Poetry
The Book of Good Love
Libro de buen amor
Synopsis
The narrator, an archpriest, recounts in the first person his love affairs with women of all conditions, a nun, a Moorish woman, a baker, mountain women, with the help of an old go-between, Trotaconventos. He quarrels with Lord Love, for a time takes the name don Melón to court doña Endrina, and witnesses the pitched battle between don Carnal and Lady Lent. Between the episodes come fables, songs of mountain women and hymns to the Virgin.
Context
The manuscripts give no title; the one in use was proposed in 1898 by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, from a line of the book. Three incomplete manuscripts preserve it: the Salamanca one, the most complete, from the early fifteenth century, the Toledo one, from the late fourteenth, and a third, later one. One dates its completion to 1330, another to 1343, a gap that Menéndez Pidal explained by two redactions. The episode of don Melón takes up the Latin comedy Pamphilus, and the go-between Trotaconventos is regarded as the forerunner of Celestina.
Who it is for
A long poem of more than seventeen hundred stanzas, in an old language, to be read in an annotated edition.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the high points of Spanish literature of all periods, and as the masterpiece of the mester de clerecía.