El que toma candela del fuego ajeno. Don Juan Manuel y la refundación castellana del mundo cortesano en el siglo XIV

Résumé

In my dissertation I propose that the books written by Don Juan Manuel are part of a coherent and organic literary and political project written from the margins of political power, intended to renew the Castilian courtly world. I have called this project Juan Manuel’s seigneurial clerisy. The topics of his books describe the different fields of knowledge associated with the building of political power in the Middle Ages: historiography, hunting literature, treatises on statehood, didactic and political fiction, advice literature, poetry, and war manuals. In each of them, analyzed in detail in the chapters of this dissertation, Juan Manuel found a strategy to build an ideological framework, his aristocratic reaction to the centralization of monarchic power that occurred between the reigns of Alfonso X and Alfonso XI. I also study how his writing project that the old Castilian aristocracy must take an active role in managing all the spheres of life of the kingdom, a reaction to the irruption of new social classes composed of a new bourgeois nobility, a class of court administrators and hyper centralized royal control. I conclude by arguing that this project is part of a more significant social discourse that embodied the awakening of the social consciousness of the Castilian nobility during the first decades of the 14th century and that announced the crystallization of this phenomenon in the aristocratic humanism of the 15th century.