El Libro del Governador o Suma de collaciones o de ayuntamientos: versión castellana del "Communiloquium" de Juan de Gales

The intellectual production of Johannes Gallensis (also known as John of Wales, c. 1210/30 – 1285), regent-master of the Friars Minor at Oxford and later a lecturer and Doctor of Theology at Paris, was oriented towards furnishing Catholic preachers with a variety of compilations of moral philosophy aimed to serve them in their pastoral ministry. One of these compilations is the Communiloquium, a manual of a kind, which displays its author's attempt to provide adequate and specific argumentation for admonishing all sorts and types of devotees. Its most prominent characteristic is a highly accurate use of classical auctoritates and exempla, which turned this work into a kind of anthology of quotations and references, for it offered its readers the possibility of citing sources and texts that they themselves had never actually consulted. The impressive number of manuscript copies of the Communiloquium that reached our times bears witness to its great popularity (some one hundred and sixty dispersed in different European libraries, according to Jenny Swanson’s John of Wales. A Study of the Work and Ideas of a Thirteenth-Century Friar). The Communiloquium must have reached the Iberian soil by means of Franciscan friars and soon spread through courtly circles, as much as in the religious milieu, due to the political taint of its first part, rooted in the organological metaphor and containing extensive reflections on the virtues and the due behaviour of a monarch. In the Crown of Aragon, the Communiloquium used to be read out loud even among the artisans. In Castile, on the other hand, particularly between the XIIIth and the XVth centuries, its main audience happened to be the lettered nobility and those intellectuals who, dedicated to composing glosas and specula principum, required its resources...

El efecto-ideología en la narrativa de Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly has been an unknown writer until recently, even in his home country, France. Nevertheless, his literary work has undergone a growing interest in the last decades. The erudite Jacques Petit was the first who studied his novels in the mid-eighties with a luxury edition of his works in the prestigious French publisher La Pléiade. He opened the way to discover the figure of the Normand author and his extensive and varied literary work. Barbey d'Aurevilly was known as a dandy artisan of his own persona, adopting an aristocratic style and hinting at a mysterious past, though his parentage was provincial bourgeois nobility, and his youth comparatively uneventful. Inspired by the character and ambience of Valognes, he set his works in the society of Normand aristocracy. Although he himself did not use the Normand patois, his example encouraged the revival of vernacular literature in his home region. The author’s family lost his fortune during the French Revolution, reason why he was against it and defended the Monarchy and the Ancien Regime; he became a counter-revolutionary. A counter-revolutionary is someone who opposes to a revolution, particularly the one who acts after a revolution to try to overturn or reverse it totally or in part. The adjective "counter-revolutionary" refers to movements that would restore the state of affairs or the principles that prevail during a prerevolutionary era; his essays, letters and newspaper articles refer to this...