Ruiz, Juan (Archpriest of Hita)

RUIZ, Juan (Archpriest of Hita). - Spanish writer, b. at Alcalá de Henares toward the end of the 13th century (1283?), d. around the middle of the 14th (1348?).

Archpriest of Hita (Guadalajara), endowed with notable culture, he seems to have enjoyed the protection of Gil de Albornoz, archbishop of Toledo, who entrusted him with the task of repressing the scandalous conduct of the clerics of Talavera.

Perhaps through the denunciation of these same men, whom he had satirized, he was imprisoned in the last years of his life.

R. offers a kind of self-portrait in the work El libro de buen Amor, one of the last manifestations of the "mester de clerecia," but with elements better attributable to the "mester de juglaria." The various episodes are linked by the figure of the narrator, who dominates with his personality the 14th-century world, presented in all its variety of problems and aspects.

In the book, violent satires against the clerics and society alternate with moments of moving elegy and pathetic religiosity and with self-satisfied descriptions of sensual love. The frequent learned derivations appear completely renewed by R., who asserts himself with his violent sensibility and with his dynamic conception of life and of that of his century in particular. In this respect R. has often been compared to Boccaccio and Chaucer.

The work, which through the representation of vice and its consequences should drive one toward divine love, often turns back into a tormented and anguished thirst for redemption, into a moved and trembling abandonment to the Virgin, into exaltation of the power of Christ victorious over death.

Guido Mancini