Cancionero: Manuscrito 1250 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real by Gómez Manrique (review)

José Suárez has provided scholars of fifteenth-century Spanish letters with a new and very faithful transcription of the cancionero of one of the most important men “of arms and letters” of the period—Gómez Manrique. Manuscript 1250, housed at the Royal Palace in Madrid, is considered the most complete collection of Gómez Manrique’s poetry, but, surprisingly, it has never heretofore been transcribed in its entirety. Beyond giving us the complete transcription of the manuscript, Suárez meticulously documents instances where versions of poems included in ms. 1250 differ from those found in other fragmentary collections of Manrique’s poetry. This is not a critical edition per se, but a transcription that maintains the manuscript’s original orthography and its present pagination. Manuscript 1250 was prepared for, and dedicated to, don Rodrigo Pimentel, Conde de Benavente, a relative of the poet’s mother, and its date of composition is sometime after 1476. As such it does not include all of the known poems authored by Manrique since some only appear in other manuscripts or were authored after the production of ms. 1250 and, obviously, before Manrique’s death in ca 1491. To supplement the materials contained in ms. 1250, Suárez provides a useful appendix of all the poet’s known compositions that do not appear in it. Suárez gives variants for ms. 1250 by comparing its compositions with nine other manuscripts containing Manrique’s poetry as well as versions published in 1928 in the “Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles” (NBAE) series, vol. 4. The inclusion of variants is particularly useful for researchers who rarely have the opportunity to consult all the manuscripts consulted by Suárez. Also helpful are appendices that classify the poems by subject matter: love, politics/morals, events, satire, religion, and drama as well as an appendix of first lines. Since Manrique’s work is extant in various manuscripts scattered throughout collections in Spain, including the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Palacio Real (Madrid), and the Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo (Santander), it is especially helpful to be able to consult variants in one convenient publication. This is the most comprehensive edition of Gómez Manrique’s Cancionero since Antonio Paz y Mélia’s 1885 compilation. Obviously, the nineteenth-century edition prepared by Paz y Mélia does not adhere to the current, rigorous standards for manuscript transcription employed by Suárez. Also, maintaining the pagination of the manuscript for this transcription greatly facilitates locating passages when scholars need to consult the original. The book itself is attractively printed with a very clear typeface and accessibly priced.