It’s a Man’s World: Women and Movement in Juan Manuel’s Works

Abstract

In medieval Iberian literature, movement and travel are linked to various forms of power, including social mobility and self-determination, but women’s access to travel is severely restricted. This is reflected in Juan Manuel’s works, but his literary depictions of women and movement vary across genres. The exemplary El conde Lucanor follows a strict gender paradigm in which mobile women are punished, while the historical Libro de las tres razones shows how women use travel and movement to obtain power. This article illustrates how Juan Manuel's experiments with historiography break with gender paradigms to generate new models of exemplary medieval women.

Key Words:

• Don Juan Manuel
• Women
• Mobility
• Misogyny
• Exemplum
• Medieval prose genres
• El conde Lucanor
• Libro de las tres razones

Notes

1 Fernando Gómez Redondo, ‘Géneros literarios en don Juan Manuel’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médiévale, 17 (1992), 87–125.

2 Gómez Redondo, ‘Géneros literarios en don Juan Manuel’, 124.

3 This work is sometimes known in scholarship as the Libro de las armas, but I follow Alan Deyermond in adopting the title Libro de las tres razones, which best reflects the work’s subject matter and structure. See Alan Deyermond, ‘Cuentos orales y estructura formal en el Libro de las tres razones (Libro de las armas)’, in Don Juan Manuel VII Centenario (Murcia: Univ. de Murcia/Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1982), 75–87.

4 In the context of this essay, I define ‘exemplarity’ as a narrative strategy in which a specific story or anecdote (the exemplum) transmits a generalizable lesson or moral, often about good or bad conduct. The classic study of the exemplum remains Jean-Thiébaut Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Âge (Paris: Occitania, 1927). For nuanced discussions of exemplarity as a discursive strategy in El conde Lucanor, see, for example: Jonathan Burgoyne, Reading the Exemplum Right: Fixing the Meaning of ‘El Conde Lucanor’ (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007); Eloísa Palafox, Las éticas del exemplum: ‘Los Castigos del rey don Sancho IV’, ‘El conde Lucanor’ y el ‘Libro de buen amor’ (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998); and Laurence De Looze, ‘Analogy, Exemplum, and the First Tale of Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor’, Hispanic Review, 78:3 (2010), 301–22.

5 María Jesús Lacarra, ‘Algunos datos para la historia de la misoginia en la Edad Media’, in Studia in honorem prof. M. de Riquer, 4 vols (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1986–1991), I (1986), 339–61; Marta Haro Cortés, ‘ “De las buenas mujeres”: su imagen y caracterización en la literatura ejemplar de la Edad Media’, in Medioevo y literatura. Actas del V Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Granada, 27 septiembre–1 octubre 1993), ed. Juan Paredes, 4 vols (Granada: Univ. de Granada, 1995), II, 457–76; Eukene (María Eugenia) Lacarra Lanz, ‘Representaciones de mujeres en la literatura española de la Edad Media (escrita en castellano)’, in Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana), ed. Iris M. Zavala, 6 vols (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993–2000), II (1995), La mujer en la literatura española: modos de representación desde la Edad Media hasta el siglo XVII, 21–68; and Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. María Morrás, Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida & Yonsoo Kim (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

6 Louise O. Vasvári, ‘Pornografía, política sexual y performance anxiety: el “enxiemplo” de la fierecilla domada (Conde Lucanor XXXV)’, in Discursos y representaciones en la Edad Media. Actas de las VI Jornadas Medievales, ed. Concepción Company Company, Aurelio González & Lillian von der Walde Moheno (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 451–69; María Cecilia Ruiz, ‘Salvation and Gender in Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor’, eHumanista. Journal of Iberian Studies, 26 (2014), 608–26, <https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/ehumanista/volume26/ehum26.1.ruiz.pdf> (accessed 23 August 2021); and Ana Adams, ‘Ser es fazer: el saber y la masculinidad de Saladín en El Conde Lucanor’, La Corónica, 40:2 (2012), 145–68.

7 Notable studies on the historical reality of women’s mobility include Miguel García Fernández, ‘Dominae viatrices: viajes y desplazamientos de las mujeres nobles en la Galicia medieval’, Medievalismo, 29 (2019), 175–214; Marta González Vázquez, Las mujeres de la Edad Media y el Camino de Santiago (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 2000) and, by the same author, ‘Peregrinas y viajeras: devoción femenina y aventura en el camino medieval a Santiago de Compostela’, La Corónica, 36:2 (2008), 241–56.

8 One article that addresses literary representations of women’s mobility in the works of Gonzalo de Berceo is Sofía M. Carrizo Rueda, ‘Mundo y mundos de las viajeras medievales: entre desafíos para la mulier virilis y señales divinas para peregrinas anónimas’, in Actas del XIII Congreso Internacional: Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Valladolid, 15 a 19 de septiembre de 2009). In Memoriam Alan Deyermond, ed. José Manuel Fradejas Rueda, Déborah Dietrick Smithbauer, Demetrio Martín Sanz & María Jesús Díez Garretas (Valladolid: Univ. de Valladolid, 2010), 529–38. However, Berceo’s works emerge from a thirteenth-century ecclesiastical context very different from Juan Manuel’s fourteenth-century secular context.

9 On the faithfulness of the Crónica abreviada to its exemplar, a version of the Estoria de España that scholars have dubbed the Crónica manuelina, see Manuel Hijano Villegas, ‘Historia y poder simbólico en la obra de don Juan Manuel’, Voz y Letra, 25:1–2 (2014), 71–109 (pp. 81–85). For counter-arguments that the Crónica abreviada’s subtle changes and omissions reflect an aristocratic ideology unique to Juan Manuel’s version, see Carmen Benito-Vessels, Juan Manuel: escritura y recreación de la historia (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1994); Pablo Enrique Saracino, ‘La Crónica abreviada de don Juan Manuel, una “lectura desviada” de la crónica alfonsí’, Medievalia, 38 (2006), 1–10; and Mario Cossío Olavide, ‘Una reacción nobiliaria a la Estoria de España: la Corónica abreviada de don Juan Manuel’, Olivar, 21:33 (2021) (forthcoming).

10 Lacarra Lanz, ‘Representaciones de mujeres en la literatura española de la Edad Media’, 53.

11 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11.

12 Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, 4.

13 Chelsea Maude Avirett, ‘ “If that I Walke”: A Study of Mobility in Late Medieval British Texts’, Doctoral dissertation (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, 2013), 4.

14 Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1989), 163.

15 Castigos y dotrinas que un sabio le daua a sus hijas, in Dos obras didácticas y dos leyendas sacadas de manuscritos de la Biblioteca del Escorial, ed. Hermann Knust (Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1878), 249–93 (p. 276).

16 On the general medieval association between private spaces and good women, and public spaces and bad women, see Cristina Segura Graíno, ‘Mujeres públicas/malas mujeres: mujeres honradas/mujeres privadas’, in Árabes, judías y cristianas: mujeres en la Europa medieval, ed. Celia del Moral Molina (Granada: Univ. de Granada, 1993), 53–62.

17 Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest, 43.

18 González Vázquez, ‘Peregrinas y viajeras’, 253–55. On negative attitudes towards women pilgrims, see also González Vázquez, Las mujeres de la Edad Media y el Camino de Santiago, 53–57, and Giles Constable, ‘Opposition to Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages’, Studia Gratiana, 19 (1976), 123–46. The Siete partidas mandated that married women obtain their husbands’ permission for pilgrimage and other acts of devotion, indicating that some women probably went on pilgrimage without such permission: ‘Casada seyendo la muger non deue fazer limosna sin voluntad de su marido, nin puede prometer romeria, nin ayuno, nin castidad con el, contra su voluntad […] E esto es, porque el marido es como señor, e cabeça de la muger’ (I.23.12). I cite the Siete partidas from Gregorio López’s 1555 edition, as transcribed by Déborah Dietrick Smithbauer and revised by José Manuel Fradejas Rueda, ‘López 1555. 1.23.’, 15 November 2019, 7 Partidas Digital. Edición crítica digital de las Siete Partidas (Univ. de Valladolid, 2017); available at <https://7partidas.hypotheses.org/4076> (accessed 11 July 2020).

19 Terence N. Bowers, ‘Margery Kempe As Traveler’, Studies in Philology, 97:1 (2000), 1–28 (pp. 9–10).

20 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality’ (1984), in her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 27–51 (pp. 39–40).

21 Part 1, also known as the Libro de los enxiemplos, contains fifty exempla more or less, depending on the manuscript; Parts 2–4, the Libro de los proverbios, contain a series of proverbs that become progressively more convoluted; and Part 5, the Libro de la doctrina, is a treatise on Christian doctrine and spiritual salvation.

22 Burgoyne, Reading the Exemplum Right, 15. Although I do not undertake an autobiographical reading of El conde Lucanor here, such approaches can be found in Germán Orduna, ‘La autobigrafía literaria de Don Juan Manuel’, in Don Juan Manuel VII Centenario, 245–58; Alan Deyermond, ‘Cuentística y política en Juan Manuel: El Conde Lucanor’, in Studia in honorem Germán Orduna (Alcalá de Henares: Univ. de Alcalá, 2001), 225–40; Leonardo Funes, ‘Excentricidad y descentramiento en la figura autoral de don Juan Manuel’, eHumanista. Journal of Iberian Studies, 9 (2007), 1–19, <https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/ehumanista/volume9/1%20Leonardo%20Funes%20Article.pdf> (accessed 23 August 2021); and Carlos Heusch, ‘ “Yo te castigaré bien commo a loco”: los reyes en El Conde Lucanor de Juan Manuel’, e-Spania. Revue Interdisciplinaire d’Études Hispaniques Médievales et Modernes, 21 (2015), n.p., <https://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/24709> (accessed 18 August 2021), as well as in numerous studies of individual exempla.

23 Juan Manuel, El conde Lucanor, ed., prólogo & notas Guillermo Serés, con un estudio preliminar de Germán Orduna (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, Círculo de Lectores, 2006), 275. Subsequent references to El conde Lucanor are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. In the interest of readability, I have silently modernized accents and accepted editorial emendations in citations of medieval texts.

24 On the son-in-law’s arc as a journey of maturation in which he demonstrates all the positive moral qualities of the ideal man, see Adams, ‘Ser es fazer: el saber y la masculinidad de Saladín’.

25 On Saladin’s quest in ex. 50 as an intellectual and moral journey, see Américo Castro, ‘The Sultan Saladin in the Romance Literatures’, in his An Idea of History: Selected Essays of Américo Castro, ed. & trans. Stephen Gilman & Edmund L. King, with an intro. by Roy Harvey Pearce (Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1977), 241–69; and Roberto J. González-Casanovas, ‘Didáctica y Bildung en El Conde Lucanor: del consejo a la educación de Saladino’, Anuario Medieval, 2 (1990), 78–90. Adams points out that since Saladin requires further instruction upon reaching home, his journey should be considered a failure (‘Ser es fazer: el saber y la masculinidad de Saladín’, 159). Despite this fact, the story concludes with Saladin conducting himself as a ‘buen señor et leal a todas sus gentes’ (El conde Lucanor, 213), suggesting that even though his journey was not sufficient, it did play a role in his positive moral transformation.

26 For the parallels between Don Illán’s manipulation of the dean and the author’s manipulation of the reader in ex. 11, see Michelle Hamilton, ‘Retelling the Future: Don Juan Manuel’s “Exenplo XI” and the Power of Fiction’, in Hispanic Literatures and the Question of a Liberal Education, ed. Luis Martí-Estudillo & Nicholas Spadaccini, Hispanic Issues On Line, 8 (2011), 152–67, <https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/182945/hiol_08_09_hamilton_retelling_the_future_0.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y> (accessed 23 August 2021).

27 Juan Paredes, ‘ “Fuesse paral Papa et contól la sua fazienda”: la escritura ejemplar del viaje en el Conde Lucanor’, Letras, 71 (2015), 27–40.

28 Juan Manuel, Libro infinido, ed., con intro., de Carlos Mota (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003), 144. This claim was proven true by Ángel Luis Molina Molina, ‘Los dominios de don Juan Manuel’, in Don Juan Manuel VII Centenario, 215–26.

29 Juan Manuel, El libro de los estados, ed., intro. & notas, de Ian R. Macpherson & Robert Brian Tate (Madrid: Castalia, 1991), 231.

30 Juan Manuel, El libro de los estados, ed. Macpherson & Tate, Book 1, Chs 1–47. On the division of the Libro de los estados into a ‘narrative section’ and several ‘didactic sections’, see Leonardo Funes, ‘La capitulación del Libro de los estados: consecuencias de un problema textual’, Incipit, 4 (1984), 71–91 and, by the same author, ‘Sobre la partición original del Libro de los estados’, Incipit, 6 (1986), 3–26.

31 This reading of ex. 35 is indebted to numerous studies that establish the husband’s conduct as domestic violence, including: Alberto Sandoval, ‘De-centering Misogyny in Spanish Medieval Texts: The Case of Don Juan Manuel’s XXXV Exemplum’, Ideologies & Literature, 4:1 (1989), 65–94; Francisco Márquez Villanueva, ‘Sangre y matrimonio: “El mancebo que casó con una muger muy fuerte et muy brava” ’, in Erotismo en las letras hispánicas: aspectos, modos y fronteras, ed. Luce López-Baralt & Francisco Márquez Villanueva (México D. F.: El Colegio de México, 1995), 315–34; Louise O. Vasvári, ‘Intimate Violence: Shrew Taming As Wedding Ritual in the Conde Lucanor’, in Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Eukene Lacarra Lanz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 21–38; Vasvári, ‘Pornografía, política sexual y performance anxiety’; and María del Carmen García Herrero, ‘La marital corrección: un tipo de violencia aceptado en la Baja Edad Media’, Clio & Crimen. Revista del Centro de Historia del Crimen de Durango, 5 (2008), 39–71 (pp. 47–48).

32 Sandoval, ‘De-centering Misogyny in Spanish Medieval Texts’, 86–87.

33 Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb wa-dhikr wazīrihā Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb, ed. with notes by Iḥsān ʿAbbās, 8 vols (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), I, 440. Al-Maqqarī’s version dates from the seventeenth century, collecting a tale that undoubtedly circulated in Arabic, orally or in writing, before then. The most complete comparison of ex. 30 to other versions of the tale can be found in Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux, ‘El Conde Lucanor’: materia tradicional y originalidad creadora (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1975), 119–23.

34 Ana Adams, ‘Humor étnico en El Conde Lucanor’, eHumanista. Journal of Iberian Studies, 34 (2016), 407–22 (p. 413), <https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/ehumanista/volume34/23%20ehum34.adams.pdf> (accessed 23 August 2021).

35 For readings of ex. 30 that highlight al-Muʿtamīd’s positive qualities, see Heusch, ‘ “Yo te castigaré bien commo a loco” ’; Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, ‘Identidad y alteridad: la representación del otro musulmán en El conde Lucanor’, e-Spania. Revue Interdisiplinaire d’Études Hispaniques Médievales et Modernes, 21 (2015), n.p., <https://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/24697> (accessed 19 August 2021); and Mario Cossío Olavide, ‘Algunos moros muy sabidores: Virtuous Muslim Kings in Examples 30 and 41 of El conde Lucanor’, BSS, XCVII:2 (2020), 127–38.

36 Al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghuṣn al-Andalus al-raṭīb, ed. ʿAbbās, I, 440; translated in Cossío Olavide, ‘Algunos moros muy sabidores’, 132.

37 Ayerbe-Chaux accounts for eight different versions of the tale composed in Arabic, Latin and Castilian, most of which characterize the antagonist simply as an old woman. See Ayerbe-Chaux, ‘El Conde Lucanor’: materia tradicional y originalidad creadora, 13–20.

38 María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, ‘Tres notas sobre don Juan Manuel’, Romance Philology, 4:2–3 (1950–1951), 155–94 (p. 158); Mike Hammer, ‘A Marginal Woman on the Loose: Revisiting Don Juan Manuel’s Beguine’, eHumanista. Journal of Iberian Studies 11 (2008), 171–85 (p. 176), <https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.span.d7_eh/files/sitefiles/ehumanista/volume11/8%20Hammer.pdf> (accessed 23 August 2021).

39 On the trope of the vilified vieja in medieval Iberian literature and its instrumentalization in a patriarchal society, see Joseph Snow, ‘Viejas marginadas en el patriarcado medieval español’, in Nuevos caminos del hispanismo … Actas del XVI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Paris, del 9 al 13 del julio de 2007, ed. Pierre Civil & Françoise Crémoux, 2 vols (Madrid; Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2010), I, 113–30.

40 Hammer, ‘A Marginal Woman’, 177–78.

41 El conde Lucanor, Manuscript M (Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 4236), fol. 74^v. My transcription silently expands abbreviations and modernizes capitalization, and I have consulted the transcription in Juan Manuel, Libro del conde Lucanor, ed., estudio & notas de Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), 373.

42 ‘Et fizieron della muchas malas justicias et diéronle muy mala muerte et muy cruel’ (El conde Lucanor, ed. Serés, 171). As Hammer points out, the version in Manuscript M not only expands on the woman’s incessant traveling, but also describes her execution in more gruesome detail (‘A Marginal Woman’, 177).

43 El conde Lucanor, ed. Serés, 115–16, unnumbered footnote. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel reminds us that despite the historical protagonists and settings of many of Part 1’s exempla, including ex. 27, they are primarily works of fiction based on folkloric motifs (‘Tres notas sobre don Juan Manuel’, 165).

44 María Soledad Arredondo Sidorey, ‘Dos ejemplos de mujeres en El Conde Lucanor de don Juan Manuel: mujeres bravas y mujeres dóciles’, ARENAL, 21:2 (2014), 243–55 (p. 253).

45 The past fifty years have seen many feminist and female-centred approaches to El conde Lucanor that debate whether the work and its author should be considered misogynistic. A summary of these debates, including relevant bibliography, can be found in Isabel Navas Ocaña, ‘El extraordinario caso de don Juan Manuel y la “mujer brava”: lecturas feministas de los exempla medievales’, BHS, LXXXV:6 (2008), 789–808 (pp. 796–800). I see El conde Lucanor as unambiguously belonging to a patriarchal milieu, and I agree with Navas Ocaña that arguments against the work’s misogyny are problematic because they rely on definitions of ‘good’ women as obedient and submissive, while downplaying or characterizing as humorous the instances of violence against women in ex. 27 and ex. 35.

46 Foundational works on the sources of El conde Lucanor are Daniel Devoto, Introducción al estudio de don Juan Manuel, y en particular de ‘El conde Lucanor’: una bibliografía (Madrid: Castalia, 1972), and Ayerbe-Chaux, ‘El Conde Lucanor’: materia tradicional y originalidad creadora. On the political implications of this scholarly understanding of Juan Manuel’s relationship to his sources, María Rosa Menocal writes that Juan Manuel ‘has made gentlemen, cavalleros, of those dispersed, anonymous, and “ethnic” collections which smacked too much of the songs of the çapatero, with the sounds of the streets about them even when they were written in Castilian, he has wrestled those pre-literary demons to the ground, and he has tamed that untidy textual past by turning it all into mere footnotes of “sources” which give rise to his own “originality” ’ (María Rosa Menocal, ‘Life Itself: Storytelling As the Tradition of Openness in the Conde Lucanor’, in Oral Tradition and Hispanic Literature: Essays in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, ed. Mishael M. Caspi [New York: Garland, 1995], 469–96 [p. 476]).

47 Lacarra Lanz, ‘Representaciones de mujeres en la literatura española de la Edad Media’, 53.

48 Lacarra, ‘Algunos datos para la historia de la misoginia en la Edad Media’; Haro, ‘ “De las buenas mujeres” ’.

49 Arredondo Sidorey, ‘Dos ejemplos de mujeres en El Conde Lucanor de don Juan Manuel’; Ruiz, ‘Salvation and Gender in Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor’; and Sandoval, ‘De-centering Misogyny in Spanish Medieval Texts’.

50 While Theresa Earenfight acknowledges how power is divided along gender lines in her many studies on medieval queenship, she has recently called for a new ‘vocabulary of power based on what is done rather than who is doing it’ (Theresa Earenfight, ‘A Lifetime of Power: Beyond Binaries of Gender’, in Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400: Moving Beyond the Exceptionalist Debate, ed. Heather J. Tanner [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019], 271–93 [p. 273]). Thus, both men and women can wield types of power traditionally coded as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, depending on factors such as their social station, familial relationships, and individual talents and expertise.

51 On this dichotomy of ‘elect’/‘reprobate’ applied to the descendants of the infante Manuel and Alfonso X, see, for example, Peter Dunn, ‘The Structures of Didacticism: Private Myths and Public Fictions’, in Juan Manuel Studies, ed. Ian Macpherson (London: Tamesis, 1977), 53–67 (pp. 61–62); Germán Orduna, ‘El Libro de las armas: clave de la “justicia” de don Juan Manuel’, Cuadernos de Historia de España, 67–68 (1982), 230–68; María Cecilia Ruiz, Literatura y política: el ‘Libro de los estados’ y el ‘Libro de las armas’ de don Juan Manuel (Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 1989), 120–26; and Marcelo Rosende, ‘Profecía, figura, consumación y providencia en el Libro de las tres razones de don Juan Manuel’, Revista de Literatura Medieval, 18 (2006), 199–223.

52 Leonardo Funes & María Elena Qués, ‘La historia disidente: el lugar del Libro de las armas en el discurso historiográfico del siglo XIV castellano’, Atalaya. Revue Française d’Études Médiévales Hispaniques, 6 (1995), 71–78 (p. 75). Manuel Hijano Villegas extends the argument of Funes and Qués, proposing that both Juan Manuel and Alfonso XI’s royal chronicler, Fernán Sánchez de Valladolid, sought to establish their histories as the legitimate continuations of Alfonso X’s Estoria de España. See Manuel Hijano Villegas, ‘Historia y poder simbólico en la obra de don Juan Manuel’, 91–100.

53 Juan Manuel, Libro de las tres razones, in Cinco tratados, ed., intro. & notas de Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1989), 89–112 (p. 107). Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text. Germán Orduna reads the work as Juan Manuel’s historiographical and literary attempt to correct the injustices brought upon him by Alfonso XI (‘El Libro de las armas’, 268).

54 Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2009), 31. My discussion of the Libro de las tres razones’ genre is indebted to the nuanced description of Funes and Qués: ‘Situamos nuestro texto en la red de relaciones internas del discurso cronístico como pauta legítima de interpretación de su funcionalidad y sentido. Por lo tanto, no nos interesa postular la pertenencia del [Libro de las tres razones] al género cronístico sino su participación de ciertos procedimientos y recursos de ese género como resultado de la estrategia discursiva elegida por el autor para su configuración’ (‘La historia disidente’, 74).

55 Gladys Lizabe, ‘El poder del entorno femenino de don Juan Manuel en la construcción de su discurso historiográfico’, in Debates actuales del hispanismo: balances y desafíos críticos, coord. Germán Prósperi (Santa Fe: Univ. Nacional del Litoral, 2016), 382–393 (p. 384).

56 Juan Manuel’s first marriage was to the infanta Isabel of Mallorca, daughter of Jaime II of Mallorca, from 1299 until her death in 1303. In 1311, he married the infanta Constanza of Aragon, daughter of Jaime II of Aragon. Savrina de Bedes, Constanza’s lady-in-waiting, has been identified as Saurina de Bessers (or Béziers), probably the daughter of Juan de Bessers, a physician employed by Jaime II of Aragon (Andrés Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel: biografía y estudio crítico [Zaragoza: Tip. La Academia, de F. Martínez, 1932], 335). Juan Manuel married a third time in 1329, to Blanca de la Cerda, daughter of Fernando de la Cerda and Juana Núñez de Lara, but she is not mentioned in the Libro de las tres razones. Giménez Soler’s biography of Juan Manuel, with its robust appendix of documentary sources, remains the definitive account of his life.

57 On the Libro de las tres razones’ oral sources as guarantors of its authenticity, see, in addition to Lizabe, ‘El poder del entorno femenino de don Juan Manuel’; Deyermond, ‘Cuentos orales y estructura formal en el Libro de las tres razones’; and Dennis Seniff, ‘ “Así fiz yo de lo que oí”: Orality, Authority, and Experience in Juan Manuel’s Libro de la caza, Libro infinido, and Libro de las armas’, in his Noble Pursuits: Literature and the Hunt, ed. Diane M. Wright & Connie L. Scarborough (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1992), 33–57 (pp. 50–54).

58 Earenfight associates the dynastic power of aristocratic women with their ability to form political alliances through marriage, reinforce the good reputation of their family name, and transmit familial power to their children, especially male heirs (‘A Lifetime of Power’, 277–78).

59 Lizabe, ‘El poder del entorno femenino de don Juan Manuel’, 389.

60 Ruiz, Literatura y política, 90.

61 Martín de Riquer, ‘La leyenda de la infanta doña Sancha, hija de don Jaime el Conquistador’, in Homenaje a Millás-Vallicrosa, 2 vols (Barcelona: CSIC, 1954–1956), II, 229–41; Deyermond, ‘Cuentos orales y estructura formal en el Libro de las tres razones’, 78–79; and Rafael Beltrán Llavador, ‘Magia y milagros de san Paulicio en Arderique (1517): el cadáver del santo, la pareja infecunda y el nacimiento heroico’, Revista de Literatura, 81:162 (2019), 365–93. The ‘disguise as menial’ motif, K1816 in the Aarne-Thompson index, appears in some form in all three sisters’ stories (Deyermond, ‘Cuentos orales y estructura formal en el Libro de las tres razones’, 80).

62 María Morrás summarizes some of these practical problems with the exemplarity of female hagiography: ‘How could supposedly meek and subservient female readers be expected to make such anti-social behaviours as extreme fasting, enclosure, and self-harming part of their “normal” life? Some have gone so far as to argue that the role of hagiographies even as models for sanctity was null’ (María Morrás, ‘Saints Textual: Embodying Female Exemplarity in Spanish Literature’, in Gender and Exemplarity, ed. Morrás, Sanmartín Bastida & Kim, 1–38 [p. 9]).

63 Riquer, ‘La leyenda de la infanta doña Sancha’, 240.

64 Deyermond posits that the infante Manuel’s link to his sister-in-law Sancha in the Libro de las tres razones lends his figure ‘un ambiente de santidad’ (‘Cuentos orales y estructura formal en el Libro de las tres razones’, 81).

65 Richard P. Kinkade confirms Violante’s jealous nature but disputes the historical accuracy of many details of her rivalry with Constanza (Dawn of a Dynasty: The Life and Times of Infante Manuel of Castile [Toronto: Toronto U. P., 2020], 43–57).

66 Kinkade provides additional documentation for the tensions between Alfonso X and his brother Enrique, as well as Violante’s trip to Calatayud, which he places in January 1256; however, he disputes Enrique’s supposed conquest of Niebla, the factor that, according to Don Juan, made him eligible to marry Constanza according to the promise Jaime I of Aragon had made to his wife (Dawn of a Dynasty, 52–53).

67 On the history and geography of the ‘Tierra de don Manuel’, see Aurelio Pretel Marín & Miguel Rodríguez Llopis, El Señorío de Villena en el siglo XIV (Albacete: Instituto de Estudios Albacetenses ‘Don Juan Manuel’, 1998), 30.

68 Deyermond, ‘Cuentos orales y estructura formal en el Libro de las tres razones’, 80–81. While the circumstances of Constanza’s death are unknown, Kinkade dismisses the tale of the poisoned cherries as pure fiction (Dawn of a Dynasty, 110).

69 Ruiz points out that Enrique, as both a talented knight and an infante unafraid of challenging his king and asserting his political influence, ‘representaría para el joven don Juan Manuel un modelo que admirar e imitar’ (Literatura y política, 114).

70 Violante’s embassy to Calatayud in 1256 is referenced in Jaime I’s autobiographical chronicle, the Llibre dels feyts. See María Jesús Fuente Pérez, ‘Tres Violantes: las mujeres de una familia en el poder a lo largo del siglo XIII’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 46:1 (2016), 137–65 (p. 154).

71 For this portrayal, Don Juan might have been inspired not just by Violante’s historical embassy to Calatayud in 1256, but also by another politically motivated journey she made in 1278 during the period of hostility between her husband, Alfonso X, and their son, the future Sancho IV, caused by the death of Alfonso’s firstborn son Fernando de la Cerda and the subsequent crisis of succession. Taking her two young grandsons, the legitimate heirs to the throne, and their widowed mother Blanche of France, she sought refuge with the King of Aragon, now her brother Pere III (r.1276–1285). See Melissa Katz, ‘The Final Testament of Violante of Aragón (c.1236–1300/01): Agency and (Dis)Empowerment of a Dowager Queen’, in Queenship in the Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the Queen in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras, ed. Elena Woodacre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 51–71 (p. 54); and Kinkade, Dawn of a Dynasty, 204–19.

72 Fuente Pérez, ‘Tres Violantes’, 151–52.

73 See, for example, Ayerbe-Chaux: ‘En don Juan Manuel ya se realiza la transformación de los personajes hacia seres vivientes, calculadores, complejos, en una palabra, vivos. Sabe adentrarse en el campo oscuro de las reacciones síquicas’ (Ayerbe-Chaux, ‘El Conde Lucanor’: materia tradicional y originalidad creadora, 1).

* Disclosure Statement. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.