La inspiración paródica del libro de buen amor: la descripción de la mujer ideal

Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor is one of the major literary accomplishments of the Iberian Middle Ages, and has generated an extensive secondary bibliography. Its uniqueness and diversity have thrilled and perplexed readers, and its influence is still felt in modern letters. One of the most solid advances in Libro de buen amor criticism, of the past three decades, has been the recognition that parody plays an important part in the work: a greater share of the credit must go to Felix Lecoy, whose Recherches deal at length with the Archpriest’s Goliardic-type parodies and with the Cuaresima-Carnal conflict. Moreover, it has been increasingly recognized that parody is not confined to some episodes but is, in some sense, a central feature of Juan Ruiz’s art. The ambiguity and the polysemy have been considering common aspect in the Libro de buen amor studies; particularly, they can be interpreted in very different way according to its diverse and heterogeneous public. From the observation of the Archpriest’s rhetorical and expressive devices which comply to the areas of allusion, semantic translation, alteration and reversal of meanings, and polysemy, it is possible to outline a rhetoric of parody. This concerns the three main traditional codes: literature, especially when referring to love and ecclesiastical literature; and scholastic philosophy. The humoristic effects which can be found in the Libro come from an intentional incongruity between matter and style, mainly concerning the unsuitable setting of literary genres and topoi. A very significant example may be noticed in the quatrains 431-435, which represent a very small section of the Libro : here parody is used to create a humoristic effect through the unconventional description that the Archpriest gives us of the ideal woman. In the ancient times women’s beauty was evaluated according to the Church’s canons, but in the xi- xii century a new model emerges: the unattainable woman, a superior creature, who becomes an essential part in the secular love literature. Thus the topos of the descriptio puellae spreads all over, both in poetry and in romances, following the guidelines of the Scholastic paradigm. Juan Ruiz’s portrait of the ideal woman subverts the rules of the classical tradition; in fact the derision of the poetic code of the descriptio pulchritudinis is built on alternations between the traditional details and the distortion of the conventional codes, in order to amplify the ironic effect and create a comic reaction.