Don Juan Manuel (1282-1348/9) was one of the most powerful men of his time. A member of the Castilian royal family, he lived in constant political turmoil. The grandson of King Ferdinand III and the nephew of King Alfonso X, today he is more often remembered as the creator of literary prose in Castilian and the declarative author of a panoply of vernacular works—among others, chronicles, treatises on theological matters, on falconry, mirrors for princes, and collections of exempla and sapiential literature—of which El conde Lucanor stands out as his finest. For a long time, within Hispanism and Medieval Iberian Studies, Don Juan Manuel has elicited studies examining the noteworthy authorial self-awareness he displayed in many of his works. Within this line of research, Anita Savo’s book focuses on his authorial-making rhetoric.
The introduction to Portraying Authorship (3-22) provides a brisk summary of the life of the author, some of the political conflicts through which he lived, his works, the manuscripts that have transmitted these, and a few premises on Don Juan Manuel’s authorial self. Savo also introduces the theoretical ideas that inform her inquiry into Don Juan Manuel’s authorial self-portraits, from Minnis and Copeland, to Chartier, Love, Bartres, and Foucault. This opening chapter will be particularly interesting to readers outside Hispanic or Iberian Studies seeking an overview of Don Juan Manuel’s writings and sociohistorical coordinates; it should facilitate a priori comparisons to, and contrasts with, other instances of author-making in the Late Middle Ages.
Drawing on Bonaventure’s frequently cited distinction among authorial tasks or personas (scriptor,compilator, commentator, and auctor), Savo devotes a chapter of her study to each, placing every authorial-making figure vis-à-vis its related rhetoric that, explicitly or performatively, Don Juan Manuel deployed in his writings. Thus, chapter one comments on Don Juan Manuel’s references to scribal work, showing their participation in two different, long-standing ideas or tropes about the labor of scribes and copyists. Savo discusses passages that either present scribes as unreliable blunderers who badly disfigure texts for future readers, or rather, alternatively, that claim for the scribe an essential and highly ethical role of recording important matters for posterity.
Chapter two explores instances of Don Juan Manuel’s compiling and arranging his works. Initially inspired by the compilatory endeavors of his uncle King Alfonso X the Learned, Don Juan Manuel’s first instances of the compiler-self took a rhetorical position that privileged the powerful self-effacing nature of the task, the authority of his sources, and the added value of brevitas. His rhetoric and practices kept evolving. He went on to compile oral sources and his own lived experience and, according to Savo, it can be argued that the textual arrangement of some of his works granted them an organic dimension of poetic qualities that was larger than the sum of its parts.
Chapter three delves into the different forms of commentary used in Don Juan Manuel’s works, focusing on the accessus ad auctores and the gloss. Commentary served the author for a variety of purposes, from writing on theological matters in the vernacular without abandoning his secular interests and privileges, to granting his prose the prestige of Latin texts and scholarly practices of his age.
Chapter four tackles Don Juan Manuel’s authorial rhetoric, not as wielder of authority or expertise—as the concept of auctor would often imply in the Middle Age—but as a creative writer, as the fourth concept derived from Bonaventure’s distinction was beginning to suggest. Savo studies Don Juan Manuel’s extant verse (within El conde Lucanor), his treatises founded on the rhetoric of valuable experience, of his own life, and devotion. An epilogue maps the interventions that the material mediators in the works of the author, the fifteenth-century manuscript copies of his texts as well as the sixteenth- and nineteenth-century editions and translations of his works had in shaping his authorial self.
Don Juan Manuel’s oeuvre is vast, and its scholarship has yielded many notable contributions over the years, so it is hard to miss how Savo masters the authorial tasks she researches, compiling and arranging key fragments that are thoroughly commented with references to earlier Manueline studies, classical contributions to studies on authorship, and recent monographs in medieval studies. The clarity with which Portraying Authorship has been written, its sources and quotations arranged, its sections and overarching arguments devised for each chapter should make it easy and enjoyable for students of medieval authorship not yet acquainted with Don Juan Manuel to consider his place in the theory and practice of medieval authorship alongside other figures, from Dante and Ramon Llull to Chaucer or Christine de Pizan.