Representing Others in the Libro De Buen Amor

Abstract

The go-between in his/her different iterations as courtier, procuress, and even text formed an integral part of official Iberian culture during the Middle Ages. The authors of the works studied in the preceding chapters were themselves courtiers who manipulated the official discourses of Andalusi culture to explore the mediator’s (and thus their own) essential role as sociopolitical and cultural intermediary. The fourteenth-century Castilian work, the Libro de buen amor (LBA), underscores the importance of the traditionally Andalusi role of mediation and the mediator in the construction of Iberian identity. The work reveals that despite official attempts to distance the increasingly Christian-dominated fourteenth-century court and church literatures of Castile from the Arabic and Hebrew traditions of Iberia, the Andalusi go-between and the cosmopolitan worldview of which she is both product and representative survived in Castilian vernacular literature.¹ In a Castilian culture increasingly influenced by Western European religious trends from beyond the Pyrenees, the author of the LBA uses this go-between to open up a space for a secular Andalusi-style erotic at odds with the moralizing and often misogynist discourse of Western European scholasticism, for which the reconciliation of sexuality, desire, and religious sentiments proved a perennial difficulty (as it also proved for Iberian Jews as discussed in chapter 3).

Assí fue, ¡mal pecado!, que mi vieja es muerta:

Murió a mí serviendo, lo que me desconuerta;

Non sé cómo lo diga, que mucha buena puerta Me fue después çerrada que antes me era abierta.

It’s come to pass—sad fate!—that my old crone is now no more.

She died while in my service, which afflicts me with great pain.

I don’t know how to say it, but many a good door Has now been closed to me, which used to be wide open before.

—Libro de buen amor