The Libro de Buen Amor (Book of good love) is a masterly work, made up in worms primarily, by some Juan Ruiz, Archiprêtre of Hita in 1330 or 1343.
It is about a composition of approximately 1700 stanzas in cuaderna vía (stanzas of four worms Spanish alexandrines - with 14 metric syllables - to rhyme consonante), typical of the Mester de Clerecía to which it belongs, preceded by a prolog/sermon in prose. The author - whose name and identity remain ignored and disputed - fact of following one another of the narrative and lyric parts at the origins and the varied set of themes.
The discussion thread of this splendid (but complex) fresco in worms is the wrongfully autobiographical course in love with the protagonist-narrator, the archpriest of Hita, which connects various adventures in love at the conclusion disastrous for the majority of them (only one of them, leads to one supposed marriage, ventures in which the archpriest is substituted by a parodic character, gift Melón of Huerta, sior Melon of the garden). These women are various conditions and origins, and constitute of this fact of the alive and varied portraits of the woman of XIVe century.
The narrator justifies his passion for the women by three essential reasons:
- nature (the man saw to reproduce, and, so to couple itself with a pleasant woman, taking again and transforming the principles exposed by Aristote in Of Animated ),
- stars (while calling once again in Aristote and the ancient philosophers),
- the habit (young people take all pleasure to covet the women).
The various adventures are intersected by various episodes, of erudite inspiration (tradition ovidienne, Pamphilus ) or popular (carnavalesque and goliardic tradition). Each adventure puts in scene a certain number of more or less pleasant characters (amongst other things the intermediary, topics of the literature medieval Castilian), and is illustrated by various tales or fables in worms of various origins.
One will retain among these episodes the argument between the archpriest and Lord Amour, which is the occasion for the protagonist to deplore his misfortunes in love, due according to him, with the perversity of the love itself: lie, fraud, sin would characterize according to him this feeling. Lord Amour, allegorical character, undertake for his answer a keen defense of the feeling in love, and an exposure of the virtues of this one, while offering to the archpriest a true handbook of the conquest in love, according to principles quite far away from morals: deception and the intermediary constitute the main components of them.
The central part of work is occupied by one diverting carnavalesque cycle, where the inversion reigns as an absolute mistress. The archpriest, on the way leading it to Segovia, comes from there to pass by collars of mountain where the meeting with four mountain occurs. The pastourelle one parodies, these parts see the archpriest in prey with the desires of the four pushing back women, with the physique and with moral contrary to the traditional image of femininity, who monnayent by the body the passage of the coll the man does not allure more, but is allured, the love is not more love but bestiality. Follows a pilgrimage with co. Marie of the Ford, in period of Easter. The Virgin, Passion, water are as many vectors of purification, after this initiatory rite which has occurred in the most hostile mountain, of the mediums for the man of the Middle Ages. Following that, the author introduces a part, inspired of a French original: the Battle of Lord Charnage and the Lent. Carnavalesque allegory opposing the forces of excesses suitable for the carnival (composed of troops of hams, sausages, roasted and other oxen taken along by Charnage, a male character), to the powers of the abstinence incarnated by the troops of fish, molluscs and shellfish directed by Lent Lady. The battle is completed by the victory provisional of the latter, driven out, once Passover returned, and spent the time of the abstinence. The return of Charnage signs the triumph of Lord Amour.
The whole constitutes a kind of exposure didactic of the dangers (moral, spiritual,…) carnal love, through an exemplary succession. He wants to be a kind of ode to the good love, which one can hear like divine love (of God) or profane love (but stripped of the bestiality of the purely carnal love). The course in love with the archpriest seems to be then a kind of metaphor of the spiritual advance having to lead to the love of god or caritas , and to the hello of the heart. The work, written by a clerk, and intended for ecclesiastics, abounds indeed in religious references. The topic of the sin omnipresent, is treated in particular at the time of two sequences, one bearing on the capital sins, and the other on the weapons of the Christian. Work opens in addition, like often in the literature, on an invocation with Christ. But, more still speaking, the Virgin Mary is sung at the beginning, the medium and the end of the work, impregnating her presence the work. We are then in full period of expansion of the worship marial, and the Virgin, who intercedes near Christ, fact appears of guide in the career in love with the archpriest, and that spiritual of the reader. With the image of the protagonist amending himself with the wire of his adventures, and his trainings, the reader makes the experiment of the search of a love, the divine love, located above the ideal love between man and woman (not condemned by the Church, and source of innumerable medieval literary productions), and rejecting any form of bestiality.
However, as of the beginning, the author informs the reader of the ambiguity of his work and suggests to him showing understanding in order to distinguish the deep sense of the Book of good love. Ambiguity is indeed one of the great characteristics of the book: Does Juan Ruiz seek to sow the reader on the dangerous ways of the love vitiated by the exposure of these literary parts where it is made a broad place with the defects and the defects of the man-sinner? Or seeks he contrary persuading of the advantages to the " good amour" by putting at severely tested the judgment readers? The researchers still did not slice: grotesque parody and " libertine" on behalf of a licencieux man? Or initiatory labyrinth for the most informed readers, only able to bore the surface layer of the speech and to draw substancielle marrow from it?
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