Trotaconventos and the Mora: Grammar, Gender and Verbal Interaction in the Libro de buen amor

In a brief episode near the end of Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor (= Libro), the aptly named Christian procuress Trotaconventos and a younger Muslim woman engage in a short but spirited conversational exchange that is narrated by Trotaconventos’s client, a hapless Archpriest who seems to know a great deal more about poetry and music than love. What is at stake within this exchange, at least at a literal level, is whether Trotaconventos can convince the Muslim woman to have sex with her client. At another level, this episode, which has received relatively little critical attention, provides concrete evidence of the existence and poetic implementation of very specific theories of grammar and gendered identity within fourteenth-century Castile. These theories, which frame both gender and grammar not as fixed a priori systems with established rules, but rather as resources to be strategically employed within agentive verbal interaction, manifest themselves in complex ways within the brief confrontation between Trotaconventos and her would-be mark. Making use of current anthropological and sociolinguistic research on grammar, identity and interaction, this article analyzes the ways in which this episode presents, within the context of a performative poetic narrative, the complex relations between a wide range of social and symbolic phenomena, including grammar, gendered and ethnic identity, human agency and cultural resistance.

Trotaconventos and the Mora

The conversational exchange between Trotaconventos and the Muslim woman consists of only five stanzas (1508–1512).¹ Just before the beginning of this episode, the Archpriest laments the premature death of doña Garoça, a nun who for two months had served as his pious and sexually abstinent love interest:

Atal fue mi ventura que, dos messes pasados, muriá la buena dueña: ove menos cuidados; a morir han los onbres que son o serán nados; Dios perdone su alma, e los nuestros pecados.

Con el mucho quebranto fiz aquesta endecha: con pesar e tristeza non fue tan sotil fecha; emiende la todo omne, e quien buen amor pecha, que yerro e mal fecho emienda non desecha.

(1506–07)

The endecha (a poetic lament made up of seven-syllable verses) to which the Archpriest refers is not present in any of the Libro’s extant manuscripts, and we can only assume that it was either lost or never actually copied down. Even without access to the endecha that might have followed stanza 1507, however, it is difficult to miss the emphasis that the Archpriest places on death, moral action, and suffering, and on the relation that these have to processes of poetic composition and emendation. As more than one critic has pointed out, these themes become increasingly salient as the Libro approaches its own end (Dagenais; Myers; Walker), and while there is not space in the present article to discuss them in any comprehensive way, it bears mentioning that the Archpriest’s narrative presentation of the exchange between Trotaconventos and the Muslim woman, who is referred to in the episode simply as una/la mora, is at all times overshadowed and shaped by a significant preoccupation with, to use a Heideggerian term, “being-toward-death”.

The stanza just after the Archpriest’s comments regarding his endecha and the active emendation it requires marks the beginning of the episode that deals with the conversational exchange between Trotaconventos and the Mora.² Hot on the heels of the lament over doña Garoça’s death, the episode begins with the Archpriest’s decision to attempt to overcome his grief and go on living (and sinning): “Por olvidar la coita, tristeza e pessar, rrogué a la mi vieja que me quisiese casar” (1508a–b). Trotaconventos obliges her client and immediately sets her sights on the Mora as his next paramour. This encounter does not work out well for either Trotaconventos or the Archpriest, however, as the latter explains in the last two verses of stanza 1508: “fablá con una mora, non la quiso escuchar; / ella fizo buen seso, yo fiz mucho cantar” (1508 c–d). It is unclear here which of the two women...