Reflections on the Circulation of Wisdom Literature in Late Medieval Aragon and Castile

Abstract

This article studies three stages in the circulation of wisdom literature in Aragon and Castile in the later Middle Ages: 1) Origins: wisdom texts in romance were preceded by texts in Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. By the time these romance texts appeared there was a highly developed (in terms of aids for the reader) of florilegia in Latin which, often dependent on other florilegia, preserved a wide range of authors, both familiar and rare. 2) Manuscript context: a conspectus of the manuscripts in which the vernacular texts are found suggests that scribes (or perhaps rather editors) had a sense of what defined wisdom as a genre. 3) Consumption: the article concludes with the use which romance authors made of the Latin florilegia and testifies to the function of these florilegia as a network of knowledge