On good love

 I first encountered the Libro de buen amor (Juan Ruiz? c. 1345) over forty years ago. It is a strange collection (anthology?) of poems written in the scholarly style of the mester de clerecía. It is a hard book to describe in that it jumps around all over the place, touching on various and sundry topics which at times border on love--of all sorts. Love is a very strange word that gets used for all kinds of relationships. The problem with the word itself, amor or love, is the ambiguity of the thing. The Greeks tried to fix this problem by having three words for love: agape, philia, and eros,  but I get the feeling that this just clouds the debate, not settle it. And if you have to go around defining which love you are talking about then you probably don't have a clear idea what you are really talking about anyway. The phrase "buen amor" or "good love" makes this whole discussion just a little worse as well. The narrator of some of this collection proclaims to be an arch-priest, a mid-level cleric bureaucrat that watches over several dioceses. He spends most of his time looking for his next date, but he is an average, if not incompetent, Romeo, who has little or no success convincing women to give him good love. At least that's the premise for much of the book's content. He does everything he can to meet and seduce several different women, but they are all very wary of his intentions, and, for the most part, avoid entanglements. There are several translations of the work, all of which reflect the difficulties the text presents. Given heavy doses of irony, ambiguity, and double-entendre, one never knows what the arch-priest is actually saying or meaning. If you don't read Spanish, and English version will do, but the Libro de buen amor is best experienced in its original Castilian, albeit from the mid-fourteenth century. Give it a read.