«Juglar»'s Repertoire or Sermon Notebook? The «Libro de Buen Amor» and a Manuscript Miscellany

Alan D. Deyermond

Two manuscript fragments of the Libro de Buen Amor would appear, from the accounts usually given by scholars, to be at opposite ends of the literary spectrum: one is contained in a miscellany compiled by the Toledan humanist Álvar Gómez de Castro (1515-80), and the other in what is supposedly the repertoire of an early fifteenth-century juglar cazurro. The humanistic scholar and the lowest type of minstrel make a neatly contrasting pair, but if one examines the two manuscripts in quick succession, the results are hard to reconcile with the generally-accepted theory.

MS 7896 of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, is the first of four volumes of miscellaneous papers compiled by Gómez de Castro. It consists of separate sections, including some printed material, and loose sheets. One of those sheets, now fol. 374 of the volume, contains lines and stanzas from LBA. These were first identified and published by F. J. Sánchez Cantón, were studied in greater detail by Lucius G. Moffatt, and have most recently been edited by M. Criado de Val and E. W. Naylor¹.

The Gómez de Castro miscellany confronts the reader with a picture of great confusion. Sánchez Cantón observed that «en un desorden inverosímil, mézclanse en estos manuscritos, en su casi totalidad autógrafos, cartas, versos propios y ajenos, inscripciones, refranes, proyectos de libros, recetas, fragmentos de romances, extractos y citas de obras clásicas y medievales...» (43), and Moffatt agreed that it was «an almost indescribable hodge-podge» (247). When one turns to fol. 374, the effect is even more striking: repeated folding has produced deep creases, and has in places torn the paper². The most likely reason for such folding would, of course, be that the owner of the paper wished to carry it about, perhaps in a pouch. The arrangement of the material is strange, both visually (the verso is upside-down in relation to the recto) and textually (the excerpts are in roughly reverse sequence, beginning with stanza 829 and ending with 711).

This is at first sight an unlikely component of a sixteenth-century scholar's commonplace book, and most of its features -the physical state of the paper, the arrangement of the material, the small format (21.5 x 15.0 cm), and the selection of excerpts from the lively narrative of the Doña Endrina episode-would be useful evidence for anyone who wished to argue that this was a juglar's prompt-sheet³. So far as I know, that theory has never been advanced, and it is certainly not my intention to advance it. I merely call attention to the fact that this section of a learned miscellany looks far more like such a prompt-sheet than the other fragment with which we are concerned.

Fols. 140v, 141 and 142r of Salamanca University MS 2497, a Portuguese chronicle in the Alfonsine tradition, contain jottings in Castilian. The main part of the manuscript (which was previously in the Biblioteca de Palacio, and before that in the library of the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca) is in a fourteenth-century hand, but the hand of the final folios is fifteenth-century. The jottings include lines from LBA, and were discovered by Menéndez Pidal. His first description is cautious: «los folios 140 vto., 141 y 142 r.º, están escritos con letra más cursiva y llenos de versos, que por lo mal medidos podían pasar por prosa rimada... Así parafrasea o, mejor dicho, copia mal la copla 521 de Fita y otras varias...»⁴. There is, it will be seen, no reference here to a juglar, and the well-known description of the fragment is due not to Menéndez Pidal but to Jean Ducamin: «... un curieux programme ou boniment de jongleur... Ce pot pourri de dictons et de bouffonneries diverses renferme encore quelques vers de l'Archiprêtre. Ils sont certainement cités de mémoire et sans le moindre souci de la mesure ni de leur ordre véritable»⁵.

Ducamin had intended to publish this text, but he abandoned literary scholarship for the monastery, giving his notes to Menéndez Pidal. The latter's edition is chiefly based on Ducamin's transcription, as he is careful to point out, and his account of the material adopts and expands the French scholar's hypothesis⁶. His edition is headed «Programa fragmentario de un juglar cazurro» (388), and his description, under the heading «Un espectáculo cazurro hacia 1420», goes on «En este singular fragmento se reseña una sesión de juglarías cazurras ante un público callejero» (233).

It should be noted that -despite what seems to be a widespread belief⁷- Menéndez Pidal nowhere maintains that this manuscript is itself a script or prompt-book that belonged to a juglar cazurro; indeed, he says that the material survives «merced a un curioso que con ellas escarabajeó los folios que había en blanco al final de una crónica» (233). It would, of course, be hard for anyone who saw the manuscript to suppose that it was an authentic prompt-book, but the firm description of it by both Ducamin and Menéndez Pidal as a juglar's «programme» no doubt helped to spread such a supposition. Another factor in creating this impression is Menéndez Pidal's speculation about the reaction of an audience to the mention of the Archpriest: «"Agora -dice el juglar- comencemos del Libro del Acipreste", y esta antonomasia bastaba para que ante todos los oyentes surgiese la sombra familiar del pescozudo y recio Arcipreste de Hita, rodeado de una aureola de regocijadas promesas» (234). No reader of this passage, or of subsequent speculation (238), could be expected to realize that the juglar is hypothetical, or that the audience's reaction, so firmly and clearly described, is a flight of fancy.

The speculation, presented as fact in one of the major works of Spain's most eminent mediaevalist, is inevitably repeated as fact by other writers: «Menéndez Pidal ha recogido el testimonio de un juglar cazurro del siglo XV, que al sentir desfallecer el interés de sus oyentes, trata de estimular su atención con estas mágicas palabras: "Agora comencemos del Libro del Arcipreste"»⁸. Worse, it can be exaggerated and can become the basis for further hypothesis: «La popularidad de Juan Ruiz era tan grande, que según nos dice Menéndez Pidal, el público se animaba y entusiasmaba sólo al anunciarse que iban a cantarse las coplas del arcipreste. En esta popularidad de calle y plaza, vemos la mayor prueba de su verismo. El pueblo castellano no ha gustado nunca de fantasías que se alejan de su realidad...»⁹. Even scholars who reject part of Menéndez Pidal's argument when it conflicts with their own specialized knowledge normally accept its basic assumptions. Thus Lucius G. Moffatt, while giving cogent arguments against the view that a punning allusion to Juan Ruiz's name appears in these jottings, heads one section of an article «The Jongleur's Repertoire», and concludes that Menéndez Pidal's view of its significance is apt¹⁰. Again, Ian Michael's convincing objections to the theory that the Libro de Alexandre was sung by juglares contain a reference to the jottings as «a fifteenth-century cazurro poem»¹¹. It may therefore be useful to look afresh at the material at the end of MS 2497, and to reconsider the theories that have been advanced.

The jottings are on paper which forms an integral part of the manuscript. The chronicle ends on fol. 137r; 137v, 138 and 139r are blank, 139v and 140r have a small amount of writing (139v apparently in the same hand as our fragment), and 140v, 141 and 142r, as already noted, contain the jottings under discussion. 142 forms a single gathering with 131, and 141 has the same watermark as 120. We must therefore exclude the hypothesis that the jottings were made on loose sheets which were later bound up with the chronicle. The paper on which they are written measures 27.9 x 21.5 cm, and shows no sign of having been folded. Its physical state is thus much closer to what we should expect to find in a learned miscellany such as Álvar Gómez de Castro's. It cannot have been carried about by a juglar (whether cazurro or not), so cannot be a prompt-book, though it could be (on grounds of physical state alone) a copy made from a prompt-book. It cannot be a direct transcript of a juglar's performance unless the juglar visited the library where it was kept (in which case, the «sesión de juglarías cazurras ante un público callejero», referred to by Menéndez Pidal and others, must be discarded), though it could be a copy made from a transcript. It could also be a record of what a member of the audience remembered from a performance. The idea of dictation by juglar to scribe, as in the case of some manuscripts of epics, is consistent with the physical state of the material but must be rejected on other grounds. Epics might be dictated because no manuscript was available when needed by chroniclers or by promoters of a tomb-cult, but no such practical reason could have existed in the fifteenth century for securing a record of a cazurro's performance.

The material, which is headed «Señor don Sancho por Yhesús», may be divided into six sections:-¹²

a (MP sect. 1-6; CN 6053-24). Two couplets, two quatrains and two more couplets, each introduced by «Dizen en un versso», «Dize otro verso», or a similar phrase. The verse is irregular, and reminiscent of the couplets placed by Juan Manuel at the end of each exiemplo of the Conde Lucanor. Where the sources can be established, they are learned: Menéndez Pidal (233-34) shows that the third couplet derives from the Libro de Alexandre¹³, and that this section in general seems to reflect the wisdom literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

b (MP 7-14; CN 6071-6096). Four lines from LBA (the warning against wine); a good deal of rhymed and assonanced material in irregular lines, not found in any extant LBA manuscript, and probably not by the Archpriest; six more LBA lines (the satire on the power of money). The LBA lines are in the wrong order, and are textually corrupt. The first half of the heading to this section is the familiar «Agora començemos del libro del Açipreste», but the second, «toma aquéste d'exenpro que vos dixere», is seldom if ever quoted. The heading thus draws our attention to the point that the material in this second section, like that in the first, is on the whole learned in origin and didactic in tone.

c (MP 15; CN 6097-17). An address to fidalgos, combining ecclesiastical emphasis (references to the two most important centres of pilgrimage, Rome and Santiago, to prayers and to excommunication) with popularizing animal imagery. The fidalgos' generosity is mentioned, though in terms more ambiguous than is usually supposed, as we shall see below. This type of direct address, apparently to an audience, is no guarantee of popular origin nor even of oral delivery, though it does not of course exclude these possibilities¹⁴.

d (MP 16-25; CN 60918-6133). A variant, involving another popular animal image, of the standard mediaeval transition topos: «Agora quiero dar un salto / cual nunca dio cavalo rrucio nin castano». This is generally thought to announce a physical display by the cazurro, but its placing is significant: what follows it is very different from what precedes, and such an abrupt change of subject would justify the colourful metaphor of «dar un salto» for what is directly stated at the beginning of sections (b) («Agora començemos del libro del Açipreste») and (e) («Agora vos quiero contar...»). Mediaeval authors frequently pointed out that they were changing the subject, usually with the formula «dexar... tornar» or its equivalent in other languages, but sometimes with verbs implying more vigorous action: «destajar... tornar» (Libro de Apolonio st. 62), «querría adelante aguijar e mover» (Berceo, Vida de Santo Domingo 222)¹⁵. The «salto» of our text is, of course, still more vigorous, and would in isolation certainly support the view that the text refers to a display of physical agility. However, the frequency with which popular and colloquial images are used by preachers and ecclesiastical poets¹⁶ makes it equally likely that this is an especially vivid use of the transition topos. Our assessment of these two rival possibilities must therefore be influenced by the context in which the passage is set: if a re-examination of the text as a whole supports the theory of a juglar's performance, there is no difficulty in taking the «salto» literally, but if the text as a whole seems more like the work of a preacher, the «salto» can without difficulty be read metaphorically. Section (d) continues with an enumeration of Spanish (chiefly Andalusian) towns, including two straight catalogues and a number of proverbial sayings about them, sometimes in verse. There is one address to listener or reader («Contar vos quiero...»). The proverbial sayings might have formed part of a juglar's performance, but the unadorned catalogues could not; however, these may be mere headings, to which material could have been added.

e (MP 26; CN 6134-12 [but really ll.4-17]). A comic tale of four priests who want to be bishops and archbishops, go to Rome, and obtain the necessary documents from the Pope, but whose high spirits at their success lead to absurd behaviour which causes them to be unfrocked. The emphasis on the need for documentary evidence suggests a learned origin for this tale¹⁷; however, the tone is popular, and the broad humour would make the tale highly suitable for a «público callejero». The combination of these two factors is reminiscent of much goliardic writing. A moral can, of course, easily be drawn from the tale.

f (MP 27-29; CN 61313-26 [but really ll.18-31]). Aphorisms rather similar to those in section (a), but more strongly proverbial in tone, and less easily attributable to learned sources.

We have already seen that the physical state of this material suggests a learned background, although it is consistent also with presentation to a popular audience by a juglar. The same is true of some of the contents, though other parts are less easy to envisage as part of a juglar's performance. Nothing so far discussed here has pointed clearly towards a juglar and his audience, and away from all other explanations, but there is one word which may well have seemed conclusive to Ducamin, Menéndez Pidal, and subsequent writers. This word occurs in section (c): «fazíades mucho bien a proves e más a jogogralles». The first two letters have been blotted out; there is no reason to doubt Menéndez Pidal's view that jograles was intended. It scarcely needs to be said, however, that the mention of juglares in a text guarantees neither their authorship nor their diffusion of it, and the use of the word in this instance requires more careful scrutiny than it has so far received. Giving to the poor was an important religious duty for mediaeval man (this point is stressed in LBA 1650-1728, the begging-songs for students and blind men), and to say that men gave more to juglares than to the poor -especially if it is said in a passage with substantial religious references- can hardly be the enthusiastic praise that scholars have so far taken it to be. I do not contend that these words are necessarily a serious rebuke to the audience for spending more on entertainment than on a social and religious obligation. On the contrary, I believe that their main function is probably humorous. That, however, does not make attribution to a juglar any more plausible: would an entertainer anxious to obtain as much money as possible from an audience risk reminding them of their prior duty to those much poorer than any juglar?

The more closely one examines this material, the weaker is the case for seeing it as the outline of a juglar's performance. This hypothesis cannot be excluded, but what must be excluded is the juglar cazurro. Menéndez Pidal gives us a great deal of information about cazurros¹⁸, and what he says makes it quite clear that no cazurro can have been responsible for the material in MS 2497. He quotes Guiraut Riquier on the disreputable nature of cazurros and of their material:

and confirms this from the Siete partidas, which add the accusation that «nin otrosí el que las oye non podrié tomar buen castigo nin buen consejo» (230-31). None of this could be said of the material we are considering, which is morally irreproachable and which contains a high proportion of sound doctrine. There is a great difference between this and the song which the Archpriest of Hita tells us he wrote for cazurros. Menéndez Pidal says that the Archpriest's troba caçurra is, despite his apologies, not indecent, but this view is untenable. The song in question, that of Doña Cruz (st. 115-21), is an elaborate and ingenious combination of blasphemy and obscenity¹⁹. The gap between what we know of cazurros and the material in MS 2497 thus remains as wide as ever. Menéndez Pidal several times expresses surprise at the nature of the supposed juglar's performance: for example, «nos sorprende que en vez de las cazurrerías... nuestro juglar emplee sólo las chocarrerías saturadas de espíritu satírico-moralizador» (239; cf. 234). Two explanations are offered: first, this material is merely a selection from the performance (234-35), and secondly, it reveals the austerity typical of Spanish literature (239). This, of course, will not do. There is no reason why this hypothetical cazurro should display an austerity so markedly absent from other juglares of this type, and the reliance on allegedly missing material (for whose nature and very existence there is no evidence) is a tacit admission that the existing material does not fit the theory of a juglar cazurro.

There is one other argument advanced by Menéndez Pidal: «La característica que Riquier señalaba para los cazurros, decir versos sin argumento, hállase demasiado clara en nuestro juglar» (238-39). It is true that the MS 2497 material lacks continuity and coherent thought, but so does any series of jottings (much of the Álvar Gómez de Castro miscellany, for instance). So, too, does a great deal of wisdom literature. Only a few of the individual items could be described as «sin argumento» (the catalogue of place-names is an obvious example), and there is no reason to attribute authorship to a juglar cazurro on these grounds.

There is, in fact, no basis whatever for associating this material with a cazurro, and there is strong evidence against such an association. It may be that some other, more reputable, type of juglar was involved, but in any case the theories of a prompt-book and a direct record of the performance must, as we have seen, be discarded. I have shown elsewhere that the fourteenth-century Mocedades de Rodrigo, of which Menéndez Pelayo said (with the approval of almost all later writers) «parece el cuaderno de apuntaciones de un juglar degenerado», is an ecclesiastical propaganda poem²⁰. The material in MS 2497 resembles the Mocedades in several ways: it is copied out at the end of a chronicle manuscript, it is often thought to be a juglar's prompt-book, and it has unmistakably learned features. I have no wish to suggest that the two texts are necessarily comparable in other ways, but there are two hypotheses that should be considered together with that of the juglar.

The first hypothesis is that most of the material constitutes notes for popular sermons, perhaps by a friar of one of the mendicant orders. Such sermons relied heavily on exempla (including comic tales) and on sententiae, which could come from vernacular authors. Section (c) would fit such a purpose most easily, but with the exception of (d), which is certainly an obstacle, all the material could be used without difficulty by a preacher who needed simultaneously to retain the interest of his audience and to convey sound doctrine to them. This material cannot be the outline of a sermon, but almost all of it could be jottings made by a preacher to be incorporated in future sermons; or, of course, it could be a transcription of such jottings. The absence of information about mediaeval Spanish popular sermons is here, as so often, a serious handicap, but studies of popular preaching in England offer illuminating parallels. «Some of the preaching books which contain notes and exempla for use in sermons have quite extensive collections of lyrics, sometimes couplets or stanzas, sometimes complete poems... Very often these sermon "tags" as they are called are striking verses (sometimes in not very polished metrical form) which would make a preacher's point memorably and succinctly... The preachers naturally favoured those which were valuable mnemonic aids... A sermon tag is sometimes simply a series of vivid images, which could be used as "headings" or expanded in the sermon»²¹. The sermon notebook of the Franciscan John of Grimston, completed c. 1376, has interesting similarities with our supposed cazurro fragment of a few decades later²². The entries in such notebooks could be jotted down from memory, which would account for the irregular metre noted by Gray and the textual corruption emphasized by Menéndez Pidal. Indeed, most of the features of this fragment correspond very closely to the characteristics of the Middle English popular sermon notebook.

A recent study of such a notebook in the Cambridge University Library provides even stronger evidence²³. This late fourteenth-century manuscript contains, in addition to sermons and an ars praedicandi, «extensive notes, written by the preacher himself, never reworked, and intended by him only as a guide for delivery» (63-64). These are partly in Latin and partly in English; a sermon preached in the vernacular seems fairly often to have been based on or to have given rise to a written text in Latin. In this case, the preacher «entered vernacular phrases as they came to him... Proverbs are continually introduced by "vulgariter dicitur"» (66) -this recalls the consistent use of «dizen en un versso» and similar phrases in section (a) of our text. Erb goes on:

Virtually the whole of our supposed cazurro fragment is covered by Erb's description of the Cambridge manuscript. What makes the coincidence particularly impressive is that Erb is a neutral witness, unaware of the existence of our text; his description cannot therefore be coloured by a wish to emphasize similarities between the two manuscripts. Analogy is not proof, but when there is such a close analogy, and when the discrepancies between the MS 2497 material and what we know of juglares cazurros are so great, the case for revising the traditional view of this material becomes very strong.

A second hypothesis is that the material is a rough kind of florilegium. Blank leaves at the beginning or end of manuscripts, and even of early printed books, often contain miscellaneous jottings, which are not always as respectable as those in MS 2497. Florilegia vary greatly in the care with which they were executed, and in the intellectual level of their contents. This one, if it is a florilegium, must have been written out from memory by someone whose intellectual tastes were not very profound; that, however, is no obstacle to the hypothesis.

To sum up: the material at the end of MS 2497 may reflect a juglar's performance; it may be a rudimentary florilegium, very different from Álvar Gómez de Castro's but arising from the same impulse; or it may be a sermon notebook. These three theories need not be mutually exclusive: a florilegium could include some material from sermons and some from juglares. On the evidence at present available, no final decision between these theories is possible, but the florilegium theory seems to me rather more likely than that of the juglar, and the most likely of all is that this is, or is copied from, a sermon notebook. What is certain is that the widely-held view of this material as a cazurro's prompt-book cannot be sustained, and that, whatever view we take of its nature, MS 2497 is a further piece of evidence that the Libro de Buen Amor was known and cited in the first half of the fifteenth century. It is possible that the middle part of section (b), which appears not to come from LBA, is evidence that material of a certain type was at that time attributed to the Archpriest, irrespective of its real authorship, just as works were attributed in the Middle Ages to Seneca, Cicero, Ovid and Cato. If that is the case, then the Archpriest must have been even better known in the first half of the fifteenth century than has been supposed. That, however, cannot be more than a very tentative hypothesis²⁴.