Abstract

This essay explores the significance of what are described as the “tears of Moses” in the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor (“Book of Good Love”). Using digitized corpora, I show how exegesis of this biblical image focused on Pharaoh’s daughter being moved by the weeping of the infant Moses. Her compassion was equated with the bridal and maternal Church lovingly receiving and nourishing the spirit of the Law of Moses as her groom and infant Christ. The Spanish poem parodies these meanings by portraying the relationship between the narrator and his procuress as that of a crying baby being soothed by his mother. In a subversion of the heart-rending cries of Moses being consoled by the Church, the old bawd enables him to seduce the object of his lust by perversely appealing to her maternal compassion.

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