RUIZ, JUAN

(ca. 1283–ca. 1350)

While his work, theLibro de buen Amor(BOOK OF GOOD LOVE), is perhaps the most important long poetic text surviving from medieval Spain, Juan Ruiz remains a mystery, our only knowledge of him coming from certain autobiographical portions of his text. A miscellany of 12 poems, each focused on a different love affair, theBook of Good Lovecomprises fables, picaresque adventures in the first person, adaptations of Arab and classical tales, anticlerical satire, religious poems, and a vivid depiction of daily life in medieval Spain. For the variety, realism, and the earthiness of his work, Ruiz has sometimes been called “the Spanish CHAUCER.” According to his text, Ruiz was born in Alcalá de Henares, and was educated in Toledo.Here he likely became acquainted with the Muslim culture that profoundly influenced his book.He became a cleric and wrote lyrics to be sung by JONGLEURS.He is believed to have written the first version of his great work by 1330 while serving as archpriest in the village of Hita, some 30 miles east of his hometown of Alcalá. However, for some reason he ran afoul of his superior Gil de Albornoz, the archbishop of Toledo,who imprisoned him for some 13 years. The cause of his imprisonment is unknown, though if there is any truth behind the autobiographical sections of the poem suggesting Ruiz’s love affairs with nuns, the sentence may not have been unmerited. During his imprisonment, tradition has it, Ruiz composed the second, expanded version of theBook of Good Love, completed in or around 1343. All of this assumes that the autobiographical passages in the text are to be taken at face value. But modern scholars have raised doubts about their accuracy, and it has even been suggested that they are interpolations. The Ruiz of the text may be a persona, may even be a pseudonym for the real author. It has even been suggested that the imprisonment mentioned in the text is intended metaphorically, that the author never languished in an actual prison cell but may have been in a “prison” of old age or some such figurative place. Questions of authorship are only part of the ambiguity surrounding the text of theBook of Good Love. The work survives in three manuscripts, two of which preserve the 1330 version and one the 1243 version. The poem contains 1,728 verses, with a prevailingcuaderna víameter (lines of 14 syllables), though various lyrics are interspersed in the text representing some 15 other verse forms. It seems likely that the lack of unity in theLibrois an indication that Ruiz had written the various parts of the text at different times and ultimately assembled the somewhat disparate sections into the final work as we have it.

■ Zahareas,Anthony N.The Art of Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita. Madrid: Edtudios de Literatura Española, 1965.