El conde Lucanor

Volume 5 of the BCRAE presents Don Juan Manuel's best-known work, El conde Lucanor (1335), a collection of fifty examples, three collections of progressively more complex proverbs, and a treatise on Christian doctrine. The unity of this work is due, on the one hand, to its didactic purpose, to educate the nobles of his time, and on the other to the constant presence of two interlocutors, Count Lucanor and his tutor Patronio, who advises, through of the different didactic procedures at his disposal, the theoretical and practical knowledge that an aristocrat of his time needed to gather, and with him any reader or listener of the book. The persistence of this work as a classic of medieval literature began to be forged already in the 16th century and has earned it, due to the freshness of the enxienplos (taken from Latin and Arabic repertoires in vogue at the time), due to the argumentative skill, that places the anecdote on a higher plane, of moral order, as well as certain games of logic and perspective, a sustained praise that reaches Jorge Luis Borges.