A self-contained library of medieval literary genres and themes, the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love, first composed in the 1330s, is an excellent introduction to medieval studies. Its primary sources are from the Latin and Christian traditions of medieval Europe, yet the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love also reflects the intercultural Mediterranean milieu of Iberia, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims interacted in relationships by turns tolerant and hostile. However, the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love remains virtually unknown outside of the Spanish-speaking world, despite its key role in the development of European literature and direct intertextual ties to works that have entered the international canon, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Multiple critical editions and other resources on the Libro de buen amor, including digitized manuscripts, are easily available to scholars. However, few bilingual, student-centered resources are available for the study of the medieval aspects of Hispanic cultural heritage and the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love Online works to remedy this absence.

The Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love, is emblematic of medieval reading practices: it requires the active engagement of its readers, promising them understanding if they can work to uncover the meanings beneath the words, and also to turn acts of reading into writing by glossing (commenting and explaining) and even continuing the text. The three extant manuscripts of the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love show the physical traces of such interactions in their margins and typify how medieval manuscripts invite multidimensional interactions with material texts. This digital, interactive, and bilingual edition takes the latest and most extensive of the three manuscripts, MS S (c. 1401-1425), as its base text. MS S is the product of dynamic reception and reshaping: the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love’s texts have been carefully curated and presented in the manuscript with rubrics (red-lettered episode headings that serve as finding aids) and it is the only manuscript of the three surviving copies that contains a prose prologue in the form of an accessus, a sermonic introduction providing instructions to readers.

The narrator of the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love is a cleric that identifies himself as Juan Ruiz Archpriest of Hita, explains that his book is open to at least three different interpretations: depending upon the skill and intentions of the reader, he or she may find the road to salvation in the good love of God, a manual for sexual seduction, or instruction in the art of poetry. For this reason, the eminent medievalist Alan Deyermond called the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love “by far the most enigmatic work in medieval Spanish literature, and probably in the literature of all medieval Europe.” Importantly, the comprehension of the Libro de buen amor / Book of Good Love allows audiences to delight in its playfulness.

The Archpriest also appeals directly to readers, celebrating the open nature of literary texts and anticipating the very ideas of “open access” and the free circulation of knowledge and artistic expression:

Qualquier omne que lo oya, si bien trobar sopiere,
puede más ý añadir y emendar, si quisiere;
ande de mano en mano, a quienquier que l’pidiere,
como pella a las dueñas, tome lo quién podiere.

Pues es de buen amor, enprestad lo de grado,
non desmintades su nonbre, nil dedes rrefertado;
non le dedes por dineros, vendido nin alquilado;
ca non ha grado nin graçias, nin buen amor conprado.

Fiz vos pequeño libro de testo, mas la glosa
non creo que es chica, ante es bien grand prosa,
que sobre cada fabla se entiende otra cosa,
sin la que se alega en la rrazón fermosa.

Any man who listens to my book, if he’s a good poet,
can add more to it and amend it, if he so wishes;
let this book pass from hand to hand, to whomever asks for it,
like a ladies’ ball game, catch as catch can.

Since this is a book of good love, be happy to share it
don’t speak ill of its name or censure it,
don’t exchange it for money, don’t sell or rent it,
for neither pleasure nor beauty nor good love can be bought.

I made you this little book of text, but as for the gloss,
I doubt it will be small, but rather, a great big piece of prose,
because each verse says one thing, but means another,
beyond all that is said in my pretty poetry. (Sts. 1629-31; translation ours)

The Libro de Buen Amor / Book of Good Love Online takes inspiration from this fourteenth century vision.