Escudero Prieto, Víctor

Several debates existed vis-à-vis vernacular languages, in various parts of Europe, from the fourteenth to sixteenth century. Those languages underwent a process of progressive regularization, a limitation of the dialectal variety, and the incorporation of new uses and registers, especially in those fields of the literate world that had retained Latin during the Middle Ages. The vindication and dignification of vernacular languages involved a slow but inexorable process of substitution of Latin in the learned arena, which entailed a redistribution of cultural prestige, a change in discursive models, and also the emergence of new agents. Nonetheless, this substitution did not occur in all languages in the same way or at the same rate.

Far from being transparent and neutral, the reception of Ovid’s corpus eroticum in the Libro de Buen Amor reveals, on the one hand, resistance to the Latin text as a result of the different literary systems in which both authors are set and the vicissitudes of the transmission of Ovid, not only as a text but as a convention and an authority and, on the other, that this same reception seems to be an appropriation of the Ovidian tradition by Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, who uses and incorporates it into his own literary and aesthetic project. To reflect on such discrepancies, we need to demonstrate a fundamental aspect of comparative literature: the conditions of production and enunciation of the literary discourse. In other words, the relationship between a text and the literary and cultural system which provides the codes and literary conventions that make an influence or specific trace meaningful. Accordingly, this article presents the reception of Ovid also as a form of resistance to Ovid.