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  • Manuscript Diversity, Meaning and Variance in Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor
  • Jonathan Burgoyne
De Looze, Laurence. Manuscript Diversity, Meaning and Variance in Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2006. 358 pp. ISBN: 0-8020-9057-5

In recent years, Laurence de Looze has published some of the most important essays on El conde Lucanor (=CL). Building on this scholarship, de Looze brings to bear his expertise as a comparativist in a ground-breaking study of the entire five-book version of Juan Manuel’s masterpiece.1 The collection of didactic short prose narratives that form the first book of the CL is a cornerstone of the Spanish medieval canon, and it has received an enormous amount of critical attention, but the remaining four parts have been overlooked by most scholars, who at times even disparage the proverbs of Books II to IV and the concluding treatise of Book V. In addition to offering an enlightening examination of how each of the five manuscript performances of the CL create meaning differently, de Looze’s book contains one of the most sensitive literary analyses of the five-part version of the CL to date.2 He concludes that it leads the reader through a series of meditations [End Page 387] on the nature of language, and indeed the world itself, as a signifying system subsumed within a divine semiosis.

The book is divided into four parts and thirteen chapters, with chapters 1 and 13 being the introduction and conclusion, respectively. As many have come to expect from the author, Manuscript Diversity is an exemplary work of scholarship. It has extensive end notes, an appendix with nine figures of manuscript folios, a useful second appendix that reproduces Daniel Devoto’s table of the manuscript orderings of exempla in Book I, and a meticulous name and subject index.

In his introductory chapter, de Looze rehearses many of the familiar topics of Manuelian criticism, from authorial intentions, comparisons and contrasts with the Libro de buen amor, and the critical debates surrounding exemplo LI (“Lo que contesció a un rey christiano que era muy poderoso et muy soberbioso”). The author also begins in this chapter a study of the first print edition of the CL (Agote de Molina, 1575), which he revisits throughout the book. Before concluding chapter 1, de Looze offers a sample of his variance approach that builds on detailed examinations of each manuscript witness as it performs the CL differently. For a case in point, de Looze focuses his attention on the concluding aphorisms that cap each narrative in Book I as they appear in variant forms from manuscript to manuscript. With a simple comparison of viessos, de Looze convincingly demonstrates not only that the CL has different meanings in each manuscript, but that the very act of rewriting a text is both a reception and a new creation, and that this performative aspect of medieval literary production exposes the characteristic instability of manuscript textuality. De Looze concludes this chapter with a final look at the framing devices found in the CL, and particularly in Book I, arguing that the frame is “structural more than narrative” and that the significance of the framing dialogue between the Count and Patronio dissipates after Book I in order to lead the reader further into a meditation on the very nature of language (25).

Chapter 2 offers a helpful overview of the manuscript witnesses of the CL, including the 1575 print edition. De Looze points out which manuscripts reproduce a five-part version of the work (SG), which ones only show Book I (MPH and the Argote de Molina edition), and which manuscripts bind the CL with works by various authors (MP). In addition to a provocative critique of the modern preference for manuscript S as the best text for editing, de Looze explains in greater detail his views on the question of meaning in the manuscript copies of the CL. In his introduction, de Looze cautions against using manuscript studies [End Page 388] to resurrect the ghosts of individual, subjective medieval responses, but at the same time he acknowledges that each manuscript performance contains valuable evidence of reception: They...

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