RUIZ, JUAN (ARCIPRESTE DE HITA). - Spanish writer, born in Alcalá de Henares around the end of the 13th century (1283?), died around the middle of the 14th century (1348?).
Archpriest of Hita (Guadalajara), endowed with considerable culture, he appears to have enjoyed the protection of Gil de Albornoz, Archbishop of Toledo, who entrusted him with the task of suppressing the scandalous conduct of the clerics of Talavera.
A sort of self-portrait is offered by R. in the work El libro de buen Amor, one of the last manifestations of the "mester de clerecia", but with elements more properly referable to the "mester de juglaria". The various episodes are linked by the figure of the narrator, whose personality dominates the fourteenth-century world, presented in all its variety of problems and aspects.
In the book, violent satires against clergymen and society alternate with moments of moving elegy and pathetic religiosity, and with complacent descriptions of sensual love. The frequent learned derivations appear completely renewed by R., who asserts himself with his violent sensibility and 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 impel toward divine love, frequently turns inward into a tormented and anguished thirst for redemption, into a moving and trembling abandonment to the Virgin, into an exaltation of the power of Christ the victor over death.