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This paper analyses Joseph Blanco White's English translations of tales XI and XLIV of Don Juan Manuel's El conde Lucanor (c. 1331-1335), which were published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1824. In these fairly free translations, Blanco rewrites and recontextualises the tales by updating and adapting them to the knowledge and expectations of the target readership. His translation decisions, paratexts and the articles on El conde Lucanor that he also published in Variedades; o Mensajero de Londres in 1824 shed light on his ideas on Spanish literature and national identity as well as on his role as commentator and disseminator of Spanish culture in Britain. His translations construct a particular representation of Spain where he underlines those aspects that he believes to be genuinely Spanish, while also including some stereotypical elements of the Romantic image of Spain in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In medieval Iberian literature, movement and travel are linked to various forms of power, including social mobility and self-determination, but women's access to travel is severely restricted. This is reflected in Juan Manuel's works, but his literary depictions of women and movement vary across genres. The exemplary El conde Lucanor follows a strict gender paradigm in which mobile women are punished, while the historical Libro de las tres razones shows how women use travel and movement to obtain power. This article illustrates how Juan Manuel's experiments with historiography break with gender paradigms to generate new models of exemplary medieval women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El exemplo XI del Libro del Conde Lucanor , además de constituir una admonición contra la ingratitud, revela una distinción ideológica clave en la obra, que marca la tensión entre el pujante mundo intelectual seglar del llamado "largo siglo XIII" y la Iglesia, justamente en el momento en que los conflictos entre ellos se debatían por los escolásticos en las aulas de las universidades y los studia generalia a lo largo de la cristiandad. En él se desvela una de las bases culturales fundamentales del ideario del libro que refleja su íntimo discernimiento de la lucha por el control y la vigilancia ética del conocimiento que siguió aun después de la muerte de santo Tomás de Aquino (1274), para quien la sapiencia debería regirse por una filosofía moral—una deontología—que disciplina y ordena las pasiones. De esta manera, el exemplo XI capta un momento decisivo en la socialización y secularización éticas del saber justamente cuando este se va perfilando como una forma extraordinaria del poder. In addition to comprising an admonition against ingratitude (the traditional interpretation), Exemplum XI of the Libro del Conde Lucanor reveals a key ideological distinction in the book. It reveals a pronounced tension between the emerging world of lay intellectuals, the science of the so-called "Long Thirteenth Century," and the Church, just when the conflict between them was being contested in universities and studia generalia throughout Christendom. When read in this larger cultural context, the exemplum discloses an awareness of the power of knowledge, and the struggle for its vigilance and ethical control, a theme disputed well beyond the death of Thomas Aquinas (1274), for whom knowledge should be regulated by a moral philosophy—a code of ethics or a deontology—that orders and disciplines the passions. In this fashion, Exemplum XI captures a decisive moment in the ethical socialization and secularization of knowledge, just as knowledge is recognized as a formidable instrument for good and evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are adept readers of the fifty some exiemplos of Don Juan Manuel's fourteenth-century El Conde Lucanor; these exempla and the prologue that precedes them constitute a classic of medieval Spanish literature. This article analyzes the proverb books in this work, Books II-IV, to argue that the lack of studies on these sections amounts to a reading problem--or, more precisely, a failure to conceive of reading and the way meaning is produced and conveyed to readers in an appropriately ample sense. I begin with the familiar corteza y meollo hermeneutic to examine not what the proverbs mean but how they mean and through what processes they convey meaning. These processes include an uncovering, two-part hermeneutic: conveying meaning as though by accident or revelation; and through sonority, or by means of confusion via the combination of literal instances and metaphoric interpretation in which the metaphoric is the easier meaning to comprehend. Medieval readers may have read with a single goal, such as finding the author's intended meaning, engaging in the author's intended reading process, or locating what was most personally useful in that reading. However, a reader's purpose may instead have been dual, multiple, or undetermined; indeed, experiencing meaning in reading may have even meant going nowhere or failing to take away any content in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the representation of Muslim kings in Examples 30 (King al-Muʿtamid of Seville) and 41 (Umayyad Caliph al-Ḥakam al-Mustanṣir) of El conde Lucanor by Juan Manuel, sustaining that they offer models of positive leaders whose virtues and morals help the author construct an idealized model of kingship. Central to the study is an examination of how Juan Manuel adapts Andalusī historical chronicles and folkloric traditions in the examples in order to offer his readers exemplary, although hyperbolic, models of how a good king should behave towards his subjects. Ultimately, it is argued, this exercise of cultural translatio, from al-Andalus to Castile, serves a political purpose: to criticize the inefficient politics and behaviour of a bad king, Alfonso XI of Castile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I analyze the figure of the counselor in Juan Manuel's first work, the Libro del cavallero et del escudero. To this end, I establish the relationship between the text, an early product of the author's larger literary and political project, and the literary production of the courtly and aristocratic clerecía that was promoted as the basis of new courtly models starting in the reign of Alfonso X. My analysis centers on the characteristics that converted the counselor into a transmitter of a chivalric encyclopedism which unified the knowledge of the lettered scholars and the practical know-how of defensores. I propose that this counselor figure can be interpreted as a discursive mechanism created to support a new project of lordly legitimacy: the seigneurial clerisy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo presenta un análisis sobre la literatura ejemplar de la Baja Edad Media, y los aspectos de comicidad existentes. Se destaca la esencia de este tipo de literatura utilizada en los sermones eclesiásticos, y destinada a aconsejar al hombre en la búsqueda del Bien. Asimismo, se señala el uso de los ejemplos como técnica fundamental para la predicación.