December 2013 – Page 2

John recorded Jesus’ healings in earthly, comic ways

Under pervasive personal surveillance and powerful forces of social coercion, the bounds of acceptable public discourse today are tighter than in earlier, more liberal times. Consider, for example, the public record of Jesus’ healings in the Gospel of John.

According to the Gospel of John, a Roman official’s son was ill nearly to death. The Roman official asked Jesus to heal him. Romans demonstrated their public-spiritedness by sponsoring public games. No one put on a better public spectacle than the Emperor in Rome. Jesus told the Roman official, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Jesus then said, “Go; your son will live.”[1] Jesus’ healing of the Roman official’s son occurred with nothing to see.

In Jerusalem, Jesus encountered a multitude of invalids near the Bethesda pool. A man who had been ill for thirty-eight years complained to Jesus, “Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going down, another steps down before me.” The invalids thought that the stirred-up water provided healing. When the water stirred up they raced to get in. The man, apparently feeble, always lost that race. Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.”[2] Instantly the man was healed. Healing didn’t require a long stay at a prominent health-care facility and securing access to a scarce healing service.

Jesus’ healing of the official’s son and Jesus’ healing of the invalid at the Bethesda pool are decorous representations of divine powers. Anything is possible for God. God willing, it will be done. The scope of healing discourse in the Gospel of John, however, is much broader than that of august divinity.

El Greco painting of Jesus healing blind man in Gospel of John

According to the Gospel of John, Jesus and his disciples saw a man blind from birth. Greco-Roman religious traditionalists, Jews, and Christians tended to understand sickness and physical disabilities as divine punishments.[3] Jesus’ disciples asked him, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered:

It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.

Jesus then demonstrated divine action:

He spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing. [4]

Greco-Roman gods seduced and deceived humans in earthly ways, but their actions typically had epic context. Mixing spit with dirt to effect healing is inconceivably lower stylistically than august, divine healing.

John records in a similarly low register Jesus raising Lazarus. Lazarus was gravely ill. Lazarus’ sisters sought help from Jesus. Jesus declared:

This illness is not unto death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it.

Jesus waited two days before traveling to see Lazarus. By the time Jesus arrived to heal Lazarus, Lazarus had already died and been entombed for four days. Lazarus’ sisters were distraught that Jesus had taken so long to arrive. Jesus told one of the sisters to open Lazarus’ tomb. The sister responded with earthy sense, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” Nonetheless, the sister obeyed Jesus’ command. When the tomb was opened, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” Then occurred a joyous, comic wonder:

The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth.[5]

The Gospel of John did not have to include these earthy details. Today such details seem inconceivably ridiculous, particularly in contrast to august divine, healing also included in the Gospel of John.

Early Christians understood God to be made manifest and glorified in astonishingly wide-ranging styles and forms of communication.[6] Public life in modern democracies would be more engaging if it more seriously embraced a wide range of styles and forms of communication.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] John 4:48, 50. All quotes are from the Revised Standard Version translation. The Blue Letter Bible website provides a wide variety of translations, as well as the underlying Greek.

[2] John 5:7-8.

[3] Nutton (2013) Chs. 7, 13. At the same time, they developed secular healing techniques and practices: “religious and secular healing re-enforced rather than opposed each other.” Id. p. 115.

[4] John 9:1-7.

[5] John 11:1-44. Mark 7:32-5 and 8:23 also describe low, folk-style healings of Jesus. John, however, with its highly conceptual theology of love, has greater stylistic contrasts.

[6] Some Christians have refused to look honestly at earthly life and the dirt. For example, El Greco’s painting of Jesus healing the blind man, shown above, minimizes the sight of the bare earth. That painting is from about 1567. A similar composition by El Greco shows no earth at all. Of course, seeing the good earth must be humanely distinguished from wallowing in mud.

[image] Christ healing the blind, El Greco, c. 1567, thanks to Wikipedia and the Web Gallery of Art.

Reference:

Nutton, Vivian. 2013. Ancient medicine. 2′nd ed. London: Routledge.

weeping-dog tale from ancient India traverses western Eurasia

A weeping-dog tale has traversed wide expanses of space and time. This is how the story goes. A lovely, virtuous woman had a husband. Her husband had to leave town on a business trip. A man deeply in love with the virtuous woman exploited her husband’s absence to plead his desire to her. She refused to have sex with him. In despair, the suitor felt that he would die from lovesickness. He sought a go-between, a gossipy, know-everyone old woman, to win for him his desire. For a large fee, the go-between agreed to bring about that union.

The go-between succeeded with guile. She fed a female dog meat with pepper. The dog ate eagerly and began to weep from the heat of the pepper. The go-between took the weeping female dog to the woman and told her that the weeping dog had been a beautiful woman. Because that beautiful woman had refused to take a lover, she was transformed into a dog, or so the go-between said. The virtuous woman hearing that tale was deeply frightened. She explained that she had rebuffed a importuning man. She pleaded with the go-between to find that suitor and bring him to her. The go-between, advancing her material interests at each step, then arranged a tryst between the virtuous woman and her suitor.[1]

weeping dog on bed

Before the use of printing presses, versions of the weeping-dog tale spread from India across western Eurasia and northern Africa. The weeping-dog tale almost surely originated in India probably some time before the sixth century. It was incorporated into Sanskrit texts, Persian texts, and Arabic texts.[2] It also was included in a twelfth-century Latin text in Spain and an English fabliau dating to the thirteenth century. It was incorporated into a fifteenth-century Arabic text from North Africa. Particularly as part of the Sindibad / Seven Sages corpus, the weeping-dog tale spread widely across western Eurasia.[3]

The weeping-dog tale was morally recast in an eleventh-century Sanskrit text Kathasaritsaga. When the go-between told her story of the weeping-dog, the virtuous woman, named Devasmitâ in this version, recognize the attempt to dupe her. Devasmitâ ordered her maid to pretend to be her. Suitors, who in this version numbered four, one by one visited the maid disguised as Devasmitâ. The maid plied the suitor with a drugged drink. Then the suitor was harshly abused:

the maids took away his clothes and other equipments and left him stark naked; then they branded him on the forehead with the mark of a dog’s foot, and during the night took him and pushed him into a ditch full of filth. [4]

Each abused suitor told the other suitors, who were his friends, that he had been robbed on the way, so that they would be abused like he had been. The go-between was similarly drugged during a visit. Devasmitâ cut off the go-between’s ears and nose and threw those bodily organs into a filthy pool. In this version, the virtuous wife remained sexually virtuous, but led acts of extreme cruelty.

The weeping-dog tale was also recast to celebrate consistently women’s guile. In the simple version of the story, the guileful go-between dupes the virtuous woman. Men historically have been more commonly cast as the dupes in popular tales. Consistent with that pattern, the weeping-dog tale was recast to make the virtuous women guileful and her husband a dupe. The go-between, not able to locate the original suitor, solicited another man for the tryst. That man turned out to be the virtuous woman’s husband. Preparing to sleep with the lover, the virtuous women recognized him to be her husband. She claimed to be testing him and attacked him for failing the test. The version of the weeping-dog tale in the Arabic 1001 Nights provides a full description of the wife’s strategic domestic violence:

She started to hit him on the head with her slipper, while, for his part, he protested his innocence, swearing that never in his life had he played her false or done what she had accused him of doing. He continued to swear by Almighty God and she continued to strike him, weeping, shrieking and calling: “Help me, Muslims!” He put his hand over her mouth, but she bit it and he then began to cringe before her, kissing her hands and feet. She was not prepared to accept this, and went on slapping him until she winked to make the old woman stop her. [5]

The version of the weeping-dog tale in which the husband is the ultimate dupe is much more common than the simpler version in which the virtuous wife is the dupe.[6]

The weeping dog tale deserves to be remembered. It provides insight into fundamental moral forces in human communication.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] The version of the weeping-dog tale told here is a slightly streamlined version reflecting typical elements in the tale. The tale has been called the tale of the weeping bitch. That the dog is female contributes to the claim that it comes from a transformed woman. However, “bitch” has a derogatory connotation similar to that of “males” used as a substitute for “men.” Hence rather than referring to the tale as the weeping-bitch tale, I refer to it as the weeping-dog tale.

[2] Versions of the weeping-dog tale exist in the Sanskrit Somadeva’s Kathasaritsaga, Bk. II, Ch. 13.8, trans. Penzer & Tawney (1924) and in the Sanskrit Shuka Saptati, tale 2, trans. Haksar (2009) pp. 12-14. The story also exists in the Persian Sindibad Nama, trans. Clouston (1884) pp. 33-4, and the Arabic 1001 Nights., trans. Lyons (2008), vol. 2, nights 584-5, pp. 563-6.

[3] Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina Clericalis, from Old Spanish trans. Hermes & Quarrie (1977), Ch. XIII, pp. 124-5; the English fabliau Dame Sirith (c. 1272). the fifteenth-century North African Arabic text The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, trans. Colville (1999) Ch. 11, pp. 56-9; an early example in the Sindibad corpus in Old Spanish is Libro de los enganos e los asayamientos de las mugeres, in a tale of the fourth counselor, trans. Keller (1956) pp. 30-2. For discussion of the weeping-dog tale’s textual history, see Annex 8 in Tawney & Penzer (1923) and Schwarzbaum (1962) n. 13, pp. 24-28. The weeping-dog tale is also called catula or canicula lacrimante.

[4] Somadeva’s Kathasaritsaga, Bk. II, Ch. 13.8, from Sanskrit trans. Penzer & Tawney (1924) pp. 137-8.

[5] From Arabic trans. Lyons (2008), night 585, p. 566.

[6] Clouston (1884) p. 84, comments on no. IX. Of the versions mentioned above, the simple version occurs only in the Persian Book of Sindibad and in the Sanskrit Shuka Saptati.

[image] sad-looking dog, thanks to AshHughes

References:

Clouston, William Alexander. 1884. The book of Sindibad, or the Story of the king, his son, the damsel and the seven vazirs: from the Persian and Arabic. Privately printed.

Colville, Jim, trans. 1999. Umar ibn Muḥammad Nafzāwī. The perfumed garden of sensual delight = Ar-rawd̲ al-ʻât̲ir fî nuzhatiʼl khât̲ir. London: Kegan Paul International.

Haksar, A. N. D. 2009. Shuka Saptati: seventy tales of the parrot. New Delhi: Rupa Co.

Hermes, Eberhard and P. R. Quarrie, ed. and trans. 1977. Petrus Alfonsi. The Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keller, John Esten, ed. and trans. 1956. The book of the wiles of women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Lyons, Malcolm C. 2008. The Arabian nights: tales of 1001 nights. vols. 1-3. London: Penguin.

Schwarzbaum, Haim. 1961-3. “International folklore motifs in Petrus Alphonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis.” Sefarad (Madrid: Instituto Benito Arias Montano de Estudios Hebraicos) 21:2 (1961) pp. 267-299; 22:1 (1962) pp. 17-59; 22:2 (1962) pp. 321-343; 23:1 (1963) pp. 54-73.

Tawney, Charles Henry and N. M. Penzer. 1923. Somadeva Bhaṭṭa. The ocean of story {Kathasaritsaga}. London: Priv. Print. for subscribers only by C.J. Sawyer.

Wednesday's flowers

red flower closeup

Telesphoros at National Gallery's Heaven & Earth

Heaven & Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. through March 2, 2014, exhibits a culture that tends to be viewed through stereotypes of stagnant elite theocracy, widespread superstition, and Byzantine bureaucracy. Such phenomenon are far removed from the lived experience of ordinary persons in Washington today. Yet a crucial function of art is to provide alternative, imaginative perspectives on the world. For those who take time to appreciate this exhibition, Heaven & Earth shows little recognized mixtures under high artistic abstractions.

Escaping the provincialism of one’s own values and way of life isn’t easy. In the eleventh century, a Byzantine princess married a high public official from Venice. A Catholic Christian monk, hostile to the Byzantine princess’s Orthodox Christian culture, observed:

Such was the luxury of her habits . . . that she did not deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would have it cut up into small pieces which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. [1]

Civilized persons in eleventh-century Venice ate with their fingers. Some golden instruments with two prongs have survived from Byzantium. Until recently they were identified as medical tools.[2] They are now recognized as table forks. You can see five of such forks in the Heaven & Earth exhibition.

Byzantine art is usually thought of as icons and mosaics. Icons are like Michael Jordan, Marlyn Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln. When you see an emblem of splayed legs and arm reaching high above, you think big jump and score. Marlyn gives you a sexy feeling. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Byzantine icons were like that in Christianity-imbued Byzantine culture. Heaven & Earth presents superheroes of Byzantine Christianity in their most famous poses. These image were thought to have special powers of communication. Images thought to have special powers of communication have been prevalent throughout history and across cultures. Icons are not merely a Byzantine curiosity.

Mosaics are explicitly combinations. They are constructed from discrete, small pieces of colored glass or stone. The small pieces within a class are both unique in microscopic details and similar in general color and size. Many pieces from various classes combine to form a larger image, a mosaic. Heaven & Earth includes a portion of a wall mosaic showing a full-length figure of the Apostle Andrew, pivoting to his left in a vigorous, athletic pose. A floor mosaic shows a fruit-bearing personification of Autumn. Another mosaic shows a running fountain and vegetation.[3] With only minor changes, all three of these mosaics could have been in Christian or non-Christian contexts. In early Christian Europe and in Byzantium, persons asserted affinity with Greco-Roman culture as a way of presenting themselves as cultural elites.[4]

andreas-pavias-crucifixion

Heaven & Earth includes astonishing works of interrelation. One is a large icon of a peaceful Virgin Mary with the Christ child. That icon is associated with protection or shelter. It’s constructed as a portable mosaic with gold and silver tesserae (constitutive mosaic pieces). It was a rare and expensive object even in its own time.[5] Andreas Pavias’s crucifixion icon combined Byzantine and Western European artistic styles and materials. The image is composed with egg tempera on wood — traditional materials of icons. It has an other-worldly gold background, but depicts realistically a bustling, diverse city of people around the foot of the cross. Even just the large number of different styles of headwear among persons in the crowd, all carefully painted, is extraordinary. Pavias, based in fifteenth-century Crete, served both Orthodox Christian and Catholic Christian clients.[6]

The entrance wall for Heaven & Earth insightfully includes a collection of marble statuettes. These statuettes apparently were part of a domestic shrine in a wealthy home in early fourth-century Corinth. The domestic shrine consisted of at least nine marble statuettes of Greco-Roman gods. The largest is a statuette of the female god Roma. The irises of her eyes are defined with flecks of gold. This unusual domestic presence of a Roma statuette suggests that the householder “held high office, or at the very least had aspirations to join the governing classes.”[7] Worshiping favored gods has always been politically expedient. Corinth, a bustling trading town, had Christian communities from Paul of Tarsus’s missionary work in the first century. Christianity in Corinth coexisted for centuries with worship of other gods.

scuplture of Asklepios with Telesphoros

Telesphoros, as depicted in one of the Corinthian domestic statuettes, provides a striking counterpoint to the The Dying Gaul, a magnificent Greco-Roman sculpture now also on display at the National Gallery. The Corinthian statuette collection includes two statuettes of Asklepios. Asklepios is a god of medicine and healing, perennial domestic interests. One of the Asklepios statuettes shows Asklepios with his dwarf son Telesphoros. Telesphoros in ancient representations always wears a cowl with the pointed cap over his head. Most prominently associated with a shrine in Pergamon, Telephoros is generally thought to be a Gallic god that Romans absorbed from Galatians in Anatolia.[8] But look at the face of Telesphoros and at the face of the dying Gaul. Telesphoros has a wide, round face, a broad nose, a low nose bridge, relatively narrow eyes, and prominent eyelids. The dying Gaul has a narrow face, a narrow nose, a high nose bridge, and roundish eyes.[9] Today people tend to associate the facial features of Telesphoros with persons from eastern Eurasia, and the facial features of the dying Gaul, with persons from western Eurasia. Sculptors in the ancient Greco-Roman world apparently associated both types of facial features with the Gauls.

Heaven & Earth: The Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections is well worth a careful examination. Important artistic signs are amid the details.

* * * * *

Part II: the Athenodora stone on exhibit in Heaven & Earth

Notes:

[1] Petrus Damianus, Institutio monialis, 11, PL 145, c. &44C, trans. Norwich (1982) p. 60. The Byzantine princess was probably Maria Argyropoulina. Her Venetian husband was Giovanni Orseolo, eldest son of Venetian Doge Pietro II Orseolo.

[2] Drandaki et al. (2013) p. 235, Description for no. 105, “Five Bronze Forks,” by Nikolaos D. Siomkos.

[3] Drandaki et al. (2013), mosaic of Andrew the Apostle, no. 47, pp. 128-9; personification of Autumn, n. 97 (p. 228); fountain and vegetal scroll, no. 45, pp. 124-5.

[4] Stirling (2005) provides extensive discussion of elite interest in Greco-Roman culture.

[5] Drandaki et al. (2013) no. 55, p. 135.

[6] Id. no. 172, p. 324-5.

[7] Stirling (2008) pp. 108-9, 132.

[8] The other statuette shows Asklepios enthroned, a posture associated with representations of Asklepios at the ancient temple of Asklepios in Epidauros. That statuette doesn’t include Telesphoros. The statuette with Telesphoros is a type known as Asklepios Giustini. Both (marble) statuettes are thought to have been carved in an Athenian workshop. The enthroned Asklepios is dated to the second half of the second century. The Asklepios Giustini is dated to the third or fourth century. On representations of Telesphoros, Wroth (1882). The name Telesphoros has a Greek etymology “carrying to the end,” generally interpreted as convalescence.

[9] Stirling (2008) p. 125 describes this Telesphoros as having a “wide, pear-shaped face with closed eyes and a broad nose.” I closely examined the sculpture in the Heaven & Earth exhibition. Telephoros appears to me to have large epicanthic folds, but open eyes. Other representations of Telesphoros are much less finely detailed. Here’s an image of the dying Gaul’s face. For the best view of both faces, go to the National Gallery while both Heaven & Earth and The Dying Gaul are still on exhibition.

[images] Andreas Pavias, Icon of the Crucifixion, second half of 15th century, National Gallery, Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens; Statuette of Asklepios and Telesphoros, 3rd or 4th century, Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth. Both images courtesy of the National Gallery of Art’s press office.

References:

Drandaki, Anastasia, Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtze, and Anastasia Tourta. 2013. Heaven & earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections. Athens: Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Benaki Museum, Athens.

Norwich, John Julius. 1982. A history of Venice. New York: Knopf.

Stirling, Lea M. 2005. The learned collector mythological statuettes and classical taste in late antique Gaul. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Stirling, Lea M. 2008. “Pagan Statuettes in Late Antique Corinth: Sculpture from the Panayia Domus.” Hesperia. 77 (1): 89-161.

Wroth, Warwick. 1882. “Telesphoros.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies. 3: 283-300.

Pitas Payas paints to prevent cuckoldry in Libro de buen amor

The fourteenth-century Spanish work Libro de buen amor includes the tale of Pitas Payas. He was a painter in Brittany. Pitas Payas married a young, beautiful woman, as most men hope to do.

Pitas Payas, like most men then and now, had no choice but to work outside the home to earn money to support his wife. Being a painter has never been a propitious occupation for earning money. One month after his marriage, Pitas Payas decided to shift to a less enjoyable, lower status, but potentially more lucrative occupation, that of being a merchant.[1] He explained to his wife (“my lady”) that he needed to make a business trip to Flanders. He promised to bring back gifts for her:

And she replied, “My lord, if you must go, then you should start;
But don’t forget our home, and me with my true, loving heart.” [2]

Men believe that their ability to provide material goods makes them worthy of love.[3] That’s a charming tale.

Nature doesn’t give men the knowledge of personal biological relation to children that nature provides to women. Pitas Payas, like most men, understood that biological reality. He was concerned about his wife having sex with another man. To safeguard his interest in their marriage, he devised an ingenious technological solution. He asked his wife if he could paint upon her body. She consented. Below her navel he painted a guardian lamb. Then he left on a business trip.

His wife found a lover. Sex with her lover rubbed off the guardian lamb that Pitas Payas had painted below her navel. After much difficulties and delay, Pitas Payas relayed to his wife that he was finally coming home. Her response:

She quickly called her lover, told him what they had to face,
And ordered him to paint on her, as well as he could trace,
A little baby lamb, and on that selfsame place.

Her lover, working quickly from his own understanding, painted a fully grown ram with horns and a protruding penis.

When Pitas Payas returned from his long business trip, his wife received him coldly and disdainfully. Pitas Payas asked to see the lamb that he had painted. His wife taunted him:

“My lord,” she said, “look for yourself, if you are equal to it,
And anything you wish to do, be bold enough to do it.”

Pitas Payas peeped beneath his wife’s navel:

Pitas Payas peeped down there and really almost fainted
To see that horny ram with all its weapons at attention.
“What’s this, dear lady? How can it be that here a lamb I painted
And now I find this head of meat, with which I’m not acquainted?

As any woman always is, when caught in such a jam,
Both shrewd and full of guile, she said, “My lord, what do you mean?
Would not a lamb, within two years, have grown into a ram?
If you had come back earlier, you would have found a lamb.” [4]

In Libro de buen amor, Don Amor uses the tale of Pitas Payas to urge upon the Archpriest of Hita chivalry as understood in the early Arabic life of Buddha. Medieval Spanish culture, however, lost that ideal to a much more brutal, man-degrading understanding of chivalry. The historical conditions of chivalry are a crucial framework for understanding the medieval Spanish fiction Libro de buen amor.[5]

While the lost ideal of chivalry is a crucial framework, the tale of Pitas Payas particularly concerns the social and biological reality of paternity. Cuckolded husbands are common figures of ridicule in medieval literature. That double punishment parallels the charivari punishment of husbands beaten by their wives. The social basis for these otherwise puzzling social phenomena is apparent in leading literary analysis of the tale of Pitas Payas. According to this scholarly work, Pitas Payas abandoned his wife. Moreover,“she takes a lover because of the physical laws of feminine necessity,” that is, “a woman’s natural needs.”[6] The analysis gets even more insightful:

Pitas is a man who is more concerned with business than he is with maintaining the integrity of his household; he violates one of the first laws of nature by leaving alone a young woman recently married. It follows inexorably that his action will turn him into a cuckold. … The young wife is not evil, while Pitas gets his just deserts. [7]

Pitas Payas thought that painting would protect him from cuckoldry. He failed to understand the much greater force of social justification and social punishment.

In the U.S. today, millions of children have false beliefs about who their biological father is. DNA paternity testing could easily eliminate much ignorance and false belief about paternity. However, it isn’t even used as a prerequisite to the government forcing financial fatherhood on men. The problem isn’t lack of technology. It’s men’s lack of social power. Men lack sufficient social power to gain the knowledge of personal biological relation to children that women naturally have. Men lack the social power even to generate any serious social attention to that fundamental gender inequality.

* * * * *

Notes:

[1] McGrady (1978), pp. 382-3, describes Pitas Payas’ change in occupations as a “blotch” in the story. Id. notes that latter writings of the story eliminate Pitas Payas’ change in occupation. Other writers seemed to have lacked the deep understanding of men’s lives that Libro de buen amor contains. Variants of the story of Pitas Payas proliferated in European languages from the fourteenth century. The earliest surviving version is that in Libro de buen amor. Scholars have perceived a generic relation between the tale of Pitas Payas and Old French fabliaux. Geary (1996). Pitas Payas is somewhat similar to the noble knight with the troublesome wife in La Dame Escoilliee.

[2] Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor (Book of true love), 475cd, from Old Spanish trans. Daly (1978) p. 139. All subsequent quotes are from Daly’s translation, s. 474-89. Juan Ruiz within Libro de buen amor identifies himself as the Archpriest of Hita.

[3] Libro de buen amor, with characteristic contraposition and subtly irony, moves from the tale of Pitas Payas to exposition on the power of money. The transition occurs through a man gaining a woman’s love through providing her material goods and money:

For some quite trifling bauble you may hold out in your hand,
She’ll serve you loyally, and do whatever you demand.
She’ll surely do for money anything you may ask.
But be it much or little, always give her what you can.

Libro de buen amor, s. 489, trans. Daly.

[4] Pitas Payas’ deferential, foolishly questioning response confirms his wife’s insinuation of his lack of masculine boldness and self-assertion. In the above translation, “head of meat” is my replacement for Daly’s phrase “beast to eat.” The former seems to me to better convey the contextual tone. The underlying Old Spanish is “manjar.” For the verse (483d) containing that phrase, Zahareas (2010), p. 829, includes the commentary, “es quizá un juego comico entre la carne o cabeza del carnero y la mala suerte (Morreale).”

[5] Zahareas (2000) argues that clerical celibacy and concubinage is a central historical layer for understanding Libro de buen amor. That seems to me to miss the more general, more troublesome historical problem of men’s social subordination.

[6] Zahareas (1965) p. 87. Id. describes Pitas Payas’ wife as “an abandoned wife.”

[7] Id pp. 88, 91.

[image] Black sheep; thanks to Wikipedia and Sigurdas.

References:

Daly, Saralyn R., trans. and Anthony N. Zahareas, ed. 1978. Juan Ruiz. The book of true love. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Geary, John S. 1996. “The ‘Pitas Payas’ Episode of the Libro de buen amor: Its Structure and Comic Climax.” Romance Philology. 49 (3): 245.

McGrady, Donald. 1978. “The Story of the Painter and His Little Lamb.” Thesaurus 33 (3): 357-406.

Zahareas, Anthony N. 1965. The art of Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita. Madrid: Estudios de Literatura Española.

Zahareas, Anthony N. 2000. “Aftermath of Juan Ruiz’s Libro del Arcipreste.” La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 29.2: 257-274.

Zahareas, Anthony N. 2010. Juan Ruiz. Libro del Arcipreste: Libro de buen amor. Tres Cantos: Akal Ediciones.