The Count Lucanor

The Count Lucanor
1335. Apologues. Don Juan Manuel (1282-1345).
(Tr. Spa-Eng from a review by mariorabiejachu)

 The book contains fifty apologues or tales of moralizing-teaching tendency. In each one of them the Count Lucanor proposes to Patronio, his counselor, a problem about human relations, to which Patronio responds using for each case an example or story of more or less fictional development, ending with a couplet verse. This verse condenses the moral of the issue.
 Topics and sources of the collection vary widely: the fox and the crow that had a piece of cheese in its beak; the scoffers who manufactured the magic cloth to dress the King; the episode of Mrs. Truhana...
 The tales come from Aesop''s Fables and Oriental apologues. According to Valbuena Prat, Don Juan Manuel creates the modern tale:

"It becomes real artifice of narrator combining soberly all the elements
that can make interesting and hatched a simple action, hitting on small
masterpieces that will advance to modern novelistic...".

Many of the tales of Count Lucanor became more or less mutated stories in later literature. So, the "what came to pass to a man who by poverty and wanes for another snack ate lupines", was glossed by Calderón in a stanza in "Life is a Dream" ("they say about a wise man that one day, so poor and miserable as he was..."); that of "the lad that married a woman strong and fierce" is the topic for Shakespeare''s "The Taming of the Shrew "; that of the mockers who wove the magic cloth was imitated by Cervantes in "The Alterpiece of Wonders"; that of Mrs. Truhana encloses the origin of the famous tale of the dairymaid, so much exploited by the later fable-tellers.

 It was noted that the author carefully avoids the subject of sensual love, which is curious in an age when the great writers of all nationalities exalted passion of the senses.This was the case with the Archpriest of Hita, Boccaccio, Chaucer, among others.
 Don Juan Manuel stands out as the first Spanish writer of the Middle Ages that was able to create a style in prose, as well as Juan Ruiz did in verse.
Don Juan Manuel, infante Don Manuel''s son and Fernando III''s grandson, occupied important political positions and actively participated in the noble struggles of the time between Fernando IV and Alfonso XI.