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In my dissertation I propose that the books written by Don Juan Manuel are part of a coherent and organic literary and political project written from the margins of political power, intended to renew the Castilian courtly world. I have called this project Juan Manuel’s seigneurial clerisy. The topics of his books describe the different fields of knowledge associated with the building of political power in the Middle Ages: historiography, hunting literature, treatises on statehood, didactic and political fiction, advice literature, poetry, and war manuals. In each of them, analyzed in detail in the chapters of this dissertation, Juan Manuel found a strategy to build an ideological framework, his aristocratic reaction to the centralization of monarchic power that occurred between the reigns of Alfonso X and Alfonso XI. I also study how his writing project that the old Castilian aristocracy must take an active role in managing all the spheres of life of the kingdom, a reaction to the irruption of new social classes composed of a new bourgeois nobility, a class of court administrators and hyper centralized royal control. I conclude by arguing that this project is part of a more significant social discourse that embodied the awakening of the social consciousness of the Castilian nobility during the first decades of the 14th century and that announced the crystallization of this phenomenon in the aristocratic humanism of the 15th century. Índice

Don Juan Manuel’s laudatory portrayal of Saladin, the Muslim Sultan of Babylon, in Exempla 25 and 50 of El Conde Lucanor presents an interesting paradox, particularly when considering that the fourteenth-century text was intended as moral instruction for a Christian audience. This report addresses this paradox by determining Saladin’s placement within Juan Manuel’s moral and spiritual philosophy through textual and comparative character analyses. The first section applies Victor Turner’s social drama theory in a textual analysis of Exempla 25 and 50 to establish Juan Manuel’s representation of Saladin as a triumphant figure, capable of meeting and overcoming challenges to his honor and virtue. The second section applies M. M. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to engage in a closer examination of Saladin’s “voice” in relation to other characters of Juan Manuel’s exempla for the purpose of revealing the ambiguities and finer intricacies of Saladin’s character. These analyses serve to raise and address paradoxical questions relating to Juan Manuel’s presentation of Saladin as both a Muslim adversary and friend of Christendom.