina Scordilis Brownlee, ‘Permutations of the Narrator-Protagonist Configuration: the Serrana Episodes of the Libro de buen amor in Light of the Doña Endrina Sequence’, Romance Notes, XXII (1981), 98–101 (98–99), for a summary of the major critical positions taken on this section of the Libro. 23. I use the following edition for all citations from the Libro de buen amor: Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, ed. and intro. Alberto Blecua, Clásicos Universales Planeta, 57 (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1983). Future references will be included parenthetically in the text. 24. Montpellier: Centre d’Études de Recherches Sociocritiques, n.d. 25. Montpellier: Centre d’Études de Recherches Sociocritiques, n.d., 88. 26. De Lope also ponders why there are two paths: ‘Mais pourquoi deux chemins, et non plus un? Ce n'est pas au niveau dénotatif qu'on y comprendra grand-chose.’ She explains this mystery through reference to a Golden-Age poem in which ‘la mention d'un grand nombre de chemins peut exprimer le nombre de fois que l'acte sexuel a été réalisé’. De Lope also passes along an explanation offered her by Jacques Joset: ‘… ces deux sentiers sont sans doute aussi une métaphore des deux voies, également naturelles, mais dont l'une est peccamineuse, de l'accès érotique à la “serrana” ‘ (108, n. 16). 27. James F. Burke, ‘Juan Ruiz, the Serranas and the Rites of Spring’, JMRS, V (1975), 13–35. 28. The controversy concerning the extent to which the lyric serranillas represent an ‘idealization’ of the events recounted in the cuaderna vía sections is the starting point for R. B. Tate's ‘Adventures in the “sierra” ‘, in ‘Libro de Buen Amor’ Studies, ed. G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny (London: Tamesis, 1970), 219–29. My reading, which finds significance in the juxtaposition itself of two contrasting images of the fourth serrana, is in clear opposition to that proposed by Tate: ‘The purpose of each individual lyric is fairly clear, as is that of the sum total of the narratives, but juxtaposed they create no recognisably clear pattern other than that of exuberant variety’ (227). My own position is that in a culture as fond of juxtaposition of opposites and contrasts as that of medieval Europe we must recognize juxtaposition itself as a form of signification, that is, we must consider (even if we find no clear textual links) the fact that Juan Ruiz or someone else placed these two forms together to be of significance. My study offers one possible explanation of what is being signified in the case of the fourth serrana. On the theme of juxtaposition and serranas, I note two poems by Carvajales which show similar thematic juxtaposition in the Cancionero de Estúñiga. The first is a serranilla with (to me) clear debts to Juan Ruiz's final cuaderna vía ‘vestiglo’. The second (also considered to be a serranilla by Nancy F. Marino, ‘The Serranillas of the Cancionero de Stúñiga: Carvajales’ Interpretation of this Pastoral Genre’, REH, XV [1981], 43–57 [54]), immediately follows the first and describes another ‘ninna loçana’ full of ‘fermosura natural’ (cf. LBA, 1. 1024d, cited above) seen bathing ‘en una corte camisa’ (Cancionero de Estúñiga; Edición paleográfica, eds. Manuel and Elena Alvar [Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, 1981], 273–74 [nos. 151– 52], 11. 3, 7, and 6 [I regularize long ‘s’]). 29. Cf. 161 : ‘Una tacha le fallo al amor poderoso, / la qual a vós, dueñas, yo descobrir non oso; / mas, porque non me tengades por dezidor medroso, / es ésta: que el amor sienpre fabla mentiroso’ (italics mine). Still more germane to the topic under discussion is stz. 447ab: ‘Tres cosas non te oso agora descobrir, I son tachas encobiertas, de mucho maldezir’ (italics mine). Of course, Juan Ruiz gleefully reveals these tachas in the stanza immediately following, and the first of them (together with its link to things diabolic) is completely familiar by now: ‘Guarte que non sea bellosa ni barbuda: / ¡atal media pecada el huerco la saguda!’ (448ab). 30. Blecua translates 1020d as ‘No te quiero relatar más, porque irás a contarlo por todas partes, cambiando mi relato’. It is interesting, then, to read these lines in the context of the epilogue to the vision of that other messenger, St John of Patmos (22:18–19): ‘Si quis apposuerit ad haec, apponet Deus super ilium plagas scriptas in libro isto. Et si quis diminuent de verbis libri prophetiae huius, auferet Deus partem eius de libro vitae …’ 31. I use the following edition: Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1973). Among other interesting parallels between Dante's dream vision and the serrana sequence are the coldness of the morning which forms the background of the episode (‘Ne l'ora che non può'l calor diurno / intepidar più ‘1 freddo de la luna’ [19.1–2]) and parallels the coldness of Juan Ruiz's sierra. There are verbal similarities as well. The serena introduces herself to Dante thus: ‘ “Io son,” cantava, “io son dolce serena, / che’ marinari in mezzo mar dismago” ‘(19.19–20). The first serrana introduces herself, ‘ Yo só la Chata rezia que a los omnes ata’ (952d). Although Burke does not cite Dante in evidence, I believe Dante's serena adds support to Burke's suggestion that Juan Ruiz was making a pun on the word ‘siren’ in these episodes (Burke 26–27). We should remember, too, that Dante is also in the ‘sierra’ in this passage and it is the month of March. 32. I use the edition by Connolly (see above n. 8), stanzas 36–37. I suppress italics used to indicate abbreviations in the edition and substitute a period for the raised dot. 33. If we agree that the ‘two-stage’ revelation is an essential part of the tradition to which Juan Ruiz is referring here, this becomes yet another argument for the presence of stanzas 1016–20, found in Ms. S but not in Ms. G, in the ‘first redaction’ of the Libro. On the question, see Joset's balanced note in his edition of the Libro (Clásicos Castellanos, 14 and 17, 2 vols. [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1974] 11,61, textual note 1016–20 and the bibliography cited there). See also the note to these lines in G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny's edition of the Libro (Madrid: Castalia, 1988), 323, n. 1016–20. 34. On the theme of clerical ‘marriage’ in the Libro de buen amor see Anthony Zahareas, ‘Celibacy in History and Fiction: The Case of the Libro de buen amor’, I&L, I (1977) No. 2, 77–82. See also his ‘Structure and Ideology in the Libro de buen amor’, La Coránica, VII (1979), 92–104, and Jesús Menéndez Peláez, El Libro de buen amor: ¿ficción literaria o reflejo de una realidad?, 2nd ed. (Gijón: Noega, 1980). All of this leads me to advance a reading of those delightful and vexing lines at the close of the Archpriest's book: ‘Buena propiedat á, doquiera que se lea, / que si lo oye alguno que tenga mujer fea, / o si muger lo oye, que su omne vil sea, / fazer a Dios serviçio en punto lo desea’ (stz. 1627). Without wishing to take away any of the fun of these lines, could we not also see them as referring to the man or woman who (in the course of reading the Archpriest's book) has seen through the veil of the flesh to the grotesque realities beneath and who has turned to the service of God? This reading gains in attractiveness when we see it as Juan Ruiz's own remedium to the situation he describes in stz. 404, in his ‘pelea’ with Don Amor: ‘Fazes por muger fea perder omne apuesto, /piérdase por omne torpe dueña de grand repuesto’ (italics mine). The version in Ms. G supports even more clearly the reading of stz. 1627 as a direct response to this stanza: ‘pierde se por vil omne dueña de grant rrepuesto’ (Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, eds. Manuel Criado de Val and Eric W. Naylor, 2nd ed. [Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1972], 111; I suppress special signs and indication of abbreviations; italics mine). 35. Portions of this study were presented at the International Medieval Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan (1988). I wish to thank William D. Paden for reading my paper as well as for his numerous helpful comments on it. I also wish to thank the readers at BHS for their many useful suggestions.
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