JUAN MANUEL, INFANTE OF CASTILE. – Writer, born at the castle of Escalona (Toledo) in 1282, died around 1348. Nephew of s. Ferdinando III, he took part in military actions and in the political affairs of the time, especially during the minority of Ferdinando IV and of Alfonso XI, his ward, whose throne he sought to undermine in agreement with the king of Aragon.
The restlessness of his life did not prevent him from engaging in extensive literary activity. In the Libro de Patronio or Conde Lucanor (1335), an outstanding document of Castilian prose that gathers together and surpasses, with aristocratic refinement, the multiple narrative currents of the Middle Ages, Count Lucanor puts various questions of social ethics to the wise counsellor Patronio, who resolves them with 50 apologues or tales of diverse nature and origin (the Aesopic tradition, the East, the Bible, medieval legends), each ending with an appropriate “moral” in rhyme. Some of the themes were taken up by Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew), Cervantes (Retablo de las meravillas), Andersen, and others.
The Libro de los estados (1330) was composed at the age of 48, during a period of spiritual crisis and physical suffering. Religious interests predominate in it and, besides numerous autobiographical elements, it contains a Christian adaptation
of the legend of Buddha, through an Arabic or Latin text of the romance of Barlaam and Joasaf.
Also worth remembering are the Libro del caballero et del escudero (1326) and, as a singular document of J. M.’s devotion to the Virgin, the Tractado en que se prueba por razón que Sancta María está en cuerpo y alma en paraíso.
His physical features have been handed down in a portrait—the first known portrait of a Spanish writer—by Barnaba da Modena, preserved in the cathedral of Murcia. His moral physiognomy is marked by a pronounced presence of contrasts, as intrigue and devotion, restlessness and the search for solitude and study, morality and a certain machiavellism ante verbum alternate and coexist within him.