Good thing for the Libro de buen amor (LBA) /Before I forget: 1.

One of the limitations I see with 1) considering the 13^th century mester texts as a school, all with a didactic intent that respond to a determined (but not necessarily expressible) set of exterior values held by a group of authors with a particular type of education, or, alternatively, 2) suggesting that each of 13^th century mester texts negotiates its own ideology, is that neither of these approaches addresses the question of the relationship between content and form (cuaderna vía).

By eliminating the LBA from the discussion, whether explicitly by suggesting that “it doesn’t fit” with the intent or project of the other texts, or by choosing to eliminate it by its date, the debate on mester de clerecía, regarding to what, exactly, this concept refers and includes, will not move forward. Neither will we be forced to ask more difficult questions about the books that seem to sit safely under this rótulo. Neither of the approaches summarized above, albeit unsatisfactorily, really moves away from the notion of didacticism. As I have commented in another post, whether the ideology is outside or inside, coming as an external influence or, alternatively, is being created within the literary object, we still arrive at the same place: the 13^th century mester texts are systems, tight packages only very difficultly, if at all able to be, unraveled. The LBA, conversely, becomes the thing that we never considered a package, or in the case that we did, one without a return address. The true test that both of these approaches have not escaped didacticism is an attempt to ask their questions of the LBA: what are we supposed to learn from the LBA? What is the ideology created within the LBA? To what ideology does the LBA respond? It becomes a question, then, not really of answering these questions about the LBA, because, well, that could take quite some time, but trying to ask them, in earnest and with much self-doubt, about the 13^th century texts. Further, if form is what at least in part (and I think it is much more than that), what groups the 13^th century mester texts together at least in the pages of Uría Maqua’s Panorama is their cuaderna vía, a thesis must be more clearly articulated, if only so that it can be eliminated later, about the relationship between the content of the works and their form. That thesis cannot be as vague as suggesting that the election of a certain form automatically suggests a school, which in turn (the school) acquires a set of undetermined values. The good thing in all of this, however, is that I think a solution could just as well come from a very “bad,” but specific thesis about content and form or, alternatively, an entirely new approach that has certainly never occurred to me.