Like a Fish Out of Water: The Paremias of Luis De Aranda'S Glosa De Moral Sentido (Valladolid: 1552)

The Spanish Humanist Luis de Aranda is best remembered for glosses of such works as Juan de Mena's Trescientas, the Marqués de Santillana's Proverbios, and the object of this study: his 1552 gloss of Jorge Manrique's Coplas a la muerte de su padre. This work is unique both because it was written in prose and because it includes a large number of paremias, that is to say, proverbs, refrains and other popular sayings. One does not expect to find this kind of linguistic register in a work that has a primarily moral didactic intent. The present study identifies the different types of paremias in the Glosa de Moral sentido, presents the corpus in an alphabetized table, speculates on the written sources that Luis de Aranda may have consulted, and postulates that the inclusion of paremias as authoritative sources in his gloss may be due to his desire for originality, for the entertainment value that paremias provide, and as a standard Humanist justfication of the use of the vernacular in their scholarly writings.